Become a big corporation?:D

It was only meant to amuse. I think any discussion on why an illegal activitiy is ok is silly. :D

And how exactly is youtube not piracy? The answer: youtube is just as much piracy as any torrent site, rapidshare or other file sharing system. If you watch a youtube vid the music is downloaded to your PC every bit as much as when you download the album at rapidshare.

To continue with the "bank robbing" analogy, if downloading an mp3 file is like robbing a bank, watching a youtube vid is like robbing a bank, spending some of the stolen money and then dropping the rest in the sewer. Some bankrobbers are not afraid of poo and go the extra mile to recover the money and keep it. Most bankrobbers hate poo though and will just rob the bank again when they need more money.
Even if you "leave the money in the sewer" by not saving or recovering the youtube vid (both are actually quite easy) you're still "stealing" music from the artists by downloading a song to your PC without paying for it.

Also, if you're so much against music piracy, why do you participate in it by being active in the Subsim Music Thread?



I don't think those are really good rules, as this is a pretty international community and you can't expect all members to know the US law. Especially since there are some major differences between the US' and other countries' law. For example, both drugs and prostitution are legal here in the Netherlands (and drugs are widely used and socially accepted, there's not a single friend of mine who doesn't smoke some weed every once in a while)

IMO it would be much better to define what exactly is illegal in the Subsim rules than to let it depend on US law.

in that case I'd might want to edit some of my old posts:88)

Where did I say it wasn't. You also appear to be ignoring the massive amount of officially released material on YouTube. Not that this isn't dwarfed by the amount "illegal" stuff. You are quite correct that the content is downloaded, however there is a perceived difference between downloading files and browsing which was my point. I don't see the point in splitting hairs though.

This straw man makes even less sense than Platapus', particularly if the artist themselves has posted the video of their own material, to which they hold the rights. The problem with YouTube for the end consumer is that it is hard to tell what the source of the vid is unless you only go to an known artists channel of course.

Who said I was against it? I only said that both forms of stealing are not right and in the eyes of the laws of most countries around the world both activites are on the wrong side. I participate there because I enjoy it of course.:D

We generally have, but we cannot specify everything (we don't spell out stuff like music piracy, or drugs as they are rarely discussed here). It's also not like we are applying every possible US law, only the big stuff which most people know. Most of it is also common sense in dealing with certain hot topics. We use US law as a reference as that is where the servers are based (and where liability lies), and because they are fairly conservative in nature.

Basically, what it boils down to is that we don't want to know the intimate details. Like for example why you like 'spending time' with prostitutes, or where you think the best places are to inject heroin. Those would be considered inappropriate topics.

Also if it is an area that is not explicitly spelled out, we often will drop lots of hints and even direct warnings first.

I think music piracy is a reaction to a bad business model. Ipods can hold 30,000 songs. at $1.00 who has the money to buy all that music?