Sam Spade
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Writer, lover, all-around commando.
@Irate Gamer Fanboy I can't believe the Irate Gamer haters are spamming Cinemassacre now. I can understand disliking Irate Gamer, but going to the trouble of making a fake troll account? You'd have to have some serious anger management/dependency issues to hate Irate Gamer/love AVGN so much
That was hilarious. I especially cracked up at the cookie monster joke. I'm kind of surprised anyone visiting Cinemassacre would be bothered by the matureness of the commentary, considering all the cursing and some of the poop jokes in the AVGN series. Maybe some people aren't comfortable with sex jokes? Eh whatever, they didn't bother me at all and I definitely look forward to more vids from Mike in the future.
RobertMcDougal Maybe you don't realize it, but when you say "just holding you accountable", that comes across as authoritative, patronizing and uptight. It doesn't help that you have spelling and grammar mistakes in your comments either.
I can understand getting tired of the 'motherfucker' moniker, and also of people that just didn't get it (tho I think most Cinemassacre fans would just say "screw those guys for not getting it").
Anyways, I do think that it would be a good idea to at least have some sort of name for these weekly reviews. "Motherfuckin' Mondays" was really memorable, and made it easy to remember that these reviews would be coming out every Monday.
tlgiguere Wow. I totally disagree with you 100%. I think they make a great team, and the vids wouldn't be the same at all without Mike.
I also take issue with how you try to make your opinion seem to be shared by a lot of people. How many people are we talking about, and who? Having a truthy gut-feeling isn't the same as having a pulse on the opinion of the vast majority of cinemassacre fans. Most opinions I've read on Cinemassacre support Mike's work, so I can't imagine who you're talking on behalf of. Your circle of friends or something?
ford3517 Sweden doesn't exactly have the same enormous global entertainment output as the United States. And correlating Sweden's lax copyright laws to their better economy is an honor by association (i.e. an association fallacy), unless you have supporting data.
Dave423 Didn't we get a Bible Games episode a week or so ago? And you're complaining already??
scificAedan132ArikEmeis You're right. NetFlix operates in Canada too. There's also Le SuperClub Vidéotron as an alternative to Blockbuster.
InnerConvictFreddy Fiorentino He's probably talking about some of the other comments below. There are a handful of individuals on here that support piracy and/or want to do away with copyright altogether.
DeathRulerOmegaSilverSlimer Wow. So you'd rather not play games put out by Nintendo, Sony, Konami, etc.? You're saying there are non-commercial games of the same quality as Skyward Sword and Portal? And non-commercial movies better than Avatar and Inception? Dude, let me know about em', I wanna' know.
StaarscommandoOdieMikes Being a legal entity like a person and sharing the same rights as a person are two distinct things.
You can't, for example, send a corporation to prison. You can't "arrest" a corporation. A corporation can't "vote" for president, or run for office. A corporation may be a legal entity like a person, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's entitled to the same rights as a person ~ they're two different things and should be treated differently.
Granting corporations free speech may, on the surface, appear to be fair, but there are negative consequences to consider ~ specifically, that organized commercial entities now have unprecedented influence on government elections. Unfortunately, our electorate can be pretty stupid ~ they'll oftentimes vote by recognition instead of by platform, and studies show a correlation between campaign financing and election results. As a result, many people believe that wealthy corporations having election promotion rights undermines the fairness of our voting system.
Staarscommando The traffic argument wasn't an illustration of transit laws infringing on rights ~ it was an example of a vested government power that has the potential for abuse that usually doesn't happen. In the United States, the founding fathers were conscientious to place numerous systems of balance to counteract corruption and abuse. Does that mean abuse never happens? Certainly not. But there are, at least, rules in place that discourage abuse and promote their correction.
I don't have full confidence in government, but I also don't take for granted the benefits that government provides. Without government (i.e., an anarchy), people could be enslaved, raped, tortured, and murdered by any powerful person or group, and unless individuals had the capacity to protect themselves, there's nothing they could do. Without government there is no such thing as "rights" --- or rather, rights can only exist when someone is there to protect them, and that burden usually rests on the shoulders of government.
As for whether or not the U.S. government should have the right to "take down" foreign sites, that's not exactly how these bills work. This new legislation focuses on restricting access to copyright-infringing foreign websites outside of U.S. jurisdiciton ~ they don't have the power to actually shut down the foreign site, only to remove DNS entries in servers within the U.S. and to block payment provider channels to said websites. Whether such companies should bear the burden of preventing access is debatable, but it's not entirely unlike the take-down and notice provisions exercised regularly on YouTube ~ it's just a lot more technically difficult to accomplish.
As I've mentioned in several other posts, I'm on the fence regarding the pre-adversarial nature of SOPA. PIPA at least explicitly notifies the site-owners before initiating measures to block access to foreign infringing sites.
supercainn You're a programmer? Do you realize that what you're basically saying is that every programmer who works for a software company should essentially work for free, because it's IMPOSSIBLE to prevent people from stealing their work? How do you think programmers get paid? That the money comes out of thin air? Programmer salaries come from revenues made by selling copies of the products they work on.
Imagine you were a programmer who spent 2 years working day and night developing Modern Warfare 2. And when your work was finished your company says to you "sorry, we can't pay your wages, because some jackass put copies on the Internet for free, and no one is buying our games. We only made $49.99 off of our initial $200 million investment. Sorry." THAT'S the scenario you'd want to support? You think that's fair?
Aedan132ArikEmeis Torrented copies are produced without the permission of the original content creators. There are more than enough inexpensive/free sampling venues to make torrenting completely unnecessary. Want to test an album? Listen to samples on iTunes or Amazon. Interested in a video game or movie? Rent a copy from RedBox or Blockbuster.
Just because an action has beneficial side effects doesn't mean that it's fundamentally right. Every illegal torrent essentially disrespects the copyrights of the original content creators. It should be up to the copyright holders to decide whether the benefits of torrenting their works outweighs the negative side effects.
Aedan132adal2007 When you buy a CD, the physical disc is your property. If you want to share that disc with other people, that's your right.
The CONTENT on the disc, however, DOES NOT belong to you. Producing a CD for retail sale can cost musicians, studios and record labels 100s of thousands of investor dollars, and Hollywood movies can cost millions. Do you think they're going to give you the full right to the content on their CDs and DVDs for $9.99 at Wal-Mart? You think they're going to say "hey, you can buy our CD for $9.99, and sell copies of it to anyone else, that's fine with us?"
It's the essence of the art trade since copying technologies were first invented. If a professional artist spends 3 months making a painting, he/she could sell the 1 painting for thousands of dollars, and only 1 person gets to enjoy it. But with copying technology, the general public can ALSO enjoy a copy of the same painting at a significantly lower price. Copyright encourages an artist to allow for copies of their work to be made with the fair expectation that each copy will give them a return on their initial investment. WITHOUT Copyright law, ANY jackass could take a high-res photo of your painting and sell/distribute free copies of it to everyone ~ making it difficult or even IMPOSSIBLE for the artist to make a return on their investment.
You need to study up on copyright and WHY Intellectual Property laws exist. Copyright is a public trust that encourages artists and content creators to share their works to the public, with the fair expectation of a trade return on their investment.
SilverSlimer They'll also stop making commercial products. If that's what you want.
Devil_RisingBig McLargehuge Well if you can tell me how these bills can be interpreted to make it legally possible for the government to abuse their power against Cinemassacre, I'd like to know. These bills pretty clearly state that they're aimed at foreign web sites, so any government abuse towards U.S.-based sites would have to come from already existing legislation (meaning that the potential for abuse towards U.S. sites already exists, whether these bills pass or not).
In any case, if you're Libertarian or even an Anarchist with strong misgivings about government, that's your point of view and I won't argue it (political philosophy is a whole different monster in and of itself).
Big McLargehuge From everything I've read so far, no, these bills wouldn't affect Cinemassacre. Both bills are focused on circumventing access to foreign-based websites dedicated to copyright infringement ~ since Cinemassacre is in the United States, it shouldn't be affected. The bills only add to existing copyright law in-so-far as they expand judicial action on websites beyond U.S. jurisdiction, and from what I've seen, neither bill affects current Fair Use and DMCA/safe-harbor laws. Don't, however, take that for a professional legal analysis --- I'd certainly be interested in any legal assessments that state otherwise.
ArikEmeis Totally disagree. You can't leave the Internet lawless and tell content-creators to just put up with copyright infringement. At some point government is going to have to step in.
Dakari777lpgingrassupercainn Torrents and piracy aren't "sneaking" around existing copyright laws ~ they're blatantly and openly breaking them. Are you suggesting that pirates are magically gaining copyright or finding loopholes in the legal framework by torrenting and pirating online? Your grammar is honestly a bit hard to understand.
Copyright is basically the right to copy, which is reserved to the original content-creators and copyright-holders. Illegal torrents are illegal because permission wasn't granted by the original content-creators to generate those illegal copies.
And of course, when you buy the DVD you aren't buying the rights to the content on it ~ you're only buying the right to view it whenever you want. And that's FAIR. Think about it --- what do you think a company would realistically charge for you to own the actual rights to the content itself? Producing a typical Hollywood movie is expensive --- you have hundreds of people from a myriad of professions spending a year or more on production and development, spending millions of investor dollars. Do you honestly think a company would sell you the copyrights to their content for $9.99 at Wal-Mart? Let's be realistic, it costs a lot of money for these companies to produce these movies, and people are taking that for granted. Hollywood is entitled to copyright protection just like the rest of us, whether they're already making a lot of money or not.