Illegal downloads

Angilion said:
Call me strange, but I think games are quite cheap if you look at them in terms of hours of entertainment and cost.
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I completely agree.

£10 will get you an hour at the cinema
£5 will get you half an hour at a bowling rink
£20 will get you an evening at the pub

£20 will get you the Orange Box, which is endless hours of entertainment
£2.50 will get you a game like Geometry wars, which can be played for hours
£5 will get you Prey, Peggle etc..

imo, games are plenty cheap, and the cost just cannot be used an an excuse for not paying for them..
 
Kreeeee said:
Just do a full format twice and the data is something like 95% unrecoverable.
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ive been told that before but that isnt true.
i once try to install an old version of xp which broke my partition table and instead of formatting just my c: partition(about 32gb) it formatted the whole drive(320gb).
silly me didnt realise and when i try to install windows it would just reset itself as though no data was getting written so i would do another format(of the whole drive) and try again...but after so many fails i started doing slow formats...fast formats in fat32 ...slow formats in fat32...fast formats in ntfs..slow..i done atleast 10 formats of the whole hard disk.

ofcourse sometime inbetween i did realise that it had kinda screwed up my partition table and the whole drive was getting formatted.

i ended up installing sp2 on another hard disk....sorting the original hard disk out so it could read/write properly and then recovered all my important data too.
 
uvmain said:
I completely agree.

£10 will get you an hour at the cinema
£5 will get you half an hour at a bowling rink
£20 will get you an evening at the pub

£20 will get you the Orange Box, which is endless hours of entertainment
£2.50 will get you a game like Geometry wars, which can be played for hours
£5 will get you Prey, Peggle etc..

imo, games are plenty cheap, and the cost just cannot be used an an excuse for not paying for them..
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Between £7.99 & £15.99 per month will get you a video games rental package. Mucho cheap.

A few quid gets you VC console games for the Wii.

Gaming can be cheap.
 
memory said:
ive been told that before but that isnt true.

i ended up installing sp2 on another hard disk....sorting the original hard disk out so it could read/write properly and then recovered all my important data too.
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Hirens Boot CD has a bit of software that will secure wipe the drive up till a point that the data will be unrecoverable. Will take a bloody long time though!
 
GarethDW said:
I don't think it is more secure. I think it's just less likely that you'll get caught downloading from Usenet as opposed to bit torrent.

As mentioned earlier, it's fairly easy for a copyright infringer to get caught red-handed because there's nothing to stop the copyright holder from joining the same swarm as you and capturing your IP address. When you download via usenet you're not exposing yourself to anyone other than your usenet provider.

Again, I'm still no Perry Mason but I guess a copyright holder can't just ask Giganews or whoever for logs of users just because they have a suspicion you were downloading something you shouldn't have been. I guess they need to have some evidence before asking them to hand over their log files. It's going to be difficult for them to ascertain what you've been downloading because, unlike with bit torrent, they can't see it happening so easily. With the help of your ISP, they could potentially snoop your traffic - but again I guess they'd need some evidence of some wrongdoing in the first place to be able to do this - which is why some people choose to download frmo their newsgroup provider via SSL, as it means that the ISP (and copyright holders) can only see that there is encrypted traffic going from the NNTP server address to you, but not what the content of that traffic is.

Additionally, if you were caught doing something naughty, they could only prosecute you for downloading but not distributing to others, which I believe carries a lesser sentence, although IANAL.
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I'm probably completely wrong but isn't the law on usenet a bit dodgy? I mean, in effect, files off usenet are just text split into several messages. It's up to your usenet client to actually reassemble these back into a binary format; they would be useless without.
 
memory said:
yeah it does about 32 passes........ i think thats where i got the tools for recovery too:p
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A brilliant combo of random data, then all 0's then random data, then all 0's until not even the Goddess could find out what is on that drive! :)

Brilliant CD and any computer "geek" should have a copy.
 
trescodrucey said:
how is usenet more secure?
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GarethDW said:
I don't think it is more secure. I think it's just less likely that you'll get caught downloading from Usenet as opposed to bit torrent.
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In the UK at least it isn't illegal to download it - only to upload, peer to peer networks fall foul of this because you upload while you download.


As on usenet you only download - your fine.
 
Pho said:
I'm probably completely wrong but isn't the law on usenet a bit dodgy? I mean, in effect, files off usenet are just text split into several messages. It's up to your usenet client to actually reassemble these back into a binary format; they would be useless without.
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No idea... I fail at being a lawyer.

Telescopi said:
In the UK at least it isn't illegal to download it - only to upload, peer to peer networks fall foul of this because you upload while you download
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Dunno, mate. Could well be true, I've got no idea. Hope so ;)
 
Telescopi said:
In the UK at least it isn't illegal to download it - only to upload, peer to peer networks fall foul of this because you upload while you download.


As on usenet you only download - your fine.
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What happens if you set your bttorrent program, to not upload?
 
Tefal said:
What happens if you set your bttorrent program, to not upload?
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You will gett really poor speeds.

As said, usenet, is only downloading, so they can only sue you for the current value of the software you have downloaded,which may be £30 for a new game or a few hundred for some pro-software.

That noob who got fined 6K plus costs should have defended herdelf, as theres no way she managed to share 6K worth of pinball in a few hours :D

Its all propaganda, if you do get taken to court, defend youself, and ask them to prove how many complete copies you uploaded, not just how many peers may have been connected at the time...

..600 peers connected do not equal 600 full uploads....schoolboy errors TBH...;)
 
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uvmain said:
I completely agree.

£10 will get you an hour at the cinema
£5 will get you half an hour at a bowling rink
£20 will get you an evening at the pub

£20 will get you the Orange Box, which is endless hours of entertainment
£2.50 will get you a game like Geometry wars, which can be played for hours
£5 will get you Prey, Peggle etc..

imo, games are plenty cheap, and the cost just cannot be used an an excuse for not paying for them..
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£2.50 got me a copy of Port Royale 2 from a swapshop. I think that's cost me about 5p per hour of entertainment. Bargain. And I'll get 10p back when I exchange it. :)

But even when I pay £30 for a new game (from the same shop - one of several ways in which swapshops increase sales of new games, money to the publishers), that usually works out at less than £2/hour, often less than £1/hour. Can't watch a rented DVD for that.

There are also a lot of PC games re-released a bit later for £5. Like here: http://www.mastertronic.com/

Sure, they're not recent releases and they don't look like Crysis, but there are some really good games at that price.
 
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Telescopi said:
In the UK at least it isn't illegal to download it - only to upload, peer to peer networks fall foul of this because you upload while you download.
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This isn't exactly true. Whilst it is not a criminal offence to download you will still be able to be sued as you are still making an unlawful copy and, as such, are liable under S17 CDPA
 
jdickerson said:
/aside.

Would physical damage to the disk prevent data recovery? (assuming some platters were recoverable)

I'm thinking C4 here...
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It has to be extreme physical damage to make it impossible to recover data. As far as I know, the UK military use an angle grinder (or leave it on a train) and the USA military use thermite (or post it to Taiwan).

If you just thoroughly smash it with a hammer, the data can be recovered. It's just too expensive to be worth doing for a copyright infringement case.
 
fini said:
This isn't exactly true. Whilst it is not a criminal offence to download you will still be able to be sued as you are still making an unlawful copy and, as such, are liable under S17 CDPA
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And as such they will struggle to claim more than the value of the software, and with the claimed amount being so low, it will be a small claims job, and as such, they wont be able to claim legal expences from you either.;)

So looking at the big picture, its not relly viable to sue for such minor infringments.
 
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