Illicit Downloaders Repent with Piracy Payback

Oh yeah, that's right, give them money by paypal then they know that's you pirated their software.

. . . . ?

^^ Exactly, sounds like a scam to catch people who are pirating... hahah dumb asses

idiotic would be a very gentle way to describe the idea and its creator

Okay, as long as the MPAA/RIAA members pay me back for bribing my politicians to extend copyright law.

It doesn't sound like an MPAA/RIAA conspiracy theory. I'm sure Drew just plans on taking about 90% as an administrative fee.

Wouldn't just buying a legal copy of the pirated software make you feel better? Not sure this thing will take off. When people really feel guilty, they just buy it afterwards.

LOL, all the cost will go to his site cost plus pocket changes.

Id have to feel so guilty that I couldn't even get to sleep in order to even thingk about donating to those that have more than enough money already... But yeah, funny thing to ask to donate from pirates Robinhood is finctional you know. And he gave to the poor. Lees not confuse those basic things please.

There's a nice way that the companies can try to go instead of suing people left and right! Adapt something like this and make it legitimate.

Is this a joke?

How about donations go to a team of lawyers that help defend those of us that have pirated when the RIAA catches us.

I downloaded Mass Effect and couldnt get the crack to work, so i bought the game. Does that count? Am I sinner? Should I donate more to the innocent publishers i so heiniously wronged?

So you're saying you should be innocent if you stole someone's TV only to find out it didn't work when you got it home. Then you went out and bought a new one. You still committed a crime. I'm not innocent either, but your statement is ridiculous.

I'm smelling a lawsuits coming for that guy from the Riaa and MPAA.

apparently sarcasm doesn't translate well into text.
iaa a

wtf why would we give money to these corporate scumbags why not just donate to a greater cause like the kids in africa that go hungury though the money probably never gets there anyway

No the correct analagy is if he built a copy of someones tv. only to find out that the exact copy didnt work, So he went out and bought one. So yeah as far as I am conserned its fair. and you are ridiculous. Piracy is not the same as stealing. When will people realize that.

Why does this have the same feeling and definition so common with buying carbon credits? Hmmmm......

Yeah it's funny reading about pirates -- and Tom's is HUGE source of those pirates/theives -- lets be realistic, you ARE stealing.

Give money to kids in Africa -- is somehow connected to stealing software?? And why can't one do both?

That said, I agree that this "donation" web site sounds pretty "religious" sorta like a Catholic going to confession -- all is forgiven and lets go do it again?! But there again if someone is religious, they're obviously pretty confused about life anyway.

And who exactly are "corporate scumbags"? Are you refering to software engineers that spend 12-14hrs/day cranking out code, designing graphics, and testing/debugging, so as to provide some entertainment? Are these hard working folks the ones you consider "scumbags" -- maybe you need to look into the mirror to find the real scumbag.

And Tom's does NOTHING (yet) to folks that admit to it publically -- just wait to the lawyers start looking at Tom's site more closely.

more like buying carbon credits when your car wont pass emissions, but you keep driving illegaly

Buying Indulgences eh?

I'm only going to comment on this part, because the rest of it is purely ignorant.

If you think this is such an atrocity, why not call those lawyers and direct them this way. It's because you are just as brainless as the idiots who go on stage and talk about how kids in Africa are dying because we don't give enough money.

Have you ever seen the UN reports on where the money goes that you give to charities that are going to "help kids in Africa"? Straight into the dictators hands that are raping them in the first place.

Software piracy and stealing clothes are obviously different. Clothes can't be duplicated without additional resources consumed. Software can easily be duplicated without much effort and without any loss to the company (if you weren't going to buy it anyways). The reason the distinction is important is not that it justifies the act but that it shows that the business model is broken. They need to figure out a better way to make money.

I'll let you know as a student in software engineering who receives quite a large amount of free software from Microsoft and others, I will likely be a loyal customer for life, however as a future programmer, I hope they fix their broken business model so they can afford to pay me the $150-200+ dollars an hour I will be making.

And yes, these companies are doing immoral things. Have you ever heard that some portions of Windows was created with pirated software? Or how when Real DRM servers crashed, all of their clients lost their music? Or any number of other companies misbehaving. You don't own what you pay for, so until they start selling you what you pay for, I don't take that much issue with people pirating their software. I say this even though I've written well over 400,000 lines of code.

He didn't make the game, he found a game online and couldn't crack it. That does not equal making or building a game. If you try and commit a crime by taking someone's goods, regardless of if it worked, a crime was still committed.

A pirate is one who steals. Somalian Pirates, yes, they steal. I actually found a definition for you to help clear things up.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pirate

pirate (plural pirates)
1. A criminal who plunders at sea; commonly attacking merchant vessels, though often pillaging port towns.

With that definition, we can safely assume that pirating does indeed equate to steal, unless the pirates plan on giving it back. I don't thing that is likely. I'm not innocent as I've stated, but people need to come to the reality that piracy is directly related to stealing. This is not at sea, however, if that's your rebuttal to the definition. Your flawed logic simply does not work.

This is incredibly dumb. For one, people will see this as a way to download and then pay what they think it is worth. Two, it doesn't actually do any legitimate payback - it's not like you are going to donate $500 and then get sued for downloading illegal content and say "oh but I paid for that by donating!"

It doesn't go to the original copyright holder, and it doesn't show them where sales went.

IF YOU LIKED WHAT YOU STOLE GO BUY THE SAME ITEM IN A STORE!

Wow.

Is it me or does that sound like this guy just wants to "Pirate" people's wallets?

people have a go at me for pirateing stuff
until i point out one simple fact
i once pirated lotr :conquest for the pc
after beating the game into the ground in about 7 hours i decided that i would never play that total pile of crap again for as long as i live
guess what if i went out and bought that game i would have wasted $40
and the dev's might have thought all the sales means make and even WORSE sequel
*shakes head* such a terrible game {honestly a balrog killing all the hobbits HOW DO U SCREW THIS UP?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?}and thanks to P2P i was able to save my money instead of waste it on that pile of crap

Really?
I had issues with Mass Effect on PC too, so I just went and bought it for console... (The ultimate way to force pirates to pay? Make a PC port so shitty they have to buy the console version?)
I figure I ppayed my dues, so fuck off.

I pirate. Infact, in the last 24 hours, I have pirated 28 gigs of software.
The only inmoral thing I find is that my upload is only 1/20 my download, so my upload ratio is only 0.5 on average, so that makes me feel guilty.

I ain't paying a cent to this.

Noble I say, now it would be noble if they stopped overcharging for software so more people would actually buy the products.

Good idea, but 2 things need addressing:

1) Website needs to be treated like an amnesty zone, because quite frankly, the copyright owners should be grateful that they're getting anything from pirates.

2) How about making it so that the money goes to the artists instead of the "benficiaries"?

I live in Spain and here we got a tax on CDs, HDDs which goes to the copyright holders (SGAE: Spanish Author's General Society). Only people who get some kind of lucrative (ads on web pages...) get prosecuted. It's a complex situation because law is harder for downloading a CD than stealing that CD on a shop. Situation has changed a lot in 50 or 100 years (the addressable audience has multiplied by hundreds factor). And it's sad to see how music doubled its revenues when CDs were first introduced and the music world wasted that money on marketing tricks (in place of supporting independent and not so profitable music). Its sad to see how Napster was an student initiative (music distributors were already earning lot of money with CDs and did not need to search for a new bussiness opportunity... iTunes was 5 to 10 years late). Now they cry... and threaten society (anyone seen an DSL connection ad which claims you can download music...) to an extent that is not admissible (heard of a hundred thousands fine for 24 downloaded songs, you mean that when I steal a CD from a music store I don't steal the music on it rights ? I know that is not that easy...