Jorge's Chris Moyle's post the other day reminded me that I need to update my celebrity hate list

[Brentwood]

Berni also mentioned Jay Kay being headbutted, which was an absolute classic piece of footage. He was also on my list (JK, not Berni)

So, who tops your celebrity hate list these days? In other words, who would you rather like to fall victim to a "Ramsay goal"?

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

next to Jay Kay. He was really a very pleasant chap indeed. wd jk.

[Classic Jorge]

Davina McCall imo, I abhor violence towards women but I could hit her until cramp set in.

[7evens]

Needs pushing off a boat in the middle of an ocean, during another photoshoot

[Brentwood]

[Classic Jorge]

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

[Berni]

Did you mention how much you'd chuckled at him getting nutted before?

[7evens]

and probably his sheets, which is possibly the only thing going for her..

[Steve Williams - gay for Mark Knopfler]

Truly awful.

I mean appalling, and drugs had been taken.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

Drinking beer and champagne together, I think it was.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

I understand that he was quite good at making music. You should have gone to watch him do that.

[Berni]

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

I've been nervous because I read somewhere that it's deeply weird.

[Steve Williams - gay for Mark Knopfler]

Singing, dancing etc. Shockingly bad, but the sun was shining.

He was of course hugely successful which allowed him to indulge in his passion for cars, Ferrari I believe. Never fully got how he managed to be as successful as he appeared to become.

When I saw him it was mid-afternoon, so really not at his commercial peak I assume.

[Berni]

I'm planning to steal it off of the internet at some point.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

bothering us with 'movies' and suchlike :clap:

What is it about the internet, exactly, that makes theft morally acceptable?

[Classic Jorge]

Both Tyres from Spaced *and* Psycho Paul.

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view2/4600380/spaced-tyres-traffic-crossing-rave-o.gif

http://www.idealforum.co.uk/gallery/d/400-1/Psycho+Paul.gif

[Berni]

Nicking DVDs from HMV was always such a stress.

[redgunamo]

unacceptable about sharing, now, can there :rubchin:

[Berni]

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

Sharing a cell with a large bank robber of rapacious tastes.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

Even Weller.

[redgunamo]

stuff to be shared (privacy and a' that) then they wouldn't put it online, see?

I think that's the idea.

[Berni]

bankers and tax avoision here].

I really must stop reading the Guardian. :-(

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

What happened to you?

[Berni]

While I never bought any myself, I do seem to remember a period in the mid-90s when you couldn't go anywhere without hearing his sub-Stevie Wonder/Curtis Mayfield-esque meanderings in the background.

[Berni]

[Steve Williams - gay for Mark Knopfler]

I would admit to not really being hugely familiar with his work from then on such was the stamp of ****e it left on my mind.

[Berni]

had no idea how to do it. Since the magic box came into my life, that's all changed. :cloud9:

[redgunamo]

Er... I mean to say... hmm. Yes. As you were.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

Have a wee peek at number 8.

http://www.truthaboutsundayworship.com/10%20Commandments.jpg

[redgunamo]

It will be interesting to see just what happens when everyone runs out of funding to actually produce anything though, won't it. Footballers, actors, would have to do a few shifts behind the bar and such just to make ends meet. And so on.

[Classic Jorge]

Is a fax stealing? Is it theft to take a photo of something?

[Berni]

On the down side, that could mean we only end up with the sort of art produced by people who do it for its own sake. :-(

[Berni]

Sorry. Smartarsed, I know. But true.

[Classic Jorge]

The people really under threat from it are the large distribution machines rather than the producers themselves. If anything they have been liberated.

Louis CK for instance, he creates Louie hiself, shooting it on inexpensive digital cameras and editing it on a macbook. He then sells that content to the network for a fair price but crucially he has maintained 100% creative control over the whole project.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

You're taking someone's product, something which they sell, without paying for it. How is that not stealing?

What confuses me is how it became acceptable. You wouldn't come on here and brag about stealing from Woolworths, or intentionally avoiding paying a train fare, so how come stealing a film or music is acceptable?

It's no wonder society is 9 parts f**ked. Everyone's making up a set of rules to please themselves and f**k everyone else.

It's really depressing.

[Luis Anaconda]

let alone arse

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

The website involved doesn't make a living from selling that picture.

You're squirming, but there's no escaping the truth.

[redgunamo]

Take this Google/Celebrity kerfuffle; the real matter of interest lies in the fact that such material even exists. How it came to be in the public domain is merely a McGuffin.

Burglary is still just burglary, even if the swag is saucy polaroids discovered at the bottom of the lady of the house's knicker drawer. However nobody would be interested if the photographs were .. well.. uninteresting.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

[redgunamo]

Maybe even rock & roll itself too.

[Classic Jorge]

Your insistence on equating physical and non-physical things won't change the fact that they are fundamentally two separate things.

The proliferation of new business models which meet this challenge and swing it round to an advantage only proves the point further.

The people who are really under threat are the people who made money off of the margins in distributing things, not the people who created them in the first place. If anything they are much freer to profit from their work now than they ever were.

I can buy stuff direct from the artists without the distributor's markup.

[Berni]

re-use content for one's own ends now that the law simply cannot keep up. What law there is is unenforcable and - inevitably, where there is no law, it becomes difficult to talk of morals.

Theft is surely the deprivation of another person of their goods or property? I am not depriving anyone of anything beyond the money they might or might not have made from its sale. And since, in many cases, I wouldn't have paid for the movie or TV series anyway, what is being stolen? Had I had to pay, I might either not have watched it at all, waited for it to be on telly or borrowed it from someone. Thus, if I take it from the internet, how am I depriving that person of income since they may well never have had the income otherwise?

[redgunamo]

somehow reach the public domain?

After all, politics will always use "celebrities" as a cat's paw in these matters. In a democracy, can we be comfortable with this? Who should be allowed to hide, and why? Only for money?

[Classic Jorge]

[Berni]

[Luis Anaconda]

[Supermac1976]

[Berni]

How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? no. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word."

Not really sure where I'm going with this, tbh. http://www.awimb.com/images/smiley_icons/ohwell.gif

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

Bull****.

[Berni]

The question of theft is surely only germane where there is deprivation? Thus, if I wouldn't have paid for something anyway, I am depriving no-one of the revenues associated with it. For instance, I would probably never have watched Californication had it not been available to stream or download. I might have thought 'Oh yeah, that. Oh well.' Or I might have borrowed it off you. However, the people who made it are no better off from that transaction than from me watching it online, are they? So where's the theft?

This is not black and white I'm afraid. It's well grey.

[Berni]

Therein lies the problem. The real problem here is that the best model for countering the proliferation of free streaming is to embed sponsored commercial content (product placement, etc) that cannot be skipped or fast-forwarded. That, inevitably, is going to be to the artistic detriment of the end product. Alternatively, the distributors are going to have to bite the bullet and distribute for free but on reliable sites with a lot of unavoidable advertising.

There may be other models, of course.

[redgunamo]

:****er: Right. People seem to think everyone was born yesterday.

[Classic Jorge]

Much like drugs, the first hit is free and I spend a lot of time skagged off of my tits.

Sure, I could nick as much stuff as I want if I wanted to keep doing it but I don't. I watched the first few episodes of GoT online as it was only on Sky MiddleClass and I didn't have it. I've since bought every box set and signed up to Now TV.

[redgunamo]

Questions of legality and morality have been essentially bantered off in favour of instant gratification?

[Ashberto]

If somebody labours to make content but nobody pays for it, then how is the creator supposed to eat? By selling T-shirts promoting the thing? Because that's what freetards (as you used to call yourself) use to justify their criminal greed in treating recording musicians as slaves. At least slavers kept their subjects alive.

You are trying to use the fact that the marginal cost of production is close to zero to justify not paying the content provider, which is an absolute nonsense. What it actually shows is that technology has rendered capitalism incapable of keeping up, not the laws. The only way that freely and infinitely copying-and-pasting content can work economically is for the state to decide who gets to make the content and then charge everyone a licence fee. A sort of massive world-government BBC.

So, just pay for the f**king thing.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

[redgunamo]

Naming no Sir Charlies.. :-)

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

[Berni]

income anyway. Nobody's losing. :shrug:

[Berni]

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

Also schools. They take MY money to educate other peoples' children.

[redgunamo]

they're doing you a favour. But in any other walk of life, when the thing ceases to be financially viable, you must find another.

That's how nature works. The point is not that they need to eat, it's that, in order to be artists, they are supposed to be well-fed already.

[Ashberto]

And do you pay for things you wouldn't have paid for before you've seen it having decided that after you've seen it that it was worth paying for?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/24/SirHumphrey.jpg

[Ashberto]

on the grounds that technology has made it financially non-viable. Just because you can get away with not paying them for it. If you don't like their "****" which you think they don't deserve to be paid for, then why are you watching or listening to it?

[Berni]

Does that absolve me morally? No, but so what? Anyone who has ever borrowed or lent a movie, CD or book is guilty of exactly the same thing. The only question then becomes one of the scale of the borrowing and lending - but there is no greater or lesser moral case to answer.

It is not my responsibility to ensure that a private enterprise maintains its profit margins. Claiming that it is is akin to the argument that I should pay more for my groceries in order to keep farmers or local shops in business. *******s, in other words.

The private enterprises were never interested in the state of my finances when they used to determine their pricing. They simply thought: 'How much can we screw out of this sucker?' Fair enough - that's capitalism. However, don't come whining to me when the boot's on the other foot.

[Ashberto]

A certain amount of sharing is sustainable as long as people are still buying stuff overall. It's why home taping didn't kill music, whereas the free download seems to be doing so as far as I'm concerned.

TV will follow, in its own way, except paying subscribers will be forced by the freetards to pay more and more until a tipping point will be reached. It's like fare-dodging. I presume you don't pay for rail travel either, on the grounds that the train was going that way anyway whether you were on it or not and the marginal difference of your weight to the running costs is negligible. Let someone else pay for it, and if nobody does then, hey, the business *deserves* to go the wall if it can't protect its revenue streams, eh?

[Berni]

negative consequences. Because they do protect their revenue streams, you see?

I notice you avoid my argument about the borrowing and lending. Yes, somebody paid for the original DVD that gets streamed as well (it really isn't worth watching footage people shoot off a cinema screen). As I said, the question is simply one of scale, at which point the moral question flies silently out of the window because I am only one man and not responsible for the scale of anything. If you lend a DVD to 10 friends, you are removing 10 people from the income of the artists in question. And if everyone does that... you can do the maths. Where does your moral boundary lie?

[Ashberto]

Sharing one DVD with a million streamers quite obviously is not ok. Sharing one DVD with one friend obviously is. We could quibble all day about lines and details which would be futile.

You have been avoiding my arguments, though. Who pays the provider since you refuse to do so? Do you pay them after reviewing it if you thought it had value? What happens if no-one pays?

Do you really want embedded, unavoidable adverts in stuff? That would be an abomination.

[redgunamo]

It's artists whining about not being paid for their "work" that I'm taking issue with. Get proper jobs then :bach:

I love art, and the Arts even, however being faced with the cost of it spoils the mood. It's as stark and unwelcome a reminder of the essential sadness of life as being surrounded by braying corporates at the opera, I fact. Or the football, in your case, I suppose.

[Berni]

Whether I pay for stuff and what that stuff is will very much be a question of my circumstances at the time.

What happens if no-one pays for anything? The model will break and have to be replaced by something else, I guess. What I want is neither here nor there. What is going to happen will happen and nothing I can do will change it. I will simply make hay while the sun shines.

[Sir Charlie of Nicholas]

You're fooling no one, mate. Your issue isn't 'the model' or 'the artist'. Your issue is short arms and long pockets.

[Ashberto]

He used to think that what happened to his victims was their problem, and nothing to do with him.