Anesthesia

And what will the 'real' mods do?

Well you've been walking around with your eyes shut then. Which doesn't surprise me. What would surprise me though is if you'd been alive in the early 80's, that would be astonishing.

That too. Pretend it is spam and it is just like buying an illegal gun from dodgy Dave behind the bowling alley and then calling the police when it doesn't work. As indy500fan said, usenet groups are requested as a whole whereas songs are requested individually. Email inboxes are requested as a whole, as are forum pages - they can have spam but songs cannot. Anyway, if you think it's spam why not complain to the government, why not sue them if you're so sure. Just let us know when they laugh in your face. Sorry to have proven you wrong. All of us.

Exactly. You are requesting the item. Sorry to have proven you wrong. I cited a law (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003) which defines spam and this is not spam. This is solicited so it is not spam.

I have changed my mind. I no longer agree with Insane and I have come up with an altogether better proposal. Implement a zero tolerance policy on teenage angst related topics, anything to do with relationships and so on. Hand out IP bans (use a wildcard for the last two octets, just to be safe) to those found to be in contravention of this rule. Here's the fun part - don't tell anyone about the new rule; let them find it out for themselves.

I'm sick of them too, I agree with what Insane suggested.

That's a good reason to make it policy to do that then (in the circumstances we described).

And that's why I said to be careful, as opposed to having a go at you.

I can do diabolo quite well, but that's only from before I could juggle. I don't really like diabolo that much.

You know what sort of thing will get this post locked so don't post such things. Whenever a topic like this comes up it generally fills up with people boasting about how much they have pirated - much like you did.

Be careful not to turn this thread into a talk about how much you enjoy piracy, what services you use or how much you've downloaded. That will just get it locked.

Not even as complex as that. In addition to what BlueLancer said, even if they pin down the exact machine used they can't prove it was you in front of it.

I believe the previous thread was removed because the author showed his face. Don't put material that allows you to be identified on this thread. My party trick is juggling. I'm not an expert, but I am pretty good. Here I am... . My face isn't shown, so this should be okay. What's your party trick?

Experts who operate on the principle that an IP == a person.

NO IT ISN'T. It is not spam. Spam is sending unsolicited email. This would be you requesting a file, wanting to breach copyright, over a peer to peer network. There is absolutely zero law against pretending a file on a peer to peer network is something else. IT IS NOT SPAM! I don't know how I could make this any clearer - you have not provided anything that confirms that it is classed as spam. However I can tell you that the CAN SPAM Act of 2003 defines it as "any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose)". This does not cover songs masquerading on peer to peer networks.

They would make them the full size... It is gonna be audio adverts encoded into the same format for the same time so it will be the same size. The trick is that it will have the same hash so it will look EXACTLY like the real deal. Exactly. Meaning it won't be possible for a user, faced with the file alone on a peer to peer service (and no user ratings, comments etc.) to distinguish it from the actual song.

Yes, but of course it depends on whether the medium in question has user ratings. Also, the way I see it, people have such fast connections nowadays that it really won't matter. There will still be an abundance of 'the real deal' on the networks so it will be a case of people taking 1 minute to download something, hearing it isn't it then getting the real thing. They aren't gonna realise it isn't what they were after then stay to listen to adverts for 3 mintues. They will hear it isn't it after 10 seconds then delete it.

The point is that the advertising files have the same hash as the originals, meaning they CAN'T filter it out.

Yes; release adverts in the place of pirated songs on peer to peer networks. It just means that someone who is trying to illegally get a song gets something else instead. Tell me how that is spam.

That isn't spam. There is no legal recourse.

The arguments were both resolved, though.

The thing is, certain things are removed that don't violate the rules - like the posts in the topic we are talking about. That is when it is useful to know why they were removed.

I agree. I want to view signatures but I don't want to view massive ones. Viewing a signature helps me identify the poster without having to read the name every time. 5 lines is enough for a song verse - that's my reasoning. However, I would like to see 300 characters. 5 lines consisting of 255 characters is not as wide as the allowed signature size, so it couldn't end up being more than 5 lines when compressed horizontally (no more than the signature image size, that is).

I do honestly know how much work moderators have and no one is asking for them to leave notes in every moderated thread - just those in which it would help a lot of users. Take darkmage099's example - we were all posting in the thread, we'd had some arguments but resolved them of our own accords then a load of posts get removed (including some which had nothing to do with the resolved arguments). They just disappear and no one is any the wiser as to why or who did it. No one is asking for them to leave notes for double post removals, removal of things which need to be removed and no notice given (blatant spam, cheat posting etc.) - only where it would be helpful to leave one.

The thing is by doing that you get no control over who it goes to - you don't get to choose your 'child's' mother; somewhat defeating the point of passing on your bloodline as there's no way to ensure the quality. I am not saying it is a bad thing to do, only pointing out that depending on how you look at it it may not be the same.