@djackson_dba
I must agree. He stole it and then uploaded. It could have been even worse if he tried to sell it.
As far as I know the overall hype around piracy is a bit wrong. Of course I could be the one who's wrong, but let's say you want to buy some tool (hammer for example). You visit different shops and look for the cheapest one on the internet. As a client you obviously want the cheapest one available or maybe even for free. The only thing you're worried about is quality. You shouldn't think whether this shop is legal or not or where they got those hammers. Of course it's always a good idea to find more information before buying.
In my opinion a lot of energy goes into wrong place.
Finding sites where people upload and re-upload things shouldn't be hard and it also shouldn't be hard to close those down. First comes the warning to remove all the content. If this is not followed, ISP has right to close the site down for good. Any further attempts to get site back online ends with a fine or something similar.
Sites what link to uploads will eventually die out if there's no new content.
However this is not where problem ends. Rapidshare, Megaupload and other files are still holding the files.
It's really hard to get around this problem, but I believe if you force every member to register and modify the system to show let's say username or something when you download it makes it very easy to track people who upload pirated software, games, movies, music and so on. Then companies can contact file-sharing sites and give them the username and every file uploaded by that user will be removed and fined if necessary.
It's even possible to create an automatic account without user ever knowing about it. This keeps files organized and under one name. If there's a problem all you need to do is report the user and files are removed.
Then there are P2P programs. What can I say? They're already able to monitor things and probably tag the most active uploaders. Just keep this up and bring in new forces whenever possible and I'm sure P2P will die once overall internet is more or less clean.
Of course there still could exist some underground places, but in big picture piracy as such should die.
I see only one problem - money. RS, MU and others are probably VERY happy when someone uploads a big game because first they need a premium account to do so and people who want to download without limitations also need premium. They earn A LOT.
This is probably the one reason why file-sharing sites aren't very co-operative against piracy, because as I've said it's actually quite easy to create a system to tag an uploader.
There are flaws in my ideas. For example if there's one user, one IP then how hard can it be to use a proxy, VPN, server or w/e else and create another user, upload, another user, upload, etc. Only few people can do that and those are people who are real pirates. You, me or any other person can't do that or at least it would require a lot of effort. So, this should at least stop re-uploading which leaves us with official source and from there on it should be easy enough to get things removed.
What about leakers like these? Continue. I see no reason why one should do so and Nintendo nailed it. I'm not aware how hard or troublesome it was and I'm also not aware how expensive this whole find-the-leaker-operation could be, but they did it and I'm sure they can do it again.
What do you get out of all this (if piracy ends)? If people buy more games, software, movies from different sites (Gamespot, Steam, etc) then there will be typical competition who gets more customers. They'll start flowing with the general market. One lowers prices, one makes great special offer weekends, etc, etc.
Basically, the more customers shops have the more they can lower their prices and that makes you, me and everyone else a happy client. There's a new game, shops pay full price and since they have so many customers they can lower the original price considerably and that means pretty much everyone will get their game if they want to.
Of course I'm not sure if the changes would be this dramatic, but it would be nice.
Competing with piracy? Never.
Uploading = Selling stolen/faked tickets to concert
Downloading = The short end of the stick. You probably wont even get inside with these stolen tickets. After all, they're tagged with unique ID and and if something's missing they'll know about it.
I'm sure everything can be done with a bit of help & support from everyone.
Facebook
Twitter