No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

Re:No, Silly, Piracy is Theft by mindslight on Saturday August 30, 2008 @05:19AM (#290778)

Given a budget of $10k, I'm pretty sure I could obtain either one of those anonymously.

How hard is it to forge the required identification or bribe a store clerk to not check identification?

If someone's house is broken into, are they going to be liable for piracy through their stolen media player? (Assuming there's a several hours before it can be disabled)

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Re:No, Silly, Piracy is Theft by tptacek on Saturday August 30, 2008 @01:30PM (#290955)

I don't know. Where's the thriving and accessible black market for AT&T SIM cards and DTV cards?

And, with regards to "are they going to be liable", I direct your attention to the track record of the RIAA.

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Re:No, Silly, Piracy is Theft by mindslight on Saturday August 30, 2008 @06:12PM (#291076)

The value of an anonymously acquired media player would be a lot higher than either of those two things. There's no market because nobody is willing to pay $1k for an anonymous cell phone when they can just get a prepaid one. But if one absolutely needed an AT&T SIM card, with that budget I'm sure they could forge all the required identification.

Of course it's hard to speculate the difficulty of such forging in the future. But I would think that $10k would be enough to break some human link in the chain.

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