Technology

Oh man, story time!

I like to stab people competitively. One of the risks you run is that they stab you back.

About 20 years ago now I was sparring with a pal of mine. We were using shinai - a Japanese sparring sword made of four slats of bamboo lashed together with leather. My pal drew back for a pull thrust and I deflected it with a move where I stepped back and lifted my blade to direct the thrust above my head.

... Only I forgot to step back. Instead of redirecting the thrust harmlessly above myself, I brought the tip of his shinai directly into my right eye. (Stupidly, I wasn't wearing any protective gear.) The inch-wide tip smashed my eye down and collided with the back of my eye socket.

I hit the ground, blind, weeping blood and in the most pain I've ever experienced.

Fortunately, I kept the eye.... but I was seeing triple due to the swelling in my socket. So I bought an eye patch and wore it until I healed.

During my convalescence I happened to have a really shitty day. It was a cold winter day and I was running late to work. My car ran out of gas a mile short. I had to run the last mile in the cold and wet, already late and getting more frustrated every moment.

By the time I reached the parking lot for my shitty retail job, I was in a foul mood.

... Now at this point in my life I wore a frankly excessive amount of black leather. Black leather boots. Black leather jacket. Black leather gloves. My pants were black too, but they were at least denim.

So imagine if you will - a six foot tall man, wearing all black leather and an eyepatch, stalking angrily across the parking lot with a baleful expression.

People were getting the fuck outta my way. Gazes averted, people turned their heads and just dipped.

... Until The Boy. A pale haired kid of about five or six was being towed out of my path by his mushroom- haired mother - but he was rooted to the spot. Staring at me with unabashed excitement, he slipped free of his mother's grasp and shouted, "Look Mom! A Pirate!"

I started guffawing, bad mood instantly gone. Mushroom-Mom grabbed her kid and started dragging him away. I called after them "It's okay!" But with a mumbled "No, it's not", she dragged the boy into their car and fled.

... And I went to work, Pirate King of the K-Mart.

Welp, here goes my confidence in wearing an eye patch. And yeah, I don't have one eye and for the longest time think that it'd be cool to wear one.

That's clearly an internet pirate. That's the man costing Hollywood billions of dollars.

Maybe closer to cars not having limiters to prevent speeding.

They could. The tech exists. Even to lock it to specific speed limits (not just an upwards cap) using GPS.

But most would say that's overreaching. Until an insurance company sues/lobbies for it because it would improve their bottom line to force drivers to drive more responsibly by legally pushing the manufacturers to add limiters.

Yes, but also no - and be careful, you're asking this around people who absolutely do hold manufacturers morally responsible for what people do with products bought from them. See e.g. any discussion of gun control on here.

If you want to draw an analogy between traffic and the internet, the ISP is your provider of roads; your PC+router+modem is your car. So this is much, much closer to suing the state for building and maintaining the road the getaway car used.

Also, there's no cleanly analogous crime - "getaway car" sounds like a comparison to robbery, but no-one here was robbed. Sony's argument for damages would have been based on theoretical sales it didn't make, arguing that its government-issued monopoly on its IP automatically implies anyone pirating content would have paid them for it.

So here's an even closer analogy: you sell marijuana in a state with a fixed number of dispensary licenses, and you are the only person in your neighborhood with a license. You set up shop. Someone else shows up in a van and gives away pot for free; your sales go down. You sue the state for providing the road the van used to do this.