Pirating VS Buying

You have to balance your priorities. That’s part of life.

Well I am not making any company lose money.

Even if I didn’t pirate I wouldn’t buy the game in the first place.

So they will not get money from me in either way.

I don’t upload games to others either so I am not doing anything to help others get the game.

Although if a game is good I will buy it.

I’ve pirated a lot in the past but I’m trying to get away from it now. The only thing I really pirate these days is movies off of my school’s DC++ network, because the only place to rent movies nearby kinda sucks and I don’t watch enough to bother with netflix.

I pay for most of my games now, but I still will pirate as a try-before-you-buy mechanic when there’s no demo. There’s a lot of shit going for $50 and I don’t like wasting my money. I have mixed feelings about it all. If someone releases a heavily DRM-protected game, I’d prefer to download cracked version w/out the DRM.

Basically, I’m not a supporter of it but I still do it without thinking sometimes. Kinda sad.

Well, many of those people that have to work for dirt cheap are born into poverty…and from what I remember, (this is speaking for the phillippines, where I used to live, with some really bad poverty levels), even public schools had some form of tuition. So for most of those poor kids’ lives, they’re not really conscious or trying all that hard to change these ‘meta-rules’ of life. “balance your priorities” becomes “prioritize your life, screw everybody else”…“pirating games is wrong” becomes “eh, I’m poor, it’s not like the police will care…so why not”. Little things that you think they’d have the common sense to know about, they actually don’t think about.

No, really. When you masturbate, you’re denying some woman the pleasure she’s entitled to. To please yourself. Not harming anybody else, just having some miss out.

And why do you partake in this behaviour? Because you learned what feels good. You probably know a lot about sex from pornography.

And with this freely obtained, pleasing information you refrain from benefiting anybody else.
Movies and games are info too.

Get off your low horse and take up a real trot. You’re too dense to consider the comparison because you disagree with the idea it carries. Perhaps I was wrong to assume here that a woman would be missing out on your infinitesimal finesse.

Firstly, it’s spelled “lose”. To lose. As in, you would be “a loser”… there’s no such thing as “a looser”, unless we’re talking about your sister.

Secondly, torrent sites hardly distribute anything. Their bandwidth is incredibly light. The torrents they distribute are merely instructions on obtaining the file from peers… how to locate the media available for download. You may then download a small part from hundreds of different locations. It’s called swarming file transfer.

That’s why our jolly-good friends at The Pirate Bay have been operating so long. That’s why they have a page dedicated to mocking legal threats.

I don’t recall the last time I obtained a game without explicit legal rights. Well over half the games I’ve obtained through a torrent, I actually own. It’s more convenient than locating and breaking out the CDs.

The remainder are ones I downloaded and deleted after not having played… the kind of game that looks promising and is then revealed shortly after its release to be a pile of crap. For example, I had gotten information claiming to be Spore. After having downloaded it I read about the aggressive DRM on official copies. I refused to install or play it, then, and it was resigned to deletion.

The reason you nancies would oppose piracy or masturbation is because you lack self-control.

Here’s how I feel about DRM:

DRM harms ONLY the legitimate customer.

Here’s how I feel about piracy:

If you think the item is too expensive, you’re either A ) Not going to buy it and the company makes no money but doesn’t lose any money, or B ) Pirate it and the company makes no money but doesn’t lose any money

At least with B, there’s a chance that you’ll like the item so much that you’ll feel the need to save up money to buy it.

That’s a shitty example, because a woman or a man aren’t entitled to a cock or a vagina, if that’s what you think then you are on your way to becoming a rapist.

Funny, to go over pretty much every DVD I have (and I have a lot)

  • Insert DVD
  • The first screen isn’t there
  • The second screen isn’t there (only DVDs I’ve seen that have that stuff on, are rentals)
  • It has the third screen once, it is indeed unskippable
  • Most of them don’t have the fourth screen, those that do can be skipped
  • Not there (see my third point above here)
  • Don’t have to push “play” to get to to the menu, it generally goes straight from the green (point 3) to the menu)
  • Does have a menu!
  • What blue-ray commercial?
  • Trailer, after the menu?
  • Not there (see my third point above here)
  • Trailer, after the menu?
  • Huh? Fade out?
  • Yep, I do have another legal-mumbo-jumbo-filled screen now!
  • Logos and intro also happen on pirated movies, since they’re part of the actual movie.
  • Matrix sucks.

So that failed image to justify piracy can be edited to:

  • Insert DVD + 4 screens for pirated (logo 1, logo 2, logo 3, movie)
  • Insert DVD + 7-8 screens for legal (legal, menu, legal, logo 1, logo 2, logo 3, movie)

If you think it’s too expensive for what it’s worth, then you obviously don’t want to see/play/hear it enough, so there’s no point in getting it anyway.

If you’re not going to buy it, fine, the company didn’t get the money and you didn’t get your entertainment. If you’re pirating, the company doesn’t get the money, but you do get your entertainment. So you’re using their “service” without paying them.

But what if you pirate it because you wouldn’t buy it in the first place?

they lose no money because even if you weren’t able to pirate the game you still wouldn’t have bought it.

If you don’t want to buy it, then you don’t own it. Simple as that.

You not wanting to buy it = you not wanting the entertainment from it, and since you don’t want the entertainment from it, you have no right to be entertained by it.

You’re really weak at arguing… If you’re going to oppose downloads by saying peoples’ televisions should turn off whenever there’s nothing good on TV, you know you could do better. If I don’t want to be entertained by BioShock, that doesn’t mean I don’t have the right for a friend to get me to play the demo on his PS3.

Because I don’t want it, and the fact I will never buy it, doesn’t mean I’ll never play it.

So what changes if I do play it?

All games are destined to be come abandonware eventually, just as all movies are destined for broadcast-TV. If you have patience, and self-control, and refuse to purchase any such things, you’re not cheating the company who sells it if you decide to download. You’re only cheating time… the fire in which we burn.

We mortals have the right to cheat time as much as we’re able.

I’m weak at arguing? I just spent 5 minutes reading and rereading this bit of text and I still don’t have any idea what you’re hinting at.

A demo is a preview of the final product that is given to customers for free by choice of the company that invested in the development of that product. I’m all for demos and previews, as they’re generally a good indicator of the quality of the final product. So I thank you for agreeing with me.

That’s a bollocks argument. Every product in every market will at some point lower in price or even become free, so you just wait for that time to come. But in the meantime, the product is still worth money and you still have to buy it. Cheating time is still cheating.

Nah I rather not buy it and save the money ^^.

But the company doesn’t lose out because if it was impossible to pirate I wouldn’t get it anyway.

You seem to miss the point.

If you wouldn’t get it, then you don’t want it, so you shouldn’t have it.

How about I want it because I can get it for free?

I don’t care if you think I shouldn’t have it.

If someone was selling a single small cookie for 10 dollars most people wouldn’t get it.

But if it was free a lot of those people would take one.

Just because something has a price on it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want it.
They will only want it if they can get it for free otherwise they won’t get it.

Just like in the past before internet a lot of people would not go to the theater or buy vhs. They would wait to see it on tv for free.

The thing with movies on TV is that the broadcasting network pays for that movie and the rights to broadcast it (which is a lot more than the standard $12 or so for a DVD). So the company that made the movie still gets the money from that, while the broadcasting network airs it as a free service.

If a person wants to hand out cookies for free, that’s his/her choice, she’ll lose money because she paid for the cookies/ingredients and isn’t making any profit from it by giving them away. If companies want to distribute their products for free, then that’s their choice as well… Too bad they don’t, so anything they put on the market will cost money. So there are no legal ways of you getting the product for free, unless you wait for a long time until it turns free.

Yah but that is not the point of my argument.

You were trying to say since I didn’t want to pay for it that I didn’t want it.
I gave an example of people who might want something but not want to pay for it if there is an option.

You can go on Justin.tv and watch some of the latest movies for free in high quality.

Point being the company will not get money from me whether the game can be pirated or not.
I don’t care about your moral views but the point is that they lose no money if I were to pirate because I wouldn’t be a customer either way.

And my point is that if you don’t pay for a paid service, you shouldn’t get it. Yes, it’s a moral thing, but so is any criminal act.

Cry me a river.

You know back in the day we had to pay to get local info from a newspaper.
Now you can just search on the internet.

I can watch new free movies on Justin.tv and they are legit.

I can listen to free music on shoutcast.com

Are you calling those crimes?

How about me watching a movie with a friend that he payed for but I didn’t?
How about him streaming it to me?

Pirating something pretty much implies that you want to play the game. And if it cost you to play it, and you do not pay, you have no right to use that product.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.