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I had a better ratio when I cared about the site.
thanks for cancelling me out i guess
:facepalm:
Did you read about MAME? some emulations are actually provided by the copyright holders:
Like I said, that’s easier said than done.
If I were to say “let’s end world hunger” I’d better have a plan.
Can you provide any evidence that any of those are related to piracy?
No, if you’d actually done some research you’d know that the recent Nintendo update did nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
That’s exactly what I’d advocate too, its just you’ve got to take that approach rather than just saying “pirates are evil, they should be purged from the Earth”.
May I try to answer that question?
For the last 30 years, the Entertainment industry was spending huge amounts of money of trying to invent “Protective Mechanisms”, even though it can be scientifically proven that their effort is futile, because of the so called “Analog Gap” (google this if you’re interested). Back in the day of floppy discs, game manuals had verification passwords printed in YELLOW on WHITE pages, so that a black-and-white copy of the game manual would wash the codes away and pirates could not pass the initial password questions; back in the day of CD-ROMs, the notion was that the size alone protects from copying, and later, producing the discs with errors (!!!) that would be auto-fixed if copied was supposed to prove that the CD in drive is actually legitimate, and not a copy. Some other protective mechanisms were invented, and all of them were overcome.
We now have the BR discs and once again, the protection is already broken. What will come next?
Instead, the Industry should, as the original poster said, “Embrace piracy”. What this means is: Why do you waste money on printing the discs, packaging them, shipping them, showcasing them in stores? Why do you share with shop-keepers and logistics companies? Why don’t you just deliver the CONTENT to the customers? The technology is there! VALVe embraced the technology, Blizzard uses the technology for digital distribution of their games, Linux is distributed through this technology…
Typical margin of a shop is 40%. That means that if a customer cashes out 40$ for a game, you only get slightly more than 20$ (before taxation). But why? The customer only wants the digital content. He doesn’t really desire to have something in his appartment that will only get in the way when he wants to move to another location. He doesn’t want to have to shuffle DVDs in the drive whenever he wants to switch from Half-Life 3 to Halo 5.
The “pirate” community has been a huge engine of development. TOR, p2p, bittorrent, all these come from people who were looking for ways to trick YOU (the Industry). Just like VHS spread because it allowed easier copying and recording, and in the end it let you made loads of money, so does bittorrent and other technologies give you an option to cheaply deliver goods to customer. Would you rather sell 5 million copies of L4D, each at 50$, or rather 100 000 000 copies, each at 10$? What is more? A quarter billion dollars, or 1 billion dollars?
Statistics from Czechia (a country in the middle of Europe) have shown that movie DVDs sold at the price of 2-3 US$ (not our currency, but just so you can get the picture) sell 20x more copies than the same movies at 20$ a piece. So the profit is roughly the same, but the important aspect is that the “voice of the street” is no longer “The movies are too expensive, I’m going to wait till TV airs it / I’m going to download it”; the voice now is “It’s cheap, and I’m in the mood, so I’m going to buy it and watch it tonight.” And through this, you can train the people that buying is right. In the long run, it pays off in a huge way.
Half-Life 2 was one of the first games I bought. My Steam account now lists games worth like 1000 $ or more, simply because I’ve learnt to buy games on Steam. What’s VALVe’s profit from that? 10%? I don’t know, but they sure don’t regret investing in this.
Crysis was one of the most highly pirated games of the year it was released. By no doubt their decision to go multiplatform was influenced to some extent by piracy.
If movies were that cheap in the States then I would probably buy some. But this year movies have been being released on torrents, as DVD rips, while they are still in theaters!
God I love it. Not having to pay ridiculous movie ticket/DVD prices.
I have download SO MANY movies this year WEEKS AND MONTHS before they were released on DVD.
/bow to the insiders releasing these rips for us.
Sharing copyrighted material is not strictly illegal (in the U.S.). It is merely an offense punishable by some hefty civil suits.
About the movie price argument:
Oh wait, ever heard of a Blockbuster? Super cheap, and it’s not like you’re going to watch it more then once unless it’s fantastic. Price for movies is a shitty excuse, because you can get them legally, cheap, and generally very easily.
seriously …you’re the 2nd guy who quoted my very first post of this thread and ignoring like 18 pages of debates and opinions & legal issues and all about that stuff.
god !
This is not the only reason people pirate movies, take Up for example, it was released how many months after here in the UK compared to America, so people get frustrated, and aren’t paitent, same with Bolt, their are many films that are released ridicolusy far apart in differnt countries, and this contriubutes to a massive up surge in piracy. Same as TV, a lot of shows in America aren’t shown in the UK for sometimes 6 months to a year after, so people just download it, and it works vice versa, sometimes theirs things on the bbc america dont get. Before this wasn’t a problem but it is now, I gaurntee that 50 percent plus of the world are impaitent and want things right now not tomorrow
Uhh, yeah, I know its hard, but rather than not have a discussion about it, let’s do it.
I already said that the prevalence of things like Steam and Direct2Drive are speeding up the process of reducing piracy, since things are cheaper and easier to access, but more things like demos, unbiased reviews and non-piracy incentives are all further steps to take.
So you’re sure that their decision wasn’t at all motivated by their desire to, you know, sell more copies by appealing to a greater audience?
I see no reason that you can’t do both. :3
That’s nice. Why should it make a difference?
It doesn’t justify pirating, just as claiming that “you wanted it reaaaaaally bad” doesn’t justify stealing from the cookie jar.
When it comes down to a conflict between what the law says and what people want, the law must win, or be changed - which is why we must be so careful when we make laws.
So you say VALVe has embraced it with steam? Here’s some news for you, people still pirate their games like any other game. I don’t think digital distribution will fix it as much as you would think, I even know of people who will find a great deal on Steam but still not want to go through the hassle of paying for it. So far, digital distribution isn’t helping make any dramatic changes.
You’re forgetting why most people pirate, they do it because they don’t want to pay for anything. Even if a game was a lot cheaper people still wouldn’t want to fork over money.
Both you and I know there was more then one reason why they did it, and we both know my statement is true.
Almost twenty pages already… how long has it been?
Think about our children.
No seriously, think about them.
They are going to grow up with parents who get everything digital for free, and thus the practice is reinforced as morally acceptable. We are the frontier generation of societal change, and our kids will be the actual change agents.
WTF am I getting at?
Think about how many young people right now who get everything they want for free, or sponsor pay-what-you-want or donation scenarios.
The entertainment industry and the software industry as we know it will not survive our children. They will expect everything to be free. They will demand it. Trying to fight the tide is not only hopeless, it is irresponsible.
In a sense you are delaying the progress of our culture into a share-alike model, in which most, if not all creative projects are cooperative and open source. It might seem scary at first, but that’s where we are heading, so hold on to your hats because its going to be a bumpy ride.
I disagree, the entertainment industry is actually moving from selling content directly to the consumer, to selling content to content providers who in turn use demand for the content to sell advertising access to their user base. In other words, digital media is moving towards a “free radio” approach. See Quakelive, Netflix, or that streaming video game server thing that was at GDC this year.