What’s sad is not what Piracy is doing to the entertainment industry,
It’s what it has done to the general perception of the bittorrent protocol.
Anyone who wants to distribute anything significant, no matter how much or how little they wish to charge for it, will have to deal with buying expensive servers or arrays of servers that can handle ludicrously large numbers of I/O request, and lease incredibly expensive high-bandwidth lines on top of that.
Additional Edit: I wonder how much Valve pays for servers/bandwidth for their steam service…
It’s not theft at all. Theft implies that you have ownership of something, while the original owner is let with nothing. You are using a copy of something without permission. The software company still has ownership of the software.
Nope ( see above ) . However, it is against the legal terms of use.
Aside from the moral implications this analogy can go further. If you had a photocopied dollar ( while it’s still illegal ) , it is a different sort of crime than distributing these illicit bills, over just owning illicit bills.
The issue here isn’t theft. Theft doesn’t even come into play here. The originals an license still belong to the companies they belonged to before. Where things get tricky is where owning a copy, and distributing copies is concerned.
It used to be so that in Canada you CAN own a copy of software you don’t own or didn’t buy, and it’s not considered illegal. This, I believe, was to protect people who are using backups of a lost or damaged original. It is illegal to download or buy copies though. If you distribute this copy it is also illegal. It’s strange little legal loopholes and gray areas that make the situation a bit tricky.
And then they sell it to balance out the costs of production, because…
Why, yes, what an excellent point that Daedalus made on page 1! After all, even creative people need money. It would be great if the world was different in a way that made this easier for them, but it isn’t; artists need money, and ultimately consumers pay them.
Anyway, thanks for proving our point for us.
Having said that, yes, there are great games that are intentionally distributed for free because the creators are in it for fun, experience and recognition. For example: Toribash (although with some goodies in an online store arrangement), many many many FOSS games like Scorched3D, and a really awesome upcoming mod called Black Mesa. You should check it out some time.
It’s a shame, though, that one key competitive property of those products (and other things that aren’t games, like Inkscape and GIMP) - the price tag - is offset by idiots who pirate the expensive stuff (like Photoshop) for free anyway. It completely destabilizes the market, giving mindshare to products that are not being sustained by their users and which have done nothing to earn it (partly because they have insane price tags). The result is an environment where the little guys have a harder time competing (since people “just pirate Photoshop”, or just pirate the AAA high-budget computer games). That one big market leader ends up charging even more money to boot.
This is a tower with rotten foundations and it ends in a crash.
Now I’m going to find a log to munch on, because I am a cockroach…
If taking something without permission is only theft if the original owner is left with nothing, then why do copyrights and the like exist? If I steal someone’s idea, they still have the idea, no?
Call it intellectual theft if you like. It doesn’t necessarily matter what it’s called - the point here is that you’re taking something that doesn’t belong to you and harming - indirectly, perhaps, but nonetheless - the original owner when you torrent games for sale.
's a different sort of crime, but it’s still a crime nonetheless.
If you want to differentiate between people who simply download software and those who distribute it, that’d be an interesting discussion - but the principle being discussed here is that downloading a game which you could buy is both morally wrong and harms the developers.
But what if you can’t buy it? as stated before, money’s tight and buying every $60+ big name title that comes out simply isn’t in the play book.
Seems that theres several different types of pirates… those that download things because they simply don’t have the disposable income to buy these things, and those that pirate things simply because they can and its free.
I was the latter, but finally got around to getting a paypal account and have been buying things off steam since.
That isn’t theft though. That is usage and right policies. I didn’t even suggest it wasn’t illegal. It’s just NOT theft.
In legal issues such as this terminology is VERY important. It’s the difference between something illegal, and something that is simply immoral. Remember, nothing is being taken here. There is copies being made, but the original remains where/belonging to where it always did. The biggest reason for this being important is how software manufacturers handle piracy. A major example of this is one I’ve dealt with twice now. I bought Crysis Warhead. Their usage indicates that I have a 3 install limit, which is enforced by securom ( which is can be viewed as illegal software as well, but moving on ). Through piracy and key gens, my key was generated by someone else and used. When I tried installing the game THE FIRST TIME, I was told I couldn’t because my install limit was reached. It was rectified after a week and a half, but the steps taken by EA was technically against the fair use policy, through no fault of mine. From a legal standpoint, what was done to EA was illegal, but it wasn’t theft, and it wasn’t by me. The steps they took were also, technically, illegal. Failure to live up to the terms of sale because they are trying to protect themselves cannot be excused because they aren’t able to prevent their software from being copied. However, if they were protecting against theft it would be different. These small differences may not SEEM important, but for the purposes of how they impact how things are handle they are VERY important.
When talking about piracy, it is important to note what piracy actually IS. Once that is determined, then you can think about the rights of the software companies to protect their intellectual properties. When thinking about such steps, the rights of paying customers should be considered.
Should I get a free car even though I can’t afford one? Should I get paid even though I don’t have a job? Can I rape some guy’s girl because I can’t get one myself?
Answer: No, fuck long term welfare, and “eww, you’re sick!”
Get a job, save up, or forget about it! It’s a simple as that!
If this is the legal definition of “theft,” then I don’t disagree with you that it’s not theft in a legal sense (colloquial, though). Point is, in this situation, both physically stealing a copy of a game from a store AND downloading it are, as you say, illegal and immoral. That both are immoral is without question; one is illegal because it’s theft, the other because it’s a agreement violation. That’s all I’m trying to establish here.
I’m not sure I understand what point you’re trying to make here. Do you mean that EA’s enforcement of a three-install limit is against Fair Use, or the steps they took to allow you to install the game after someone used your key was against Fair Use?
Either way, if the point you’re trying to make is that game companies should handle piracy differently, I don’t disagree. Obviously what they’re doing right now isn’t working.
I personally don’t dislike the way Steam handles this - where a game, once purchased, is bound to your account forever, and can be downloaded to your account as many times as needed. Obviously Steam isn’t immune to piracy either, but it seems to be a good step forward.
How should we define piracy, then? The downloading of a copy of software which one hasn’t paid for?
I’m ashamed to say that I’m somewhat ignorant of the finer details of Fair Use. Is this allowed under said rights? Or is downloading the software legal, but distributing it isn’t?
I’m sure some of them would, they just don’t think as that exact word, as you can see they’ve deluded themselves into believing it isn’t and it’s a step forward to them.
Well I do think pirating a game is better than going and stealing a physical copy of it from a store, but whatever. I’m going to keep pirating games and so are the rest of us and we’re not going to stop just because some people think “OMGZ STEALING IS RONG!”
And that’s supposed to make it all better? It doesn’t, at least if you stole it like the guy who stole 100 copies, you’d have earned it to some extent (now that’s stealing I can agree with).
I know you aren’t going to stop slowly starting to ruin my favorite platform. And maybe yours too.
But yeah, PC gaming is dieing and it’s all the fault of piracy. Let’s all enjoy this great platfrom while it last before the “peasent console-fags” take over for good.
I could have gone all proper explanation but eh, generalization. And like it was discussed before, you can’t really steal something you don’t own so it can’t be compared to say, stealing a car which someone else has paid for.
Also, saying that PC gaming is dying due solely because of piracy is a bit much. Personally I think consoles are part of the problem there (if there is even a problem) but thats a whole other can of worms.
Come on, physically stealing goods is worse than piracy; that directly impacts particular companies or individuals. At least pirates don’t necessarily impact the physical market of goods - as I have said twice now in this thread there is no proof that they would have bought the game in the first place. Obtaining a digital copy does NOT necessarily lead to a loss on the part of anyone. There is a huge difference between me downloading a game that I have no intention of purchasing, or me going into a store and ripping off a few copies of a boxed game - those are physical copies that the store could have sold, not a digital copy which can be reproduced and distributed many times over at no cost.
Yes this is true, I do not advocate the pirate party’s views or anything, because there are people without morals who would take advantage of opportunities like this. I am a strong believer that if companies take a reasonable approach to piracy though then more people will buy their stuff. A good incentive to buy Valve games is that they constantly update them, their DRM system doesn’t blow, and they give us feature-updates as well in games like TF2 and L4D. Crappy DRM that makes it harder for legitimate owners to play the game gives people an incentive to download it, on the other hand.
You’re going to run into shrink in any industry, whether you’re selling a piece of software or tangible goods. It’s inevitable. I agree that pirates are a potential contributing factor to poor sales; but I have a hard time believing that they cause enough financial damage to really be a threat. If people didn’t have the option to download they probably just wouldn’t give the game a second thought, not automatically go out and buy it as the alternative. There’s going to be the few people that download and enjoy it and take advantage of getting it for free, but I would imagine that this is limited to a handful of lost sales (except in some specific instances)
E: How are you guys justifying the ‘PC gaming is dying due to piracy’ argument?
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.
