Piracy helps consumers because it gets lower prices. DO you think you could buy MP3s on amazon for 29p if they could still get away with charging £13 for a full CD? We'd still be carrying around discmans if the music industry had its way. As it is, the need to try and compete with free means offering unique game cases and bonus items and lower prices on music/games and movies.
This is just misinformed.
The Music and Movie Industry and the Gaming industry are very separate beasts, don't let anyone tell you differently. There are differences in structure, production and, well, just about everything. The Music and movie industries have tried to hold on to some form of old "glory days" in their pricing. As new technologies emerge they tried to create an artificial sparsity in order to charge what they used to in order to not upset their old music stores etc. This was doomed to fail simply due to how the market economy works.
When it comes to games, piracy doesn't lower prices either. Like in any business you lower prices in order to widen your target demographic. Basically you try to find that sweet where you maximize the volume of sales and the net gain of each sale. This is one of the fundamentals of selling ANYTHING.
Basically the only thing pirates "achieve" is fooling some companies to believe they have bigger markets available to them than they actually have, and making said companies try stupid things like this DRM.
Also, suggesting that piracy lowers prices assumes that those pirates would have purchased the game had the game been low enough...which, has been noted repeatedly, isn't necessarily true.
Although, the reduction in PC prices is pretty complex. To some extent, itt may be due to the perception of "lost" sales.
I really cannot see how you could say downloading these was infringement, barring legal contortions. Copyright means the copyright holder has an exclusive right to distribute the work in question. If they themselves upload it to a torrent site, that is clear and indisputable evidence they have knowingly made it available to download without preconditions. If I set up a yard sale that says, "Take anything free," and it is in fact my property, and I don't try to stop anyone until they have loaded the item in question into their car and gotten home, then call the cops 10 days later, is that theft? No, it's absurd.
Now, if they attached trackers to a third party release, that would negate the above complaint, but it's also probably be a federal computer felony.
That's not really a good analogy. A better analogy is cops leaving an unattended bike or an unlocked car and monitoring it from a distance, and arresting people who try to steal.
Also, suggesting that piracy lowers prices assumes that those pirates would have purchased the game had the game been low enough...which, has been noted repeatedly, isn't necessarily true.
Although, the reduction in PC prices is pretty complex. To some extent, itt may be due to the perception of "lost" sales.
Then again, I do wonder how many sales Steam made during its xmas sale, and how many of those purchases were from people who originally pirated the game, or simply didn't buy it at the original price point.
I think too many publishers look at the first month's sales and if their game didn't do well conclude that piracy was to blame, when it very well could have been poor reviews, lack of consumer perceived value in the product, bad economy, etc. But what publisher would ever admit that their QA department fucked up, or that their game is overpriced for what is offered, or that the game just plain isn't fun for most people.
Although, the reduction in PC prices is pretty complex. To some extent, itt may be due to the perception of "lost" sales.
That's simplifying it a bit, but yes. The lowering of prices due to piracy would be indirect. The idea of lost sales would make publishers and developers set a lower budget on a game, which in turn would make the game cheaper. Sadly, though, also of lower quality.
That's not really a good analogy. A better analogy is cops leaving an unattended bike or an unlocked car and monitoring it from a distance, and arresting people who try to steal.
Which they already legally do.
Uh no, that is a terrible analogy. Remember the copyright holder is making available their IP on a public network. There is a difference between the cops leaving a bike unattended, and those same cops leaving a bike unattended with a sign on it that says "free bike." His original analogy explains the situation.
If more individuals actually got arrested, fined and sent to jail for pirating and stealing software then we'd probably see a stark decline in the amount of digital property stolen over the internet.
I think this is exactly the wrong tactic to use. The laws on the books right now for copyright infringement are so draconian at the moment that they are effectively unenforceable. Take a look at the Jammie Thomas case. The end result serves no one.
To echo Tom Merrit's thoughts on the subject, I think we need to treat piracy a lot more like speeding than theft. Slap someone with a non-cumulative $50 fine every time they are caught illegally file sharing. Give the ISP's a cut of this to incentivize them to act and use part of the fine to reimburse IP holders.
Piracy *does* drive prices down, and it did happen in the music industry too.
It also kills pricey mid-tier content producers. But they might have been in the wrong business anyway. There's great merit in the idea that the internet forced music providers to halve their prices, and the same is happening to games. 30$ is the new 60$.
If more individuals actually got arrested, fined and sent to jail for pirating and stealing software then we'd probably see a stark decline in the amount of digital property stolen over the internet.
I think this is exactly the wrong tactic to use. The laws on the books right now for copyright infringement are so draconian at the moment that they are effectively unenforceable. Take a look at the Jammie Thomas case. The end result serves no one.
To echo Tom Merrit's thoughts on the subject, I think we need to treat piracy a lot more like speeding than theft. Slap someone with a non-cumulative $50 fine every time they are caught illegally file sharing. Give the ISP's a cut of this to incentivize them to act and use part of the fine to reimburse IP holders.
To be fair, I should've said fined or sent to jail. Sending someone to jail for downloading a few MP3's would be far too harsh.
Current laws should be altered before they start to be strictly enforced. They weren't created with today's problems in mind.
Sending someone to jail for downloading a billion MP3's is still too harsh. Remember we are talking about copyright infringement not theft. The IP holder has not actually lost anything in the process.
Now if someone downloads these and turns around and sells them, then yes, I could get behind a little jail time, because those are the real bastards of piracy. But that has to do more with the fraud/counterfeit side for me.
I didn't really mean that piracy forced lower game prices, it just forces them to offer more, like the collectors editions, additional content, etc, etc. Again on PC that DLC will be freely available eitehr way so its more effective on consoles certainly. But IMO we as the consumer are better off because there is a free alternative and corporations realise they have to compete with that. Now they would much rather crush it and charge us whatever they want and have stuff like the AC2 DRM be the norm so I'm very, very glad theres an alternative out there that forces them to rethink that stance.
@Ragnar.
Noone should ever go to jail for piracy unless they're making money off it. Theres a difference between 'copying' which is what we are talking about here, not theft, and making a profit off of someone elses work. If I downloaded Mass Effect 2 and then burned off a few copies at £10 a piece, there shouldn't be serious jail time but what Im doing there is clearly iffy.
If Im downloading music and in doing so someone else downloads it off me and im not making a profit should I be expected to pay £160000 per song/upload or face years in jail? Fuck no, what have you lost and what have I gained apart from a copy of a song? When I read that someone is going to lose 10 years of their life for making a shitty copy of a shitty film in a cinema? That's wrong. Murderers don't sometimes get that kind of sentence.
It's possible the piracy of PC games might have to be addressed legislatively in a more creative way than it currently has been (i.e. not hilariously draconian penalties that even rightsholders are afraid to try and enforce.)
Assuming it gets easier to pirate software as time goes by (more and faster broadband, better disguise of torrents, just more pirates in general), the solution might wind up being some kind of compulsory licensing, either on highend broadband packages or video cards or something.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I didn't really mean that piracy forced lower game prices, it just forces them to offer more, like the collectors editions, additional content, etc, etc. Again on PC that DLC will be freely available eitehr way so its more effective on consoles certainly. But IMO we as the consumer are better off because there is a free alternative and corporations realise they have to compete with that. Now they would much rather crush it and charge us whatever they want and have stuff like the AC2 DRM be the norm so I'm very, very glad theres an alternative out there that forces them to rethink that stance.
No coorporation in their right mind would try to "charge you whatever they want", piracy or no piracy. The free market doesn't work that way. Pirates have no measurable effect on pricing, and there's no reason to assume they do, really.
Also I don't understand what sort persons you think "corporations" are. Do you honestly think that someone faced with a group of people who use their product illegally would go "Oh, golly, I guess I need to throw more money at this project in order to appease these people"? Collector's editions and the likes exist because the demographic that does pay for games tend to buy that kind of stuff. They're not an anti-pirate measure.
And consumers aren't better off(Remember, a pirate is not a consumer). "Rethinking that stance" might very well be rethinking the fact that they spend so much on making a game. Meaning they'd rather make cheaper and probably worse games to minimize any loss. Or just abandoning a platform altogether.
Speaking as someone in the industry; from what I know all that piracy has really given the gaming community so far is DRM and publishers less willing to invest in PC gaming. That's the whole of the pirate legacy, as far as I can tell.
Noone should ever go to jail for piracy unless they're making money off it. Theres a difference between 'copying' which is what we are talking about here, not theft, and making a profit off of someone elses work.
I agree with this, to a degree. Copying files is more like sneaking in to a theater or riding on public transportation without paying, and the punishments for them should be consistent with this.
But I have to laugh a bit about the fact that we live in a society where the ones committing a crime think they should have any say regarding how the crime should be classified.
I didn't really mean that piracy forced lower game prices, it just forces them to offer more, like the collectors editions, additional content, etc, etc. Again on PC that DLC will be freely available eitehr way so its more effective on consoles certainly. But IMO we as the consumer are better off because there is a free alternative and corporations realise they have to compete with that. Now they would much rather crush it and charge us whatever they want and have stuff like the AC2 DRM be the norm so I'm very, very glad theres an alternative out there that forces them to rethink that stance.
@Ragnar.
Noone should ever go to jail for piracy unless they're making money off it. Theres a difference between 'copying' which is what we are talking about here, not theft, and making a profit off of someone elses work. If I downloaded Mass Effect 2 and then burned off a few copies at £10 a piece, there shouldn't be serious jail time but what Im doing there is clearly iffy.
If Im downloading music and in doing so someone else downloads it off me and im not making a profit should I be expected to pay £160000 per song/upload or face years in jail? Fuck no, what have you lost and what have I gained apart from a copy of a song? When I read that someone is going to lose 10 years of their life for making a shitty copy of a shitty film in a cinema? That's wrong. Murderers don't sometimes get that kind of sentence.
EDIT: Damn you Travathian! >:(
I agree and disagree... but the punishment should fit the crime. People who are downloading and selling pirated material should definitely go to jail, no question.
For people who are just downloading "casually", the punishment should ideally be the same as if you walked into a store and stole a game off of a shelf. Usually, this entails a fine. Shoplifting doesn't usually yield jailtime, except in extreme cases.
That said, if you're downloading music and in doing so, someone else downloads it off you and THEY make a profit, then you're guilty by association. Then again, you're already guilty because you downloaded the file in the first place. File sharing is a twisted web of willful ignorance.
Regardless, it doesn't matter what "they" have lost and what you have gained. What you have gained is something that does not belong to you. Want to listen to songs for free? Turn on the radio. Otherwise, pay the publisher so they can continue to make music.
Assuming it gets easier to pirate software as time goes by (more and faster broadband, better disguise of torrents, just more pirates in general), the solution might wind up being some kind of compulsory licensing, either on highend broadband packages or video cards or something.
Ya, or the marketplace can just decide to go with Steam or some other closed platform for distributing your software. That seems way more likely than either of the scenarios you described -- they're so unbelievably intrusive that the public would never bite.
No coorporation in their right mind would try to "charge you whatever they want", piracy or no piracy. The free market doesn't work that way. Pirates have no measurable effect on pricing, and there's no reason to assume they do, really.
Piracy totally altered the music industry. I think you *have* to assume they're effecting pricing.
Hockey Johnston on
0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Assuming it gets easier to pirate software as time goes by (more and faster broadband, better disguise of torrents, just more pirates in general), the solution might wind up being some kind of compulsory licensing, either on highend broadband packages or video cards or something.
Ya, or the marketplace can just decide to go with Steam or some other closed platform for distributing your software. That seems way more likely than either of the scenarios you described -- they're so unbelievably intrusive that the public would never bite.
Yeah, it's not like games only distributed on Steam never get pirated...
Piracy does lower prices, by increasing supply. The greater the supply, the lower the demand; the lower the demand, the lower the price. Game publishers have to find a price point that is low enough to be more attractive than the hassle of pirating a game for free, in the eyes of a significant portion of the market. That price point can be raised by adding non-downloadable value to the product, such as cloth maps and collectible figures and whatnot. But yes, in order to make money in an era where the media one produces can be acquired for free, one does have to lower their price.
motorfirebox on
0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
The funny thing is, aside from Steam, I see more console games with lowered prices than PC games.
Before the Internet--> Sharing = Caring
After the Internet--> Sharing = Stealing
How to end piracy?
Start making people to be SELFISH.
When people are SELFISH there will be no SHARING and thus no PIRACY.
There were attempts at this with the limited install DRM. It was an attempt to try and make an infinitely reproduceible resource scarce. Of course it just ended up causing trouble for the legit consumers and the pirates just cracked it.
Besides you'll never end piracy. The only thing that would come close to ending it would be a change in societies morals. People would have to actually feel bad about pirating (I'm sure some do, but obviously not enough) and there would have to be some kind of stigma associated with it. But that kind of change has to come from the bottom up, not the top down. Until then the best DRM can do is just make it bigger hassle to pirate the game than buy it and so far those attempts have failed.
LittleBoots on
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
No coorporation in their right mind would try to "charge you whatever they want", piracy or no piracy. The free market doesn't work that way. Pirates have no measurable effect on pricing, and there's no reason to assume they do, really.
Piracy totally altered the music industry. I think you *have* to assume they're effecting pricing.
I'm just gonna quote what I said a few posts up:
"The Music and movie industries have tried to hold on to some form of old "glory days" in their pricing. As new technologies emerge they tried to create an artificial sparsity in order to charge what they used to in order to not upset their old music stores etc. This was doomed to fail simply due to how the market economy works."
And also:
"The lowering of prices due to piracy would be indirect. The idea of lost sales would make publishers and developers set a lower budget on a game, which in turn would make the game cheaper. Sadly, though, also of lower quality."
And if anyone still feels like making the assumption that piracy makes games cheaper I'll just settle to say that I think that assumption is false, simply because I have never heard anyone actually IN the gaming industry say anything that could amount to "We have to make this game cheap, or else people will steal it instead".
There seems to be a desire to make it look as if piracy is helping the games industry. As if by not paying for games you are somehow contributing to a world where games are better, cheaper and everyone's happy.
You're not helping. Stop trying to make it look as if what you're doing is noble.
All you're doing is making sure developers have a harder time getting money because of the scary pirate boogeyman and you make games suffer as a result.
How to end piracy?
Start making people to be SELFISH.
When people are SELFISH there will be no SHARING and thus no PIRACY.
Nice platitude. Y'know, some people would argue that piracy in itself is pretty selfish and self-serving. And it really ought to be up to whoever created something whether or not they would like to share.
I agree with this, to a degree. Copying files is more like sneaking in to a theater or riding on public transportation without paying, and the punishments for them should be consistent with this.
But I have to laugh a bit about the fact that we live in a society where the ones committing a crime think they should have any say regarding how the crime should be classified.
Of course they should. Which doesn't mean that they should have the final say, but there have been many cases where violating the law has been the right thing to do (see: civil rights struggle).
I think copyright is there (though not at the same importance, but it is very important) in certain respects, like parts of the DMCA. The fact it is a crime for me to fix a product that was sold to me in unusable condition is unjust and pretty much the opposite of what was intending by any sane reading of the Constitution, which directly addresses copyright as for society as a whole's benefits primarily.
Really, as others have sort of eluded to, this issue is so fucked up because of greed and zealotry on both sides. You have the pirates who don't give a shit, and on the other side, you have the greedy corporations (Disney is one of the worst offenders here) who push bad law, and a loud minority of creators who think they have some Divine Right of Artists to control all aspects of their art for the rest of eternity.
Before the Internet--> Sharing = Caring
After the Internet--> Sharing = Stealing
How to end piracy?
Start making people to be SELFISH.
When people are SELFISH there will be no SHARING and thus no PIRACY.
There were attempts at this with the limited install DRM. It was an attempt to try and make an infinitely reproduceible resource scarce. Of course it just ended up causing trouble for the legit consumers and the pirates just cracked it.
Besides you'll never end piracy. The only thing that would come close to ending it would be a change in societies morals. People would have to actually feel bad about pirating (I'm sure some do, but obviously not enough) and there would have to be some kind of stigma associated with it. But that kind of change has to come from the bottom up, not the top down. Until then the best DRM can do is just make it bigger hassle to pirate the game than buy it and so far those attempts have failed.
They need to start teaching SHARING is BAD.
Being SELFISH is GOOD.
When people are SELFISH there will be no piracy.
But since SHARING = CARING
Piracy will ALWAYS exist.
Before the Internet--> Sharing = Caring
After the Internet--> Sharing = Stealing
How to end piracy?
Start making people to be SELFISH.
When people are SELFISH there will be no SHARING and thus no PIRACY.
There were attempts at this with the limited install DRM. It was an attempt to try and make an infinitely reproduceible resource scarce. Of course it just ended up causing trouble for the legit consumers and the pirates just cracked it.
Besides you'll never end piracy. The only thing that would come close to ending it would be a change in societies morals. People would have to actually feel bad about pirating (I'm sure some do, but obviously not enough) and there would have to be some kind of stigma associated with it. But that kind of change has to come from the bottom up, not the top down. Until then the best DRM can do is just make it bigger hassle to pirate the game than buy it and so far those attempts have failed.
They need to start teaching SHARING is BAD.
Being SELFISH is GOOD.
When people are SELFISH there will be no piracy.
But since SHARING = CARING
Piracy will ALWAYS exist.
WHO IS THIS "THEY" YOU SPEAK OF?
LittleBoots on
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
I can't tell if you're making a serious argument. But if you are I'd say there are two issues.
1) No one cares what the RIAA & MPAA says. Especially pirates. So it doesn't really matter what they say. (thats what I mean about it not being a top down solution)
2) People pirate because they are selfish. They don't want to spend their money to pay for the product of someone else's work.
LittleBoots on
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
All you're doing is making sure developers have a harder time getting money
"Put up or shut up", as the saying goes. I agree piracy is bad for the industry, but not because it hit sales. Either post accurate charts/numbers/data points correlating loss in sales to piracy and I'll be less hateful on DRM, that the paying consumer has to deal with, and the pirates don't. Until then publishers/people need to stop saying piracy hurts sales or at the very least noticeably so.
The industry publishers are trying to play ghetto cop with pirates and are failing miserably and in turn, creating even more piracy. The more DRM that gets introduced the more pirates there are, the more pirates there are the harsher the drm. The problem originates at the pirates, but you can not make them go extinct. It's ok though, AC2 is probably going to get the spore treatment to a lesser degree, and then you will see them go "oh shit maybe that WASN'T a good idea".
All you have to do is look at piracy before drm, piracy after the industry got big, and piracy since drm has gotten big along with the industry. I've already said it, but this idea that all these people pirating the game are just going to go out and buy the game because drm makes them wait longer is living in a fantasy land.
I agree with this, to a degree. Copying files is more like sneaking in to a theater or riding on public transportation without paying, and the punishments for them should be consistent with this.
But I have to laugh a bit about the fact that we live in a society where the ones committing a crime think they should have any say regarding how the crime should be classified.
Of course they should. Which doesn't mean that they should have the final say, but there have been many cases where violating the law has been the right thing to do (see: civil rights struggle).
Yeah, I agree. I was just musing a bit. The whole "Piracy is not theft" thing really only boils down to semantics in what sometimes comes off as a way to muddle the fact that someone is doing something wrong by calling into question what to call what they were doing that was wrong. I keep getting mental pictures of a 1890s street urchin arguing with an old lady on whether he by taking her purse is a thief or a pickpocket.
I guess my point, if I had any, was that the semantics seems rather irrelevant to this discussion. I don't think I've called anyone a thief here, but if I had I wouldn't mean the catburglar-variety, obviously.
and a loud minority of creators who think they have some Divine Right of Artists to control all aspects of their art for the rest of eternity.
While there certainly might be those types, I think most are just very frustrated. Most people make games because they want to make awsome stuff and get it out to people. However, to do that you need money. So I can understand that people think "If they like my game enough to play it, why can't they pay for it? Don't they understand that I would use the money to make the next game?"
Personally, I don't think this. I don't consider a pirated version to be a lost sale. I don't se anything positive with it either though.
All you're doing is making sure developers have a harder time getting money
"Put up or shut up", as the saying goes. I agree piracy is bad for the industry, but not because it hit sales.
No need to get rude. If you read my posts a bit higher up you'll notice that I've repeated again and again that I don't consider a pirated version to be a lost sale. Piracy does, however, make it increasingly hard to get funding for game projects for developers(Just to make things clear. The developers are the ones who make the game. To do this they usually need to pitch the idea to a publisher, who might give them money to make the games. Publishers are sometimes less willing to invest in PC titles nowadays because THEY and their shareholders might think pirates are hitting sales).
I honestly have never heard of anyone stating that they pirated a game because of DRM. And honestly, it's kind of a shitty justification, but honestly...
I honestly have never heard of anyone stating that they pirated a game because of DRM. And honestly, it's kind of a shitty justification, but honestly...
I have heard someone say that.
LittleBoots on
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
1) We got people who went outta their way to SHARE/CRACK/DISTRIBUTE without getting anything back in return.
2) We got people who download them.
How do we stop piracy?
Make people selfish.
When people are Selfish no one goes SHARE/CRACK/DISTRIBUTE.
And when people are selfish, torrent dies quickly because nobody is there to SEED.
Why does piracy continue to exist?
1) We got people who went outta their way to SHARE/CRACK/DISTRIBUTE without getting anything back in return. (TYPE A BOOK INTO A TEXT DOCUMENT TO PIRATE THE BOOK, FILM THE MOVIE WHILE IT'S SCREENING IN A CINEMA, CRACK A GAME OF IT'S DRM AND MORE)
2) People continue to SHARE because they CARE that's why people continue to SEED in torrents so others can complete the file.
The solution to stop PIRACY is to promote SELFISHNESS.
When people are SELFISH = No one go outta their way to pirate to share those files.
No one SEEDS so people can't pirate.
No one SHARE = No one can PIRATE = No one can STEAL.
I actually was not trying to be rude, it's just a saying that fit the subject. Also, I wasn't meaning you directly, just the industry as a whole.
Publishers are sometimes less willing to invest in PC titles nowadays because THEY and their shareholders might think pirates are hitting sales).
I doubt that is the reason. Piracy hasn't been shown to be a risk in sales, so why would people crunching numbers use something that hasn't been identified as sales related?
I think the reason PC companies have harder times is simply because the market is a lot smaller in terms of who buys AAA games on the PC. Add to the fact that PC variances from system to system and its a lot hard to find that happy medium. PC gaming is treated differently then console gaming there for its investors will treat it differently also.
I think a lot of the fault though is the publisher/developers trying to blame piracy on sales for underperformed, instead of taking it like a "man" so to speak and just admit that their game wasn't as popular as expected.
I honestly have never heard of anyone stating that they pirated a game because of DRM. And honestly, it's kind of a shitty justification, but honestly..
There were news articles for weeks, with regarding Spore, stating EXACTLY that, what are you talking about? Although I agree it is a stupid justification. Just dont buy that damn game I say.
Posts
Also, suggesting that piracy lowers prices assumes that those pirates would have purchased the game had the game been low enough...which, has been noted repeatedly, isn't necessarily true.
Although, the reduction in PC prices is pretty complex. To some extent, itt may be due to the perception of "lost" sales.
That's not really a good analogy. A better analogy is cops leaving an unattended bike or an unlocked car and monitoring it from a distance, and arresting people who try to steal.
Which they already legally do.
Then again, I do wonder how many sales Steam made during its xmas sale, and how many of those purchases were from people who originally pirated the game, or simply didn't buy it at the original price point.
I think too many publishers look at the first month's sales and if their game didn't do well conclude that piracy was to blame, when it very well could have been poor reviews, lack of consumer perceived value in the product, bad economy, etc. But what publisher would ever admit that their QA department fucked up, or that their game is overpriced for what is offered, or that the game just plain isn't fun for most people.
That's simplifying it a bit, but yes. The lowering of prices due to piracy would be indirect. The idea of lost sales would make publishers and developers set a lower budget on a game, which in turn would make the game cheaper. Sadly, though, also of lower quality.
Uh no, that is a terrible analogy. Remember the copyright holder is making available their IP on a public network. There is a difference between the cops leaving a bike unattended, and those same cops leaving a bike unattended with a sign on it that says "free bike." His original analogy explains the situation.
I think this is exactly the wrong tactic to use. The laws on the books right now for copyright infringement are so draconian at the moment that they are effectively unenforceable. Take a look at the Jammie Thomas case. The end result serves no one.
To echo Tom Merrit's thoughts on the subject, I think we need to treat piracy a lot more like speeding than theft. Slap someone with a non-cumulative $50 fine every time they are caught illegally file sharing. Give the ISP's a cut of this to incentivize them to act and use part of the fine to reimburse IP holders.
It also kills pricey mid-tier content producers. But they might have been in the wrong business anyway. There's great merit in the idea that the internet forced music providers to halve their prices, and the same is happening to games. 30$ is the new 60$.
To be fair, I should've said fined or sent to jail. Sending someone to jail for downloading a few MP3's would be far too harsh.
Current laws should be altered before they start to be strictly enforced. They weren't created with today's problems in mind.
Now if someone downloads these and turns around and sells them, then yes, I could get behind a little jail time, because those are the real bastards of piracy. But that has to do more with the fraud/counterfeit side for me.
@Ragnar.
Noone should ever go to jail for piracy unless they're making money off it. Theres a difference between 'copying' which is what we are talking about here, not theft, and making a profit off of someone elses work. If I downloaded Mass Effect 2 and then burned off a few copies at £10 a piece, there shouldn't be serious jail time but what Im doing there is clearly iffy.
If Im downloading music and in doing so someone else downloads it off me and im not making a profit should I be expected to pay £160000 per song/upload or face years in jail? Fuck no, what have you lost and what have I gained apart from a copy of a song? When I read that someone is going to lose 10 years of their life for making a shitty copy of a shitty film in a cinema? That's wrong. Murderers don't sometimes get that kind of sentence.
EDIT: Damn you Travathian! >:(
Assuming it gets easier to pirate software as time goes by (more and faster broadband, better disguise of torrents, just more pirates in general), the solution might wind up being some kind of compulsory licensing, either on highend broadband packages or video cards or something.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
No coorporation in their right mind would try to "charge you whatever they want", piracy or no piracy. The free market doesn't work that way. Pirates have no measurable effect on pricing, and there's no reason to assume they do, really.
Also I don't understand what sort persons you think "corporations" are. Do you honestly think that someone faced with a group of people who use their product illegally would go "Oh, golly, I guess I need to throw more money at this project in order to appease these people"? Collector's editions and the likes exist because the demographic that does pay for games tend to buy that kind of stuff. They're not an anti-pirate measure.
And consumers aren't better off(Remember, a pirate is not a consumer). "Rethinking that stance" might very well be rethinking the fact that they spend so much on making a game. Meaning they'd rather make cheaper and probably worse games to minimize any loss. Or just abandoning a platform altogether.
Speaking as someone in the industry; from what I know all that piracy has really given the gaming community so far is DRM and publishers less willing to invest in PC gaming. That's the whole of the pirate legacy, as far as I can tell.
Edit:
I agree with this, to a degree. Copying files is more like sneaking in to a theater or riding on public transportation without paying, and the punishments for them should be consistent with this.
But I have to laugh a bit about the fact that we live in a society where the ones committing a crime think they should have any say regarding how the crime should be classified.
I agree and disagree... but the punishment should fit the crime. People who are downloading and selling pirated material should definitely go to jail, no question.
For people who are just downloading "casually", the punishment should ideally be the same as if you walked into a store and stole a game off of a shelf. Usually, this entails a fine. Shoplifting doesn't usually yield jailtime, except in extreme cases.
That said, if you're downloading music and in doing so, someone else downloads it off you and THEY make a profit, then you're guilty by association. Then again, you're already guilty because you downloaded the file in the first place. File sharing is a twisted web of willful ignorance.
Regardless, it doesn't matter what "they" have lost and what you have gained. What you have gained is something that does not belong to you. Want to listen to songs for free? Turn on the radio. Otherwise, pay the publisher so they can continue to make music.
Ya, or the marketplace can just decide to go with Steam or some other closed platform for distributing your software. That seems way more likely than either of the scenarios you described -- they're so unbelievably intrusive that the public would never bite.
Piracy totally altered the music industry. I think you *have* to assume they're effecting pricing.
Yeah, it's not like games only distributed on Steam never get pirated...
Happy Consumers = More Sales.
This did seem to work for the guys who made SoaSE. Make a game people actually want and you'll see sales.
After the Internet--> Sharing = Stealing
How to end piracy?
Start making people to be SELFISH.
When people are SELFISH there will be no SHARING and thus no PIRACY.
Problem solved /thread
Take note music/game/movie people.
Don't you know people are being sued for porn piracy now?
Their motto is turn piracy into profit.
Cash demand over 'porn downloads'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_7766000/7766448.stm
There were attempts at this with the limited install DRM. It was an attempt to try and make an infinitely reproduceible resource scarce. Of course it just ended up causing trouble for the legit consumers and the pirates just cracked it.
Besides you'll never end piracy. The only thing that would come close to ending it would be a change in societies morals. People would have to actually feel bad about pirating (I'm sure some do, but obviously not enough) and there would have to be some kind of stigma associated with it. But that kind of change has to come from the bottom up, not the top down. Until then the best DRM can do is just make it bigger hassle to pirate the game than buy it and so far those attempts have failed.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
I'm just gonna quote what I said a few posts up:
"The Music and movie industries have tried to hold on to some form of old "glory days" in their pricing. As new technologies emerge they tried to create an artificial sparsity in order to charge what they used to in order to not upset their old music stores etc. This was doomed to fail simply due to how the market economy works."
And also:
"The lowering of prices due to piracy would be indirect. The idea of lost sales would make publishers and developers set a lower budget on a game, which in turn would make the game cheaper. Sadly, though, also of lower quality."
And if anyone still feels like making the assumption that piracy makes games cheaper I'll just settle to say that I think that assumption is false, simply because I have never heard anyone actually IN the gaming industry say anything that could amount to "We have to make this game cheap, or else people will steal it instead".
There seems to be a desire to make it look as if piracy is helping the games industry. As if by not paying for games you are somehow contributing to a world where games are better, cheaper and everyone's happy.
You're not helping. Stop trying to make it look as if what you're doing is noble.
All you're doing is making sure developers have a harder time getting money because of the scary pirate boogeyman and you make games suffer as a result.
This latest DRM? It sucks. So thanks for that.
Nice platitude. Y'know, some people would argue that piracy in itself is pretty selfish and self-serving. And it really ought to be up to whoever created something whether or not they would like to share.
Of course they should. Which doesn't mean that they should have the final say, but there have been many cases where violating the law has been the right thing to do (see: civil rights struggle).
I think copyright is there (though not at the same importance, but it is very important) in certain respects, like parts of the DMCA. The fact it is a crime for me to fix a product that was sold to me in unusable condition is unjust and pretty much the opposite of what was intending by any sane reading of the Constitution, which directly addresses copyright as for society as a whole's benefits primarily.
Really, as others have sort of eluded to, this issue is so fucked up because of greed and zealotry on both sides. You have the pirates who don't give a shit, and on the other side, you have the greedy corporations (Disney is one of the worst offenders here) who push bad law, and a loud minority of creators who think they have some Divine Right of Artists to control all aspects of their art for the rest of eternity.
They need to start teaching SHARING is BAD.
Being SELFISH is GOOD.
When people are SELFISH there will be no piracy.
But since SHARING = CARING
Piracy will ALWAYS exist.
WHO IS THIS "THEY" YOU SPEAK OF?
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
Before RIAA & MPAA.
SHARING = CARING
After RIAA & MPAA
SHARING = STEALING
Twitter
1) No one cares what the RIAA & MPAA says. Especially pirates. So it doesn't really matter what they say. (thats what I mean about it not being a top down solution)
2) People pirate because they are selfish. They don't want to spend their money to pay for the product of someone else's work.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
"Put up or shut up", as the saying goes. I agree piracy is bad for the industry, but not because it hit sales. Either post accurate charts/numbers/data points correlating loss in sales to piracy and I'll be less hateful on DRM, that the paying consumer has to deal with, and the pirates don't. Until then publishers/people need to stop saying piracy hurts sales or at the very least noticeably so.
The industry publishers are trying to play ghetto cop with pirates and are failing miserably and in turn, creating even more piracy. The more DRM that gets introduced the more pirates there are, the more pirates there are the harsher the drm. The problem originates at the pirates, but you can not make them go extinct. It's ok though, AC2 is probably going to get the spore treatment to a lesser degree, and then you will see them go "oh shit maybe that WASN'T a good idea".
All you have to do is look at piracy before drm, piracy after the industry got big, and piracy since drm has gotten big along with the industry. I've already said it, but this idea that all these people pirating the game are just going to go out and buy the game because drm makes them wait longer is living in a fantasy land.
I don't agree with this.
Internet during Infancy -> Sharing = Caring
Internet post-commercialization -> Sharing = Stealing
Yeah, I agree. I was just musing a bit. The whole "Piracy is not theft" thing really only boils down to semantics in what sometimes comes off as a way to muddle the fact that someone is doing something wrong by calling into question what to call what they were doing that was wrong. I keep getting mental pictures of a 1890s street urchin arguing with an old lady on whether he by taking her purse is a thief or a pickpocket.
I guess my point, if I had any, was that the semantics seems rather irrelevant to this discussion. I don't think I've called anyone a thief here, but if I had I wouldn't mean the catburglar-variety, obviously.
While there certainly might be those types, I think most are just very frustrated. Most people make games because they want to make awsome stuff and get it out to people. However, to do that you need money. So I can understand that people think "If they like my game enough to play it, why can't they pay for it? Don't they understand that I would use the money to make the next game?"
Personally, I don't think this. I don't consider a pirated version to be a lost sale. I don't se anything positive with it either though.
No need to get rude. If you read my posts a bit higher up you'll notice that I've repeated again and again that I don't consider a pirated version to be a lost sale. Piracy does, however, make it increasingly hard to get funding for game projects for developers(Just to make things clear. The developers are the ones who make the game. To do this they usually need to pitch the idea to a publisher, who might give them money to make the games. Publishers are sometimes less willing to invest in PC titles nowadays because THEY and their shareholders might think pirates are hitting sales).
I have heard someone say that.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
1) We got people who went outta their way to SHARE/CRACK/DISTRIBUTE without getting anything back in return.
2) We got people who download them.
How do we stop piracy?
Make people selfish.
When people are Selfish no one goes SHARE/CRACK/DISTRIBUTE.
And when people are selfish, torrent dies quickly because nobody is there to SEED.
Why does piracy continue to exist?
1) We got people who went outta their way to SHARE/CRACK/DISTRIBUTE without getting anything back in return. (TYPE A BOOK INTO A TEXT DOCUMENT TO PIRATE THE BOOK, FILM THE MOVIE WHILE IT'S SCREENING IN A CINEMA, CRACK A GAME OF IT'S DRM AND MORE)
2) People continue to SHARE because they CARE that's why people continue to SEED in torrents so others can complete the file.
The solution to stop PIRACY is to promote SELFISHNESS.
When people are SELFISH = No one go outta their way to pirate to share those files.
No one SEEDS so people can't pirate.
No one SHARE = No one can PIRATE = No one can STEAL.
SELFISHNESS = End of Piracy.
Almost.
I hope to be an Cyborg someday and eventually an Andriod.
I doubt that is the reason. Piracy hasn't been shown to be a risk in sales, so why would people crunching numbers use something that hasn't been identified as sales related?
I think the reason PC companies have harder times is simply because the market is a lot smaller in terms of who buys AAA games on the PC. Add to the fact that PC variances from system to system and its a lot hard to find that happy medium. PC gaming is treated differently then console gaming there for its investors will treat it differently also.
I think a lot of the fault though is the publisher/developers trying to blame piracy on sales for underperformed, instead of taking it like a "man" so to speak and just admit that their game wasn't as popular as expected.
There were news articles for weeks, with regarding Spore, stating EXACTLY that, what are you talking about? Although I agree it is a stupid justification. Just dont buy that damn game I say.
Here are some links if you are doubting me.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/drm_is_helping_spore_make_history_as_the_most_pirated_game_ever.php
http://torrentfreak.com/spore-most-pirated-game-ever-thanks-to-drm-080913/
http://gamernode.com/news/7410-piracy-rampant-on-spore-drm-fails/index.html
http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/12/spore-drm-piracy-tech-security-cx_ag_mji_0912spore.html
And then you have EA saying that the piracy didn't necessarily hurt their sales.
http://torrentfreak.com/ea-downplays-spores-drm-081001/