The view I expressed was that the developers should get together and bring lawsuits against individuals who own places like BitTorrent sites which host torrents for stolen software; also, the advertisers that support them.
That's a good idea, but would it really be worth spending money for the cases? Sites will get closed down and new ones will continue to open, however brief or lengthy their 'reign' and it'll be somewhat of an endless cycle. Some form of legislation will have to pass to prohibit the operation of such sites, but how many countries would have to agree on that to make it effective?
Maybe, as I said, take the lawsuits to the advertisers then. Without ad revenue, these places can't survive on a large scale; they require too much bandwidth.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
btorrent sites don't host anything, they are a directory, much like google, can we sue everyone who places an ad on google, because you can use google to find kiddie porn. It's dumb. You cannot break piracy, in the digital age, it's a fact of life. You have to adapt your business model to be profitable even with piracy. Because the old models aren't going to work.
The music industry is in the last stages of finally realizing this after years of trying to "Stop piracy at the source" Now they have myriad ways to get their content at all kinds of entry level price points, and from that, while traditional revenue levels are down, revenue from ancilliary sources is up.
The view I expressed was that big name developers and publishers should get together and bring lawsuits against individuals who own places like BitTorrent sites which host torrents for stolen software; also, the advertisers that support them. Failing that, yes, lobby the government to do something about at least the most egregious offenders (the high traffic P2P sites).
What on earth do the advertisers have to do with it? They give money to torrent sites for showing the ads. Go after the torrent sites and take that ad money from them instead. That's what business interests are trying to do with the Pirate Bay.
Not that they're succeeding, though.
And the US government already tried to grease the palms of the then minister of the justice department to take legal action against TPB. Which breaks the Swedish constitution, since ministers are not allowed to interfere in specific cases.
I think the thing is that some of these advertisers might be perfectly legitimate companies, and because of how internet advertising works they might not even be aware that they are advertising on sites which can be used to assist copyright infringement. I don't know, I use adblock and rarely visit torrent sites, but the point is that if they did know, they might decide to use a different advertising agency that won't taint their brand with the image of copyright infringement, removing money from torrent sites which do enable copyright infringement.
Friedmanite economics in action - the morals of the people in an economy will be represented in the corporations within it.
The point here is: Ad Company A does business with Torrent Site B.
Torrent Site B is convicted of doing illegal stuff. You don't start demanding money from Company A. You prove that B made money showing ads that A paid them for, and take that money from B. You don't go waving lawsuits at A for their perfectly legal business.
Echo on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited March 2008
If the process is in any way automated, and judging from how fast the internet moves that's likely the case, chances are Lewie is right an the companies aren't aware of it.
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
Rather than start a new topic, I thought I'd just mention it here: some guys have been working on a mod that replaces all of the Masteries in Titan Quest with new Masteries and new skills. Looks like it's about to enter into beta testing.
The new Masteries are: Alchemy, Archery, Bestiary, Chronoscophy, Close Combat, Construction, Mysticism, Sorcery, and Vampirism. I don't know how balanced it will be at first, but it should be fun to mess around with.
These are large internet ad distributors; I know for a fact people have contacted them in the past and asked them to pull their ad support from illegal software distribution sites, and they have refused. As such, it's clear that they know what they're doing and don't give a shit.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
These are large internet ad distributors; I know for a fact people have contacted them in the past and asked them to pull their ad support from illegal software distribution sites, and they have refused. As such, it's clear that they know what they're doing and don't give a shit.
These are large internet ad distributors; I know for a fact people have contacted them in the past and asked them to pull their ad support from illegal software distribution sites, and they have refused. As such, it's clear that they know what they're doing and don't give a shit.
If these sites are so indisputably illegal, they should be taken down no problem, right?
Ohh wait. Ad sites should pull ads from websites that haven't been taken down, because they don't like money. I get ya.
Torrent sites are almost certainly legal. The Pirate Bay, for example, is one of the big ones that does not break the law, and has a strong legal team backing them up.
Users of torrent sites that upload/download data without permission from the copyright holder are committing copyright infringement.
To reduce the amount of copyright infringement occurring on these perfectly legal sites I can see two options -
1. Go after the users. Sue anyone caught committing copyright infringement, lobby for legislation that forces ISPs to monitor users for illegal activity and pass this information onto the authorities. Try to take down perfectly legal sites which are very useful to a wide range of users (both those committing copyright infringement and those not). Marginalise the public and reduce privacy.
2. Cultivate an economic environment where torrent sites have financial incentives to stop facilitating copyright infringment. Advertising agencies have hundreds of clients. If customers of all of these clients give them feedback telling them that they are being associated with web sites that facilitate copyright infringement, I would expect (speculation maybe?) that at least some of them would ask their advertising agency to not advertise them on said sites, and if they refused some would go to other, more legitimate advertising agencies. This would eventually lead to a situation where the price that torrent sites which facilitate copyright infringement could charge for advertising space would drop, and make it hard for them to stay in business, making legitimate torrenting more profitable.
Of these two options, I find 2 far more desirable. Bittorrent and other P2P networks are fantastic technologies, and the idea that 'P2P = piracy' needs to die in fire. Removing the revenue stream for piracy is almost certainly the most effective way of reducing it (not that I ever think it can be 100% stopped, that would be ridiculous, but if you could make piracy harder to commit, then a proportion of potential 'pirates' might go legit)
Number 2 won't happen because 99% of the usage of such sites is to perform copyright infringement and, as already mentioned, those advertisers don't give a shit since they don't sell a product capable of being pirated.
Slightly off topic, does anyone have an update on the current status of the suit against rapidshare? They lost the court ruling a month ago, but are they in appeals now?
Rakai on
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those advertisers don't give a shit since they don't sell a product capable of being pirated.
Right, because their customers/potential customers have the same apathy towards it.
Were that to change, and their customers objected to their providing a revenue stream for web sites facilitating copyright infringement that would change, they would (eventually) start caring.
So wait, Lewie, you'd rather the users--the little guy--pay instead of the guys who run a site which basically amounts to a classified ad for the software, music, and movie black market? That's stupid.
Nothing against BitTorrent, and I'm fine with P2P technology. It's the sites whose virtually entire basis is distributing illegal goods that need to die in a fire.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
So wait, Lewie, you'd rather the users--the little guy--pay instead of the guys who run a site which basically amounts to a classified ad for the software, music, and movie black market? That's stupid.
Nothing against BitTorrent, and I'm fine with P2P technology. It's the sites whose virtually entire basis is distributing illegal goods that need to die in a fire.
I don't think that's what I said.
I know that piracy is never going to go away, and legislating against it just pushes it further underground. Reducing the profitability of facilitating copyright infringement means that (some) sites which do so will simply shut down from not being able to profit.
those advertisers don't give a shit since they don't sell a product capable of being pirated.
Right, because their customers/potential customers have the same apathy towards it.
Were that to change, and their customers objected to their providing a revenue stream for web sites facilitating copyright infringement that would change, they would (eventually) start caring.
For this to happen, people would have to start viewing piracy as wrong and that won't happen without #1 going to effect. Also you would have to put the enforcement in the government's hand rather than the current situation where the copyright holder has to sue. You're also ignoring the fact that torrent sites are relatively cheap to host since they only upload small file sizes. Going after advertisers won't have a big impact.
The problem with piracy is that it's too damn easy. Any retarded monkey with a computer can google his way to anything he wants. If you manage to push piracy underground, you at least take it away from the general masses.
Rakai on
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1. Go after the users. Sue anyone caught committing copyright infringement, lobby for legislation that forces ISPs to monitor users for illegal activity and pass this information onto the authorities. Try to take down perfectly legal sites which are very useful to a wide range of users (both those committing copyright infringement and those not). Marginalise the public and reduce privacy.
I sure hope you're just debating against an interlocutor here and not being serious.
The problem with piracy is that it's too damn easy. Any retarded monkey with a computer can google his way to anything he wants. If you manage to push piracy underground, you at least take it away from the general masses.
Exactly what I was going to say. I want piracy pushed underground; then it'll stop being harmful to our industry (and others) in any significant way.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
1. Go after the users. Sue anyone caught committing copyright infringement, lobby for legislation that forces ISPs to monitor users for illegal activity and pass this information onto the authorities. Try to take down perfectly legal sites which are very useful to a wide range of users (both those committing copyright infringement and those not). Marginalise the public and reduce privacy.
I sure hope you're just debating against an interlocutor here and not being serious.
The problem with piracy is that it's too damn easy. Any retarded monkey with a computer can google his way to anything he wants. If you manage to push piracy underground, you at least take it away from the general masses.
Exactly what I was going to say. I want piracy pushed underground; then it'll stop being harmful to our industry (and others) in any significant way.
By underground here, I mean more decentralised, and harder to have any control over. Like how drug culture is underground but there is still lots drug related crime.
I'm not sure it'll work out quite like that; even if you just decentralize it, it'd put a HUGE dent in the amount of piracy that goes on. Average Joe isn't comfortable surfing to dozens of different sites, all advertising all manners of porn and the majority trying to stick spyware on his computer. He wants one central source that he can trust and keep coming back to; that's what these torrent listings do for him.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
The problem with piracy is that it's too damn easy. Any retarded monkey with a computer can google his way to anything he wants. If you manage to push piracy underground, you at least take it away from the general masses.
Exactly what I was going to say. I want piracy pushed underground; then it'll stop being harmful to our industry (and others) in any significant way.
I was gonna ask that: Is being underground all that bad? In the old days, pirating something involved delving deep into likely spam-ridden pages, clicking on multiple voting links just to open one zip file out of 100. The virtual equivalent of going into the bad part of town, down a seedy alleyway and conversing with a guy who likely was released from prison that morning. And even then you had to know connections or at least where to start looking.
Nowadays, it's like a clean, well-run store in the local mall. Easy, neat, courteous. You just walk in, click a link, and you're done. It's widespread because it's just that simple.
The Wolfman on
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Piracy is completely different from the drug situation because if you host a website that does something illegal you are putting up a neon sign that says "Here I am feds, come and arrest me." The comparison would be more akin to child pornography in terms of what would happen if it was established as illegal and governments took priority to shutting them down.
Rakai on
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If I download a torrent for a game I don't own, how is it really different from downloading the game itself? It's not like the particular torrent can be used for anything besides downloading the game.
I understand that many people here may be gamers and not "Geeks" but the suggestion that ISP's should be held legally responsible for the content on the networks is terrifying. Once you break the legal safety of Safe Harbor then the whole damn internet falls down. It's REALLY that simple. A legal obligation to monitor and police the data stream destroys the internet in irreperable ways.
I understand that PC Piracy is a BIG problem, I argued that point earlier, but proposing an end to safe harbor is flat out lunacy.
Completely agree. This is an example of the kind of shit that can and has happened if an ISP starts becoming liable for the content their users host and or traffic on their connections:
I understand that many people here may be gamers and not "Geeks" but the suggestion that ISP's should be held legally responsible for the content on the networks is terrifying. Once you break the legal safety of Safe Harbor then the whole damn internet falls down. It's REALLY that simple. A legal obligation to monitor and police the data stream destroys the internet in irreperable ways.
I understand that PC Piracy is a BIG problem, I argued that point earlier, but proposing an end to safe harbor is flat out lunacy.
Except no one is suggesting ISP's be held liable. They're suggesting that people hosting servers with the explicit purposes of sharing files be held liable for their part in facilitating copyright infringement. The DMCA protects ISP's and that's not going to change.
Rakai on
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If I'm understand this correctly, it means torrenting sites go down the tube, yes? Y'know, I dream about an internet where people share files with everyone else. It would take a major overhaul of distribution methods, but I bet with enough ingenuity companies could make it work. Sadly, the age of shareware is over.
Why is this thread about piracy all of a sudden? I must have missed the part where THQ blamed the poor sales of the Titan Quest games on piracy...
I didn't miss, however, the part where people claimed that THQ didn't market the games, and someone said that they didn't pay for patches...
And apparently, everybody missed me wondering if you buy the game from Steam right now, won't all of the money go to THQ and none of it to the developers?
eobet on
Heard the proposition that RIAA and MPAA should join forces and form "Music And Film Industry Association"?
THQ will no longer pay a non-existent developer for patches which is what was commented on. (Someone was disappointed at the prospect of no more future patches). The game was marketed all over the internet. It just didn't have TV spots running around the clock. Developers often have royalties based on the performance of their game and such royalties don't disappear with the dissolving of the studio. Without knowing the exact nature of the contract it is impossible to say who gets what. Either way, buying Titan Quest will not bring back the studio unless several hundred thousand people decide to buy it.
Rakai on
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THQ will no longer pay a non-existent developer for patches which is what was commented on. (Someone was disappointed at the prospect of no more future patches). The game was marketed all over the internet. It just didn't have TV spots running around the clock. Developers often have royalties based on the performance of their game and such royalties don't disappear with the dissolving of the studio. Without knowing the exact nature of the contract it is impossible to say who gets what. Either way, buying Titan Quest will not bring back the studio unless several hundred thousand people decide to buy it.
Not to mention, Iron Lore didn't go under due to Titan Quest, they said they broke even on it. They couldn't get funding for another game. The read between the lines portion is that due to ALL the reasons he listed, including piracy. The market for small games is going under, if you aren't a giant EA powerhouse, it's damn difficult to get your game made because between piracy, DRM, and a dwindling market, along with millions of machines running substandard hardware, it's just too damn hard to break even anymore.
TL;DR....Titan quest was awesome, Being a PC developer nowadays is hard.
Why is this thread about piracy all of a sudden? I must have missed the part where THQ blamed the poor sales of the Titan Quest games on piracy...
I didn't miss, however, the part where people claimed that THQ didn't market the games, and someone said that they didn't pay for patches...
And apparently, everybody missed me wondering if you buy the game from Steam right now, won't all of the money go to THQ and none of it to the developers?
Did you miss the massive rant by one of the Iron Lore guys on the first or second page?
Just pointing out that Titan Quest was advertised on PA, but I saw nearly nothing of it in traditional media or mainstream sites. I was following it closely before release, hell I had the game before I saw a review of it.
Also, just like the music industry, the games industry is going to have to adapt. Cracking down on piracy is all well and good, but see what the last 8 years of site takedowns and whatnot have gotten the RIAAA. Bad press, some results, but an endless cycle of people adapting to the situation. Services like Steam and XBL are models of how things will have to go in the future, call them the iTunes of the games industry if you will.
While I agree that digital distribution is the way to go, it won't solve the piracy problem unless digital distribution services can be made completely foolproof, which so far hasn't been shown to be possible. People just crack Steam and get their illegal copies even easier.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
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Maybe, as I said, take the lawsuits to the advertisers then. Without ad revenue, these places can't survive on a large scale; they require too much bandwidth.
The music industry is in the last stages of finally realizing this after years of trying to "Stop piracy at the source" Now they have myriad ways to get their content at all kinds of entry level price points, and from that, while traditional revenue levels are down, revenue from ancilliary sources is up.
What on earth do the advertisers have to do with it? They give money to torrent sites for showing the ads. Go after the torrent sites and take that ad money from them instead. That's what business interests are trying to do with the Pirate Bay.
Not that they're succeeding, though.
And the US government already tried to grease the palms of the then minister of the justice department to take legal action against TPB. Which breaks the Swedish constitution, since ministers are not allowed to interfere in specific cases.
Friedmanite economics in action - the morals of the people in an economy will be represented in the corporations within it.
Torrent Site B is convicted of doing illegal stuff. You don't start demanding money from Company A. You prove that B made money showing ads that A paid them for, and take that money from B. You don't go waving lawsuits at A for their perfectly legal business.
Here's the thread: http://www.titanquest.net/forums/modifications-editor/10437-wip-masteries.html
And here's their website with mastery and skill information: http://www.fotoreflexion.de/masteries/index.html
The new Masteries are: Alchemy, Archery, Bestiary, Chronoscophy, Close Combat, Construction, Mysticism, Sorcery, and Vampirism. I don't know how balanced it will be at first, but it should be fun to mess around with.
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
Or maybe they're just not doing anything illegal.
If these sites are so indisputably illegal, they should be taken down no problem, right?
Ohh wait. Ad sites should pull ads from websites that haven't been taken down, because they don't like money. I get ya.
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
Users of torrent sites that upload/download data without permission from the copyright holder are committing copyright infringement.
To reduce the amount of copyright infringement occurring on these perfectly legal sites I can see two options -
1. Go after the users. Sue anyone caught committing copyright infringement, lobby for legislation that forces ISPs to monitor users for illegal activity and pass this information onto the authorities. Try to take down perfectly legal sites which are very useful to a wide range of users (both those committing copyright infringement and those not). Marginalise the public and reduce privacy.
2. Cultivate an economic environment where torrent sites have financial incentives to stop facilitating copyright infringment. Advertising agencies have hundreds of clients. If customers of all of these clients give them feedback telling them that they are being associated with web sites that facilitate copyright infringement, I would expect (speculation maybe?) that at least some of them would ask their advertising agency to not advertise them on said sites, and if they refused some would go to other, more legitimate advertising agencies. This would eventually lead to a situation where the price that torrent sites which facilitate copyright infringement could charge for advertising space would drop, and make it hard for them to stay in business, making legitimate torrenting more profitable.
Of these two options, I find 2 far more desirable. Bittorrent and other P2P networks are fantastic technologies, and the idea that 'P2P = piracy' needs to die in fire. Removing the revenue stream for piracy is almost certainly the most effective way of reducing it (not that I ever think it can be 100% stopped, that would be ridiculous, but if you could make piracy harder to commit, then a proportion of potential 'pirates' might go legit)
Slightly off topic, does anyone have an update on the current status of the suit against rapidshare? They lost the court ruling a month ago, but are they in appeals now?
Right, because their customers/potential customers have the same apathy towards it.
Were that to change, and their customers objected to their providing a revenue stream for web sites facilitating copyright infringement that would change, they would (eventually) start caring.
Nothing against BitTorrent, and I'm fine with P2P technology. It's the sites whose virtually entire basis is distributing illegal goods that need to die in a fire.
I don't think that's what I said.
I know that piracy is never going to go away, and legislating against it just pushes it further underground. Reducing the profitability of facilitating copyright infringement means that (some) sites which do so will simply shut down from not being able to profit.
For this to happen, people would have to start viewing piracy as wrong and that won't happen without #1 going to effect. Also you would have to put the enforcement in the government's hand rather than the current situation where the copyright holder has to sue. You're also ignoring the fact that torrent sites are relatively cheap to host since they only upload small file sizes. Going after advertisers won't have a big impact.
The problem with piracy is that it's too damn easy. Any retarded monkey with a computer can google his way to anything he wants. If you manage to push piracy underground, you at least take it away from the general masses.
I sure hope you're just debating against an interlocutor here and not being serious.
Exactly what I was going to say. I want piracy pushed underground; then it'll stop being harmful to our industry (and others) in any significant way.
Yes, that is what I was doing.
By underground here, I mean more decentralised, and harder to have any control over. Like how drug culture is underground but there is still lots drug related crime.
I was gonna ask that: Is being underground all that bad? In the old days, pirating something involved delving deep into likely spam-ridden pages, clicking on multiple voting links just to open one zip file out of 100. The virtual equivalent of going into the bad part of town, down a seedy alleyway and conversing with a guy who likely was released from prison that morning. And even then you had to know connections or at least where to start looking.
Nowadays, it's like a clean, well-run store in the local mall. Easy, neat, courteous. You just walk in, click a link, and you're done. It's widespread because it's just that simple.
Twitter
I understand that PC Piracy is a BIG problem, I argued that point earlier, but proposing an end to safe harbor is flat out lunacy.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070627/120101.shtml
Except no one is suggesting ISP's be held liable. They're suggesting that people hosting servers with the explicit purposes of sharing files be held liable for their part in facilitating copyright infringement. The DMCA protects ISP's and that's not going to change.
Edit - Moved to a more on topic thread.
Try here - http://savygamer.blogspot.com/
I didn't miss, however, the part where people claimed that THQ didn't market the games, and someone said that they didn't pay for patches...
And apparently, everybody missed me wondering if you buy the game from Steam right now, won't all of the money go to THQ and none of it to the developers?
Not to mention, Iron Lore didn't go under due to Titan Quest, they said they broke even on it. They couldn't get funding for another game. The read between the lines portion is that due to ALL the reasons he listed, including piracy. The market for small games is going under, if you aren't a giant EA powerhouse, it's damn difficult to get your game made because between piracy, DRM, and a dwindling market, along with millions of machines running substandard hardware, it's just too damn hard to break even anymore.
TL;DR....Titan quest was awesome, Being a PC developer nowadays is hard.
Did you miss the massive rant by one of the Iron Lore guys on the first or second page?
Also, just like the music industry, the games industry is going to have to adapt. Cracking down on piracy is all well and good, but see what the last 8 years of site takedowns and whatnot have gotten the RIAAA. Bad press, some results, but an endless cycle of people adapting to the situation. Services like Steam and XBL are models of how things will have to go in the future, call them the iTunes of the games industry if you will.