clicklick said:
We see piracy being discussed by developers as it hurts them ( which it does definitely ) but are these developers guilty of piracy themselves ? Check their mp3 players or media collection. If they have a few pirated versions lying around, then why should the consumer care about their product ?
You also see pirated versions of SDKs, tools, OSs installed on the computers they use for development. Do they then have the right to complain if their product is geting pirated ? I am not saying all devs do this but isn't this possible ? What about the TV shows and movies they download off torrents for their own viewing pleasure at home, but then come to work and complain about piracy amongst themselves ! Isn't that ironical ?
Piracy will have to be lived with m afraid and unless it becomes hard,risky or rare to pirate, it will continue to eat a slice of the revenue pie everytime.
Well, interesting tidbit. When Bill Stealey first encountered Sid Meier, according to a recent "Retro Gamer" magazine, he was running "an Atari user group which was pirating games." I don't think anyone is likely to argue that the world of electronic gaming would be better off if Sid Meier was slapped in prison in his youth for ten to twenty, rather than co-founding Microprose and creating Civilization et. al.
In large companies, there's probably relatively little piracy. Maybe a little back in the servers where the gurus run things so arcane that no one dares look over their shoulder. But the fact of the matter is that, aside from having more stringent rules (and more to lose if caught infringing), the larger companies are also more likely to end up with an employee or ex-employee with a grudge who is more than willing to rat them out. And major IP lawsuits can make piracy losses look like a walk in the park.
Smaller companies and groups are more likely to indulge in some piracy, partly because many of the tools that are necessary to create a professional product and website are just so expensive. And young, up-and-coming programmers often have to write their meal ticket before they can afford the kind of cash necessary to buy the tools they have to learn in order to become professional game programmers.
Hippocritical? No question. But hippocracy doesn't necessarily shear you of the right to the protection of the law, morally or otherwise.
Morally speaking, I like to hope that when the people who can't afford tools (and games) become people who can afford tools (and games), they pay up. That may be a pleasant fantasy.
Frankly, if the only people pirating software were creators of software themselves- people mining and reverse-engineering to make the next generation of games better- maybe that wouldn't be so bad. A little "ten percent tithe to the future creative process", as it were. Of course, that's not the case.
I agree that piracy will probably always be with us. At some point, programmers work on code that doesn't require the disk to be in the drive and the program to connect to the internet to verify its legitimacy; a sufficiently clever programmer with the right tools is probably always going to be able to return the finished game to that state.
I think it would behoove us all to create a legal and ethical ground that assures that creators can make a living making great games. Heck, mediocre games; I don't mind giving people some runway to see if they can fly. Treating customers like criminals, increasingly clearly, isn't the answer, and not all pirates are created equal. But if the guys in suits reach a concensus that PC gaming is a loser's market, we all lose.
