Illegal downloading is not theft - its something new

[elpresidente]

I would like to download a free copy of a woman, that is already bought by someone else, and use her as I like. That guy would still has the original and act around like he's better than me just because he has money, but I'd have that woman too and my version wouldn't try to check me every time to see if have the right to own her.

In fact, If it was possible to download physical copies of things on the internet, I'd be downloading everything - gummies, watermelons, BMWs and the Great Pyramid.

 

[Signa]

Regardless of what you might think about piracy, it is indisputable that piracy is making developers and publishers behave in strange ways, whether it means not bringing games to PC, like Gears of War 2, or using it as an excuse to dump draconian DRM on us, like SecureROM.

The thing is, their concerns are not entirely without basis...

My view on this though is that even if there wasn't piracy, devs would still be jumping ship off of the PC. There are too many (poor) reasons to not develop for the PC and to just stick to consoles. Piracy is just the strongest excuse devs can come up with so that they don't look lazy.

I remember reading an article about a year ago where one dev was blaming Intel on the fall of PC games. It sounded far-fetched, but it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of PCs out there, and only a few of them will run the games being put on them. Devs don't want to spend the time to make their game ugly but runnable on everyone's laptops. Making PC games is almost like making PS3 games in 2007: Foolishly pointless as no one owned a PS3.

Anyway, I get really pissed when I hear anyone cry "piracy." It's not a big deal. It's always been around and always will be. The things that deserve to get purchased still do, and the companies that sell shit go out of business.

IF companies are so concerned about the damage piracy is doing, then they need to stop spending all this money on advertising that you are a criminal for "stealing." It certainly makes me feel awesome (no sarcasm here) when I see those MPAA ads at the beginning of movies. I don't know how much money goes into those ads, but it's 110% waste. The campaign needs to be "If you like it, buy it!" Sure, it sounds a little less dramatic, but it would be a ton more effective, and it would inform people that devs, artists, studios, etc all need their money too for the things YOU love.

Hell, they don't even need to spend a lot of money on the campaign. All the time CEOs get interviews and they always are complaining about piracy. Instead of the usual piracy rant just say "I know people are going to do what people are going to do, but just remember to buy it if you like it."

 

[Taerdin]

So apparently you're pretty fed up with analogies that you feel dont suit downloading. Well as I read that I came up with an analogy of my own.

An airline sells seats on a plane. They still fly the plane from point to point even if it is not completely full. If you could somehow reproduce a fake ticket and board the plane the airline would not be losing money because they still have to pay the same to run the plane itself, and there happened to be a free spot on the plane. Does this make it legal? Umm... no...

Is this a better analogy than stealing a car? Yes. What would this form of crime be called? Umm... I dont know... stowing away on a plane is not something I have a lot of experience with, but I still feel like that analogy works better.

But I happen to agree with everyone who said downloading still theft, of intellectual property. You've pigeonholed theft as being only when someone removes something from someone elses possession, but ideas can be stolen too. If I steal your idea, you still have it. See how that works? No? Ok.

 

[incal11]

No;
an idea can really be stolen if the one who taken it then claims unfairly it's his own idea.
The idea which lead to the creation of a game has already been used ,
who would claim to be the maker of Halo after pirating it ?
Also a plane needs more fuel if it carries more weight , however small , and fuel is tangible.

I'll try but in my defence I was pointing out the hypocrisy in incal11's post.


Here's an interesting point. You can call it whatever you want and try to justify it however many ways you want but until it is legal to take somebody else's property without their permission then you are breaking the law.

The real hypocrites are the one who started insulting me at every turn ; and I could have used a lot more verbal violence .

You see the word in black and white if you think the law is forever almighty , and your blind acceptance makes you a sheep .
That's not name calling , it's a constatation; at least I'm not insulting your intelligence , but your ability of making use of it.


I feel like talking to a wall; I'm not trying to change the way the world works...
but it will change , it will HAVE to change along with our current conception of property and some laws , like it changed before you were born.

Maybe this thread is just a few years too early.

 

[Plastic14407]

I declare that this new word/term SHALL BE.

ILLEGAL REPRODUCTION! (of copyrighted material)

are you ganna copyright your word and be the first person to copyright a word thereby limiting said word to your use only? on topic i see your point but still as Richard said nobody wins or loses but at the same time the company of said game is losing. They are losing because if you had bought the game from a retailer they would have gotten your money. So they dont get your money when you illegaly download the game. I still think that the odds of me being caught if i downloaded something illegaly are pretty much 1:120 EDIT:Yea dont comment on how im trailing off topic or dont know what im talking about

 

[Logan Westbrook]

What baffles me is how some people try and moralise piracy. You're not fighting against an oppressive regime or toppling a dictator when you download Crysis from a torrent, you're committing a crime and depriving people of income, however small a sum it might actually be.

You don't get to pick and chose which laws you obey and if you think a law is unjust, the correct response is not to break it, but to try and get it changed.

 

[Alex_P]

Regardless of what you might think about piracy, it is indisputable that piracy is making developers and publishers behave in strange ways, whether it means not bringing games to PC, like Gears of War 2, or using it as an excuse to dump draconian DRM on us, like SecureROM.

The thing is, their concerns are not entirely without basis. The recently released puzzle title World of Goo has seen massive piracy rates, around 90% [http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy-rate/] and Crytek [http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/30/crytek-turns-back-on-pc-exclusivity-cites-piracy] and id [http://www.joystiq.com/2007/03/09/id-software-ceo-piracy-pushed-us-multiplatform] have both turned their back on PC exclusivity thanks to piracy. In essence, by continuing to pirate games, we're cutting our noses off to spite our faces. The more we do it, the more the EA's of the world will foist their crap on us and the more games will go into that multi-platform hodgepodge that the PC fares so poorly in.

Look at the market for books. You can read books for free thanks to libraries. You can buy books cheaply thanks to second-hand bookstores. A huge portion (something like 75% if Charles Stross' article is to be believed) of most books' audience get them through these channels.

For console video games, there are rough analogues. You can play games temporarily thanks to rentals. You can buy used games cheaply. I think these services are inferior to libraries and second-hand bookstores, but they're still similar. And, yes, they're more expensive, but a video game costs ten times as much as a paperback, too. I think we can all agree, just anecdotally speaking, that the volume of rentals and second-hand sales is huge.

For PC games, these services don't exist.

It's not that much harder to illegally copy and run console games than it is to illegally copy and run PC games. A small group of people has been doing it for many years now. But, for most gamers, there's just not enough incentive. Because they've got these nice legal alternate channels.

Of course, most video-game publishers hate second-hand sales and rentals. Recently they've started waging war on them with special "only-if-you-bought-this-retail" downloadable content. Some of them even go so far as to write stupid editorials about how the next president should regulate second-hand sales with special video-game blue books and funnel half the money from any such sale to the game's publishers. They dream of the day when they can crush used games and rentals, when every customer will be walking home with a shiny $60 box right on release day. (Some of them have tasted the MPAA's ways and have an even bigger dream -- to turn all gaming into a rent-directly-from-the-publisher experience, where you as the end user own nothing.)

But those second-hand sales and rentals are the only thing keeping illegal distribution of console games down. If they ever succeed, console "piracy" will skyrocket. There is no way to make everyone who plays video games right now pay $60 for them.

-- Alex

 

[TerraMGP]

What baffles me is how some people try and moralise piracy. You're not fighting against an oppressive regime or toppling a dictator when you download Crysis from a torrent, you're committing a crime and depriving people of income, however small a sum it might actually be.

You don't get to pick and chose which laws you obey and if you think a law is unjust, the correct response is not to break it, but to try and get it changed.

SOMEONE is Lawful good.

Seriously though While I don't ALWAYS agree with that sentament (I am all for going outside the law when unjust) The point has been made. You should not steal and that is stealing plain and simple. Yes corporations are greedy and money grubbing, Yes they lower standards to make money, but if you want something you should compensate those who work for it.Life has alot of things to fight back against and even more ways to do so but at this point the relative consistency of game prices, especially considering how much piracy should drive it up, is just one of those facts of life.

Yes its still going to happen, Yes we need to find some way for file sharing to become a way to gain compensation for work, yes the Paradigm needs to shift. But call an apple an apple for crying out loud.

 

[Alex_P]

You don't get to pick and chose which laws you obey and if you think a law is unjust, the correct response is not to break it, but to try and get it changed.

I agree with this statement as far as copyright infringement is concerned, but not in general.

There are circumstances when the law is very poorly thought-out and not likely to change soon.

Sometimes, it's trivial laws covering trivial shit. I know the DMCA makes pretty much any form of DRM circumvention illegal. Fuck that! I'm not waiting ten years for the legislature to get off it's ass just so I can back up a bit of media or make some DRM-infected game work with my CD drive.

Sometimes, it's trivial laws covering non-trivial shit. If I lived in a state with sodomy laws that covered something I like to do, I would certainly break them.

-- Alex

 

[zacaron]

bob has a batman fetia`

 

[incal11]

What baffles me is how some people try and moralise piracy. You're not fighting against an oppressive regime or toppling a dictator when you download Crysis from a torrent, you're committing a crime and depriving people of income, however small a sum it might actually be.

You don't get to pick and chose which laws you obey and if you think a law is unjust, the correct response is not to break it, but to try and get it changed.

Some companies I need not to name are actually acting like opressive regimes, and i'm moralising piracy only under some conditions (to simplify to the extreme you think in terms of yes OR no, I think in terms of yes AND no)
If there's anything I can actually do to change the law where I live I will do it , but 'till then I refuse to be completely manipulated , especially by laws that does not concern the proper working of my state , they'll have my money if they deserve it .

But call an apple an apple for crying out loud.

I never said it's not theft , just that it can be justifiable in some conditions.
And I believe the very concept of theft will have to change.

 

[TerraMGP]

If you want to change things, start by boycotting their product. Picket, hand out fliers, stand outside of their building. Do the kind of thing that people should be doing to Yahoo. Illegally downloading to cull the market does not work because they can simply point to the figures and say 'see? those people would have purchased our games" and iwth people still putting money into the games by purchasing them the company gets its reward.

 

[jockslap]

theft is theft is theft, whats the difference between stealing a game online or snatching a dudes wallet. Everyone loses (even the thief eventually)

 

[incal11]

I'm already boycotting , as for the protest , things aren't looking too good with sarkozy , but it will blow up if he keep it up.

theft is theft is theft, whats the difference between stealing a game online or snatching a dudes wallet. Everyone loses (even the thief eventually)

Personally I don't think I'm stealing anyone's wallet with 10+ years old games , or games I bought but left home.

 

[TerraMGP]

Personally I don't think I'm stealing anyone's wallet with 10+ years old games , or games I bought but left home.

In that case your not, especially with orphaned works or works that will never see a rebirth. But there is a difference between getting a copy of a game that you paid for at one time or getting an orphaned work you cannot otherwise get and taking something that a person depends on for income.

Just saying

 

[jockslap]

Personally I don't think I'm stealing anyone's wallet with 10+ years old games , or games I bought but left home.

In that case your not, especially with orphaned works or works that will never see a rebirth. But there is a difference between getting a copy of a game that you paid for at one time or getting an orphaned work you cannot otherwise get and taking something that a person depends on for income.

Just saying

i agree, if it's old and i can't find it in a store, then downloading it is great, you can keep the classics alive. Otherwise it is stealing. Perhaps internet downloading should be legal for games over a certain age?

 

[incal11]

Still it's stealing in regard of the law ...
and yes hopefully the law will have to accept reality regarding this.

 

[Alex_P]

Still it's stealing in regard of the law ...
and yes hopefully the law will have to accept reality regarding this.

Nope, it's a different thing. For a long time, copyright infringement was only a civil offense, for example (whereas theft is covered under criminal statutes as well).

-- Alex

 

[incal11]

my mistake , so many equated copyright infringement with theft here...

 

[Nimbus]

I wish people would stop saying illegal=wrong. The law isn't infallible.