Libraries are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
Torrent sites are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
There are only three real differences; amount of content, ease of access, social acceptance.
And that when you sign out a book from a library, you give it back, whereas if you pirate the game, then you own it forever. A library's not the equivalent of piracy, it's the equivalent of playing a game at a friend's house. It would be more like piracy if you signed out the book from the library and kept it. Who here's going to fess up to doing that?
Aby_Z said:
This will be my answer to every piracy thread from now on. Yes, piracy is bad and all.
Libraries are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
Torrent sites are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
There are only three real differences; amount of content, ease of access, social acceptance.
I think the difference is how many books can you name that have bungets over a 5 million dollars (ammount it costs to make some games) what about 200 million or more dollars( the price it costs to make some movies). also worth noting is that the number of people who check out a book at a library in the books lifetime is nothing compared to the number of people who share the same torrent. Atleast with a library the copy of the book was legitimately bought by someone at some point. the same cant be said for torrents.
I love people, especially the MPAA & RIAA who claim that every download = lost sale. I'm a pirate, and among the games I have pirated is Dragon Age. Which I then bought from the EA Store because it came with the DLC and other cool crap like the soundtrack and wallpapers. You can also bet your ass that I am not the only one who has done similar stuff.
I have 67 games on my computer, bought from Steam and a few other games that I bought from elsewhere (Gears of War, Farcry 2, Alone in the Dark - so basically a cavalcade of disappointments). Being a student, I buy what I can - when I can. When I can't, I pirate it. If the game that I download is good, I will buy it when I get enough money - if it's not I delete it and try to forget that it even exists.
I also have a PS3 and 4 games to go with it, which bumps the amount of money I have used on games + PS3 up to a fascinating $1380 (rough estimate). Not to mention my $1400 computer.
Yeah, Finnish students get paid quite a lot of money.
Libraries are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
Torrent sites are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
There are only three real differences; amount of content, ease of access, social acceptance.
I think the difference is how many books can you name that have bungets over a 5 million dollars (ammount it costs to make some games) what about 200 million or more dollars( the price it costs to make some movies). also worth noting is that the number of people who check out a book at a library in the books lifetime is nothing compared to the number of people who share the same torrent. Atleast with a library the copy of the book was legitimately bought by someone at some point. the same cant be said for torrents.
So you're saying that because an author is paid less, it's okay to not pay for their work? And yes, for someone to upload a game, it had to be bought first. And most books in libraries are donations. And a books lifetime is a lot longer than a games. How many people have read Fahrenheight 911? How many have played Adventure? How many people have read Shakespeare's Romeo&Juliet? How many people do you expect to ever play Halo?
SideburnsPuppy said:
infinity_turtles said:
How about this justification:
Libraries are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
Torrent sites are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
There are only three real differences; amount of content, ease of access, social acceptance.
And that when you sign out a book from a library, you give it back, whereas if you pirate the game, then you own it forever. A library's not the equivalent of piracy, it's the equivalent of playing a game at a friend's house. It would be more like piracy if you signed out the book from the library and kept it. Who here's going to fess up to doing that?
How about fessing up to repeatedly checking out a book as long as you might play a game? Because stealing a physical object and copying a document aren't equivalent. In one situation, someone loses something after all.
I suppose, but don't go saying that's how I define morality. I define immoral behavior as causing harm to someone else for materialistic or sadistic reasons. The fact that the law says those things are bad is irrelevant to me. If it said they were the greatest thing ever I'd still say they're wrong.
And taking that piece of software or that song but not paying for it isn't harming the creator (they do get a few cents of each sale) isn't a materialistic reason?
I suppose, but don't go saying that's how I define morality. I define immoral behavior as causing harm to someone else for materialistic or sadistic reasons. The fact that the law says those things are bad is irrelevant to me. If it said they were the greatest thing ever I'd still say they're wrong.
And taking that piece of software or that song but not paying for it isn't harming the creator (they do get a few cents of each sale) isn't a materialistic reason?
Nope, if I enjoy it I pay for it. If I hadn't downloaded it, I wouldn't have bought it. If I'm unable to try a product, I simply don't buy it unless I trust the people making it. In other words, for any case where I try before I buy, I was never a potential sale. No loss for the creator at all. If there was no sampling of any kind, outside of the creators I trust now, I wouldn't be purchasing much in the way of intellectual property. I have other hobbies that can occupy my time. I have a date with one such hobby actually, and I really should be heading out to my sub's house soon, so this might be my last post for the night unless you reply before I finish my shower and get dressed.
Libraries are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
Torrent sites are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
There are only three real differences; amount of content, ease of access, social acceptance.
You know that 30+ minutes of DRM we have to put up with before we start playing any game. We have pirates to thank for that. Their selfish nature is not only killing the gaming economy but also giving us ridiculous amounts of DRM to wade through. Developers now don't have a choice. Pirates are creating an environment in which maximum profits come from Ubisoft DRM-ing us to death while the Humble Indie Bundle still gets pirated even though it's being offered for free.
Now, the thread about the Obama administration's plans is filled with enough examples of this that I refuse to return there.
People's privacy should not be invaded. However personally I'm surprised the internet isn't monitored more strongly than it already is. In England I believe your internet history is held by the government for 12 months then deleted, should they need to use it against you.
This is not invading people's privacy. This is keeping people's internet history in the short term so that they have it if you commit a crime and they need evidence. If they didn't do this then the law which governs us would be unenforcable.
What people seem to be after is a world where the internet is left unfettered, because breaking the law is of greater benefit to Hollywood, they just don't realise it because they're too busy with their money baths.
But anyway.
My problem with piracy is the justifications, the "It's try before you buy / free advertising", the "It's because prices are too expensive" excuses.
I'm sorry, but that is like somebody driving away from a petrol station without paying because they want to protest against high petrol prices.
Sure, you get your petrol, until the police show up and arrest you. They don't arrest you because you represent a threat to bureaucracy and they want you silenced, they arrest you because you committed a crime. You didn't pay the price for the petrol you used.
Joe Biden called it "theft". It's not hyperbole - THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS. You are taking a service without paying.
If you want a CD but don't want to pay the full price - just wait a few months. CDs decrease in price. Same with DVDs, same with games.
If you don't want the publishers and record companies to get rich, you can buy one second hand.
If you still believe yourself to be vindicated, feel free to argue with me - if you can find a way of proving this without using any of the above I shall be impressed.
(Oh, and anyone who says "Everybody does it" as an excuse...you have been warned.)
I'm anticipating this thread devolving quickly into a flame war and being locked. Please attempt to prove me wrong.
You, sir, are 100% correct.
I'm gonna go one further (and likely be the aggressive jerk you have wanted to discourage in your thread). The vast majority of the hue and cry over this issue (and any govt crackdown on piracy) that flares up here is not about personal freedoms, human rights, or the constitution. It's dressing up one of two motives in pretty rhetoric:
1) The poster does not like the current administration (I'm not taking sides. Same crap, different side two years ago).
2) The poster wants to be able to bit-torrent Twilight:Eclipse when it's first available without any feeling of moral obligation or chance of legal repercussion.
everyone has pirated at least once. Also, everyone has legally paid for their product at least once. It all depends on morals, money, and what it available to you. Pirating can be considered a "try before buy" method, but be honest, who has actually bought something you have pirated? People pirate for their own reasons, and no one will reveal those on the internet, trust me. Pirating will always happen. Sites will go down before most single users are tracked down because 1 torrent site = about 100 or so piraters. Just do the math, it will be stopped eventually.
Libraries are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
Torrent sites are places that host other people's intellectual property that you can view for free while the creator makes no money off of it, whether you enjoy it or not.
There are only three real differences; amount of content, ease of access, social acceptance.
Well, in some places it would be more then acceptable - if said 47 people were all dirty infidels.
Legality isn't morality. Laws don't tell you what's right and what's wrong. And morality is pretty subjective, too.
Sure, there are certain laws that would be almost required to exist in some extent to have society - mostly the basic "don't kill" and "Try to help out and stuff".
But stealing isn't even all that intrinsic - in a communistic society (and no, I'm not here to promote communism, while it's a great idealistic theory it doesn't quite work in real life, although nobody really did it because on large scale, all countries we consider "communist" have been dictatorships. Yes, USSR, too) there would be no stealing because for stealing to exist there has to be the concept of ownership.
But that's just an example.
I doubt that I'll be doing anything in this thread at this point, it's pretty drawn out already - and I'm sure all the arguments were used.
But I'll go ahead and reuse that one argument. Piracy. Isn't. Stealing.
Piracy doesn't remove the original. It merely creates a copy. And frankly I'm not a big believer in ownership of ideas and such. If you read a book enough times that you know it word by word, completely, and can recall - or even rewrite it from your memory, are you stealing it? Because it's no different from piracy. You just copy information, 1s and 0s, from the copy of the book (Which you might not even own, you could read it in a bookstore or in a library) and save it in your brain.
Sure, human brain isn't all that great at retaining information (although people still manage it), but as technology progresses and we might be able to, roughly speaking, plug in USBs into our heads (Yes, if you put it that way, it does sound pretty stupid) or use any kind of futuristic devices capable of teaching you something in minutes by simply downloading the information into your brain (seen Matrix, and hundreds of works of science fiction before that).
Sure, these are unlikely and far-out-there examples. But they certainly show that as we progress technologically, our laws and ideas regarding intellectual property become more and more outdated and perhaps even counter-intuitive.
everyone has pirated at least once. Also, everyone has legally paid for their product at least once. It all depends on morals, money, and what it available to you. Pirating can be considered a "try before buy" method, but be honest, who has actually bought something you have pirated? People pirate for their own reasons, and no one will reveal those on the internet, trust me. Pirating will always happen. Sites will go down before most single users are tracked down because 1 torrent site = about 100 or so piraters. Just do the math, it will be stopped eventually.
Okay, I lied, I'm off after this post. I have bought most of the things I've pirated. I don't pirate everything and anything though, because I don't have the time to play everything and anything.
And that when you sign out a book from a library, you give it back, whereas if you pirate the game, then you own it forever. A library's not the equivalent of piracy, it's the equivalent of playing a game at a friend's house. It would be more like piracy if you signed out the book from the library and kept it. Who here's going to fess up to doing that?
No, that is not the same thing, because the library loses the book when you keep it, and other people cannot check it out. If you were to take it home, photocopy it, and then return it, that'd be a better example.
Steal a physical good: Company loses one potential sale, and 1 good
Steal intellectual good: Company loses one potential sale.
Piracy is illegal. Does that mean it's bad? I guess it depends what you mean by `bad'. Stealing is bad, because if you steal something, it stops being available to the people who worked for it. If I stole my neighbor's lawn mower, my neighbor is short one lawn mower. But if I steal his music collection? He's not down anything. Unless he has a personal issue with me having the same music he has, he doesn't have any problem with it whatsoever. He's just as well off, and I'm better off. Nobody's down, except the artists are down in `potential profit', whatever that is. I say that because, I don't know what this Biden guy is smoking, music sharing has been shown in numerous studies to increase music sales, not decrease it. Due to pirates, the industry has gained money, not lost it. Music sharing is good for sales. I'll show you what I mean. Does anyone here really believe that Machinae Supremacy would even be out of their garage, if they kept their music to themselves, and didn't make it freely available on the internet? Thought so. That doesn't necessarily mean that piracy is good, however. It just means sharing is good. It means that more bands should be like MaSu, and release their music online, for free. Because that increases sales. How is that possible, you ask? And I answer you. Do you really believe that people get rich from selling albums? Especially with the fucking RIAA stealing quite a bit of that profit? Without tours, bands would be broke. Almost all the income that bands make is from concert tickets. Compared to that, selling albums makes pennies. Why invest so much energy into trying to keep people from doing something that would help you make money, if the alternative won't hurt you much in the first place? Don't sell music. Give it away. It's probably the best advertising you will ever get. And if your band doesn't suck, people will pay lots of money to watch you play live. It really isn't that difficult, and I don't get why more bands aren't already doing this, it just makes logical sense and will logically bring more income. Actually, I can't think of any reason there's still arguments over this, except - oh yeah - if it weren't for music sharing being a `bad' thing, the RIAA would be out a job. I mean that's the only thing they do, sue pirates with money that should have gone to the musicians. Otherwise, they're a pointless useless middleman. Well that's my rant, I didn't really mean to do that but it just sort of came out. You know how it is.
So authors of books, but not writers for video games, should be forced to work part time jobs? One person getting paid more than another on average doesn't make it "right".
I never said anything about what was right and what not. The thing is, though, that book writers are not neccessarily dependent on their work being bought. They get their main income from their job and in their free time they write books and sell them to publishers. If the books don't sell anymore - fuck it, I've still got my regular job.
A games designer is not in that position. Develop three failures in a row or something and you're out of a job. Who gives a shit if Beyond Good&Evil or Psychonauts are considered cult classics if nobody bought them?
Gladion said:
Second, those developers are very well entitled to your money. No matter whether you enjoyed their work or not, you took the service. This is also not like street musicians who play music and just hope you drop em a Euro or buy their CD. From the very beginning on, those developers made clear "we're going to make this game and for you to check it out, we will provide trailers, gameplay videos, developer walkthroughs and a demo - that should be enough for you to realize if the game is it worth for you or not. Just don't simply download it, play through, and afterwards say 'it was shit, you're not getting anything'."
Again, this is about permission. Not all the authors in your library have given permission to have their books in the library. Also, there's evidence that pirates put more money into the industry than others do, so it comes down mainly to having been given permission. I say other people's permission means little to nothing in terms of morality.[/quote]
Let me tell you I'm rather indifferent to the subject of internet piracy. Sure, I do get pissed about people who don't pay any money and got to see even more movies than me, but that's about it. I really do have bigger problems than to fight music piracy.
The one thing I can NOT stand, though, (as the OP, if I remember correctly) are any sort of justifications pirates bring up again and again, that's not referring especially to you. I was trying to make clear in my earlier post that any sort of excuse for piracy is absolutely idiotic, but sadly it seems many believe them themselves. It's always the same, high pricing, bad customer service, testing, whatever. The only thing I want clear is that none of those reasons make pirating software any better. With the very few assholes out there saying "I just don't care, I take whatever I want" you at least know you simply avoid them, but the rest still gives you the feeling there is room for discussion and maybe to bring one or two back to the light side of things, even though experience taught you many times that this is impossible
Piracy is not theft, it dose not directly effect the industry but rather to a extent is a natural part of it.
Note I am talking about sharing,lending recording protected broadcasts and such not selling bootlegs, trying to make a profit off unlicensed copyrighted items should be a crime not lending it to soemone. Just because its imposable for the IP/CP conglomerates to make up rules and legalities like they did for libraries dose not make sharing a crime. You can not stop the flow of information to the public.... but you can nuke illicit profiteers.
I rarely pirate video games. In fact, the only time I do, it's very old PC games that I can't find anywhere else.
I do pirate music. Not too often (and nowhere near as much as some people I know), but I do it. And here's why I don't think it's too bad of a thing.
I recently heard a song by a band called Falling Up. I couldn't find any of their albums in the only music shop in town, so I checked online. The cheapest I could buy it for is £17.49. And that's bloody expensive for one CD with 12 tracks on it. So, unfortunately for Falling Up, I never get to hear any of their other songs, lose interest and never think of them again.
But, let's say I torrented the album. Now I've heard it and know that it's awesome. Now if they ever play any shows in the UK, I'll go see them. They might even be selling some albums at the show, and I'll happily fork over £10-£15, because I know that this money is going straight to them.
And, if I torrent it and it sucks? Well, no-one loses. I was never going to buy the album anyway. I'll probably end up deleting it, as I'm in constant need of hard drive space.
Yes, okay piracy is bad. I do download the occasional game now and then, I will admit that. My budget is very tight so I have to be very picky with the games I buy, which really isn't easy seeing as most of the games I play or bought or want to buy have/had no demo. I blew 60 dollars on Modern Warfare just to find out I hated it, it was filled with hackers and lag issues, very unbalanced and overall, a waste. I was severely disappointed and I still play it, why? I am trying to get my moneys worth out of that awful game. I download games because I don't want to take that risk again, and if I do enjoy it, I will buy it. Infact, most of the games I have downloaded I found to be a waste of time, and I was more then happy to have saved my money, and I delete it never to see it again.
If the companies truly did care about piracy, why the hell wouldn't they at least try to release a demo or beta? I don't want to walk blindly into the nearest gamestop and guess if I will like the latest and greatest title. If these piracy laws are going to be enforced, they should make game developers release a demo, because I truly don't want to buy a game without trying it first.
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