Poll: Everything is pirated!
- Thread starter Sylveria
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Sylveria said:
First off, I know it's satire. But good satire makes a clever and/or interesting point about the subject material. Though the writing is good, this is bad satire because it actually has very little to do with the subject.poundingmetal74 said:
The problem is that what you described relates to an entirely different market system than that used by the video-games industry.
With a house, all the builder or contractor or whatever has to do is get paid more than he spent when building said house. He has made a profit, end of story. It is a market system based not on customers, but on a single client. Not so with video-games.
Video-games can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, and basic common sense tells us that that kind of moolah will not turn a profit if the product sells only once. A video-game must sell multiple, and I mean MULTIPLE copies in order to turn that same profit.
Let me break into a minor tangent for a moment.
The fundamental principle of any economic system is that something of value is created and then sold for slightly more than the cost of creation, this turns a profit. When a house is built, the item of worth that is created is the physical house. The builder of the house than gets paid slightly more than the initial cost of the house (yes this is basic, sorry), they turn a profit and can wipe their hands of the matter. The value of the house remains; it has merely changed hands. When the house is sold, if the owner kept it clean and maybe spruced it up a bit, they can sell it for slightly more money than they paid. It matters not whether they do, the fact remains that they were at least reimbursed. But, and here's the important part, THE BUILDER HAS NOT LOST ANY PROFIT. They have already profited on their work and no longer have any relevance.
The item of worth that the developer has created is not a physical object, but a certain amount of entertainment. This is an ethereal product, existent only in the mind, and the physical disk is merely the conveyor of the product. When you pay new for a videogame, you are directly paying the publisher for their work, but you are not giving them profit. As I said before, they must sell a certain amount of copies in order to make that profit.
And here's the kicker; when you buy a used game, they don't get paid. The physical copy of the game has been bought from them once, but their actual product, those hours of entertainment that cost so much to produce, has been sold TWICE, and they didn't get the money from that second transaction.
I tried to painfully twist it into your analogy, saying it's ALMOST as if the builder built two houses, and was relying on the sale of both to make a profit, but someone bought one and then acted as though they had bought both, and sold the second one to others, but even that doesn't work. It's analogy proof. Apples and oranges.
This is why I always try and buy my games new, and also why I (for the most part) support the practice of limiting some game content to only those who bought it new.
In any case, I hope this has been, illuminating.
EDIT:
But not Spore's DRM, that thing was shit. Yay. I can play the game on three different computers simultaneously. WHOOP-DE-F***EN-DOO. For God's sake, just make it so it only plays from the disk.
Oh I think people do, it's just that if it was indeed satire (which I'm still not convinced) it was awfully unfunny. Even then, most of the points raised still remain perfectly valid and worthy of discussion concerning piracy and used games.FelixG said:
People really do need to wake up, from inside experience the music industry is far from healthy (especially the smaller independents and the like) and the vast majority of it's ills directly relate to the rise of widespread piracy on the internet. Many of the smaller artists and labels are not completely against moderates and second hand sales of CDs, but when one person buys and downloads a DRM free album costing £5 then shares it with half a million people which results in almost zero sales whilst the artist can not afford to feed their family then there's a serious problem that needs to be addressed (real world example).
Moving on to the second hand music market, how many of those stores actually remain? Growing up there was at least one in every minor town, now it's lucky to see one in a major city (at least here in the UK). I can only see game retailers following suit in the future. There is a culture surrounding used games that never really existed with music either, I'm guessing cost may be a factor for this (although some rare albums command a higher price) - so I can understand and have no objections to initiatives like Project Ten Dollar. Intrusive DRM is not acceptable, however. Valve seem to have managed their DRM superbly, unlike say any company that uses SecuROM as an alternative. Pirates need to become responsible, just as some companies need to realise that draconian measures are punishing their paying customers and driving others away. I'll be in shock the day either of those happen.
It's funny though, almost all of the above will be wasted typing and space. I've yet to encounter a single person who has changed their opinion (whatever their stance), or even questioned themselves on the subject from a forum discussion.
Well, tough tamales Mr. Super President of such and such corporation! If you don't want people pirating your intellectual property, then don't distribute it! Oh, and technically, you're living in a house too, so guess what? YOU'RE A PIRATE TOO! HAH!
(For the record, I'm playing along too. I found this post to be quite humorous.
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(For the record, I'm playing along too. I found this post to be quite humorous.
)
Right, is this about that FBI thing? Because ummm...basically, they don't have a sense of humor. Satire and sarcasm will be missed entirely and they'll probably take this all verbatim. I really hope you knew that going in.Sylveria said:
So in your oppinion (from what ive been able to discern) anything that containst intelectual property should be discarded as soon as anyone has used it for its purpose.C-Mag said:
So library's, movie rentals and (art) musea are all "stealing" from the original makers of the work and are thereby breaking the economy.
Book restoration shops and painting restoration shops are even worse they enable the "stealing" for generations to come and are making a profit off of doing so.
This is just what i recieved from your post and as you can probably notice from my writing style I dont agree.
In my oppinion if you hand something out whether it is a disc containing your intelectual property or a bench you made with your hands you lose the right to control what goes on with that item unless someone copy's your work for his own gain. then again that is simply illegal and for good reason.
Well, no, that's not quite what I'm saying. I don't want to insult but please, don't generalize or unnecessarily extrapolate. There are various nuances in business models that I am unaware of that may well make used resale a non-issue for many industries. I'm unable to comment on things like, say, movie rentals because I have no idea how that business model operates. For all I know, the movie producer may well get a share of every movie rented.Wormthong said:
And I'm not saying they're stealing. I'm saying that the developer has every right to be angry about lost profits. The common element of movie rentals and libraries are that the material is returned. Therefore I think it's safe to assume that when a movie renter buys a movie, he is not simply buying the movie the way you or I would, he must also pay the producer for the right to rent that movie. In fact, I think I remember something about unlicensed lending for profit being illegal.
As for art galleries, I should consider it self evident that they pay far more for the right to display their collections than it would for an individual to purchase them for private viewing.
Book restoration shops are irrelevant. If something is old enough to need restoration then the IP has probably already reached public domain or something similar.
What developers have a right to be very angry about indeed is the fact that retailers sell both new and used products at the same time, something which, to the extent of my knowledge, is not a common practice in bookshops. What's more, these retailers customarily offer slightly cheaper used copies of a game when someone tries to buy new, and pocket all the money made from these sales. Thus, in the video-game industry, there is a very high correlation between used sales and profit lost.
But on reflection, the above does not really rebut the gist of your argument; that
"if you hand something out whether it is a disc containing your intelectual property or a bench you made with your hands you lose the right to control what goes on with that item".
Perhaps I aught to make clear what developers mean when they use the term 'Intellectual Property'.
The term Intellectual Property does not mean "that's my idea and I always own it no matter how much the customers pay", though that is sometimes a subset of it.
Put simply, it is meant in THE MOST LITERAL SENSE POSSIBLE.
Intellectual Property actually means exactly what it says; intellectual property. Property that exists in, and only in, the MIND. The aetherical and ephemeral realm of thought and abstract. It has no physical form. If you bought the intellectual property that is a video game from the developer then yes, you do have the right to do whatever you want with it.
But you haven't.
You have bought the right to use their property (and it is still THEIR property) for entertainment. And the thing about most video-games is, they don't have all that much replay value. To twist it into a physical analogy, it's like a loaf of bread that, once eaten by one person, can be transferred to another and be eaten again. So when their game is sold back to the retailer (for a pittance, by the way), who then sells it to another and pockets the money, the developer has every right to say that their property has been sold by someone else. Not only without their permission, but without seeing any of the money either.
I don't know how this works in other markets, but we're not talking about them. They are different situations.
What is contained in the disk is a right to use. Not the product.
And to return to my earlier statement about limiting content to disks bought new, I say absolutely yes.
When you buy Skyrim new, you are paying Bethesda for Bethesda's work.
When you buy Skyrim used, you are paying the retailer for Bethesda's work.
If you buy used, Bethesda owes you Jack Shit.