Why is this distinction important to you? Does your objection to the characterisation of piracy as stealing come from a specific issue that somehow does harm, or is it just XKCD's "someone on the Internet is wrong!" impulse?Nomadic said:
-- Steve
To the people who don't pirate: Is life really so bad?
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-- Steve
If someone kills another, are they robbing them of the rest of their life, even though they never had it?Assassinator said:You can't steal something you don't have, the company doesn't own my money per definition. The only thing we're doing money-wise, is limiting their (finally got the their/they're/there thing right) profits.Symp4thy said:
PS: For the record, I don't use it as a justification for my piracy acts, I don't really care about the fact that they make loads of money with it.
No no you got me wrongninjablu said:I ment you can't do much about the fact that that's the way it stands in the law.
The fact is, you are getting not only goods, but services for free. (Goods the actual disc, services all the programming that went into it). Let me try a less severe example. If you work for several months on some project, let's say a master architectural piece, and when finally finished, you get a copyright/patent on the design, and sell the blueprints to be used by only a few companies. Well, someone photocopies the blueprints and offers them for free online.
Now, the design is worthless, why buy from you when you can get it off the web for virtually free.
Of course, this might be great if you got the prints for nothing, but if you, indeed, were the one who devoted his life towards that goal, would you not be devastated?
My god this thread is still going?
We get it, piracy is not stealing, but still wrong. I have said this countless times in the past myself.
However here's something to think about (someone may have already said this but I cannot go through he pages of posts as I am too tired):
What of the concept of buying used games? If I buy a used game from another individual or shop, the company who developed the game see hide nor hair of that money, so is this wrong? Am I wrong for purchasing used games? For enjoying an IP without the company profiting from it?
We get it, piracy is not stealing, but still wrong. I have said this countless times in the past myself.
However here's something to think about (someone may have already said this but I cannot go through he pages of posts as I am too tired):
What of the concept of buying used games? If I buy a used game from another individual or shop, the company who developed the game see hide nor hair of that money, so is this wrong? Am I wrong for purchasing used games? For enjoying an IP without the company profiting from it?
Strong Sapir-Whorfism as a defense against piracy? C'mon, man.Cheeze_Pavilion said:
But if you're so set on this, then perhaps you could provide an adequate substitute; one in terms that your typical narcissist can understand. Explaining it in terms of opportunity reduction or trademark dilution doesn't seem to get through to pirates, as they'll just wave them away and say they don't apply to them.
What simile, metaphor, or analogy would you use?
-- Steve
This best defines software piracy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4
Its old but still relevant.
As for Music and Movies,
Bend that line as much as you want tis still illegal at the end of the day. That goes for software too.
Being a lawyers son I get explanations on the Nuances of different laws. The loopholes never protect you from the fact that its illegal.
A court will do you for having a computer composed of completely pirated software, no explanations of several loopholes will help. I would use Linux but never pirate Red Hat enterprise Linux.
As for EULAs, thats the terms you HAVE to agree to to use THEIR software. You get licenses to USE it, not OWN it. You do not own ANY software unless you coded it yourselves or paid for the source code.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4
Its old but still relevant.
As for Music and Movies,
Bend that line as much as you want tis still illegal at the end of the day. That goes for software too.
Being a lawyers son I get explanations on the Nuances of different laws. The loopholes never protect you from the fact that its illegal.
A court will do you for having a computer composed of completely pirated software, no explanations of several loopholes will help. I would use Linux but never pirate Red Hat enterprise Linux.
As for EULAs, thats the terms you HAVE to agree to to use THEIR software. You get licenses to USE it, not OWN it. You do not own ANY software unless you coded it yourselves or paid for the source code.
My thought is simple. 99% of the time I buy games used. Used game purchases do not contribute anything to the game developers, so I would feel very little guilt over pirating games. However, I will say that I don't have any pirated copies of games for my PC, Xbox, or PS2. I have had a lot of music on my ipod that I downloaded. Basically, I'll download an album by a band I just discovered and give it a listen for a while. If I really like it, I buy it. If I don't, I delete it because it's a waste of hard drive space. In the case of the latest Metallica album I feel no remorse. Lars is a dick.
isnt making a profit off of ones property (or even the ability too do so) contingent on having control over it?Cheeze_Pavilion said:
for the second part its both. if people dont pay for it than the makers cant be rewarded now can they?
id say we allready have a pretty good 'system' in place, its called "dont friggen steal shit". or various words to that effect.
just because its easy to steal due to the nature of the net that doesnt mean we shouldnt try and stop it. not sure you'd get many people to embrace a 'new system' where theft is now ok and you just work for nothing. or perhaps for the common good i guess? its been tryed allready this 'new system' its called Socialism .
didnt work out so well.
In NSW, Australia, at least, piracy is technically not stealing. Theft, or larceny, is concerned not with the unlawful acquisition of goods, but the fact that the legal owner has been unlawfully deprived of something which is his by right. I believe most Australian and British laws regarding larceny are much the same; I'm unsure of the wording of the law in the US and elsewhere.
In all fairness, we can all see the underlying message.Cheeze_Pavilion said:
Which to me doesn't seem that effective tbh. Capitalism has got us to where we are today, so what would be wrong with trying a new system?Wyatt said:
I personally will Pirate basically anything. Adobe photoshop for example. Would I buy it? Yeah, like that's worth £600.
On a different note though, there are several things that I would NOT pirate.
1)An OS. I can delete other stuff, but my OS is my OS. I'll pay £70 and know that it's gonna be fairly stable.
2)Any steam game. I went to download Saints Row 2 a couple of days ago. I finished downloading it and browsed for any installation tips online, and came across the line "yeah, too bad it's Steam DRM". I checked further and sure enough it was. I deleted the .iso, simply because Steam have truely earned my $39.99 (I can download it straight from them), but also because I have a Steam account reputation to keep clean.
3)Anything I TRUELY enjoy gets deleted and D2D'd. I did not enjoy Fallout, I did not particularly enjoy Bioshock (for 14 hours of gameplay for both sides of the storey? Pfft get real)
4)Indy games. It's like mugging a guy who's just lost his job. £15 actually means something to an indy company, whilst £150 means less to a large company.
Allright. Let's take an adequately cliched scenario, and let's see if you can find a good parallel. I'll even abuse the thesaurus and throw in a semicolon at random - just to show how good a writer I am.Anton P. Nym said:
So imagine with me this entirely fictional scenario: You're working for a video- game developer. And it's not games of the good kind, unfortunately. You're working on writing video- game plots because you suck. You're producing shit. But you're still pretending it's artistic and glorious, because you're arrogant stupid bastards. Who either conveniently forget their initially chosen target audience when rambling on about their unappreciated artistic achievement - or simply have no concept of the word artistic apart from "I did it". In fact, you are narcissists, seeking to find a justification for why not everyone loves your work as much as the publisher does - who by all the overly used mixed metaphors in the world - are also pretentious little twats, by sheer coincidence.
Fortunately there is a brilliant excuse. If it wasn't for pirates, I would be successful and great. That's what these entirely fictional people say. Because then all the different people who downloaded the game and thought it was shit, would've bought the game and loved it!
Strangely enough, that same scenario could be repeated with music and films of various kinds. But on reflection and with a randomly and misplaced semicolon; let's not wish for quality to win out in spite of missing exposure and the backing of a large publishing house. No - let's instead argue in all seriousness for supplying welfare for the unsuccessful corporate whores who have no talent. Because if you manage to get published once - you've got to be good. No matter how much people don't think it's worth paying for. That's only fair, after all. Because the imaginary numbers of the anti- piracy lobby do not lie: if only the generated and hyped interest for a title could translate into sales, then any title should sell in millions. That is the truth.
---
But here's what's actually going on: because it's easy to get hold of a title, you're likely to want to try it, even if you wouldn't be swayed by an advert to buy it. On the other hand, a title that's hyped as the next messiah is going to generate interest that is enough for people to want to try it - even if they typically would not have bought it before trying at a friend's house, or after downloading it.
Still - if you sincerely believe that the value of your product could be a million times larger if it wasn't for pirates, then there's obviously nothing I can tell you that will change your mind.
