A potentially original take on piracy? Probably not, but interesting.

[Vegosiux]

You keep going, bro, you keep trying to score that win.

I'm not your bro, chum.

I never claimed anyone defended piracy. Theft is taking something that doesn't belong to you, piracy is similar. They have different textbook-definitions, different definitions in law, and do not have the exact same effect on people, industry, society, etc, but all this is irrelevant, for it wasn't my point.

So basically, they're the same, except that they have different legal definitions, they do not have the same effect on people, society, etc...

OH, but aside from hat, they're EXACTLY the same.

Okay.

My point is that both are morally wrong, on equal grounds.

What grounds would that be?

 

[Vrach]

Do these people deserve the product when they cannot pay for it? Short answer: no. Long answer: revolution.

If the government could snap its fingers and eliminate all piracy tomorrow, what would happen? Well you'd have tens of millions of former pirates, poor people who simply couldn't afford to pay for games, music, and movies, sitting on their fucking hands as they finally realize how poor they've actually become. Sure, they never had the house/car/pool, but they were watching and playing the same shit as everyone else - and it was enough. Now, though, in our hypothetical world free of piracy?

Summary: I think there's at least an off chance that piracy, as a whole, might be a critical form of wealth redistribution, and its elimination might have drastic and unforeseen consequences for the United States and the world.

I completely agree with your summary.

Btw, you're being a bit of a typical American and not seeing further than your country's borders. Do you realise there's countries outside the US who have a lower medium income than your low income salary? Coupled with the unemployment rates in such countries, it doesn't make for a pretty picture.

Bottom line is, the system works. Publishers aren't poor by a long shot and everyone's enjoying their products. Where capitalism would fuck people over, piracy steps in and raises their quality of life, and quite substantially at that.

Also, to the people you know who pirate like motherfuckers, do they ever pay for some entertainment products? Personally, I know a pile of people who are rampant pirates, but they always buy stuff whenever they get a chance and think the product deserves/needs it.

 

[Chairman Miaow]

I really can't buy the whole "can't afford the product" if those people have the hardware to play this games. If you can afford a TV + console or a PC strong enough to play the games than you can also afford the games.

TV's are cheap as hell these days and a PC is pretty much a requirement if you want to do ANYTHING.

And games are even cheaper. What's your point?

I bought about 10 games this year, 5 of which were new releases. The last time I bought a tv was errrmmmm.... let's seee..... I don't even remember. 3 games adds up to more than a decent TV. Games aren't cheap. and my point was that people will have TV's and computers regardless of whether they play games or not. therefore the can't afford it point is still valid.

 

[manic_depressive13]

I don't care about piracy. I pay for my games but I'm not going to cry with impotent rage at people who don't, thrusting my limp dick in their direction because they got something for free.

If pirating is some sort of compensation for the poor, they're getting a pretty fucking raw deal considering you guys don't even have a real healthcare system over there. I genuinely believe poverty and piracy are seperate problems, and I'm pretty sure preventing piracy wouldn't result in a revolution. People would just revert to the good old fashioned method of buying entertainment, making do without, stealing hardcopies and borrowing from their more fortunate friends.

 

[ImSuperCerealGaiz]

I've been saying this since 1999, if the media companies wanted to be smart, they'd make their own sites with their own movies, games, music, etc and charge a monthly fee for unlimited access, basically make their very own Netflix but they don't want to be smart, they want the be RIGHT. And that's why they will always FAIL.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

No offense but what he means is made clear by the context of what he's saying, to compare it to giving someone a gift is pedantry on your part.

The "context" is nothing more than being holier than thou. A blanket statement is a blanket statement and no "context" can make it look like anything but a blanket statement. People should just think before they open their mouth (or begin typing), and start generalizing otherwise they come across as overzealous, silly and inconsiderate.

But hey, true. Not like they need me to shoot even more holes into their own misconceptions, that much I concede.

Because I'm still looking for all those shady pirate criminals who want to bring down the hard working men and women (and cheat you out of YOUR MONEY!), and I haven't met a single one yet. And I know a lot of people, some of which actually downloaded something at some time.

How is it a misconception that pirating is copying or taking something that doesn't belong to you. That's exactly what it is.

Again you are yourself using blanket statements, there is no one out there sitting in their volcano lair, steep-ling their fingers and laughing manically about all the games they pirated today. Normal people, like you mentioned, are pirating games and hurting the honest gamers who keep the industry afloat by actually paying for games.

Despite his wording the poster has every right to be 'holier than thou' if he pays for his games. It immediately makes him a better person from a moral standpoint than a pirate.

I think what the guy basically wanted to say is that if you pirate a game, that does not necessarily means the company loses a sale.
It's still a crime, but it's way below actual theft.
If I steal something you own, I take away your property.
If I pirate your game, you still have your property, completely untouched, undamaged, etc. Sure I didn't pay you for it, but I might not have bought the game anyway. This is not me trying to say piracy should be allowed, this is me saying that one pirated game does not equate to one lost sale.

Is piracy okay? No it's not. It's illegal and immoral.
Is piracy the same as theft? No, it's not.

I agree with you if you say that piracy is bad. I also agree with the guy for saying that piracy is still not the same as theft.

Now, some other things to think about...
What if games were for some shitty reason banned in my country (aren't most cool games banned in australia?)?
What if I just wanted to watch a tv program I cannot get my hands on legally (not in my country, does not and will not exist on dvd, etc.)? Can I illegally download it then?

 

[burningdragoon]

You keep going, bro, you keep trying to score that win.

I'm not your bro, chum.

I'm not you chum, buddy.

<youtube=zuQK6t2Esng>

couldn't resist, carry on

 

[Realitycrash]

You keep going, bro, you keep trying to score that win.

I'm not your bro, chum.

I never claimed anyone defended piracy. Theft is taking something that doesn't belong to you, piracy is similar. They have different textbook-definitions, different definitions in law, and do not have the exact same effect on people, industry, society, etc, but all this is irrelevant, for it wasn't my point.

So basically, they're the same, except that they have different legal definitions, they do not have the same effect on people, society, etc...

OH, but aside from hat, they're EXACTLY the same.

Okay.

My point is that both are morally wrong, on equal grounds.

What grounds would that be?

Ah yes, the "let's dissect a persons post so I can prove how even more right I am". Tiresome. Listen, can you stop trying to prove that you are "right" and score a win, and try to add someone to the discussion?

Ah, yes, there we go go. "On what grounds"? Well, as my point as, downloading is equally morally bad as stealing from said company. Actually, if you physically stole from said company, you would take a disc (let's assume it hasn't been put in a case with a manual yet, since it's from the company we steal, not the store), which costs money to produce. So yeah, I guess you take a tiny little fraction extra if you commit theft instead of piracy. If you are an utilitarian, this means that it is a tiny, flimsy bit worse to commit theft than piracy.
Remember, we are discussing the act it self, not the breaking-and-entering probably required to get inside and actually steal the disc, or similar situations.
You could claim "but I never would have bought that to begin with!", which is fine, but you still took it, did you not? The act itself is equally bad, even if it doesn't constitute a financial-loss for said company (this is, of course, up for debate. Some people might not agree that it is the act that matters, but the consequences. If so, then it isn't equally bad. I disagree, but hey.)

 

[Killertje]

I think the OP could very well be right, as far as the USA is concerned (although its getting worse in Europe as well). I think the biggest problem is that most people who pirate anything would pirate the stuff they MIGHT like and always buy the stuff they definitely WILL like.

For me personally I always buy any game made by Blizzard because I know I'm gonna get my money's worth. If I don't know whether I'm gonna like a game, I want to try it out first. Demos nowadays aren't even worth downloading if there even is one because they never show a decent amount of the game. I don't want to play the first 2 out of 20 levels where I can't do anything anyway because it's a half assed tutorial. I want to know whether I'm gonna enjoy the game for more than a few hours, otherwise it's not worth my money (assuming full price ofcourse).

So most of my money goes to what I like most and I pirate the rest. Granted, if I pirate a good game I usually buy it anyway, but my standards are pretty high because for me to pay full price for a game it has to be on the level of quality that I expect from games with that price tag. Poor people will probably do the same thing (not implying that I'm rich) which means that most average games only get money from people with lots of it to spare. So if a company makes a few decent but not excellent games they might feel the piracy burn a lot harder than companies like Blizzard.

What we need is some sort of entertainment tax that spreads the money people spend on entertainment around between developers based on how often their product is pirated+bought so that everyone whose products are downloaded receives some profits from it. Don't ask me how to make this happen though.... thats not really my area.

 

[Xanthious]

Theft is taking something that doesn't belong to you, piracy is similar. They have different textbook-definitions, different definitions in law, and do not have the exact same effect on people, industry, society, etc, but all this is irrelevant, for it wasn't my point.
My point is that both are morally wrong, on equal grounds.

Both equally wrong? I would beg to differ. If I steal a CD from a friend he is out a CD. I have deprived him of his CD for my own benefit. I have caused him a demonstrable loss.

However, if I take his CD and rip it to my computer he is still left with his CD. He isn't out anything. The artist who made the CD might be out of a sale assuming I would have bought the CD if pirating it weren't an option. If I wouldn't have bought the CD regardless, for instance if I was unable to afford it, then nobody is out anything at all. Nobody has been deprived of anything. The only thing that has happened is that I have gained the contents of a CD.

Furthermore, if you are going to claim piracy and theft is so similar to make no difference then I can just as easily claim that piracy and libraries are so similar as to make no difference because I can draw just as many parallels between piracy and libraries and you can draw between piracy and theft.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Was the game you purchased the one that was cracked and uploaded as a torrent? No? Then they didn't it steal from you.

This is the sort of analogy you're trying to make: You buy a pair of sunglasses. Right after you pay for your sunglasses, somebody shoplifts a pair. That person didn't steal the sunglasses from you, they stole it from the store. It would have made no difference if you had bought orange juice or a nice sweater instead of the sunglasses. They stole the sunglasses, and the sunglasses belonged to the store. End of story.

And then the store jacks up the prices of those same sunglasses due to loss from theft, and we all pay the next time we go to the store. Oh you didn't know thats how companies/corporations deal with shoplifters/thieves?
Go work for K-Mart or Walmart sometime and learn how loss/profit/prices work.

 

[UnderGlass]

Fun fact: You know what my 'favorite' type of pirate is? The ones who do so simply because they see something they want and can get for free, so they take it and are honest about why they are doing it. No bullshit claims to justify it, just piracy for it's own sake. (note I am not condoning this behavior, just appreciating the lack of bullshit)

I completely agree with you. I used to pirate the majority of the non-console games I played before making a conscious decision to stop. Those torrents are filled with "Thanks! I moved and lost my disc", "I hate business practices of publisher x" and "I'm too strapped for cash atm" comments and I found the insincerity in them painful. Although at least it implies some amount of latent guilt on people's part I suppose.

I actually was very poor at the time but I can confidently say that not once did I download something because I felt I needed it and it was too expensive. It was simply the easiest, most accessible way to try out the game I was interested in. Funnily enough I rarely played more than a fraction of each, many I never got around to at all (no value attachment). I did it because I could and because I felt no particular loyalty to the industry or the creators at that time. Anecdotally and completely without proof, this is the way just about everyone I know who downloads illegally does so and I suspect is the attitude of the majority of pirates.

 

[viranimus]

Its a good idea. Reminds me of a society built around



Surely that ended well, right?

On the whole "I wasnt going to buy it anyway" line not being credible. Seriously piracy never equals a lost sale. Its so simple. If you reduced piracy down to a zero sum, all those people who are pirating the software today, would simply migrate to Renting from gamefly, blockbuster, (local outlet) etc, borrowing from a friend, purchasing a used copy, possibly direct theft and the last alternative is waiting for the price to be reduced down to a realistically affordable amount. All of those situations, save for the last one, boils down to the same thing. The publishers STILL dont see any additional profits from the elimination of piracy.

So knowing that the ends will never justify the means because the solution will never have any sort of impact on the problem, is it logical to justify any sort of defensive action to try to put a stop to it? Is it a good idea to give up your rights along with the rights of those around you because you have it in your mind that putting a stop to piracy is "doing the right thing"?

Realize some important factors.

If you completely eliminate piracy, the publishers will view the increase in revenue as an irrelevant blip, continuing to rail on how the used market is killing them.

If you completely eliminate piracy any additional revenues actually generated for the publisher will NEVER make it into the hands of those who are pouring their blood sweat and tears into the product.

The video game industry has for a while now been one of the largest media industries. However, its also an industry that refuses to publicize how much money they make. The reason for this is because by doing so would allow every slack jawed yokel to grab a calculator and comprehend that when your making enough profit to cover the cost of the game that you developed as well as funding the sequel for it and then still enough to reinvest back into shareholders pockets, then cries of "piracy/used market is killing us" would start to fall on deaf ears and simply carry no weight.

There is an infinitely more devastating effect at play here. Using litigation to stomp on the rights of people justified by corporate greed. Corporations are not people. It is the governments responsibility to protect the people from all threats foreign and domestic. That includes threats made by the corporations we helped to build up.

Im not saying our corporations are inherently evil. They simply do what they are designed to do which is make money in any way possible. Sort of like the economic circle of life. You NEED corporations. But you also need something in place that keeps them from destroying everything they touch. The problem is that they have been left unchecked for far too long and have gotten to the point that they have become a swarm of locusts and when exactly has an oversized swarm of locusts ever been considered to be a good thing? And oddly enough the tables get turned and you realize that the corporations are the real parasites, and they are feasting on the people.

 

[tjcross]

That's not relevant either? Nor is the fact that "theft" is X many years in jail and X dollars in fines, and Piracy is Y. What us relevant? That you are taking something that doesn't belong to you. You are doing it in case Y, and you are doing it in case X. The textbook definition of "theft" and the textbook definition of "piracy" matters little, for what I am aiming at (and you know this as well, you just want to keep trying to score a "win" by saying "it's not the same!") is if you can somehow get away with moral superiority by claiming "it's not theft! It's piracy!". Well, theft and piracy are so closely related that it is basically the same thing.

Me trying to score a win? Please. All I'm trying to do is make people stop being silly.

And trust me. Definitons and semantics matter once you go "legal". In law TV shows maybe they don't, but then again those shows also use terms "homicide" and "murder" interchangeably so I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them.

Why did you get this idea that saying "piracy isn't the same as theft" is defending piracy? Cause, news for you, it isn't defending piracy. It's merely stating that someone needs to get their definitions in order.

You keep going, bro, you keep trying to score that win. -Chuckles- You are so off the point now that I can't help but to shake my head.
So let's get back on it, shall we?

I never claimed anyone defended piracy. Theft is taking something that doesn't belong to you, piracy is similar. They have different textbook-definitions, different definitions in law, and do not have the exact same effect on people, industry, society, etc, but all this is irrelevant, for it wasn't my point.
My point is that both are morally wrong, on equal grounds.

man you must either be trolling of have no idea how the human mind works, it is very easy to say something without saying it if you get overly defensive over someone saying something like piracy isn't theft it translates to "this guy thinks i support piracy" also choose your words carefully as what you say and what people hear (or read in this case) are two very different things. and as a last thing because i love hearing the sound of my keyboard piracy happens in more places than the Americas it happens in places that do not sell many video-games if any at all is it morally wrong for those people to obtain something they cannot get without piracy? and what of the demoists like myself who like to sample a product before purchasing it (like borrowing a book or movie from someone who has it) when the game does not have a demo it's harder to borrow a good game because good games have hours of re-playability and talking about the games makes people who own it want to play it more is it wrong for me to pirate a game for a weekend to see if i like it before i buy it with money i can never get back if i don't like the game and hell i don't even know if some games will run decently on my pc so a tech test is always a plus(i've lost about $300 on games my pc couldn't run).

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

True, but they are not taking the games away from those honest gamers, so I don't see what you're trying to say. I'm not losing the games I paid for to pirates, am I?

No but you are losing out on what the industry could be doing if it got paid for every copy that got pirated. Maybe it wouldn't be at the mercy of massive publishers for example. Maybe every game wouldn't be clogged up by annoying DRM because their investors wouldn't be concerned over losing money.

Being holier than thou actually doesn't make you much of a person, it's a negative character trait.

His attitude is justified in this case though.

 

[Realitycrash]

Theft is taking something that doesn't belong to you, piracy is similar. They have different textbook-definitions, different definitions in law, and do not have the exact same effect on people, industry, society, etc, but all this is irrelevant, for it wasn't my point.
My point is that both are morally wrong, on equal grounds.

Both equally wrong? I would beg to differ. If I steal a CD from a friend he is out a CD. I have deprived him of his CD for my own benefit. I have caused him a demonstrable loss.

However, if I take his CD and rip it to my computer he is still left with his CD. He isn't out anything. The artist who made the CD might be out of a sale assuming I would have bought the CD if pirating it weren't an option. If I wouldn't have bought the CD regardless, for instance if I was unable to afford it, though then nobody is out anything. Nobody has been deprived of anything at all while I have gained the contents of a CD.

Furthermore, if you are going to claim piracy and theft is so similar to make no difference then I can just as easily claim that piracy and libraries are so similar as to make no difference because I can draw just as many parallels between piracy and libraries and you can draw between piracy and theft.

You committed an illegal act, that's the point here, and you deprived the company of a potential sale (and leave your friend out of this, it's not the same. When you pirate, you steal from a company, not a friend). Sure, you might not have bought the game anyway, but you still committed an illegal act, did you not?
The CD you stole (if a theft) from a company might not have been sold at all, ever, yet you still stole it, did you not?

 

[NoPants2win]

FieryTrainwreck - You railroaded your own topic in the very first post. We could have had an interesting discussion, but you went and ruined it by putting your feelings about piracy on top and now we're going to have 7 pages of piracy/anti piracy ranting.

As for the more interesting bottom half of your post, I think there needs to be more then just massive wealth disparity to trigger the kind of anger needed for people to be willing to kill each other. I've been to other places where the poor are even more miserable, and the ruling class even more corrupt, and they are still stable. (Panama for example)

If the country defaults, I think you might start to see that kind of anger, with millions of educated, connected, and unemployed people out of work. I like to think if people start getting revolution angry, they might instead decide to become involved in the political process, and become the catalyst for real change.

;TLDR; voting > revolution, its easier.

 

[mellemhund]

No but you are losing out on what the industry could be doing if it got paid for every copy that got pirated. Maybe it wouldn't be at the mercy of massive publishers for example. Maybe every game wouldn't be clogged up by annoying DRM because their investors wouldn't be concerned over losing money.

You means like COD 78 or FIFA 2052? In the hypothetical case, that people bought every game they tried, noone would bother to make better games for that reason.

 

[Xanthious]

No but you are losing out on what the industry could be doing if it got paid for every copy that got pirated. Maybe it wouldn't be at the mercy of massive publishers for example. Maybe every game wouldn't be clogged up by annoying DRM because their investors wouldn't be concerned over losing money.

This assumption that piracy is costing content providers piles of cash is simply a false one. In some cases of piracy people either simply have no way what-so-ever of affording the item they are pirating as in many poorer countries like China, Russia etc. As for those that can afford it? Studies have shown that pirates are some of the largest spenders when it comes to entertainment. This means that just because they are pirating one product they are likely spending the money they saved on another similar product.

These pirates aren't just throwing money in their mattress or burning it I promise. Damn near same amount would still be spent with or without piracy. If piracy were to vanish immediately there would likely be no major increase in sales of the pirated goods as there is only so much money people have to buy said goods and they are indeed spending what money they can afford to.


Bottom line is piracy isn't the cause of most of the woes of the video game industry. Poor business models and sheer over reaching greed can be attributed to far more problems than piracy can be blamed for. If piracy went away they would simply find a new scapegoat.