pokepuke said:
JonnWood said:
Actually, there's several times more money "in banks" and in the financial system than there is in physical form. If everyone were to try and withdraw all their money, the banking system would collapse. A lot of money only exists as numbers in a database somewhere.
Thanks for the lesson, professor.
Theft is, at it's simplest, taking something without permission. It does not require direct loss, or else we would not have terms like "identity theft".
A semantics conflation. Identify theft itself isn't really quantifiable, as it is more of a category. I can gain all your personal info, but is that identity theft? It's just knowledge. Have I taken or used anything? If I commit fraud and use your likeness as my own then I have, but that isn't considered theft unless I am stealing something in the process.
And there has been a lot of debate about whether piracy is "theft".
A game is a "something" that can be taken without permission. Or to be more pedantic, access to a game and the experience of playing it.
Which is intangible and can't be claimed. They could say you had a copy and no license, but that is entirely not theft in any way, just like reverse engineering someone's product isn't considered literally stealing the inner secrets from the company.
At the very least, it's copyright infringement, even if it's not theft. And as you own previous argument about money indicates, it is possible to "steal" things with no physical existence, only a virtual once.
Piracy involves taking a game you didn't pay for and keeping it. You're undercutting your own argument here.
Taking? That doesn't apply. You're playing another word game, and trying to cheat.
No I'm not. If you go in, acquire something without permission, and keep it, what word would you use?
Lots of which has only a virtual existence, as I mentioned before. Stealing it is pretty similar to piracy, in that sense.
And that sense is completely negligible. If you copied the money then it would be counterfeit money. And just because you only read from a screen the amount you have, you still have it in your possession.
I didn't say anything about "copying" money, I'm talking about the existence of said money in absence of any physical counterpart.
Pirates are people are people who take games they don't pay for. They are not a competing market fo-
It's still a competing force. Other product allow you to do something that undercuts their business.
Calling piracy a "competing force" is like calling a leak in your pipes a "tap".
Your venn-diagrams are out of place. What do trains and planes have in common?
They're both modes of transport, which are sometimes in competition with one another.
What do publishers and "file-sharers" have in common?
One sells things, the other acquires them without permission. So very little. Which is my point; you were making two contradictory points.
]And you've trotted out the old "omg let's cry for this indie dev that still makes tons of money".
No, I'm saying that even cheap indie games without DRM are pirated.
Why even do that when you also say pirates don't buy games?
Because piracy, by definition, involves getting a game without paying legitimately for it. This is not semantics. This is the actual definition of piracy. If they were to actually buy the game afterward, then they would become a customer as well as a pirate.
That is a very false claim, by the way, along with the 90% bit.
Here's the quote from 2D Boy [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars]. The developers of the game in question. Note that they do not use it as an excuse for poor sales. In fact, they say they're doing well in spite of piracy. And here's the Humble Bundle source [http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle].
But, if they don't buy games then no harm done! If anything, they are helping to market the game, doing the creators a great service.
Except the people they're "marketing" to are most likely other pirates. The creators, for some reason, rarely think people playing their games for free is a "good thing".
You even argue my point for me, that the market doesn't always support itself very well when plenty of people want to play games but don't want to buy them. If the old model is becoming a propped up dinosaur, like what has been happening to music and partly movies, then something new needs to be made to morph it into a viable industry.
Piracy is the equivalent of sneaking your friends into the movies through the bathroom window. If people want your stuff but don't want to pay for it, tough. They shouldn't get it for free anyway. Entertainment is a luxury, not a right.
One example is how consoles have included hardware DRM. They can keep trying it, but it doesn't always last and is becoming very risky to rely on. Even still, the PC market sells very well, which leads to other reasons for why games aren't just illegally copied to everyone on the planet. If everything was as cut and dry as the posters here often try to make things out to be, then barely anyone would be purchasing their games.
Piracy is still illegal, and a lot of people who don't pirate don't know about it, or simply think that content producers should actually get paid for the things they make.
Where is the line drawn when you don't need the original disc?
Good question. I believe you're legally allowed to make a backup copy while you have the original, as long as you don't circumvent any copy-protection to do so. You'd be able to use it if you lost or damaged the original disc, but making a copy and then giving the original or the backup to someone else would be copyright infringement. Don't quote me on that, though.
If I can install the game/program and run from there, letting someone else use the disc doesn't make any sense. And if I make a perfectly legal backup of a movie, how can I lend the DVD out when I could still play my backup?
It's a "backup". You're supposed to use it when you damage or lose the original. Selling it or lending it out doesn't qualify as "losing".
That would easily make a loophole and allow you to double the usage of all the media out there. This is exactly why some DRM limits you from installing a program a number of times. Some licenses are even so limited that you are only supposed to install the item on a specific product you own. That is how OEM copies of Windows are. If you wanted to switch out the motherboard in your PC, the license would get thrown out right with the old one.
That, unfortunately, is mostly pirates' fault. If there weren't pirates around, companies wouldn't be resorting to increasingly ridiculous DRM in order to protect their investment. I simply don't buy games with DRM I find restrictive. However, I don't think of it as some sort of "right" to get a DRM-free game. They have a right to protect their stuff, and I have a right not to buy it. I do not, however, have a right to circumvent their protection.
