Developer Tracks Single Pirated Software License to 750,000
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
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As long as there are software licences, and software does cost prizes that people living in poorer countries simply cannot afford - there will be piracy.Tom Goldman said:
Even if prices are adjusted, there still will be people who pirate software just for the heck of it.
You can try to reduce the amount of piracy by cracking down pirates with harder measures, and by investing millions over millions in better and better DRM methods - but none of these measures will possibly ever completely stop piracy.
So since you are asking for a "real solution": Open Source Licencing totally does solve that problem once and for all!
... OK, for a moment I was confused here, because the notification I recieved attributed both things you are commenting on to me, where the first clearly is a different person.TechNoFear said:
As to the figures, they're apparently down to experiments run by a game company called Reflexive games.
A small note about this can be found here: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy
I would dispute the 'conservative' part of your claims here, for reasons I've already explained. (How can 10% be conservative, if one of the few experiments done on the matter suggests 0.1% is a 'realistic' figure?)Generic Gamer said:
However, you do have a point that Antivirus software might have much higher rates owing to it's nature as an 'essential' service, much like there are unusual pressures on Operating System and 3d graphics software piracy that don't apply to more general situations.
Of course, a notable issue with this is that Antivirus software is essentially a commodity item, in that there are a fairly large number of similar products that are difficult to distinguish between.
That makes it much more likely that messing with the availability of one product will shift demand to another.
... Although a counter to this concept itself is of course that the product in this article, Avast!, has substantial rates of piracy despite providing an entirely free option regardless.
This is perhaps the most confusing aspect of this kind of piracy, since you are 'stealing' something when there are plenty of usable free alternatives available, including a variant of the exact thing you're 'stealing'.
As much as I prefer to consider pragmatic solutions to things, sometimes you have to wonder why people do this to begin with. Is it really so much easier to pirate something that doesn't even have that good of a reputation, than to look into the freely available options that are known to work quite well?
Mmm. It does make you wonder. I don't see the point in upgrading from the free AV program I use, short of the annoying advertising it shows every time it updates itself.Generic Gamer said:
But I guess there's no accounting for things.
There are obvious cases of piracy with specific, unique reasons behind them though, which are interesting in their own right: - And you find a lot of these cases only fought against half-heartedly.
Piracy of Windows - A computer doesn't work at all without an OS, and if you're short on money, or have a few too many computers for some reason, you might have the temptation to use a licence on more computers than you're allowed to. Microsoft fights this, but only in a halfhearted manner. Why? Because actually crippling people's computers would probably lead the people affected to shift towards using linux, BSD or some other freely available OS. And ironically, while not necessarily being sold for a loss as such, an OS can be considered a form of Loss-leading product. Putting up with people stealing your OS might be preferable to the alternatives.
Piracy of 3d rendering software (Maya, 3d studio max, etc). - This has a long history of being pirated, and there are two main causes; Students, and game modders. Why? Because licenses for this kind of software are extremely expensive. So expensive, in fact, that unless you have a commercial reason for owning such software, and are actively making money from it, you probably won't be able to justify owning a copy.
Hobbyists, or people with a passing interest in 3d graphics can find cheaper (or free) alternatives. (like blender, for instance), but students hoping to get into the professional industry are faced with a dilemma; They cannot afford the software, but they need to know how it works to be able to work with it later. Academic and 'personal learning' versions of such programs have been used at times to mitigate the need for piracy in this situation, but the companies involved keep changing their minds on this, which means piracy for this reason keeps going. (and really, when even teachers are encouraging their students to pirate a program, you know there's a problem.). The modding community has even bigger problems here;. Again, a typical modder cannot possibly hope to afford an actual license for this kind of software, but is often confronted with a game developer releasing SDK tools for their games which, while very powerful, do presume the modder has access to the kind of tools the game studio can afford, with little if any provision for cheaper tools to be used. - This leads to an inevitable problem where the only way to make certain kinds of mods is to use the same professional level 3d packages the game company used, but there's hardly a modder in existence with the money to actually pay for such tools.
Faced with a choice between either giving up on a project because the tools required are too expensive, or piracy, many modders choose piracy. Not that there haven't been attempts to solve this dilemma as well; Gmax existed for this very reason. - But it's reliance on forcing the game developer to pay for letting their players use Gmax with their game ultimately led to it's demise. It clearly wasn't an expense game developers were willing to pay.
Roms, old programs, old games; Abandonware - Finally, we come to the most peculiar category, and one most frequently cited as a 'grey' area. In reality, and in all legal sense, it remains piracy, but it is often viewed differently for a simple reason; With the exception of Roms, where in some cases they can be of quite recent games, it all involves products that are either very difficult, or outright impossible to get hold of through legal means. In many cases, even where legal means are available, this is only through the second hand market. (and these days some groups are inclined to say that's as bad as piracy).
This is a problem of a gap between supply and demand. There's demand, but no real supply.
Over time we have seen reactions to this though; Massive amounts of roms for old Nintendo games undoubtedly had some influence on the idea of the Wii's virtual console. (and similar services offered by Sony and Microsoft). Good Old Games primarily exists because of the interest implied by this kind of piracy.
Companies releasing old games as promotions for newer ones also reflect an acknowledgement of this.
Even so, there remain things which clearly won't ever be released legitimately, and some which are unlikely to ever be released. (Rom images of unreleased Snes games, such as Starfox 2, or fan translations of games which never made it out of Japan, like Secret of Mana are among those things unlikely to ever see the light of day through any legitimate distribution.)
What all these examples demonstrate is the complexity of some of the edge cases involved with piracy.
Mainstream piracy is clearly about people that want to get something they can't pay for.
The other cases are more complex, and seem to result in half-baked attempts to fix them. Sometimes, these fixes work. Sometimes they don't. But it's clear that they represent cases where Piracy seems to have ended up being the defacto solution to almost unworkable problems caused by the convoluted nature of copyright laws.
I'm not sure I understand how the "indirect costs" undermine anything. What we're talking about here is whether or not piracy results in lost revenue to the people to whom revenue is due for this game.CrystalShadow said:
Yes, there are indirect costs, but as neither the customer nor the developer/publisher benefit from those at all, they aren't part of the cost of the game as discussed in terms of how sales/lost sales impact the developer/publisher.
If I download a pirated copy of a game and it fills my hard drive with malware or child porn, one could argue I "got what's coming to me," and that might provide some sense of ethereal "justice." But it doesn't do anything to correct the loss of revenue to the publisher.
When we're talking about whether an act is criminal or not, or whether or not something is stealing, we've got to look into defining the crime based on the actions and benefits of the criminal. But when we're looking at repairing the damage done by the crime, that's not solved simply by punishing the pirate with some viruses.
Not at all. The assertion that a pirated copy is a loss to the revenue of a company relies only on whether or not that pirated copy ends up in the hands of anyone who would have paid that company even a single dollar for that game.
And, actually, the fact that there are these "indirect costs" to the pirate means that they, in fact, have to demonstrate even more desire to have that game, if they are willing to endure all the inconvenience of searching, downloading, and risking malware. This means that their actual interest level in the product is even farther from zero than we originally believed. A person that actually had $0 interest in the game wouldn't even go through those inconvenient hoops for a product they weren't interested in.
That last bit of reasoning doesn't work. The 'inconvenient hoops' they have to jump through are no worse than the ones they would need to jump through to get hold of a legitimate copy.dastardly said:
That was the whole point I was making with 'indirect' costs.
It had nothing to do with any 'karmic' concepts like say, getting a virus is somehow payback for your 'crime'.
It's not. It's just something that you have keep in mind if you pirate something.
Just like, if you buy a game from a shop, you have to keep in mind that the DRM might cause you a lot of trouble.
In any event, I was making a point about the costs that ARE NOT things usually given a financial value, even though they are costs in a strict, economic sense.
And that from this perspective, even if the monetary costs were the same in both cases, pirated software could still end up being better 'value' to someone because of such indirect costs. (Or not. It's hard to predict such things.)
In any event, the loss of revenue to a company is statistical, but the real event is not.
Any one person that pirates anything either would have paid for it, or they would not there is no middle ground, when discussing an individual person; It's all or nothing.
For an individual person to pirate something, the value of the equivalent non-pirated version of something is either $0, or not.
But, the amalgamated revenue lost to a company is the average taken over all the pirated copies that exist.
This clearly isn't $0, but neither is it 100% of the retail value of their product.
Where it lies between 100% and 0% is something that is difficult to answer, and can vary enormously depending on what reasoning you use.
What should be done about piracy unfortunately, to me, depends on this very thing which cannot be answered.
And because I'm not a believer in enforcing laws for their own sake.
And, I also believe most of life is filled with moral grey areas that cannot adequately be forced to fit into rules and laws, that by their very nature cannot be ambiguous.
As such, I would prefer people actually thought about whether it's worthwhile to put so much effort into fighting an uphill battle like this to begin with.
To answer such a question, you need an estimate of how much additional revenue fighting piracy would gain you, compared to what it costs you to do so, and what else is being sacrificed along the way for the sake of a few extra dollars.
A difficult question to answer.
Now, to answer something specific for a moment:
Well, as far as I know it doesn't say "Thou shalt not pirate software." anywhere in the Bible... It does in the legal codes of a lot of countries though...thethingthatlurks said:
And what point, exactly, is it that you're trying to make? That's what isn't very clear here--you're talking in ever-widening loops that seem like the might be encircling a point implicitly, but we'd save a lot of time and space if you'd just be out with that point explicitly.CrystalShadow said:
If both sides have these indirect, non-financial costs, then it's a wash--why should they even enter the discussion? They're just background noise, with absolutely no significance to the discussion or any of the points contained therein.
But that's just it. It's not "all or nothing." That's a forced, false dichotomy used by pirates and pirate-sympathizers as a way of "proving" that piracy doesn't result in lost sales. "If they were going to buy it, they would have bought it, but they didn't, so that proves they wouldn't have." You see the circular logic, right?
Just because someone doesn't want to buy it at full price doesn't mean they're not interested at all in the product. They might be willing to pay $20 when the price comes down over time. But the introduction of an illegal, free option is the force that interrupts that process.
It's like someone claiming a tire goes flat because it was never inflated. No, someone poked a hole that let the air out (path of least resistance, and all), and without that hole it's likely the air would have stayed in at least a little bit longer. Saying someone pirated it because they weren't interested in it, besides being nonsensical, similarly ignores that someone poked a big gaping hole in the system.
So, just because each pirated copy doesn't automatically mean a loss of a guaranteed-full-price sale doesn't mean it's not creating a loss of some portion, representing what that person would have paid. It's specifically not all or nothing.
The data that's been collected (and covered extensively in several other threads around here) makes it pretty clear that once the pirated copy is made available, sales drop off pretty sharply. But when DRM is in place that delays the release of the pirated copy, the game benefits from more sales. That, in turn, makes it clear that plenty of people would buy a game if there were no pirated copy available.
That gives these companies, who are pretty careful with their money, enough reason to believe that it does represent a big enough loss to fight for. This isn't a moral grey area, though. Morally, taking something that belongs to someone else without permission is wrong. It doesn't matter if you're stealing to feed your starving children--you're stealing from someone else's now-starving children for all you know.
You're overstating the point, here. It's certainly not impossible to work with. The penalty on someone for "attempted murder" is just as bad as for "murder," though they name it differently for technical purposes. Why? Because the murderer shouldn't get a break just because they screwed up the crime. If it's proven they intended to kill this person (thus securing a guilty verdict for "attempted murder"), they're punished as though they killed the person--at least in the legal systems with which I'm familiar.
For theft, however, it's clear to me that it's not just "wrong if someone loses something." That's the tired old justification for piracy--"Oh, he still has his copy, so I haven't taken anything." Also the same justification for counterfeiting money, by the way.
Not "only." "Also." It's an important component to defining a crime. After all, killing someone results in a loss of life... but we have many different classifications based on what the criminal's intended gain was (if any). It's not solely based on what the victim lost (his life).
You're deliberately omitting facts. You stole someone's TV. That means "You've now gained a TV by circumventing the means by which you would legally obtain that TV."
Maybe you stole it from a store and not a person. Technically, no one 'lost' a TV, right? No one owned it yet (save perhaps the store). And hey, there's no guarantee they'd have ever sold that TV anyway--it might have just sat on display for years. So, if you base the definition of the crime solely on what the victim lost, you can weasel out of any crime.
Actually, no. You're oversimplifying and misapplying my argument.
If a person is willing to find and download the game, for the purposes of playing it, this demonstrates they want the game. As such, those that say people only pirate games they weren't interested in make no sense--if they weren't interested in it, they wouldn't be playing it. They clearly want the game.
Now, they just don't want it badly enough to pay full price for it. That's clear. But it doesn't mean they wouldn't have paid something. They've demonstrated interest in the product, which means there's just cause to believe they would have paid something. Most people, if not interested, choose to both pay nothing and thus receive nothing. Because my example above is dealing with people behaving within the law. I refer to the offending party as "pirates" only because it's faster than typing "would-be pirates."
But in a law-abiding system, people who don't have any monetary interest in the game don't play it. This only changes with the introduction of a "free" alternative. Now people have a strong motivator against paying, regardless of how much they'd have been willing to pay.
Before the introduction of that copy, they'd have been able to sell to anyone in the $59+ crowd, and the others might have waited varying amounts of time until the price dropped. But since there's a free option, everyone has a reason to avoid it--even the people in the $59+ club.
My point above was simply to point out how circular the reasoning is when pirate-sympathizers argue that people pirate games in which they have no interest in paying... but it's not because of the "paying." Rather they argue it's the "game" part they have no interest in, if you can believe that. That would be like me (a guy) stealing crates of tampons, for which I have no use. Why would I do it? I wouldn't. If I steal something, barring severe mental issues, it's because I value it.
Oh, and taking something without paying for it? That's called stealing in most circles. We give different types of stealing fancy names like "fraud" or "burglary," but it's stealing. And that definition (taking something without paying for it) is based on the actions of the criminal, rather than the loss of the victim.
No, that was just me trying to make sense of why you were bringing any of this into the discussion. I don't see any reason to think that a significant number of people have ever refused to buy a game because they didn't want to pay for the gas to get to the store. It's simply not statistically worth weighing, and to insinuate it is... well, that would only be deliberately trying to derail the discussion into the outlandish in an attempt to discredit the original premise by proxy (ie, strawman).
No, I'm saying we use both. Not one or the other. I've made the argument that, in many cases, the gain/methods/actions of the criminal are just as important in defining the crime (and sometimes far more important) than the loss sustained by the victim.
In the case of entertainment, the legal system is squarely on the side of the entertainers because it's not a necessary product. If they decide to charge insane prices or put padlocks on the box for which you have to buy a separate key, it's their product and their choice. They're selling an item that they created. Of course copyright law is on their side--they hold the RIGHT to COPY it.
Yes, companies have a reason to exploit the law to make more money. But in this case? All they want to do is close a loophole. They're not asking to raise the price, or to force consumers to pay twice for the same game against their will, or any other exploitative nonsense.
The only grey area comes in terms of how many lost sales a particular copy represents, and how far along the "distribution chain" this particular pirate was--basically, how much did HIS actions cost in lost revenue. Yeah, that's a hard area in which to fight, because it relies on the unprovable.
But I haven't been trying to affix a price tag to that. I'm simply debunking the idea that a lot of people around here push--"Not every pirated copy means a lost sale." Not every copy means a lost full price sale, no. But I believe that most pirated copies mean someone that would have paid something got away with paying nothing because the free copy was available faster than the reduced-price copies a few months later.
I think we've really said all that can be said on this whole matter anyhow. This thread has provided data that shows piracy spreads like wildfire, and that people are using it to get products they want (as evidenced by using a pirated license when there are free options available). People want it, but they are getting it for free before companies are able to find out how much they would have paid. And that's a problem.
Piracy isn't theft, but it is most definitely a crime. And one so widespread its penalty (and for good reason sort of) carries a greater cost than most thefts would.Generic Gamer said:
Piracy is indirect theft, nothing is lost but a potential of profit. It's bad but we won't see appropriate laws with the "piracy is inseperable from theft" attitude, or the pirates "sharing is caring" attitude.
If anything its copyright infringement:
Calling it theft is misrepresenting the crime, pure and simple, like those that reterm "abortionists" into "baby murderers".Wikipedia said:
It comes from this report;CrystalShadow said:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350
Note how removing 'simple' bypasses to their DRM resulted in a 70% increase in sales. All DRM 'fixes' resulted in a 83% increase in sales.
That 83% increase is tiny (in raw sales numbers) because for every 1,000 pirate copies (used to connect to the companies online servers) there are only 87 sales!
I wonder how many more are using pirated copies and never going online (and so do not show up in the piracy rate of 92%).
It appears that the pirates would rather find another game for free than play one that costs money (if a game's DRM stops them playing, they just find a game with less effective DRM).
I wonder how much more sales would increase if there was no games for free (and the pirate had a choice of pay or no play).
Buy software?Azaraxzealot said:
The OS is most likely bundled with the box, the rest you get for free thru the glorious invention of open-source.
I must admit I have a fair slew of MS-ware, but these are licenses I get thru the job cuz I have to work with the shit. I'm not religious about what tools I use, I just dislike to pay when there's free and legal ware available.
The only thing I pay for on my comps are media streaming and games, and outside the rare AAA first day purchase, most of those are reasonably priced.
I have to apologise here, because I think I've gotten caught up in a bit of a problem I can run into sometimes.dastardly said:
That problem, is that sometimes, I start arguing for the sake of arguing, without really having a point that I'm trying to make...
So... Sorry for that.
There are still a few nitpicks here with things you've said, but they're not really relevant to whatever the point was to this whole thing to begin with.
So, bear with me, I'll mention them, then, I think, that will have to be it, because I'm not even sure why I'm doing it anymore.
Firstly, you've repeatedly made reference to the similarity between the punishment for attempted murder vs. murder.
You claim the punishment is very similar for both, yet that's not been my experience. Granted, I'm not going by facts here, merely half-remembered news stories, but my memory of those implies the punishment for attempted murder is anything from half to 1/4 the severity of actually succeeding in murder.
This still fails as an example regardless, because murder still isn't about the gains to the person that commits murder;. Attempted murder might not have an explicit consequence, but there is a definite definable danger that anyone that attempts murder might try to do it again.
Anyway, enough of that.
The final thing is that I do indeed believe Intellectual propertly laws are getting out of hand, and becoming abusive in and of themselves.
This isn't related to piracy (except perhaps in a minimal sense in regards to Abandonware and the like), but rather, in relation to the areas of 'Fair use', Derivative works, and in general, just about everything to do with patents and trademarks.
You make a point about entertainment, but the laws aren't specific to entertainment. Copyright covers a lot more than that, and regardless, I reject the notion that you should be permitted to exercise monopolistic control over a product just because it is a non-essential one.
However, that's a different discussion, and having realised what I've been doing in this thread to begin with, I'm not going to go any further with this.
Oh, I can definitely agree that those areas of intellectual property laws can get pretty hazy, and usually constitute someone trying to make a quick buck for very little work. Of course, I know that there are legalities surrounding things like trademarks to prevent people just sitting on them, without using them, in hopes of someone stepping into the trap.CrystalShadow said:
But, as they apply to games, copyright law seems pretty clear. A pirated copy constitutes a full, functional copy of the work, so it clearly doesn't qualify for "fair use" policies.
I think that you should be able to exercise monopolistic control over a product because you created it. I just think the only place in which someone could make a case is if you were in control of the whole supply of an essential good. Basically, as long as you don't have a "captive audience" (which means they must have the product, for which they must pay you), what right is there to tell someone they can't control it?
If I write a piece of music, and I want to charge $50 million for each recorded copy, or $10 million for the rights to publicly perform it... why should anyone be able to stop me? I'm not forcing people to buy it. I'm simply saying that is what I choose to charge for my creation.
If someone else comes along and starts selling copies of my music without my permission, what right do they have to do so? It's mine. I created it. Moreover, that person contributed in no way to the creation of that work, so what right do they have to lay claim to any of the proceeds it generated without first coming to an explicit agreement with me?
I have to absolutely agree . . . even more-so on the basis that the majority of people's complaints about what has spurned piracy are 95% of the time unfounded or uneducated.Dastardly said:
I have to applaud Avast's modus operandi here, quite ingenious . . . but, I can't see it working for the gaming industry just yet - not unless the vast majority of new games go straight to digital distribution (or require a DD client to install; i.e. Metro2033). DD, which updates both your client and games as they're made available, has the capability already laid out to follow this same exact path that Avast did. It can keep track of the user's game license, and effectively nulifies the DRM measures publishers like to slap in place on the retail disk. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this little incident kick-starts a chain reaction or carbon copy practices through game DD in the not-to-distant future.
Illicit downloading isn't theft. You cannot steal a product that isn't available for purchase. You cannot violate a purchase agreement when there is, in fact, no purchase of anything. Games are NOT for sale anymore, they're only for rent. You might be in violation of your rental agreement (if you signed one), but since you have not purchased anything when you spend money on a videogame you cannot actually be accused of theft for NOT purchasing one.
Dense walls of legalese "electronically signed" when you start a game(EULA) are not contracts or purchase agreement. They're not. Look it up. A company is within their rights to refuse you service for violating a EULA, but it is in fact NOT a legally binding document (which would have to be notarized in any event)no matter how many times a publisher's lawyers type it in that it is.
P.S. Recaptcha sucks. I had to cycle it five times to get a "challenge" that didn't look like abstract art. Please find another method to stop spam, Escapist. Recaptcha is a noble idea but poorly, poorly implemented.
Dense walls of legalese "electronically signed" when you start a game(EULA) are not contracts or purchase agreement. They're not. Look it up. A company is within their rights to refuse you service for violating a EULA, but it is in fact NOT a legally binding document (which would have to be notarized in any event)no matter how many times a publisher's lawyers type it in that it is.
P.S. Recaptcha sucks. I had to cycle it five times to get a "challenge" that didn't look like abstract art. Please find another method to stop spam, Escapist. Recaptcha is a noble idea but poorly, poorly implemented.