Exploring How Piracy Should Be Handled.

[Vault101]

see me? the consumer..the good gamer who has never pirated? and buys your games new?

DONT fuck with me...seriously, DONT make me jump through hoops to play your game...DONT insult me by calling me a pirate

YOU should be thanking ME for buying your game, if you make it more apealing to pirate why shoudlnt I?

oh "I" personally wont but plently of people will

 

[dessertmonkeyjk]

From what I know, Online DRM subtracts from the accessablity of the software if the signal is bad somewhere and Offline DRM cannot be monitored. Essensially, if someone figures out how such DRM works they can remove it then sew up the hole they made so the game doesn't check for it.

That makes local checks (disc in drive, serial key, hard-coded passwords, etc.) almost useless and currently Online DRM is the only way to ensures they cannot access the servers that verify that a game is a legitimate copy or not. At least, that's what I can tell. Not that I agree with always-online DRM but there still might be another secure offline alternative.

 

[jboking]

And I never once claimed that DRM is undesirable.

Right. Just like I never claimed you claimed that. Semantics aside

Abusing what DRM can do is the issue. DRM is fine when it's handled properly. Think of a lock - you want to stop random people from wandering inside your house, but you don't want to do so at a significant cost of your own ability to enter. DRM can very well serve a similar function - for example, it can try to stop random people making a free copy for their buddy to play (You need a CD to play the game or the game has to be in your Steam account to launch it and so on). You don't want to stop actual paying customers from playing the game. As has happened before. Example: when Ubisoft introduced their always online DRM and people couldn't play Assassins Creed (if I recall correctly, that was the title) for a day or two, because their servers went offline.

I'm actually using the Ubisoft example in my final report, as it is a primary example of why the gaming community is opposed to most anything described as DRM. If something's main appeal isn't that it is DRM(Or where media coverage doesn't focus on the fact that it is DRM), but rather that it is a service(steam), it is usually well accepted by the community. I don't know how I feel about the Lock analogy, but it is close to being the best explanation.

Shutting down the internet will in no way stop piracy. It may reduce it, yes, but not stop it. Piracy existed before the internet and still does. The internet just makes it less of a hassle to transport. People still can get a hold of physical copies.

For this, you are correct. I spoke too soon. The type of Piracy we are worried about is online piracy because of how many people it can reach and the minimal collective effort it takes to get the copyrighted material (instead of someone having to crack it for just a few friends, one person can crack it and share it for anyone with an internet connection).

And SOPA is so utterly stupid that it will not have a huge impact on piracy.

And this, we disagree on. If the case of the music industry has shown us anything, it's that companies are willing to chase down people taking their products even if the chase is a futile one. Now, imagine they had the ability to take down a website hosting said materials until a court trial (which could take several months to reach) could be had on the issue. They left enforcement to corporations, and corporations will do anything for a perceived 'profit'.

What we're really looking for is reducing piracy to the point of insignificance

Which is the point of "some people will just pirate". If they want to, they would.

Incorrect. The high piracy rates of Portal 2 suggest that even if price flexibility (Portal 2 was discounted in price so fast that people who bought on release felt short changed), developer care (the arg, taking in fan complaints with portal), and DRM (steam) were all there, it still wouldn't make the "some people will just pirate" bunch insignificant. You can also consider the hefty number of people who pirate humble bundles for this consideration. The number is not insignificant. We have to find a way to either turn "Will just pirate" people into people who have a reason for pirating that can be addressed or people stopped by the law.

and heavy law enforcement mixed with laws like SOPA on an international level could get that done. The issue is that no one wants laws like SOPA to come about because of the implications.

Also, because SOPA will not have a big impact on piracy. The implications are surely undesirable too, but even with them aside, SOPA simply wasn't going to be able to tackle piracy on it's own. It was a stupid way to tackle piracy in the first place.

I honestly don't think it was an entirely stupid way to tackle piracy, and I believe it could have limited the amount of pirated content available to US citizens greatly given a year or two to work (my reasoning on this has already been addressed). However, I feel the negative implications of SOPA (the internet has no free speech, public domain exists their only on the good graces of large corporations, etc) outweigh the ability to reduce piracy

However, there are laws out there about Piracy that have worked exceedingly well. Check the DMCA and how it effected the hosting of copyrighted material on United States hosted websites.

This I do not question. Laws can work. But they need to be smart and designed by intelligent people who understand the issue. As it stands, the people currently in charge are not the best equipped to deal with piracy. Case in point - SOPA again.

This, we also agree on

 

[ResonanceSD]

yeah, pretty sure the instant the HIB got pirated, any pirate with any excuse lost all legitimacy.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/05/26/reflections-on-the-humble-indie-bundle-piracy/ <-- great article on the issue.

 

[Hal10k]

I hope we see the major publishers crashing down soon. Cant wait.

I hope you love not playing games then.

*Glances at kickstarter projects*

When we start seeing finished, profitable products consistently emerging from Kickstarter projects, we can start talking about the death of the publisher system. The fact of the matter is that publishers currently perform a vital role in the current market. Many people tend to disregard the fact that video game publishers, in addition to actual publishing, are also partially or mainly responsible for financing the development of games. That's how most triple A games get their obscenely huge budgets: because a publisher decides to pump money into the project until more spews out. And regardless of what we think of triple A games, most of them couldn't be made by a small indie team with current technology. But people- a load of people- still buy these games, enough to make them a profitable product as a whole.

Now I'm not saying the current conglomerate of publishers is never going to befall any sort of financial misfortune, or that they will be totally unaffected by things like digital distribution, advances in technology, or anything else. And it certainly wouldn't be unheard of for a major publisher to mismanage itself into the ground (Anybody else remember Interplay?). If that's what you meant by "major publishers crashing into the ground", then I can agree with you; I can think of one or two that can expect major shifts within 2-5 years. But publishers as a whole perform a role that indie development cannot meet, and Kickstarter development has yet to be proven to be able to meet. So long as AAA games remain profitable, publishers will probably still be around in one form or another.

 

[Savagezion]

I hope we see the major publishers crashing down soon. Cant wait.

I hope you love not playing games then.

EA, Activision, 2K, Atari, Nintendo, and THQ could all go bankrupt tomorrow and we would have new publishing giants before the end of the year. This is a multi-billion dollar market. Someone will step up to the plate. They will be clawing at each other to be the first as well.

Deliver a well made product to a hungry market and you have the recipe for the success of Nintendo in the 80s. This is a market with so much demand a phoenix will rise from the ashes after every crash and burn.

 

[malestrithe]

I hope we see the major publishers crashing down soon. Cant wait.

I hope you love not playing games then.

*Glances at kickstarter projects*

Don't be too hasty about praising this service. Adventure, Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2, and the Leisure Suit Larry remake are the exception, not the rule. The majority of Kickstarter projects only exist to get a working demo of the game finished. The companies then take that completed demo and shop it around to the publishers to get a bigger game completed.

 

[hatseflats]

Piracy is a difficult issue. Since this topic is about how piracy should be handled, and not about whether or not it is right or wrong to pirate, I'll try to explain a few things with economic concepts.
I'll start with empirical data (usually it should be the other way around, first develop theory, then look at data, but this case is different). The reason for that is that it's important to realize we don't really have anything to go on here. Piracy is a difficult phenomenon to measure or estimate and it's even more difficult to estimate the effect of piracy on sales. Measuring piracy is difficult because it's illegal and has somewhat of a stigma and some people think it's cool to do. This means surveys are probably going to result in answers which are far from the truth. Pirating games by using the copy of a friend can't be measured, and torrent downloads can be legal downloads (in some countries it's legal to download a copy of your game if you own it, and even if it's illegal the "pirate" may still own the original).
One report by the U.S. GAO mentioned that

Three widely cited U.S. government estimates of economic losses resulting from counterfeiting cannot be substantiated due to the absence of underlying studies.

An oft cited report by the FBI reporting losses of $200-$250 billion per year "has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and [...] cannot be corroborated."

That is to be expected. Not only is measuring or estimating piracy difficult, estimating the effect of piracy on sales is even more difficult, if not impossible. To give an example, a friend of mine had his HDD full of pirated movies, games and music. However, he never watched any of those movies, played only a few games (mostly for only a few minutes to try them out) and listened to only a few songs. He pirated just because, really. If those movies and games had not been available for free he wouldn't have bought any of them. Yet, in the (torrent) statistics, he would've downloaded movies, games and music worth thousands of dollars.
I myself, on the other hand, pirated games a few years ago and actually did play them (examples include GTA:San Andreas, Mafia and Oblivion). I didn't have much money, so one pirated game wouldn't have been equal to one lost sale, but some sales were lost (I have since bought most games I ever pirated and since I've been using Steam I don't pirate any more at all).

These examples show that it's difficult, if not impossible, to properly estimate the substitution rate, since they are different per downloaded copy (depending on the item itself and the person who downloaded it). To give another example: if one would regress the number of sales on number of copies pirated, there may well be a positive relationship. However, "number of sales" is NOT the variable you'd want to use: you'd want to use a variable like "willingness to pay". Usually, willingness to pay is measured by looking at... sales and prices. But because there is now a free alternative, it can't be measured. People pirating a certain game might well be the result of their unwillingness to pay for it.

Since empirical research isn't going to get us anywhere, let's look at economic theory to try and find out what the effect is and, knowing the effect, what can be done about it.
The first thing which anyone discussing piracy should acknowledge is the fact that there _is_ piracy, no matter what. No DRM has managed to make piracy impossible. There is, in other words, always a free alternative (of course, there are a few exceptions, like games which are fairly obscure; however, next to all games we play are available for free as well).

Knowing that there is a free alternative, WHY would anyone PAY for anything? There are two main explanations: different (better) product and social reasons. I buy games because I want to support good developers and publishers. I even backed 8 projects on Kickstarter for that reason, while I'm actually not interested in the project itself in a few cases. Buying games makes me feel good about myself (to put it in microeconomic terms: I gain utility from paying for the product).

This social (or ethical) factor can be influenced by publishers and developers. I would never pirate a Double Fine game because I'm in love with those guys. I wouldn't pirate a game from CD Projekt either. Both would make me feel like a dick. Pirating from Ubisoft or EA, on the other hand? I have no issue with that. The only thing that's keeping me from doing so is the fact that they haven't released any games I'd even want to pirate. Treating customers well is a way to increase the cost of piracy and increase the benefit of buying games. (That's not an opinion, BTW: that's microeconomic theory (cost/benefit)).

Second way to reduce piracy is by offering a superior product. This is what Gabe Newell is saying when he states that "piracy is a service problem."* This is something Microsoft, with GFWL, doesn't seem to comprehend. For example: I heard GTAIV was a bad port and decided I didn't want to buy it without knowing whether I liked it. So I pirated the game, played it for a few hours, loved it and immediately bought it off Amazon. I uninstalled the pirated copy, tried to install the LEGITIMATE copy, and I couldn't get it to work. It first it asked me to create several accounts, which didn't activate. When after literally half an hour or so I managed to activate them, but then GFWL stated the password was incorrect. An hour later (no joke), that problem was solved as well. GFWL then demanded to download the latest patches and wouldn't let me do otherwise. It stopped downloading halfway through. During the second attempt it did download the update, but then it crashed when it tried to install the patch. And again. And again. Ultimately, I quit. I tried it again a few days later and it still didn't work. A few months later I found the courage to try again, and it worked (probably due to a GFWL update). I haven't touched games using GFWL since.
Long story short: it was easier for me to pirate (including the latest updates!) then it was to get a legitimate copy to work. Obviously, this only encourages piracy since pirates offer a superior product at lower cost! No matter how bad piracy is, DRM which hurts paying customers more is always a bad thing to do (and one reason why I never play Ubisoft games, I would want to try Assassin's Creed II but I won't due to their stupid DRM).

So, legitimate copies should offer a higher utility than pirated copies by including DRM which is somewhat annoying to pirates (if only because it makes it more difficult to update to the latest patch because the right crack is unavailable or difficult to find) and unobtrusive to customers, include no DRM, or include very bad DRM which hurts pirates even more than paying customers, if and only if the loss of sales to legitimate customers put off by the draconian DRM if offset by the increase in sales from pirates who don't want to put up with the even worse problems they face if they try to get their pirated copy to work. The last option is fairly unlikely IMO and would be difficult to measure.

DRM is not the only way to improve (or decrease!) the utility of legitimate copies relative to pirated copies. Another way is to include extras which can't be offered by pirates. Achievements, save file back-up in the cloud, communities, multiplayer and support as well as physical items, such as nice boxes, manuals, maps and other goodies. Steam offers some of the first few items, while hardly any publisher releases collector's editions for PC games, which is kind of odd considering the fact they always complain piracy is really problematic on PC. A collector's edition can be a reason for a gamer to buy a copy instead of pirating (and it's no more expensive to sell a PC collector's edition if you also sell collector's editions for PS3 and/or Xbox 360 and there is a regular PC edition as well).

Bottom line is: treat customers well, use no DRM or unobtrusive DRM (unless you really know what you're doing, which you don't) and offer services or items pirates can't provide.

There is one more option, of course, which is suing pirates. The effect of this is unambiguous: lawsuits cost money (lots of it) and might decrease the social or ethical cost of piracy (because people think the company suing individuals are immoral bastards), though it might also scare pirates (however, this may not actually result in actual sales if the substitution rate is zero, or in very few extra sales if the substitution rate is very low). However, lawsuits don't seem to scare away pirates (piracy, as measured by torrents, didn't go down after such cases AFAIK).

Of course, the government could do something about piracy as well. In the grand scheme of things, however, piracy is unlikely to be a problem. If consumers don't spend their money on a game they spend it on something else, so other sectors profit at the expense of the entertainment industry. Plus, piracy increases welfare. And there are severe privacy implications for most measures. The result is a trade off, which depends mostly on one's preferences (besides the effectiveness of such measures).

*he goes on to say it's "not a pricing problem", which is rather odd since it's typically about the price/performance characteristics, the two being two sides of the same coin. However, if the prices are low enough to make the pricing factor insignificant compared to the social/ethical factor, the product/service is more important than the price, but the social/ethical "price" and benefit are still very important.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Oh I know all that and I am sure the gaming market would recover but it would take a long time. If those publishers went the next thing to go would be both retail gaming stores and online gaming websites such as, kotaku, ign, the escapist, etc.

The online market is flexible. They might shrink, but would recover as quickly as the market would. Besides, journalism loves disasters; it's a strong supply of news even in the absence of gaming. Plus, self-funded/small-funded indie projects are booming right now.

Projects that are entirely independent of primary publisher funding. Projects that aren't reliant on Kickstarter (which seems to be the new buzzword of the month...hopefully, it will replace "entitlement").

As for the retail stores; that basically only applies to Gamestop and everyone they bought out at this point; there aren't any other game store chains left in my area that aren't Gamestop, and the Big Box retailers aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Local shops that have survived this long will stick around. Why? Because they provide a backlog of vintage games that their competitors don't carry, or perform services on the side. They can't hold a candle to Gamestop's ability to move current AAA product, new or used.
A lot them are sustained through online business as well.

Those big publishers are the reason these places stay in business. Now think without those major websites how much less publicity is something like a kickstart project going to get? With a smaller market there is no longer enough business to support things like E3. Then you have to look and see if its still profitable for console manufactures to be in a much smaller market. Yes gaming would probably survive but it would go back to what it was twenty years ago.

Twenty years ago Nintendo practically had a monopoly, and their business was booming because of it. The market is far too different now to make such a comparison.

For one thing: Distribution is handled differently and far, FAR more efficiently. Nintendo was deliberately restricting distribution and had a "Hollywood blacklist" for anyone who didn't play by their rules.

For another, the amount of talent waiting in the wings is positively enormous, and there are non-gaming electronics and software giants just WAITING for a gaming giant to fall (Apple, most notably) so they can move in. It's no coincidence that Apple has been scoping out various parts of the industry for the last 4 years now.

Like it or not EA and Activision are what is keeping the gaming market going. You have to look at not just the games they make but all of the businesses that they support.
Its not

I know that!

It's because they have so much influence over the market that I constantly criticize their agenda! It's why I call into question every bubble-headed money-making scheme!
You think I don't see this giant oligopoly they've established?

That's the problem with market consolidation and bloat; each company becomes an expanding bubble that demands more and more from the market to continue to grow. And they must grow, because even more than profits, that's what investors want to see. After they've bought out so much of the market, they're now such a big part of the market that their failure will cause a crash.

It's a field-fire that has overspread, consumed nearly all of its fuel and is running towards the river.

And what do you propose we do? Continue to support such corrupt bloated giants? Accept these increasingly bullshit costs their legal stipulations blindly and trust them? That only enables further abuse, because they don't know when to quit.
That's the path that leads to more trouble than ANY game is worth.

If they must fall, they will fall on their own merits. There is absolutely no point in trying to preserve their empire now since it will only cost you far more in the long run. Gaming can lose their publisher-overlords today and we will have something better established further down the line, because demand is still sky high; it only needs some space to breathe.

 

[DoPo]

And I never once claimed that DRM is undesirable.

Right. Just like I never claimed you claimed that. Semantics aside

It was the way you phrased it. What I said was that overusing DRM was bad. However, you spent a significant portion of text to elaborate on what I already agreed with - DRM isn't bad by itself, overusing it is bad.

I'm actually using the Ubisoft example in my final report, as it is a primary example of why the gaming community is opposed to most anything described as DRM. If something's main appeal isn't that it is DRM(Or where media coverage doesn't focus on the fact that it is DRM), but rather that it is a service(steam), it is usually well accepted by the community.

This is a relatively new problem in the field. People didn't use to dislike DRM until it broke what it had to do. CD copy protection and such had been around for quite but didn't really impact gamers much, so they weren't "accepted" they were pretty much overlooked. This is the best DRM you can have - almost transparent.

But I recall when it started becoming an issue. I distinctly remember that while waiting for Heroes 5 and Ubisoft had announced the game would be using StarForce protection. At that time, StarForce had a very bad reputation in the gaming community for hampering gameplay, acting as spyware and downright breaking your computer (there were reports of CD drives that stopped working. I don't remember if they were urban legends or actually legitimate). It got more bad rap than Origin, and that's saying something. Anyway, the fans protested and Ubisoft dumped StarForce in favour of SecuROM.

A bit later, Spore came out and the copy protection was so bad that it actively stopped legitimate customers from playing their game. From limiting installations to only 5, to sometimes flat out refusing to install the game at all. Customers were angry (to put it mildly). It didn't help at all that the pirated version 1. Existed despite the copy protection 2. Had none of the problems. Eventually, the copy protection was stripped down to a more basic level. Ironically, the protection used was SecuROM.

Bottom line is - once the security is not transparent, it means it's bad. And that's part of why people perceive DRM as bad - it's only noticeable when it's bad.

I don't know how I feel about the Lock analogy, but it is close to being the best explanation.

The lock is pretty much the explanation of DRM. It can protect your house but anybody determined to get in, will find a way to bypass it. As with DRM. You can try to make your front door a castle like moat and a bridge and that would inconvenience you any time you enter exit. A determined person would still find a way to bypass it. There is a balance between security and comfort that must be found. DRM is tends to take a hit on comfort the most with not as significant rise in security.

In fact, security is never flawless. It is a known problem in the computing world - the more security you throw at something, you're only warding against low level intruders. Higher security attracts high profile crackers. Possibly people who know more than you about security (and going around it). Or just people who are damn good at finding flaws. The bottom line is, that security should never be considered infallible.

The type of Piracy we are worried about is online piracy because of how many people it can reach and the minimal collective effort it takes to get the copyrighted material (instead of someone having to crack it for just a few friends, one person can crack it and share it for anyone with an internet connection).

This changes things...however, online piracy is unlikely to be stopped, either. There have and always have been ways to get illegal stuff online. Ways that are hard to monitor or reliably shut down. Shut down a website and it will just get mirrored the following day. Find a way to outlaw websites and people may go back to IRC. Decentralised networks are still, by and large, out there. There are always ways.

It is very hard to root out internet piracy. What is easier, though, is making it less accessible. IRC, for example, would need slightly more technical knowledge than is needed right now to find an illegal copy of the latest popular game or a movie. Right now, people can even stumble upon an illegal copy when they didn't intend to. Raising the bar to be a pirate, would mean that "accidental" pirates (as in "well, it's just easier to do this than buy it") would be removed. And again, that's towards making buying the product more appealing. If it's easier to go to the store, then more people would go to the store. If going to the store is more of a hassle and actually impacts your experience playing, then more people will pirate (again, the Oatmeal comic I linked to illustrates this perfectly).

And SOPA is so utterly stupid that it will not have a huge impact on piracy.

And this, we disagree on. If the case of the music industry has shown us anything, it's that companies are willing to chase down people taking their products even if the chase is a futile one. Now, imagine they had the ability to take down a website hosting said materials until a court trial (which could take several months to reach) could be had on the issue. They left enforcement to corporations, and corporations will do anything for a perceived 'profit'.

The fact that the music industry goes after pirates, does not mean that pirating music decreased significantly. What decreased it is making music more convenient to buy. People did voice their concerns and suggestions on the matter a lot but the music industry kept clinging to it's old ways. For a long, long time. People wanted a better way to get their music - if they wanted two songs from band X they didn't want to buy a whole album or even two. Piracy allowed them that (well, also for free) but the introduction of convenient way to shop for music. You do not tackle a problem by closing your ears singing "Tra-la-la" while kicking everybody you don't like. Which is what the music industry essentially did. They avoided the MP3 like the plague for a while. And another while. And a while after it had turned into the dominant and most convenient way to listen to music.

Embracing change and going with it has proven useful. More useful than suing people for six digit numbers (I think it was a six digit number) on account of downloading an album illegaly. Or trying to sue people who don't own computers at all. Or trying to sue people who have been dead for years. All of which has happened. And no, it didn't make piracy vanish in a puff of smoke.

So, yes, SOPA wouldn't have worked. And as I said above - there are always ways around it. Shut down a website - mirrors. Also decentralised networks. By their nature they cannot be shut down. SOPA would have only had benefit as far as showing actual results. And those results would have been wrong. Ever had ants or other insects in your home? I had some time back. You could see them marching on the wall in a line. You can break their path and force them to not go there any more, but that doesn't mean there are no more ants in your home. SOPA is the same way. It would only work for toddlers intelligence "I don't see it so it doesn't exist". Going for visible targets would be doing just that.

What we're really looking for is reducing piracy to the point of insignificance

Which is the point of "some people will just pirate". If they want to, they would.

Incorrect. The high piracy rates of Portal 2 suggest that even if price flexibility (Portal 2 was discounted in price so fast that people who bought on release felt short changed), developer care (the arg, taking in fan complaints with portal), and DRM (steam) were all there, it still wouldn't make the "some people will just pirate" bunch insignificant. You can also consider the hefty number of people who pirate humble bundles for this consideration. The number is not insignificant. We have to find a way to either turn "Will just pirate" people into people who have a reason for pirating that can be addressed or people stopped by the law.

Yes, you are correct. I was looking at it from the wrong angle. I still maintain that there are people who given a choice between paying money for a product and taking a possible equal or bigger inconvenience (compared to the price) to pirate the same product, would pirate it. But there are some who do need and would accept correction. There has to be action that discourages piracy as a whole.

The Humble Bundles again, I do not think that there were a large portion of people who went "Oh, I could pay a cent for these games but I'd better not pay a cent". Some of them are people who didn't even know they had the option of paying a cent. They found the HIB illegally, liked it and downloaded it. They didn't say "Har har, you're not taking my cent from me". Lots of them could be converted to legitimate customers given the right incentive.

But unfortunately, there are "hardcore" pirates who would really go "Har har, you won't take my cent from me". These are the people I talk about. They just may be irredeemable. But they shouldn't be the primary target of action against piracy. Once illegal downloading is reduced, they are going to be the core of the remaining issue. Maybe only then should they be targeted, however it is way too early to talk about that.

I honestly don't think it was an entirely stupid way to tackle piracy, and I believe it could have limited the amount of pirated content available to US citizens greatly given a year or two to work (my reasoning on this has already been addressed). However, I feel the negative implications of SOPA (the internet has no free speech, public domain exists their only on the good graces of large corporations, etc) outweigh the ability to reduce piracy

And I already said why it wouldn't work really. But I highlighted another thing. The US isn't a huge offender for piracy. Or at least hasn't been last I checked (few years ago). I can't find enough recent statistics to make a judgement.

Anyway, reducing piracy in one country (assuming it worked), doesn't do anything. Targeting piracy on a case by case basis is not a way to stop it. If anything, the warez scene has proven itself incredibly flexible and able to adapt with a rapid pace. Going at the issue slowly will just force it to evolve into something else. Case in point - a certain European website which recently got sued for hosting torrents. The owners were found guilty and so the issue (website) should have gone, right? Except the website is absolutely still working and is now hosting magnetic links which are like the son of torrents. Not only did this reduce the size of the database (in disk space) to barely a fraction of it before, but also puts the website outside the reach of the law. BAM - instant change for the better for the warez scene, while legally the issue still remains and has taken a turn for the worse as the previous methods would no longer work.

Going after piracy in such a limited fashion makes no sense. Thus, again, the market needs to adapt as well as the law. The law should help not isolate the issues.

-sniiip-

I enjoyed reading that. Thank you for your input.

It reminded me of this material called Piracy Examined [http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html]. A very good read as well, although it's slightly dated now. But I noticed there have been updates. Even without them, it's really relevant

 

[targren]

I'm very much against piracy, but I feel very strongly that consumers are being thought of as potential pirates rather than a potential sale.

This. This RIGHT here is the problem.



I'm going to tell you a story of two gamers, Ben and Mal. Both have been waiting with bated breath for the imminent release of the latest installment in their favorite game series ever: Call of Fantasy: Battlefield XXIII. And it's going to be great. They know it because the publisher, Twirling Mustache, Inc, has taken every opportunity to make sure they know it.

The long awaited day comes: The first payday after release!

Ben calls his wife and tells her he'll be home a bit late, because he's stopping at Video Emporium to pick up his new game. He walks into the store, Explorer card in hand, sets it down on the counter, and says "A copy of the new Call of Fantasy, my good man!"

Mal's bittorrent download of Call of Fantasy had started a day earlier, and was just finishing up when he walked in from work. Both gamers sit down at exactly the same moment and begin installing the game.

Some minutes later, a demonic servant of Twirling Mustache, Inc appears in one of the gamer's rooms, grabs him by the collar, and pulls him out of his chair. "You filthy, thieving scumbag!" the twisted beast shouts. "How DARE you consider playing our game without our express, written consent? As punishment for your transgressions, we're going to turn off your access. You'll NEVER run that game again!" Then, the demon kicks the gamer in the crotch, and disappears.

The other gamer, ten minutes after sitting through the fully rendered, half-hour long unskippable introductory cutscene, uninstalls the game because it's an unplayable, bug-ridden mess.


WHICH GAMER IS WHICH?

 

[jboking]

It was the way you phrased it. What I said was that overusing DRM was bad. However, you spent a significant portion of text to elaborate on what I already agreed with - DRM isn't bad by itself, overusing it is bad.

I didn't argue that DRM was good. I was responding to you saying that DRM is handled poorly. I simply showed an example of how DRM is being handled well. That's all.

The type of Piracy we are worried about is online piracy because of how many people it can reach and the minimal collective effort it takes to get the copyrighted material (instead of someone having to crack it for just a few friends, one person can crack it and share it for anyone with an internet connection).

This changes things...however, online piracy is unlikely to be stopped, either. There have and always have been ways to get illegal stuff online. Ways that are hard to monitor or reliably shut down. Shut down a website and it will just get mirrored the following day. Find a way to outlaw websites and people may go back to IRC. Decentralised networks are still, by and large, out there. There are always ways.

It is very hard to root out internet piracy. What is easier, though, is making it less accessible. IRC, for example, would need slightly more technical knowledge than is needed right now to find an illegal copy of the latest popular game or a movie. Right now, people can even stumble upon an illegal copy when they didn't intend to. Raising the bar to be a pirate, would mean that "accidental" pirates (as in "well, it's just easier to do this than buy it") would be removed. And again, that's towards making buying the product more appealing. If it's easier to go to the store, then more people would go to the store. If going to the store is more of a hassle and actually impacts your experience playing, then more people will pirate (again, the Oatmeal comic I linked to illustrates this perfectly).

Increasing the skill requirement to being a pirate would potentially present a method of reducing piracy to insignificance. Given, in a number of years, they'll have to find yet another method to make it more difficult to pirate, but it constantly keeps piracy at the point of insignificance. So yes, we can outlaw certain types of websites and Pirates can move to IRC once more, but if it makes them insignificant, that's okay.

The fact that the music industry goes after pirates, does not mean that pirating music decreased significantly.

I wasn't suggesting they actually stopped piracy. Not in the least, actually. I was suggesting that they were willing to fight people pirating even though it was a completely futile activity at the time, which you seem to agree with. I was simply displaying that companies will fight over a perceived loss, even if the fight itself is pointless.

What decreased it is making music more convenient to buy. People did voice their concerns and suggestions on the matter a lot but the music industry kept clinging to it's old ways. For a long, long time. People wanted a better way to get their music - if they wanted two songs from band X they didn't want to buy a whole album or even two. Piracy allowed them that (well, also for free) but the introduction of convenient way to shop for music. You do not tackle a problem by closing your ears singing "Tra-la-la" while kicking everybody you don't like. Which is what the music industry essentially did. They avoided the MP3 like the plague for a while. And another while. And a while after it had turned into the dominant and most convenient way to listen to music.

There is actually a lot of suggestion that piracy in the music industry hasn't slowed down too much. What has changed is that the music industry got the memo that as piracy increased (thus decreasing record sales), performance income increased. The boost of free exposure, essentially free advertisement, that they got from piracy lead to people being more informed about certain bands and made them more willing to go to said shows. The music industry is one of those rare cases where piracy was actually useful.

Embracing change and going with it has proven useful. More useful than suing people for six digit numbers (I think it was a six digit number) on account of downloading an album illegaly. Or trying to sue people who don't own computers at all. Or trying to sue people who have been dead for years. All of which has happened. And no, it didn't make piracy vanish in a puff of smoke.

You're right, it doesn't. This is because the litigation focused on individual people, rather than other websites.

So, yes, SOPA wouldn't have worked. And as I said above - there are always ways around it. Shut down a website - mirrors. Also decentralised networks. By their nature they cannot be shut down. SOPA would have only had benefit as far as showing actual results. And those results would have been wrong. Ever had ants or other insects in your home? I had some time back. You could see them marching on the wall in a line. You can break their path and force them to not go there any more, but that doesn't mean there are no more ants in your home. SOPA is the same way. It would only work for toddlers intelligence "I don't see it so it doesn't exist". Going for visible targets would be doing just that.

You say a lot about how SOPA wouldn't have worked without addressing what SOPA's text suggested it do at all. I believe that the methods of SOPA could have drastically decreased piracy online by force. It wouldn't have been permanent, but it would have set a precedent of being able to blame full websites and even charge search engines if they direct people to sites with copyright material on them. It would have allowed things like the stop online child pornographers(that's roughly the name of the legislation), which allowed for ISP's to track and report any suspicious activity (including suspected deepweb activity) and then end contracts and deny internet access to individuals associated with the account. SOPA may not have totally stopped piracy by itself, but it would have set the background for more draconian laws that potentially could.

Yes, you are correct. I was looking at it from the wrong angle. I still maintain that there are people who given a choice between paying money for a product and taking a possible equal or bigger inconvenience (compared to the price) to pirate the same product, would pirate it. But there are some who do need and would accept correction. There has to be action that discourages piracy as a whole.

The Humble Bundles again, I do not think that there were a large portion of people who went "Oh, I could pay a cent for these games but I'd better not pay a cent". Some of them are people who didn't even know they had the option of paying a cent. They found the HIB illegally, liked it and downloaded it. They didn't say "Har har, you're not taking my cent from me". Lots of them could be converted to legitimate customers given the right incentive.

This is incorrect. If you look at the link in my OP, they have that 25 percent of the people who downloaded the bundle from the site it was hosted on used an exploit that had tutorials for it showered across the internet. This wasn't a "people accidentally found it." This was a "people intentionally tried to avoid paying even a cent." I won't deny that given good incentive, these people could become legitimate customers, though.

But unfortunately, there are "hardcore" pirates who would really go "Har har, you won't take my cent from me". These are the people I talk about. They just may be irredeemable. But they shouldn't be the primary target of action against piracy. Once illegal downloading is reduced, they are going to be the core of the remaining issue. Maybe only then should they be targeted, however it is way too early to talk about that.

The approach we are using now is suggesting unobtrusive DRM, ala steam, open communication between developers and consumers, and price flexibility on the part of the developers. My research partners and I believe that the market suggests that games that are high profile and also break the traditional $60 price tag sell better and experience lower piracy rates (Left 4 Dead 1 and the Orange Box were two of the games that suggested this - we examined discount activity and the effect of quick price dropping). Some time after that, we feel that those that can be turned into paying customers will

And I already said why it wouldn't work really. But I highlighted another thing. The US isn't a huge offender for piracy. Or at least hasn't been last I checked (few years ago). I can't find enough recent statistics to make a judgement.

What is true is that, as of right now, US hosted websites are not large offenders of piracy, but it is suggested that citizens within the US are. P.s. for the law portion of this we are looking to more international approaches with multi and bi lateral agreements, as the only other standing option is the UN....which tends to be ineffective.[/quote]

Anyway, reducing piracy in one country (assuming it worked), doesn't do anything. Targeting piracy on a case by case basis is not a way to stop it. If anything, the warez scene has proven itself incredibly flexible and able to adapt with a rapid pace. Going at the issue slowly will just force it to evolve into something else. Case in point - a certain European website which recently got sued for hosting torrents. The owners were found guilty and so the issue (website) should have gone, right? Except the website is absolutely still working and is now hosting magnetic links which are like the son of torrents. Not only did this reduce the size of the database (in disk space) to barely a fraction of it before, but also puts the website outside the reach of the law. BAM - instant change for the better for the warez scene, while legally the issue still remains and has taken a turn for the worse as the previous methods would no longer work.
[/quote] International laws would be a better approach, no? Also, to confirm, are you talking about PirateBay? I don't think their name is illegal here. In fact, I think the only thing you can't do on this website without mod wrath is admit to piracy.

 

[jboking]

snip

I like your analysis, but I have a number of problems. First, while it is difficult to tract the total amount of times any given product was pirated, it is not difficult to tract portions of that piracy. For example, requesting information from bittorrent trackers is one commonly used method of discovering how many times the material the tracker was linked to was accessed. This can give you a piracy rate for a product, albeit, one that only includes bittorrent. However, bittorrent numbers are usually very high and, while adding more would increase the perceived impact of piracy, it is rarely necessary to prove that there is an impact. Also, while we cannot call each torrent a 'lost sale' with certainty, we can view it as a time that material was accessed (and likely used) illegally. No matter whether the person would have bought it or not, by using the product, they are taking something that had a price. Therefore, the only instances of piracy that could be said to not relate to money lost is from individuals who are using it to back up a product they already own and people that are using it to access something that is otherwise unavailable to them (a game that is not sold in a certain country, for example). This, for legal purposes anyway, is why that $200 billion statistic is still often sited. $200 billion is a huge stretch, however, and I'm uncertain of the methods by which they accessed this material. The research some of my partners have dug up suggest that piracy, at most, could account for about 1.7 billion a year in the games industry (which is about a 27 billion dollar industry). Aside from that, I had one other issue.

So, legitimate copies should offer a higher utility than pirated copies by including DRM which is somewhat annoying to pirates (if only because it makes it more difficult to update to the latest patch because the right crack is unavailable or difficult to find) and unobtrusive to customers, include no DRM, or include very bad DRM which hurts pirates even more than paying customers, if and only if the loss of sales to legitimate customers put off by the draconian DRM if offset by the increase in sales from pirates who don't want to put up with the even worse problems they face if they try to get their pirated copy to work. The last option is fairly unlikely IMO and would be difficult to measure.

While I agree that it is difficult to track the sales gained from those that would have otherwise pirated the material, I disagree that there will be many pirates who are hurt by 'very bad DRM.' When thinking of this we have to look at practical examples of this occurring. Currently, Ubisofts Always-on DRM is one of the most obtrusive DRM's in the industry. However, it is circumvented, rather easily, by pirates. Then, Ubisoft experienced a backlash from the poor DRM, which lead to fewer PC customers and a sustained number of pirates. Very Bad DRM is bad for all.

I lied, there is one more thing I want to talk about

There is one more option, of course, which is suing pirates. The effect of this is unambiguous: lawsuits cost money (lots of it) and might decrease the social or ethical cost of piracy (because people think the company suing individuals are immoral bastards), though it might also scare pirates (however, this may not actually result in actual sales if the substitution rate is zero, or in very few extra sales if the substitution rate is very low). However, lawsuits don't seem to scare away pirates (piracy, as measured by torrents, didn't go down after such cases AFAIK).

Suing individual pirates is one approach, but the one the US seems to be approaching now is suing full websites, such as megaupload. These sites are often viewed as just as 'faceless' as the corporations. This leads to a less loss of face on the part of the company and gets them what they want (typically). It's true that these lawsuits don't scare pirates, which is why hosting sites are what is being attacked now. Instead of attack the downloading/uploading pirates, attack the hosts. Essentially, they are attempting to cutoff the supply.

One more thing

Of course, the government could do something about piracy as well. In the grand scheme of things, however, piracy is unlikely to be a problem. If consumers don't spend their money on a game they spend it on something else, so other sectors profit at the expense of the entertainment industry. Plus, piracy increases welfare. And there are severe privacy implications for most measures. The result is a trade off, which depends mostly on one's preferences (besides the effectiveness of such measures).

This mindset does not consider those companies that experience the negative effects of piracy. Example: Say a new IP is being created. It receives minimal sales and experiences a large amount of piracy. The company creating the new IP is now likely to either go under or cut spending (which leads to layoffs). The tangible effects of mass piracy can be seen in unemployment rates. This is a serious problem, as the video game industry is one of the largest entertainment industries today and fuels many domestic companies. Not only that, but you forget people who would instead save the money, which is more common in times of economic downturn.


Finally, that's all I have for you. I liked your analysis.

 

[ElPatron]

I hope we see the major publishers crashing down soon. Cant wait.

I hope you love not playing games then.

How does a handful of bankrupt corporations affect the number of games that were already released?

And how does that have an effect on indie games?

 

[DoPo]

There is actually a lot of suggestion that piracy in the music industry hasn't slowed down too much. What has changed is that the music industry got the memo that as piracy increased (thus decreasing record sales), performance income increased. The boost of free exposure, essentially free advertisement, that they got from piracy lead to people being more informed about certain bands and made them more willing to go to said shows. The music industry is one of those rare cases where piracy was actually useful.

I must admit, I haven't seen any hard recent evidence of music piracy reducing. It was mostly based on speculation both others' and my own. And music is really weird when it comes to it. At the very least, I'm pretty sure they get less potential lost sales now than some years ago while they still regarded MP3 as the spawn of Satan.

So, yes, SOPA wouldn't have worked. And as I said above - there are always ways around it. Shut down a website - mirrors. Also decentralised networks. By their nature they cannot be shut down. SOPA would have only had benefit as far as showing actual results. And those results would have been wrong. Ever had ants or other insects in your home? I had some time back. You could see them marching on the wall in a line. You can break their path and force them to not go there any more, but that doesn't mean there are no more ants in your home. SOPA is the same way. It would only work for toddlers intelligence "I don't see it so it doesn't exist". Going for visible targets would be doing just that.

You say a lot about how SOPA wouldn't have worked without addressing what SOPA's text suggested it do at all. I believe that the methods of SOPA could have drastically decreased piracy online by force. It wouldn't have been permanent, but it would have set a precedent of being able to blame full websites and even charge search engines if they direct people to sites with copyright material on them. It would have allowed things like the stop online child pornographers(that's roughly the name of the legislation), which allowed for ISP's to track and report any suspicious activity (including suspected deepweb activity) and then end contracts and deny internet access to individuals associated with the account. SOPA may not have totally stopped piracy by itself, but it would have set the background for more draconian laws that potentially could. [/quote]

It's really impossible to keep out the fact that were it really enforced it would be bad for pretty much everybody. You either go all the way and make a lot of people victims, restrict the very foundation of the Internet, and generally make the world a worse place, or, alternatively, you let some leeway which means that piracy will have a time to adapt while the world is still a worse place. There are just too many drawbacks for...well, for everybody, really. And those drawbacks make enforcing SOPA undesirable for anybody affected by them.

Now, as I said, if people with actual understanding of the issue put some thought and intelligence into making a law, then I would be more favourable towards it.

Yes, you are correct. I was looking at it from the wrong angle. I still maintain that there are people who given a choice between paying money for a product and taking a possible equal or bigger inconvenience (compared to the price) to pirate the same product, would pirate it. But there are some who do need and would accept correction. There has to be action that discourages piracy as a whole.

The Humble Bundles again, I do not think that there were a large portion of people who went "Oh, I could pay a cent for these games but I'd better not pay a cent". Some of them are people who didn't even know they had the option of paying a cent. They found the HIB illegally, liked it and downloaded it. They didn't say "Har har, you're not taking my cent from me". Lots of them could be converted to legitimate customers given the right incentive.

This is incorrect. If you look at the link in my OP, they have that 25 percent of the people who downloaded the bundle from the site it was hosted on used an exploit that had tutorials for it showered across the internet. This wasn't a "people accidentally found it." This was a "people intentionally tried to avoid paying even a cent." I won't deny that given good incentive, these people could become legitimate customers, though.

I totally missed that - I took the OP to mean something along the lines of 25% weren't torrent downloads... Fuck. And now I feel bad.

But unfortunately, there are "hardcore" pirates who would really go "Har har, you won't take my cent from me". These are the people I talk about. They just may be irredeemable. But they shouldn't be the primary target of action against piracy. Once illegal downloading is reduced, they are going to be the core of the remaining issue. Maybe only then should they be targeted, however it is way too early to talk about that.

The approach we are using now is suggesting unobtrusive DRM, ala steam, open communication between developers and consumers, and price flexibility on the part of the developers. My research partners and I believe that the market suggests that games that are high profile and also break the traditional $60 price tag sell better and experience lower piracy rates (Left 4 Dead 1 and the Orange Box were two of the games that suggested this - we examined discount activity and the effect of quick price dropping). Some time after that, we feel that those that can be turned into paying customers will

That's actually interesting. I haven't seen any more precise measurements of piracy (partly because it's really fricking hard to have some. But general tendency can be observed just doesn't happen often enough) than roughly the numbers per year/industry/country/really general stuff.

But, yes, my words are confirmed - DRM is good when it's not felt or seen by users. And open communication is really good, yes. It allows adequate action from the devs/gaming companies - so they can address an issue, say DRM running amok. And also adequate action from users - they should turn to the devs instead of piracy.

And I already said why it wouldn't work really. But I highlighted another thing. The US isn't a huge offender for piracy. Or at least hasn't been last I checked (few years ago). I can't find enough recent statistics to make a judgement.

What is true is that, as of right now, US hosted websites are not large offenders of piracy, but it is suggested that citizens within the US are. P.s. for the law portion of this we are looking to more international approaches with multi and bi lateral agreements, as the only other standing option is the UN....which tends to be ineffective.

Hmm, then the numbers I've seen are really old probably the tendency has shifted. I was under the assumption that the US piracy, as in using pirated products, wasn't high in the list of countries. Last somewhat reliable data I've seen was from somewhere in 2006-2008. Which is more than five years away. And now that I think about it, it may have been looking just at a specific thing, say operating systems.

Out of curiosity, why would the UN be ineffective? I really don't know, I'm not suggesting that the would be.

International laws would be a better approach, no? Also, to confirm, are you talking about PirateBay? I don't think their name is illegal here. In fact, I think the only thing you can't do on this website without mod wrath is admit to piracy.

Yes, I'm talking about that. I wasn't sure if it was allowed and I was sure you would be able to guess it.

As for international laws - yes, some sort of internationally enforceable law would be a better option. I am in no way well versed in legal stuff, so I am not sure how feasible that is, however, it seems to me that it can be done.

I'm not sure how I feel about a law that is enforced by one party only, say, the US. I'm looking at the Richard O'Dwyer's case. I haven't looked into it seriously but extradition seems wrong (also I have no idea if that was approved or not yet). I think it's better if it's possible that the offenders would be prosecuted on home ground, so to say.

 

[DoPo]

snip

-snip-

Wow, and I agree with you. I'll just want to elaborate a bit by throwing a few more sentences

First - tracking the piracy. Yes, it's not possible but it can be guessed. And since it can be reasonably assumed that piracy is roughly proportional across different sources (torrents, FTP, HTTP) and we can observe one of them (torrents have the statistics easily accessible). So yes, we can't get a precise number but we can get a precise enough estimation on the scale.

Second - lost sales. The numbers the industry throws at you are overblown. But each download is at least a partial lost sale. For example, for every 10 downloads one could have been a proper sale. The fact that somebody downloaded something, shows that they place at least some value on it. Sure, there are the odd people who are virtually no lost sales as they don't use the product but for each one of them there are dozens, if not hundreds, who do place however small value on it.

Now - very bad DRM and pirates. Pretty much by definition, pirated copies bypass DRM. Very, very often only legitimate customers suffer from it. I already mentioned the lock explanation (stop people from very easily pirating a product) but I forgot to mention the other major reason for the existence - prevent zero day releases. Not stop illegal releases but ideally slow them down. If it tries to do much more than that, people who haven't bypassed the DRM (i.e., legal customers) have to put up with it.

I just wanted to offer some more on the matter.

 

[Therumancer]

Digital Distribution is too laced with greed to be the future in the current form. It's what the industry wants right now because of how rife for exploitation it is. The industry wants to get it established before the goverment can catch up with properly regulating it... but that is another point entirely.

The issue with piracy is that it's not taken seriously, like many other crimes the penelties wind up being fairly mild in a practical sense, with the current state of prisons nobody wants to say toss some dude in prison for life (and pay for it) because he stole games. It's like drug use, it's such a slap on the wrist/revolving door crime despite all talks of getting tough, that nobody cares. The risks simply aren't anywhere near equal to the payoff.

Likewise it comes down to the international mess that is IP laws, with major powers like China pretty much refusing to acknowlege this. This means pirates have places that they can operate out of with imputiny. Some dude pirating games out of a country like China has no incentive to stop because China doesn't acknowlege the issue as being a crime. With that kind of thing being allowed, it really doesn't matter what kind of policies countries like the US put into force.

While games are a tiny tip of the iceberg, I think IPs and patents are going to be a big part of what leads to World War III, but that's an entirely differant discussion that goes in a LOT of differant directions. The bottom line is that your not going to make a major inroad against piracy unless nations are willing to force other nations to comply, and/or seize/abduct citizens from countries without extradition treaties. This applies to a wide array of issues, many far more important than gaming, it's just that gaming is one of the minor things influanced by the current state of the world and this unpleasant reality. Being unable to deal with other nations protecting pirates and other IP/Patent/Copyright criminals without the direct application of overwhelming force (leading to massive wars) is one of the reasons why very little is done.

Simply on the domestic front, there is the issue of the law as a deterrant. Right now you not only need a strong penelty, but one that is actually enforcable. Increasingly people don't take threats of say "20 years in prison for piracy" that seriously because the odds of any state enforcing that sentence are miminal, the simple cost means that if they ever actually do jail time, they are probably going to be outed due to overcrowding in favor of more dangerous criminals. A penelty nobody is afraid of or believes will ever really be applied is not much of a deterrant.

Incidently prison overcrowding is one of the reasons I'm such a "psycho" when it comes to prison overcrowding. I believe in the rapid (no appeals or delays) enforcement of the death penelty, as well as applying it to a much wider range of crimes. Perhaps even going so far as to control overcrowding by simply executing the more heinous criminals on the spot when prisons get too full even if not actually given the death penelty before that.

See in our effort to be "nice" and "humane" we have basically created a museum of the worst humanity has to offer. Rapists, killers, pedophilles, and corperate exploiters who have ruined thousands or even millions of lives (which I place in the same catagory). In keeping all of these people alive to be "humane" we have overcrowded our system and made it so we increasingly can't deal with lesser criminals at all. What's more the system is so broken that people are more afraid of the people they will be put into prison with, than the prison sentence itself (which is another issue entirely).

Basically I feel that if we say ordered the DoC (all the differant ones) nationwide to lock down the cell blocks, and then go cell to cell with squads of guys with shotguns cleaning out the majority of these scumbags, followed by an increase of the death penelty, we'd actually have room to start enforcing prison sentences on lesser criminals where it can act as a deterrant.

I know many people disagree with me, but I think being unable to deal with a lot of these problems comes from our morality, and too much concern over the "human rights" of a seriel rapist or whatever. To an extent all those liberals who have done things like ban the death penelty, or created all these hoops and appeals for it to be applied, and insisted "death" not be added to many crimes, have created the whole problem we have of not being able to enforce laws and discapline in the population and stop things like piracy and similar "low impact" crimes due to the sheer number of prisoners.

I know many people will disagree with me here, but that's my thoughts.