DVSAurion said:
First of all, good work from Activision. Didn't expect them to come up something that doesn't involve suing everything in existence.
Signa said:
Allow me to chime in here with a quote I read recently:
One of the frustrating issues for analysts of the file-sharing phenomenom is that so much of what we know, or think we know, about it rests not on any real numbers but on our beliefs and suppositions. Statistics thrown around by the rights-holding organizations like the MPAA, the RIAA or the BSA are notoriously unreliable, while the illegal and highly fragmented nature of P2P networks themselves makes it impossible to get any dependable numbers from the sharers themselves.
The problem with making statements such as "Pirates
are pathetic" is that because of the diversity of the way people pirate, you may be attacking a large group of them unjustly. You can hate them all you want, but the fact is, you are under an opinion when you are stating a fact. It's like calling all black people criminals because the majority of the prison population are blacks, except it's not like that at all because we can quantify that statement with real data. The same can not be done with pirates.
Would you like to tell me what makes piracy justifiable for some then? I share the Pirates are pathetic point of view, but if you can give an example of reasons of piracy that are not pathetic, then go ahead. I can name many black people that aren't criminals, so I can easily counter the black people argument.
I'll do my best because my opinion that pirates aren't scum is just as ill-founded as yours and Woodsey's. My point in the first place that you can't prove anything about pirates also works against my stance. The only difference is that I'm giving the pirates the benefit of the doubt, because I see plenty of examples to justify so.
The biggest thing I look at is that everything still sells millions of copies if it's good or popular. Mario, Zelda, Modern Warfare, Halo: they all are bought by millions, and yet each one of those millions are still offered a chance to get those games free. Why don't they? Is it perhaps because they don't know how to pirate? Possibly yes, but you pretty much can go to any forum that doesn't have a ban on discussion piracy and find constant admissions of people who pirate and then buy later when the price is right or because they just liked the game (provided the topic comes up at some point. I doubt the Hello Kitty forums talk about piracy much). It's actually quite uncommon to see people say "I stealz shit and there's nuthin' they can do about it!"
As I said in my response to that other guy, that quote came from an article about the movie Red. I guess they leaked the movie intentionally as an experiment and it's still doing quite well in the box office. With how often you hear the movie industry whine, you'd expect that at least 2/3rds of all movie watchers use bittorrent to steal their movies and not pay anything. Yet if this was true, then how does any movie do well at all anymore, especially if it's a high-quality DVD screener like this was.
What it comes down to is who you believe when they say stuff about people getting things for free. I've heard that the music industry was dying in the 50's because of recordable radio, as was the movie industry because of VHS in the 80's. They've been crying and bitching for decades and they are still around. On other other hand, you have the pirates who admit to downloading games, movies and music, but they also buy the content they love, because they know that they are voting for more of it with their wallets. Now who between the two have a reason to lie or exaggerate? I'm not going to say pirates because they have nothing to gain by telling other random people on the internet their buying habits.
Now that I've typed all that, I realized I still haven't touched on what makes it justifiable.
I don't think I'm qualified to state that because pirates all have different reasons. Some just don't want to pay for shit, and I can't condone that. One argument I will buy is the lack of respect and trust the content industries show us consumers (HDCP, DRM, anyone?). Why vote with your wallet if they don't trust you. A premium price for a premium product shouldn't contain flaws or restrictions. In the end, it's not justifiable, but it is understandable.
I feel strongly from what I've seen and the people I know that those who would buy a product, but choose to download it instead are few. Most pirates are just not arguing with free, because you can't argue it. The content industries are taking all those "free purchases" as lost sales because they didn't get any money from it. They never stopped to consider that they wouldn't have in the first place. Most pirates I know will still buy a game or movie if they liked it after pirating it, so there is no lost sale. This allows the consumer to take back the control of the product so that they don't get ripped off. The content industries don't like this because if they sink a million dollars into a piece of crap before realizing it's crap, they aren't going to apologize and offer discounts or refunds.
Bah, I feel like I'm starting to ramble by stating my own opinion as fact and throwing too much junk "data" out. If I touched on something you think I should expand on, I will, but I know I'm not changing anyone's opinion here.
The point is there are problems on both sides of publishers and consumers and piracy is more of a symptom than the problem, which is why I think it's stupid to call pirates scum.
