Jimquisition: Piracy Episode One - Copyright

Meggiepants

Not a pigeon roost
Jan 19, 2010
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The problem with your argument is you assume publishers are contributing nothing to the process, that they have nothing to risk in the whole endeavor of creating a video game. While I don't disagree with your example for Metal Arms, a game that is highly unlikely to be re-released in any case, I think it's still stealing to pirate that game.

Publishers who back games take gambles, expensive ones. The creators of those games sold the rights to their games for the opportunity to possibly make big bucks, also a gamble. They don't necessarily have the money to lobby Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft to make sure theirs games are licensed and produced for the consoles. They likely don't have the money to advertise the game, to publish it, to create the box art, to go to E3 and get noticed by thousands of gamers. They rely on the publisher to do this. The publisher has no idea they'll make their money back. I'm sure their are plenty of games that are net losses for companies like EA. Not every game is going to net EA huge profit margins. Some will undoubtedly be Too Human.

The reason I think it is still stealing to pirate a game like Metal Arms, is because the publisher that rightfully paid the creator for the rights to that game entered a contract saying, "I promise to give you money now, on the hopes that I can make a profit off of this thing in the future."

I don't know if the publisher made all their money back on that game. But it doesn't really matter. They have purchased the right to make as much money as they want to. If you invest in something, that's how it works. If we arbitrarily decide which contracts are right, and which are wrong, we are putting ourselves in the role of the judiciary. This, in my opinion, is the biggest problem with PIPA and SOPA. They bypass judicial review and become a law unto themselves. We are no different than them if we decided to take on the role of deciding who deserves money for their products, and who doesn't. We are no different than them if we say piracy is okay, because some corporations have too much money and don't really deserve anymore.

Let the courts decide which contracts should be looked at. If you don't like copyright law, then start a lobbying group to change it. Don't sink to the level of the corporations you despise. I know it sounds cliche, but really, you are playing into the corporations' hands. All they need to do now is say, "See? These lowlifes aren't interested in paying, just like we told you."

After all, if we start to tear apart the legal world of contracts, what's to stop your employer from saying, "I don't need to pay you this week. I think you have enough money. You are spending it all on video games anyway."

Let me be absolutely clear, I do not support SOPA or PIPA, but I do not, and never will, support piracy either. Even if fat cat EA Execs don't really get hurt from it, you do give them an excuse to make shitty laws like SOPA by doing it, and you also give them an excuse to hurt the paychecks of their employees. They don't need anymore excuses to fuck us over. The public at large is easily fooled by their rhetoric. Don't give them examples to feed into their lies.
 

veloper

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Jan 20, 2009
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I'm not convinced that publishers aren't doing anything useful.

High profile games cost millions of dollars to make. Publishers fund that money and take the risk for possible failure.
That's not to say that money could never come from another source, but I doubt a bank would offer developers better terms.

That said, I do agree software piracy is a victimless crime, but not just when big companies are concearned, but in all scenarios. It's not a case of taking something away, but rather a case of not contributing.
It's selfish, but there's alot of (legal) ways already where the game company won't see a penny from you. Buying used is just as selfish (just less intelligent). You could simply not play the game at all and nobody can prove or disprove that you didn't pirate it.

I think of it this way: if the publisher makes a profit, the wage slaves who made that nice game for us to play, get to keep their funding for the next game. That's the way you support artists who sold their creation.
 

CatmanStu

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Jul 22, 2008
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All of the big name devs (the ones that can pretty much do what they want) have that freedom because at one point they made a decision to sacrifice the ownership of their IP, as well as some of their artistic freedom, in exchange for the funds to make the games they wanted to make. In return they got wide distribution and publicity that gave them a level of leverage on their next project, which they capitallised on to go through the cycle again, until they have so much respect in gamers and critics eyes that the publisher doesn't want to interfere as it may affect their sales, or worse push the dev into someone elses camp.

Developers need publishers money as much as publishers need their ideas; neither one are criminal or victim; or do we want all games to go back to the 16 bit days?
 

aPod

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Jan 14, 2010
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Wow Jim, Boom indeed. The Jimquisition was razor sharp today.

It brings up a good issue, who should have control over the copyrighted material. The people who funded it or the people who created it.

To me justice would see the creators owners and those who funded its creation merely capable of profiting from it for a period of time. So, I do agree with you and this episode.

Excellent job.
 

Diana Kingston-Gabai

Senior Member
Aug 3, 2010
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Sober Thal said:
How so? You mean the people that don't know how to research a product before they buy it?

Yeah, they gamble, and it's silly.
I fail to see how any amount of research would've stopped customers from shelling out substantial amounts of money for products like "Elemental: War of Magic" or "Amy", to name just a few recent duds...
 
Jun 11, 2008
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While I am not in full agreement over the publisher thing as they can provide the capital to companies to make big games I do agree they abuse their power so to speak. What I keep coming back to is that Hollywood was basically formed to escape patent laws and that they have been complaining about piracy for years. They have tried to get the US to make a law to ban VCRs and MP3 players so I honestly cannot back anything a publisher does in this regard.

All they have been doing in regards to "stopping" piracy is try to hold back progress. What they need to do in the case of video games is create DRM which is non invasive and hard for the average to moderate computer literate person to crack. That keeps the honest people honest and doesn't treat paying customers like criminals with a hot lead digital enema on their games.
 

mjc0961

YOU'RE a pie chart.
Nov 30, 2009
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Diana Kingston-Gabai said:
Sober Thal said:
How so? You mean the people that don't know how to research a product before they buy it?

Yeah, they gamble, and it's silly.
I fail to see how any amount of research would've stopped customers from shelling out substantial amounts of money for products like "Elemental: War of Magic" or "Amy", to name just a few recent duds...
Well, let's see.

Amy came out. I heard it sucked. Read some reviews that said it sucked. Watched some gameplay footage on YouTube and saw for myself that it sucked. Didn't buy it. That's how any amount of researched stopped me from shelling out money for Amy.
 

Robert B. Marks

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Jun 10, 2008
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I managed to get about six minutes in before I had to stop watching - just too many misconceptions about copyright and the industry. My background is as an author and the owner of a small publishing company, so I deal with copyright on a regular basis. So, to correct some of the misconceptions in the first six minutes:

1. Copyright IS about protecting creator's rights. However, 95% of it is not about protecting creator's rights from consumers. Most of copyright is a legal framework governing the interaction between those who create and those who distribute the creations, mainly during the contract negotiations. An example of the protection provided is to prevent a distributor from taking a creator's work, declining to publish that work, and then adding a new name to it and publishing it anyway. That goes both ways - another protection is to prevent a creator from selling exclusive rights to a work to one publisher, and then going behind that publisher's back and selling the same exclusive rights to another.

2. Copyright IS built so that the creative artist owns the copyright to his/her work upon completion of the work. In order for the creative artist to lose those rights, s/he has to sign them away. One of the reasons that there are literary agents is to protect authors from contracts that strip them of their rights to their own work. That the equivalent in the music industry often do not do the same is scandalous, to say the least.

3. There are nasty companies out there with highly predatory practices interested only in their bottom line, 'tis true. The music industry is one of the worst out there in that. But that's a problem with industry practices, not copyright law. To say that it's a problem with copyright is like saying that a security company failing to call the police on time during a burglary is a problem with anti-theft laws. Requiring creative artists to sign their entire copyright to a work away in the music, film, and software industries is a nasty industry practice, but it is an INDUSTRY practice.

4. If anybody wants to say that game companies are not injured by computer game piracy, I would ask them to take a moment and count the number of PC game companies that hopped ship to the smaller console market over the last 10 years. Compared to 2002, the computer game world is considerably sparser than it used to be.

5. Publishers are important, and when doing their jobs properly can provide a level of quality control, distribution support, and marketing that a creative artist alone cannot. To say that in the past the need for distributors was an illusion is ludicrous, particularly considering that the internet has only been available to the general public for the last 20 years or so. It may be easier to self-publish now, but it wasn't in the past, and many of the functions of publishers and distributors are still done better by distributors than by the creative artist alone, if for no other reason than the distributor generally has more resources.

Anyway, that corrects the more grievous misconceptions. I really wish that people would do their research sometimes.
 

Robert B. Marks

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Jun 10, 2008
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Xifel said:
Hitchmeister said:
On the other hand, these big publishers didn't seize the rights away from creators at gunpoint. They walked up and waved a bag of cash in front of them. It seemed like a good deal at the time, and I have a hard time feeling sympathy for anyone who sold their soul, or IP, to EA.*

Then on the third hand, you get stuff like a band posting videos they created themselves of their own music on Youtube and getting takedown orders from their record company because they don't have the rights to promote themselves in any way that might interfere with the company's profits. Yeah, screw that.




*I know EA wasn't actually involved in the example in the video, but I wanted to draw a selling your soul to the devil analogy, and EA just fit so well.
It is true that the creators has been paid for the rights. However I do not believe there are any buisness model that allow the creator to keep their rights. I believe it is "Give us your stuff and we get it out, or stay in the dark".
In a lot of book publishing, the standard contract is for first publication rights. The copyright itself remains with the author.
 

RJ Dalton

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Aug 13, 2009
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Well, if there's one thing I can agree with, it's that big publishers are nothing but leaches on society that need to be removed from the picture.
 

TheDooD

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Dec 23, 2010
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Preach it Jim, preach it.

OT

Thats why I only DL'ed SNES, Genesis, NES and Arcade Titles because who am I really hurting because I wanted to play Secret Of Mana, Vectorman, Contra and Raiden 2.
 

HavocS6

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Nov 3, 2009
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Ariyura said:
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this why they can't get the IP back for Firefly? Because Fox now owns it?
Yeah, I think it's something like that. It's also the reason why it took nine sodding years to get a new Mechwarrior game, *grumbles* Blasted Microsoft *grumbles*, and don't get me started on that Harmony Gold BS... *grumbles*
At least MekTek was able to release Mechwarrior 4: mercenaries for free in 2010.
 

katsabas

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Apr 23, 2008
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The problem isn't with companies like Bethesda or Rockstar. It is with companies that are owned by bigger ones that do absolutely nothing to contribute to the project except publish them. But there is a very fine point here that Jim may have missed. I am no expert but I do not think that developpers always have money to publish their own games, like the indie developpers. And when you wanna create something big, you have no choice but to turn to a publisher.

I gotta know though. Is giving up the rights to a title the only way for it to see the light of day ? Cause if yeah, publishers are holding devs by the balls and companies like Criterion, Bioware, Naughty Dog or even Infinity Ward will never be truly free to pursue their own concepts.

The video hits where it has to cause I have been thinking about this for some time. For example, what creative part of any Pixar movie had Disney involved ? Little to none, I bet.
 

scorptatious

The Resident Team ICO Fanboy
May 14, 2009
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Metal Arms! One of my most favorite games of all time! :D

I had no idea there was a trilogy planned. I knew there was going to be a sequel, but not a trilogy. It's a real shame that the IP is left to rot though. I love that game.