dbenoy said:
I agree! It's so annoying!
I just want to shake these jerks and say "It's not 'piracy' it's copyright infringement! Piracy is a moral abomination, copying things is wonderful and natural!"
I feel your pain.
Unless, of course, the person who created the content in the first place hasn't given you permission to copy it.
At which point, copying things is not wonderful, nor natural, but rather analogous to, y'know,
theft.
There are those, of course, who argue that the concept of intellectual property itself is inherently bad. These people are, for lack of a better word, innocents.
Because there are a great many things in this world that would not exist without intellectual property laws. Things like Mass Effect.
And I
like Mass Effect. I like a great number of things that simply
would not exist if people were not given the ability to have their ideas and intellectual labors protected by law.
This is not some post-capitalist Marxist utopia in which vast bands of self-motivated people gather together for large collective projects since all of their material needs are taken care of. Here in the real world, large projects require large investments, investments which entail a great deal of capital. People, after all, need to get paid.
There are those who like to crow about the Humble Indie Bundles, and use them as an example of a new model of intellectual property. Except that the Humble Indie Bundles, all told, have made something like $11 million dollars. Which is something like 20% of the development budget of the average AAA title.
Or significantly less in some cases.
So sure, Louis C.K. can put out a show for $5, and the HIB guys can throw things up on a pay-what-you-want scheme, but in these cases we're talking about production costs measures in the tens of thousands of dollars, not tens of
millions.
If we assume that the more outrageous budget figures for The Old Republic are true, for example, EA would have to sell 100 million copies at $5 each in order to just break even.
So copyright laws definitely exist for a reason, and the people who decry their existence, particularly over something so incredible
trivial as entertainment media, come off, to me, like squalling children complaining that their allowance isn't big enough. It's a movie. You don't have to watch it. It's a game. You don't have to play it. And in all cases, far more importantly, you don't have the
right to watch it, any more than I have the right to go into your home and make a copy of your diary, so that I can distribute it to whoever I want.
I could
almost accept the argument that the world would be a better place without IP laws when it comes to patent law, given the sheer preponderance of life-altering technologies and pharmaceuticals that could probably be made available more cheaply without it, except that the cold, hard truth of the matter is that most of those things wouldn't
exist without it. And the people whose lives might have been saved would have died anyway, along with all the people whose lives
were saved.
.
