It's depressing reading this sort of thread, really it is. If we were simply discussing blatant pirates and cheaters, then yes, everyone would be well within their rights to crow about not being banned and to point and jeer at the nasty pirates/cheaters.
But that's
not the entire scope of this issue - you have modifications like the ones to get around region locking, where any sensible observer would tell you that if a customer
really wants to import games from Japan, you should let him because a sale is a bloody sale. Those aren't pirates, those are customers you're refusing to sell things to, and then punishing when they find a way to
buy your products anyways.
Don't want to pay Microsoft a small fortune for what amounts to just a standard SATA hard drive when you could get one with a
ridiculously larger storage capacity for the same price instead? Too bad! That's consider modding your console, as opposed to the official Microsoft-branded hard drive accessory which is installed in exactly the same way - time to ban your console!
You replaced a fan because the ones Microsoft ships it with suck and it's a remarkable hassle to have to get a console replaced when you could just
fix the problem yourself and keep playing uninterrupted? You're a horrible modder, time for the banhammer!
And as for the "legitimate backups" issue, this is one of those bizarre legal issues where you are in fact given the legal right to do that, but the manufacturers of the media (games, DVDs, etc) make it impossible to do so legitimately, which is (somehow) also within their legal rights - so you have the right to make copies but you're not allowed to make copies.
Discs get scratched, and commercial grade CDs/DVDs don't actually have all that long of an expected lifespan before they degrade. While you should endeavor to take care of them, making a backup is just a bloody sensible thing to do. There's a reason I track down no-CD patches for all the PC games I own where the developers didn't release such a fix themselves - constantly swapping a disc in and out of the drive when it isn't actually needed is a sure-fire recipe for raising the wear and tear on the discs for no good purpose. The EULA almost certainly specifies I shouldn't do that, but the EULA can take a flying leap - I've bloody paid for the games and it's insulting and non-nonsensical to treat paying customers like thieves, even more so when sometimes the very copy protection
renders paying customers unable to play the game they've purchased (this has happened to me on no less than 3 occasions).
Microsoft is well within their rights to ban consoles when their owners breach the Terms of Service, but just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right or morally unassailable - there are a great many ways to be a despicable jackass without breaking any laws, but at the end of the day you're still a despicable jackass.
sheic99 said:
muckinscavitch said:
Epitome said:
Lets change context on the whole "stealing" issue.
Lets pick another company that makes millions of dollars a year.
Hmm.. Walmart, McDonalds, Apple (Taken from http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2009/performers/companies/profits/)
Now, why don't you just walk into walmart, or any of the other above companies stores, and steal things. According to your argument of "MS make PLENTY of money off teh games they develop", it doesn't matter. You wouldn't walk into Walmart and start taking thousands of dollars in clothes or other merchandise, even though they make a crap load of money each year and it probably would not affect their final income substantially.
Second, where do you think the word "Piracy" comes from? Pirates. What did/do pirates do? They steal things. Illegally downloading games is the same as going to the store and just taking it off the shelf. Bottom line, stealing is wrong and these xbl users deserve to be punished.
Piracy, when not occurring at sea, is more formally known as Copyright Infringement/ violation. The act of stealing involves the illegal acquiring of a physical product, while copyright infringement, or piracy, involves an illegal reproduction of a product. Essentially downloading games is the same act as purchasing fake designer handbags.
Ha ha, that was quite hilarious. But to answer the considerably less intelligent poster you just mocked - the difference between software piracy and outright theft revolves around the matter of incurring a direct loss. When you swipe products from a local Walmart, you are costing them money because you've just
stolen some of their inventory, which they PAID for in the first place. When you make an unauthorized copy of a software application, you... didn't give the author any money. The act of copying it
does not in itself make them lose anything.
Now if you're distributing your stolen copy commercially or co-opting the code to release your own product illegally, then you might be legitimately impacting the bottom line through that act of software piracy, but the legion of pirates downloading cracked versions of PC games are impacting the bottom line of publishers in the same way that shoppers who look around the Walmart and then leave without buying anything do - they are
non-customers. True, they are non-customers who still end up with your product (or rather, an altered version of your product), but their having that copy
does not cost you any money in and of itself, anymore than when somebody glances at your game on the store shelf only to pick up something else instead.
When publishers tout figures about all the 'losses' incurred because of piracy, what they're actually citing are
potential sales figures, if the pirates had all bought copies instead of, you know,
pirating them, which they are claiming are losses - by the same reasoning companies should be able to claim the disparity between
sales projections and
actual sales as losses for all the basis in fact that comparison has.
Pirates are not customers - there is absolutely NOT a 1 to 1 correspondence between units pirated and "sales you would have made if they couldn't have pirated it", and it's fundamentally dishonest for companies to claim as such.
I don't defend pirates, but it's important to realize that "piracy" is largely a straw-man the industry raises to justify chipping away at consumer liberty via systems like restrictive DRM - it sounds a lot better when you explain that you are going to screw your customers over to "fight pirates!" instead of "gradually make the second-hand games market obsolete because we don't actually get any money from that" or "we'd like to sell you multiple versions of the same exact product for every system you want to use it on".
