Sink The Pirates

[Bakery]

I agree that piracy is damaging the industries (music, movies and games) but i don't beleive it is to the extent it is being made out to be. When it's suits a person, they'll turn to piracy. If I lose my copy of Assassin's Creed when I'm shifting houses, (damn those pesky, thieving removalists), I sure as hell am not going to go down to EB Games and pay eighty bucks for another one.

"Why David", you say, "You could simply purchase another one off Ebay for a mere $20."
True, i could. But how the hell does that help the industry? I've just gone and payed $20 to some punk for a scratched copy of the game. That is, if I'm lucky and havent gotten a pirated copy with an instuction booklet containing the controls to The Adventures of He Man in it.

Solution: I download it for free, hassle free.

All of that isn't to say piracy never gets used for purposes of evil, don't get me wrong. What I'm trying to say is that coppied media _can_ be used legitimately. Another example is downloading snes roms for games of mine that died in storage that I am not paying $40 to Gametraders for because it's considered classic. (Again, how does this help the industry?)

This rant (i won't say article) was unpleasant to read.

To say the opinions of pirates and users of pirated media are invalid is immature and stubborn.

Last note: love the site and everything in it, even though i disagree with this rant it got people talking and more importantly thinking which is great.

 

[Gnomeking]

I agree that piracy is damaging the industries (music, movies and games) but i don't beleive it is to the extent it is being made out to be. When it's suits a person, they'll turn to piracy. If I lose my copy of Assassin's Creed when I'm shifting houses, (damn those pesky, thieving removalists), I sure as hell am not going to go down to EB Games and pay eighty bucks for another one.

I dunno, I bought about 7 copies of Neverwinter Nights or one of it's expansions for the PC because I kept losing one of the 30+ CD keys for one or all of the expansion packs every time I went to reinstall it. So maybe, if they can keep me buying 7 copies for every copy I may have pirated as a result of annoyance with their cumbersome copyright protection, this whole thing can turn out to be profitable. I've never pirated a game in my life, but if I lose another copy of Neverwinter Nights the next one will be downloaded. I think I've earned it.

 

[Saskwach]

I was kinda disappointed by this article. I would have thought someone who was above the pirates' line would be above the industry's line, too. Here's some anecdotes and some truths.
I have a group of 7 other gamer freaks. Not a single one plays recent PC games; we're all consoletards, though some of us still play classics or quirky niche titles. The reasons are simple. we're tired of the PC bleeding edge demanding that we get new PCs for new games. We're tired of jumping through hoops that don't actually stop piracy (CD keys, CD in drive at all times, online activation etc). We love the simplicity we get from having a console that without any doubt will run our games and will do it quickly without flaming hoops to jump through. None of us pirate PC games; we just don't play them any more (with the exception of, say, Gal Civ 2, which gives up the ghost on piracy).
All the measures that have been designed to protect games from piracy do nothing. They achieve nothing. In fact, they could have a negative impact. If you've ever read some of the piracy related rants, and comments, over at Twenty Sided [http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/] you'll see that there are a lot of gamers who literally don't buy games if it has any of the completely ineffectual but annoying- even harmful- piracy protections beyond CD key and CD-in-drive. I'm one of them and so are many of my friends. Hell, I've been literally drooling at the mouth for Spore but when I heard of the DRM it has I've gone from auto-purchase to undecided. Many people thought the same for Spore, and Mass Effect.
The way I tackle the gun issue in America is a lot like the way I tackle piracy: it's sad and shouldn't happen, but it does, and the brute force measures (banning for guns, incompetent protections for games) do not work. Developers and publishers, sadly, just have to live with and change how the biz works [http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512], because, while they'll blame the PC gaming boat's sinking on the pirates, they're idiots if they think they didn't put some good-sized holes in the boat too.

PS: Last part of the second link's article:
"When you blame piracy for disappointing sales, you tend to tar the entire market with a broad brush. Piracy isn't evenly distributed in the PC gaming market. And there are far more effective ways of getting people who might buy your product to buy it without inconveniencing them.

Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.

In the end, the pirates hurt themselves. PC game developers will either slowly migrate to making games that cater to the people who buy PC games or they'll move to platforms where people are more inclined to buy games.

In the meantime, if you want to make profitable PC games, I'd recommend focusing more effort on satisfying the people willing to spend money on your product and less effort on making what others perceive as hot. But then again, I don't romanticize PC game development. I just want to play cool games and make a profit on games that I work on."

 

[Logie--bear]

I don't pirate games, I have downloaded the occasional CD key to replace the legit ones I have lost. The developer already has my money for the game, surely they can't expect me to buy the game again? This is after going through the tedious customer support process of proof of purchase photos. In the end, they never got back to me, I was sitting with a uselessly legitimate copy of the game while the developer who I had supported with my hard-earned cash had left me.

As stated several times in these comments, Anti-Piracy measures are only hurting the consumers. Pirates have the know-how to get around all the code they put in place that makes my game run slower or blocks me from reinstalling.

As a side-note; I'm aware that 'casual' games are among the most pirated out there. Personally I don't give a crap. No effort is given as they make the same game over and over again, so why should cash people spend several hours earning go to waste?

 

[Angron]

ok, ill try to keep this reasonably short...

first off i was quite appaled by ths article, i dont mind valid arguments, for or against, pirates, but this isnt a valid argument, u have brought shame to the escapist!

all im gonna say is, read the recent article in Total PC gaming, and i also recall Bioware saying(somethin along these lines) 'the best way is to make quality games that ppl feel are worth buying' and i agree totally with that
OK, fair enough, i pirate (yay i can say im a pirate ^^) but i will pay for a game if it is really worth the money, its not my fault games are overpriced and not even worth £10 nowadays...

i have torrented a few games in my time, but never any i have really enjoyed, or i would have paid for them, and someone meantioned Valve made somethin to stop pirate thingys, personnaly i think they dont need one cause there games are pure awesome! i would never torrent a game of that standard, i would have paid £100 for the Orange Box...

But to finish, some pirates are morally wrong, they dont pay for anythin, but it doesnt mean we are all like that, so dont label us, dont rant (only i can do that ) and put up with it, all this rant did was lower what everyone thought of u...

 

[Geoffrey42]

Great job justifying crime guys.

Y'all (pirates and their defenders) are slime. You ARE making horrible points and arguments. "Pirating isn't totally free, they still have to buy the PC." So bank robbery is just fine as long as I purchase a quality gun? I would love to see your upbringing and ask you parents how they think you could possibly pass as a functioning member of society.

Say you have some great idea. You make widgets(nothing in particular, just something people want). You spend years crafting the perfect widget, getting the right handle, the right curves and lines, the perfect weight and feel in the hand. You sell your widget for $50 because you think it is worth it. Some people buy it, but somebody else gets one from a friend and starts making moulds of it and giving them away for free. Is this legal? Moral? Ethical? Beneficial in any way AT ALL?

Take your excuses for piracy and apply them to the real world for a second. "Your car is to expensive, so I'll steal somebody else's" "I broke my old T.V., I'll just take that one" "No, I will not stop taking your wallet, I paid good money for these sticky gloves and I'll be damned if I don't use them!" Do any of those make sense?

Nobody justified crime (yet).

The above quote is barely a "defense" of piracy. It was a pure statement that pirates don't do what they do for free, unless they also steal the hardware, but I doubt it. This does not make the piracy "okay", it just means it is not "free".

Widgets? Did anyone make a statement indicating this was okay? Is this in response to anyone, or are you just having a reflex reaction to the subject of "piracy"? PLUS: Moulds and widgets and the supplies to produce additional copies cost money. Most IP pirates engage in what they do because it has no additional noticeable cost to them. The pirates that do what you're talking about? They put bounties on DVD-sniffing dogs in Malaysia, and nobody has ever tried to defend them... Go home and play with your straw-man by yourself.

No, your lunatic fringe statements don't make any sense. Which conversation are you in?

I'm sorry... who are you talking to? The one "quote" you seem to have honed in on is barely identifiable as a "defense" of piracy, yet you go on for paragraphs pretending we're all defending piracy?

 

[fix-the-spade]

I have a question.

It's all fine and dandy to rail against the western software pirates who (mostly) download one or a couple of copies of each game, they make a nice easy target. But what about the Far East?

The claim of 20 pirate discs for every one official sold might not be inflated, but I gaurantee that 19.9 of those discs will have come from China, where there is pretty much no copyright law (as long as the product isn't Chinese).
Even if every European and American software pirate ever was thrown in jail for eternity. It would barely make a dent in overall piracy.

Maybe your next article should look into this. The one you've just written was a nice little diversion, but you didn't really address any new issues.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Another thing.

You made no mention of the way PC devs treat their customers.

Mr Yerli might complain that no-one bought his game. But Crysis works on maybe 1% of all Pc's. Even then it's an unstable, broken game that they offer no support or patches for. Why should anyone pay £50 for a product that doesn't work?
The same applies to EA. I haven't bought one of their games since battlefield 2 because there's simply no backup and the verification processes they dream up are plain intrusive.

Compare that to Valve, I still buy games off Steam. I have no idea how high piracy is for Valve games but I'll bet it's lower than average. The download, installation processes are painless. It doesn't ask if the game is genuine every time I unplug the printer (I'm looking at you EA). The pricing is cheap and the games run fine on a wide variety of hardware.
On top of that they fix bugs and exploits at an impressive rate whilst any extra content they add is usually free.

It's fine for developers to whine about how nobody buys their game because of piracy. But the argument would carry more credibility if the product was any good to begin with.

 

[Crusnik]

I have downloaded games in the past, and I am in no hurry to do so again. I had two games (Halo and Halo 2) and they somehow screwed up my sound system. After doing a a factory reset to fix the problem, I opted to not download them again. Having said that, I will probably pirate BioShock in the near future. I legitimately own a copy for PC, but the restrictions that have been placed on it through DRM are ridiculous. By buying it and downloading it, the company had not lost a sale and I don't have to deal with they're BS. If something goes wrong, I back up important files to an external drive regularly, and most of my games are on Steam, so another reformat wouldn't be too much of a hassle.

 

[EvolExE]

I do agree that piracy is wrong "BUT" (if i could make the font bigger and red i would) sorry Sean some of the comments you spouted in that article are just beyond belief, lets have a closer look.

"As I understand the basic fabric of the social contracts that struggle to keep most of humanity from bashing each other's heads in with the bleached femurs of our enemies, there are some basic concepts about right and wrong that we all agree to by living within a society. One of those is that when you use something that someone else used resources to create, you're expected to give some of your resources in return. That's good. That's ten thousand years of civilization at work. It's safe to describe the concept as pretty well entrenched."

Yeah thats all well and good if the thing created was finished, complete, OR NOT F**KING BROKEN! and this is the underlying problem. Until there is a developers standards commission governing the release of FINISHED titles to the gaming markets then its piracy that is going to dictate which game i will decide to buy.

Looking up at my shelf i worked out i have over £400 worth in games that are either broken, or discontinued in some form or another, lets just transfer that across to my films collection, oh would you believe it ! £0, now if this was 500/1000 years ago and you sold me a Wagon you just built claiming it had all 4 weels and to my stupidity i believed you, then you ran of with the cash and spent it claiming some law that says once sold no comebacks, you would have found my foot "entrenched" in your ass at the very least, in modern times we cant do this.

"When I hear all that yahoo-whackjob nonsense about entitlement to try before you buy"

See above, really developers can do allot more to help gamers decide if its the right game for them, but they choose to hide behind Technically limited Demos and bullshit license agreements that are akin to modern day legalized con-artists.

Nuff said.

 

[Singing Gremlin]

Great job justifying crime guys.

Y'all (pirates and their defenders) are slime. You ARE making horrible points and arguments. "Pirating isn't totally free, they still have to buy the PC." So bank robbery is just fine as long as I purchase a quality gun? I would love to see your upbringing and ask you parents how they think you could possibly pass as a functioning member of society.

Say you have some great idea. You make widgets(nothing in particular, just something people want). You spend years crafting the perfect widget, getting the right handle, the right curves and lines, the perfect weight and feel in the hand. You sell your widget for $50 because you think it is worth it. Some people buy it, but somebody else gets one from a friend and starts making moulds of it and giving them away for free. Is this legal? Moral? Ethical? Beneficial in any way AT ALL?

Take your excuses for piracy and apply them to the real world for a second. "Your car is to expensive, so I'll steal somebody else's" "I broke my old T.V., I'll just take that one" "No, I will not stop taking your wallet, I paid good money for these sticky gloves and I'll be damned if I don't use them!" Do any of those make sense?

Y'all don't deserve to have a voice in any argument. Your opinion is worthless, you points are void, and you have no damn excuse. Stop being cheap and get a job to buy your games, music, and videos like people who are worth something.

Until that point, you are spineless cowards who are trying to claim something that ain't yours. GROW A PAIR!

Hang on. The PC argument was said once. It is, I'll agree with you, a rubbish argument. Unfortunately in picking on it, you have lowered yours to a similar level. In your rabid offensive, you pick on the weakest argument of the thread, seemingly to blindly ignore the other, far more prevalent arguments out there. You then proceed to repeatedly compare it to utterly incomparable situations, give it a good lathering of hyperbole and sit back and look smug. Allow me to continue.

First up, with your original offensive of the "have to buy a PC" argument. You utterly fail to say why it is a bad idea, only leap into one of your useless comparisons. Being a gent, I shall do it for you. If you give Dell one and a half grand for your super gaming computer, it is somewhat unlikely Dell will pass all that onto the various game developers you pilfer from.

But "So bank robbery is just fine as long as I purchase a quality gun?" is a very bad comparison. A more fair comparison is that would bank robbery be fine when you've opened an account with said bank but unfortunately you've accessed your account three times this month and that's all you're allowed, and now you cannot get at your dosh without giving away both your kidneys? (Hyperbole there, but I couldn't resist.)

Your widget comparison also needs a little bit on the end. So you're having your widget's nicked, oh no. Some people are still buying yours, but to combat the theft you demand, by law, that every widget owner must come and personally show you their widget once a week so you can check if it's fake. The stolen widgeters are not going to, and you can't enforce it. It just penalises your paying customers.

Your cost paragraph is the closest you have to being reasonable, but it's still not fair. Your comparisons suggest that we will hurt some poor sod on the street by thieving their stuff. This isn't true, since it would be stealing data, not other's people's hard copies. The only possible way you could modify your arguments would be "I can't afford a TV, so I'll use my handy matter replicator and make a copy of my mate's." which, while still stealing from the TV company, is not the kind of mug-an-old-lady theft you seem to be alluding to.

 

[Asehujiko]

Every single anti piracy argument is based on the fact that every single pro piracy argument is inhrently and uncondtionaly invalid and anything that is opposed to that is therefor inherently and unconditionaly the thruth. So instead of providing counter arguments which you will dismiss as invalid before you even read them, i'll just rip your arguments to shreds.

"drm is justfied because it stops pirates" - Wrong, drm does nothing to delay pirates. Drm prevents the people dumb enough to buy "legal"(last time i checked you could be jailed for infecting other people's computers with rootkits...) games from playing said games and in some occasions damage/destroy unrelated hardware(starforce broke one of my dvd players which is something i never saw anywhere in the eula or tos of any game that used it) and cause other software to stop working as well(securom cannot co-exist with any spyware remover that also detects rootkits). Name me one example where drm caused more would be pirates to buy the game then scaring away costumers who don't like rootkits. Look up Sins of a Solar Empire.

"if you can't pay for a game you shouldn't play it" - Wrong and it even completely nulls your problem, lost sales. If a costumer couldn't buy the product anyway, how much do you loose if he plays it anyway and how much do you gain if he doesn't? Absolutely nothing. And then there's the problem involving national bans, regional differences(anybody with the american version of The Witcher knows what i'm talking about), games no longer being sold or otherwise being a pain in the arse to obtain. Downloading a game doesn't cause one copy of the game to migicly disapear in a puff of smoke before it could be sold. Crysis could never sell more then 3.1 million copies because there are only 3.1 million computers that can run it. So i'd say that 3.06 million copies are a reasonable ammount of sales. The only effect this could possibly have is that a bad product might discourage the costumer to buy your more reasonably priced products in the future or a good product might cause somebody to start saving for your next game.

"developers stop making pc games because of piracy" - Wrong, everybody is migrating because quickly cashing in on the Halo Syndrome is easier then making something work on different hardware settings. The ones that do stay are the ones who think that you are wrong as well. Sins of a Solar Empire deserves a second mention here.

"pirates shouldn't be allowed to discuss piracy because they won't change their opinion" - So nobody is allowed to enter an argument unless the opposition is confident that they can be persuaded? Why don't you fuck off as well then?

Irregardless of the content of the debate, i'm firmly behind the pirates on this one because they actualy deliver meaningful arguments here instead of assuming that everthing they say is law only because they say it. Surely they bring their load of bullshit as well but i've yet to hear anything sensible from the objectivist camp.

 

[panfist]

You assume that everyone who says that a download does not equal a lost sale is a pirate. That's false, because I'm off the opinion that a download does not equal a lost sale and I'm not a pirate.

Yes, I have downloaded games before and I will in the future, but if they are good I buy them. I bought six games last year. I have bought four games so far this year. If I download a game and it sucks, I'm not going to buy it. If I don't have a chance to play a game before I buy it, I'm DEFINITELY not going to buy it, no way jose. If you want to label me a pirate because I download games in order to decide whether I'm going to buy them, then I'm going to label you a retard because you have your head up your ass.

Would you buy a car without test driving it? Would you buy a CD without hearing a song from it on the radio?

You say that Cevat from Crytek may have inflated his 20-to-1 number, but this article is even worse. You say that pirates should not be included in the discussion about piracy; that is the most whacked out thing I have ever heard. Let's divide gamers into three categories: people who bought the game, people who pirated the game, and people who don't care about the game. How do you propose to increase sales without somehow targeting the pirates?

How about the study that shows that despite the MPAA's claims that piracy is costing them billions, growth in the movie industry has been steady since 1995.
http://torrentfreak.com/us-pirate-party-study-shatters-mpaa-claims-080709/

Allocating any resources to stopping piracy is about the stupidest thing anyone can do. It's about as dumb as England installing 4.2 MILLION surveillance cameras only to accomplish a zero percent drop in crime. Perhaps before they installed their 4.2 million cameras they should have realized that a high-tech device known as a "hoodie" can foil their cameras.

 

[Lvl 64 Klutz]

Saying that you can't blame piracy for bad sales is like saying you can't blame bank robbery for the failing economy. It's WRONG, who cares how much good or bad it does.

That's why Sean argues that pro-piracy arguments are irrelevant. I could go around and shoot every racist in the head, thereby wiping out any problems with racism, but I'd still be considered a serial killer and condemned by any moral person.
--------------

That being said, I don't understand this statement from the article at all:

"Compared to an industry with a PR problem and the perception that said industry is going to see legitimate customers as criminals anyway..."

what's it referring to?

 

[ash1300]

Aside from spending three pages to basically say "piracy is bad and I won't listen to people who disagree," the whole premise of the article seems wrong.

The industry should listen to pirates. They might learn something.

I don't pirate games. (Thanks to my job, I have enough money to buy games and not enough time to play them.) But, I think I have a pretty good idea of why people pirate games.

The main reason for a lot of people is probably "why pay for something that you can get for free?" Those people aren't going to stop pirating games anytime soon. But there are a lot of other reasons to pirate games. If the industry paid attention to these reasons and tried to address them, instead of disregarding all software pirates as parisites they might actually significantly reduce piracy and much more importantly increase sales.

For example, I expect that a lot of piracy occurs because of the riskiness of purchasing PC games. Some games are too buggy to play out of the box. Some games don't run acceptably on their minimum system specs. Some games can even harm your computer (e.g. those with Starforce DRM). Since you generally can't return defective games like you can with virtually anything else you would ever care to buy, you're often out $50 with nothing to show for it. Faced with this risk proposition, it's not suprising that people choose to pirate games.

If the game industry started to listen to pirates, maybe they could convert some of them (although obviously not all of them) and more importantly (to me) maybe heading out to buy games might become less of a roll of the dice.

 

[usernamed]

Oh Sean, you are full of venom. (I nearly said something else)

Firstly, I buy my games, so feel free to listen.

As I said above I buy my video games, as does everybody I know who plays games in the tech environment that I work in. We are fortunate to have jobs that pay us enough to have a modicum of disposable income. However, if I cast my mind back to when I was young, spotty, had £2 a week pocket money and an Amiga, I did pirate games. The reason was a simple socio-economic one, I couldn't afford to buy any.

I can state as certainty that not one game sale was lost through my piracy as a 13-14 year old. For me to buy an Amiga game would have meant staying at home for 13 weeks without doing anyting. No tennis, no cinema, no music, no swimming, no fizzy drink, no sweets, nothing. My only opportunity for income boosting work was a paper round, and in an area with 200 kids of suitable age and a total of 11 paper-round slots there was almost no hope of getting one. Mine wasn't one of those 'cash for chores' households either.

If you successfully managed to stamp out piracy, I can tell you exactly what would happen. There would be a lot of second-hand consoles and PC's on the market as kids who'd got bored of the game their PC/console came with, and had no hope of getting another game before Christmas, sold them due to disuse, because they'd got to thinking that they'd rather have a bike/skateboard/guitar/radio-controlled car etc. than a dusty plastic box they never use.

You'd actually shrink the market. You may not like it, but piracy is the hook that keeps kids into gaming until the point that they have an income and can afford it legitimately.

I'm not saying it should be this way, but I don't see the industry coming up with any innovative ideas around 'purchase price based on ability to pay', I just see media companies trying to sue children.

 

[Bretty]

I do download games, and I have to be hounest, I don't feel that guilty about it.

Sean Sands released a game that still, to this day, will not run on full graphics settings well. And he gets angry at me and people like me that he released a game that only 2% of gamers can play well on high? Does he understand business? Niche products are NOT big sellers. They never have been and never will. Why is Crysis a niche product? If you have a crap comp would you buy it? If you just spent $3000 on a comp would you? The target market for this game was huge, but in reality they targeted the wrong market. They wanted all young FPSers to play when only those with amazing comps would.

Ever since napster in the 90s I have been downloading things. So downloading a game is no great shakes, call downloading music a 'gateway drug'. I know it is not legal but that will never stop me. If I think I will play a game for maybe a week if that or just see what all the commotion is about I will download it.

But if there is a ground breaking game, WAR, WoW, Spore, WiC, COD4, E:TW, M:TW etc... I will buy them. And do you know why? Because they are good games, supported by good companies with good track records of customer satisfaction. And yes I BOUGHT Sins! Another awsesome game by the way.

I also bought all of the BF2 series....

And why all the hate on EA lol, they make your games better 8). Unless you are terrible at computers and dont know how to work around DRM etc.

 

[kiltmanfortywo]

Nobody justified crime (yet).

The above quote is barely a "defense" of piracy. It was a pure statement that pirates don't do what they do for free, unless they also steal the hardware, but I doubt it. This does not make the piracy "okay", it just means it is not "free".

Widgets? Did anyone make a statement indicating this was okay? Is this in response to anyone, or are you just having a reflex reaction to the subject of "piracy"? PLUS: Moulds and widgets and the supplies to produce additional copies cost money. Most IP pirates engage in what they do because it has no additional noticeable cost to them. The pirates that do what you're talking about? They put bounties on DVD-sniffing dogs in Malaysia, and nobody has ever tried to defend them... Go home and play with your straw-man by yourself.

No, your lunatic fringe statements don't make any sense. Which conversation are you in?

I'm sorry... who are you talking to? The one "quote" you seem to have honed in on is barely identifiable as a "defense" of piracy, yet you go on for paragraphs pretending we're all defending piracy?

Way to miss the point.

My statements might be a little extreme or bizarre, but that is merely to make a point.(Which, again, you missed.) If your flawed logic makes no sense in these scenarios, how does it make sense in the real world?

"I paid money for a game, for some reason I cannot play it anymore(damage, loss of CD key, etc) so it is right and fair for me to steal a copy?" Lets throw this into the out-of-context-machine i recently acquired and let us see what comes out.

I have purchased a widget(nothing in particular, could be anything from a watch to a plane) and it stops working. Well, I paid good money for it, therefore I own the rights to get as many of these widgets as I want without paying 1 cent more. Sounds fair to me. What about the manufacture of the widgets? Where is the fairness to him? He designed and built these things and for the right to use them he should be paid what he deems fair market value. If you have a problem with that, DON'T USE HIS WIDGETS!

And that analogy of the Dell, banks, account limits, and kidneys makes no sense either. You also appeared to have missed the point. Let me try again: You spend money on a fantastic printer, amazing ink, and pristine paper. You now have the means to make copies of $100 bills, so it is your god given right to do so? After all, you are not hurting anybody, just printing some money that you didn't have to work for. Sounds fair and legal.

The "Try it then buy it(or not)" logic is also full of holes. You cannot compare it to test driving a car, hearing a song on the radio, or any of that other nonsense. If you want to try a game before you buy it, you get the demo or rent the game. Demo's are available for a great many games and are perfectly legal, so try those. They are often free or very, very cheap. You idea of the car would be better translated to stealing a car, driving it around, then buying another one because you like the handling. Most illogical.

My last comment in this post, yes I have more but I have shit to do, is the idea of excluding you cowards from the discussions. Remember that piracy is illegal. Plain and simple. Using the out-of-context-machine(needs a better name) yet again, lets try something.

A government has enacted laws to make theft illegal(crazy I know). They are still having a problem with theft, so they try several things but nothing works. Their next step is to call a town hall style meeting with the thieves and try to talk with them about what will keep them from stealing peoples shit. Where do you see this going?

Again, be a productive member of society and stop stealing shit.

Kiltman

P.S. Plato was wrong. People don't uphold justice because of a lack of cahones, it is because they have a sense of right and wrong. In Virginia, many of the public schools and official buildings have a system of anybody who is in a fight is guilty. I have, on several occasions, jumped in a fight to help those who are clearly being wronged DESPITE social consequences. Compassion for fellow man is the driving force for many on the "justice" side. Ask any Marine, Soldier, or sailor why they do it, and I promise you it is NOT because of a fear of the consequences.

 

[Makaze]

Lets throw this into the out-of-context-machine

Way out of context. Right out of the context of data duplication not having a material cost...

The closest you're coming to a coherent rebuttal is your $100 bill counterfeiting argument which does encapsulate the concept of reproduction being costless (or close enough). But it contains another serious flaw. Games have use value and so are valuable no matter how many there are. Money doesn't have any use value, it's value is based solely on rarity and so each additional unit devalues all other units in existence.