Seconded. Since any pirate can get around it without any trouble DRM is, as you say, punishing solely the legit customers. What happens when they can’t use their legit copy because DRM blocks them? It is as much a cause of piracy as it is a reaction to it.
The smart video game companies can get around piracy. Blizzard, for example. Want to download WC3 illegally? Go ahead. Good luck getting onto battle.net, where all the real fun lies. Contrast EA Games, who buy out companies and produce crappy sequels (RA3, anyone?) while whining because no one wants to pay for their shitty product with their shitty unskippable intro ads.
It is a lot harder to prevent piracy of TV shows, music and movies, so they need to embrace new strategies. With TV, for example, ads can run every now and then across a header bar along the bottom of the screen. that would suck, but there are plenty of commercial networks that do that already, as if the damn ad breaks weren’t enough.
In conclusion:
1)piracy can not be stopped, it needs to be approached in an intelligent way.
2)consumers are pissed off at a lot of the big companies and this is one factor leading to piracy
3)piracy is theft, as the holders of the intellectual rights do not benefit from your consumption. So, IR holders need to see point (1)
4)EA Games sucks. DRM sucks as well.
That’s a fair point. Again, I would argue that it’s a different, less severe kind of theft, because I’m not taking away something that the car makers once had and now don’t.
So you would put a price on the love of your relatives? Your daughter has/would have a value that could be expressed in monetary terms? Or is she/would she be worthless? After all, monetary value == worth, and all worth can be expressed in monetary terms, right?
I’m not saying it’s his right, I’m offering a potential reason for his attitude which doesn’t involve ulterior motives, thus invalidating the assumption that willful disregard of the law must be inspired by some deeper need.
Well, I’m a proponent of the open-source movement, through which many successful companies (see Red Hat, SuSe, Novell, IBM, etc.) have made substantial profits. I believe that Photoshop would be better software and, yes, that Adobe would still make substantial profit, more than enough to justify the continuous development of the product.
This has also been proven in the realm of music, where Radiohead and a number of artists using the Creative Commons license have released their work for free and still turned substantial profits.
Not only that, but in cahoots with their lobbyist-persuaded friends in Congress, they have extended copyright protections beyond any length of time that can reasonably be justified if you really believe that the purpose of copyright is to encourage creativity.
They have also, through legislation like the DMCA, effectively circumvented fair use, making it almost non-functioning in some cases. In doing this, their level of immorality rises at least as high as that of the pirates.
You can afford a computer and an internet connection, can’t you? Maybe you can find 10 other students and pool your money and have your school buy a copy for you all to use. Maybe it’s not so impossible after all for you to compensate Adobe for their labors. But you’ll never know if you just decide to steal it.
If you really can’t afford it, maybe you can get Adobe to donate their software to your school. I think they do that, actually - I know Microsoft does.
This reminds me of another problem with piracy - what does it do to manufacturers of other software at lower price points? If I am selling Paint Shop Pro for $99, who is going to buy my software if people think it’s okay to just steal Adobe’s?
How about “plagiarism”? Do we all think plagiarism is okay, because you’re not actually stealing anything physical from the original creator? After all, they still have their original work, right?
One copy on ten PCs for 10 students? Isn’t that immoral in your eyes? Anyway, stop with the suppositions. My example deals with a poor student who can genuinely not afford to obtain Photoshop legally. Stop pretending there is no such thing.
An indescribably high value is not “without value”. Priceless is not synonymous with worthless.
All worth can be expressed in monetary terms - I would give any amount of money to save the life of one of my relatives. That doesn’t mean they’re worthless, it means they’re the most valuable things in the universe to me.
ZebraShaSha said she thinks physical objects are “without value”. I don’t see how that means anything other than “zero value”.
They would install it on one PC and the students would share access to it.
Inability to afford something doesn’t make it ethical to steal. I would probably agree with you if you argued that it would be unethical for Adobe not to donate software to such a person. But it is not ethical for such a person to make that decision for Adobe because they feel they need it.
As I said, your stealing diminishes the worth of the product that other people have had the integrity to pay for.
EDIT: I phrased this badly and am too tired to revise it. I do not think this is an accurate statement of my opinion, so don’t bother replying to it. Will be back in the morning!
I don’t think that’s nearly as much of a given as you seem to think it is.
And what of the system by which the law-abiding have less freedom to use the content than the law-breaking do? People often speak of the incentive for people to make things, but what of the incentive for people to buy things? As it stands in the music industry, there is much less incentive for me to buy music than to steal it, even without considering the exorbitant prices of records and the tendency of record labels–who do more to cheapen the music than the artists do to enrich it–to skim off the top. In fact, I would argue that buying CDs is tantamount to enabling theft of a much realer fashion.
And, of course, when those students grow up to be writers, video editors, etc., etc., they’ll have the money to buy the software.
Seconded.
Bullshit. DRM has done nothing to curtail piracy. It exists because some idiot thought it was a good idea; if anything, it’s frustrated the people who paid for the stuff anyway, and has driven more people to piracy. Not to mention that DRM software has crippled end users’ computers before.
Nonsense. Paying for DRM-protected products legitimizes DRM and encourages its continued use. Pirating content sends the message that it is not acceptable, and is much more likely to lead to a sea change.
If the relevant industries don’t like me pirating their work, they are free to stop using systems that punish me for buying it.
You can make stuff like this up, but the fact is that Adobe is doing extremely well despite, or because of, the fact that its high-end software is easy to pirate.
How do you expect me to empty my entire bank account for software when I need that money for textbooks, food and transit to my classes?
Maybe you should make a better product. I doubt Paint Shop Pro is doing well against Adobe among people who buy it legally, either.
Plagiarism has nothing to do with piracy and you know it.
Do you make it a habit of dropping into every thread you are uninterested in and leaving a turd?
The last thread you started, back in April, was entitled Nutter Butters: Creme Patties or Sandwich Cookies? I didn’t jump in there and shit out “I don’t give a fuck which one you like!”, so what the hell is your problem?
So your daughter has a monetary value, then? Theoretically, if I had enough money, I could buy your daughter from you?
Well, that certainly sounds like a great educational environment.
By the way, your link explicitly states that institutions of higher learning, and everyone outside of a select number of first-world countries, are not eligible for free Adobe software.
I didn’t say that was always the case, so please, knock it off. I gave an example where the thing being stolen wasn’t an actual thing and the stealing of it caused no financial loss to the company that provided it and was not stolen out of greed and it absolutely could not be obtained legally due to cost. The person doing the stealing also believes by doing so it will make it more possible to be a contributing member of society. What makes the theft in my case as explained unethical?
If you’re not even going to bother to read the entirety of my posts before responding to them, this whole exercise is pointless. I’m not going to repeat myself.
Musicians aren’t allowed to set the market price if a new band wants to create a cover version of the song. There is a statutory price, and the only negotiating room is under it because if the intellectual property owner refuses to budge, a cover band can simply end the negotiations, pay the government-listed price, and go on with their music.
Software is obviously different in many ways, but there is at least a precedent for forcing an intellectual property owner to accept a fair price, as determined by government fiat. Obviously, creators should be paid for their efforts, but eventually we reach a point that the value in spreading the data outweighs the owner’s stubbornness. It is not unreasonable in the slightest that we force these creators to give up some control over distribution, potentially including price in certain circumstances, as long as we stringently enforce their right to be adequately compensated for their work, so that we can be assured that new inspired souls will enter these fields in the future and bless us with more such creations.
Of course, this is a nuanced position, which you claimed not to want in the OP. But you personally entered this nuance into the picture: You simply cannot make blanket claims about owners having a right to set the price when many do not possess such a right in different mediums.
I read the whole thing. I didn’t quote the whole thing because that’s just silly; any reader can scroll right up and see the whole thing. To prove I read your post, I’m going to retype it in its entirety in Spanish:
Now, respond to my argument and apologize, or I’ll be left with no option but to conclude that you are truly and hopelessly full of shit.
I answered that question in the bolded section of the post you were replying to. No one could give me enough money to buy my daughter from me - she is the most valuable thing in the universe. That is the complete opposite of valueless.