Availability of information is a good thing on its own. This is a strong justification for pirating work old enough that it should be free, or work which is unavailable through realistic legal means. This type of pirating doesn’t even need a defense; copyright law is unjust and ridiculous on this matter, and it is not immoral to disobey an unjust law.
Material containing DRM does not quite fall into this easily defended category, because even though a working version of the product is not legally available, there is the option of buying the nonfunctional version and then pirating the working version. There is some justification for pure piracy though, because by buying the product with DRM you would be supporting DRM, which is an absolute evil. Again, availability of information is a good thing on its own, so simply not using material sold with DRM is not a good option. Personally, in this scenario I buy used so as not to support DRM too much.
I think one of the major divides here is that I, and many others, do not believe there is such a thing as the “moral right” to completely control your intellectual work. I don’t think you have a “moral right” to put your work out there, and then decide that you want to take it back and not let anyone see it for 500 years. On the other hand, I do believe that availability of information is a good thing for its own sake.
Because what do I care if it’s copied or transferred? If you email the pdf, then delete your own pdf, that’s two readers and only one sale. If that person emails the pdf, then deletes the pdf, that’s three readers and one sale. Now if you keep the copy and mail it, that’s still two readers and one sale. From my end, it’s all the same and I’m completely ignorant of what you do with a book before or after you share with a friend. That’s why I find the argument that piracy takes money from the artist somewhat disingenuous from people who don’t think twice of swapping books, or make sharp distinctions between copy and transfer. When I have to pay my rent at the beginning of the month, I don’t look at my royalty check and think “Well, it’s a good thing people only swapped my books and sold them secondhand, not copied them, or else I might not have enough to make ends meet!”
Now, like I said above, I actually don’t care too much either way. Share the books with friends, pass them around, create new fans who would be interested in following my career. Or at least somebody who might tell their friends. (Not that I want people to run out and do that right now. I’m just saying I recognize the reality of the situation and it’s beyond my control. So you know, buy my books! Support your local pepperlandgirl! )
I fully and completely support circulating libraries and lending between friends, for both the reader’s sake and for the sake of authors. But I’m saying that if the issue is artists getting paid for the work they generate, then I think people who use that argument need to think long and hard about long acceptable practices that are just as detrimental to the artist’s bottom line.
I think that we do agree. I’m just saying that from my point of view, the distinction you’re making still results in both losses (mainly monetary) and gains (word of mouth advertisement, etc). And so, for me, it’s not really much of a distinction. (And you should give me a call anyway later. I’m home all day).
I am not pretending anything, and I am merely contending that yes, true piracy hurts the labels more than the artists (yes the two need each other as the arrangement sits right now, but we seem to have agreed that that is changing due to other means of dissemination due to the internet).
I also don’t believe that me downloading a bunch of songs for me to listen to while in front of my computer or in my car is really piracy. Honestly many of the songs I have downloaded I already own on full-length releases(by purchasing them), but making MP3 compilation discs for the car is a lot easier than burning multiple tracks off multiple discs, plus the MP3 format fits hundreds of songs onto a disc rather than the WMA format.
I am not striking a blow for anyone, nor championing anything. I am doing something that I feel isn’t that big of a deal. I’ve never downloaded a single pirated movie or game, I pay for those. To me I’m just listening to internet radio. I don’t pay to listen to the radio, I don’t pay to listen to music online. The difference is I can control the format, rotation of songs and there aren’t any commercials.
Why is downloading music any different than DVRing a movie, or recording a movie onto a VCR tape if it’s for my own personal use?
I go to shows and support many of the bands I listen to with my money. So you know, they can pay back those record companies for their advancement, studio time and MTV video.
Personally, I think they’re seriously overinflating that number. There’s no way 90% of the copies of the game were pirated. And even if the number is that high, how many of that 90% would have even considered buying the game? I’ll bet it’s pretty low.
Beyond that, the Wii version is pretty well impossible to pirate.
While I continue to contend that a transfer should be legally different than a copy, let me address what I think is your core point.
I think our differences here are with respect to magnitude - authors have recognized that for centuries that folks would loan and transfer books and they would get no money from it. But that was a slow, small process, so they figured that it wasn’t enough of a concern (and from case law thus far, the courts have not considered it to be enough of a concern). In other words, it was part of the cost of doing business.
But now we have the Net - where you don’t have to know someone who read the book and hands it off to you, you have a case where a Google search calls up a link to a PDF of your book, and someone downloads it with one click, and then they have it. It’s the same net effect as you say - unless you consider the potential differential lost revenue to you. My contention, and I think it’s the same others are making, is that with the old way of paper books, your revenue “bleed” is manageable and expected. With the new way, it could be monstrous. You could, in theory, have a case where only one, single copy of your book is sold, then it’s scanned and put online, to then be downloaded by 100,000 people. While in theory someone could loan your book out IRL to 100,000 people, or make photocopies and send around 3-ring binder versions, it’s incredibly unwieldy and not very likely.
Take real life - if I want to loan a book to someone IRL, there are only 2 people I could give it to and have some expectation my book would return to me. But an e-book, well, I could send that to 50 people and not care if it returns, because I can always get another perfect copy.
So my point is, the magnitude of your potential lost money is so great in the electronic copying case that it’s a burden that you should not have to bear.
Which you base on … what, exactly? Why would they lie?
Maybe, but that still doesn’t make it all right for them to take it. If they want it, they should pay for it. If they don’t want to pay for it, they shouldn’t take it.
I base it on the fact that that number seems excessively high. And if you read the comments after that blog post, it seems that a huge majority of their paying customers are playing the game on their laptops. Laptops they take to coffee shops, libraries and other wi-fi enabled places. They then play the game at these places and upload new scores. One player thinks he played World of Goo at a minimum of 15 different locations.
When it comes right down to it, the number doesn’t pass the good old fashioned smell test.
And beyond that, “piracy rate” is a meaningless statistic. It’s only used in two situations:
Look at how many people pirated our game!
Look at how many sales we would have had if so many people hadn’t pirated our game.
Anyone who’s concerned about the financial stability of a development house shouldn’t care about (1) because you would need a lot more data to come to any conclusion. And (2) is just a flat out lie that media companies have been using since piracy become a hot button issue in the 90s.
No; it’s because of all the people who think that sellers have a right to damage their customer’s machines, and the customer should just sit back and take it. It’s because of this attitude that corporations have no responsibility towards the public, but the public has a responsibility towards them.
And one of the problems with DRM is that it encourages piracy because it means the pirates produce a better product, and are more trustworthy.
In order to pretend that it’s more popular than it is, perhaps. Or in order to justify DRM on other games. Or just because it’s practically a reflex by now to claim piracy.
Why should I trust these people ? At all ? I don’t even trust them to not include defective or malicious software in their products, much less to be honest.
For the record, Absolute, since we’re talking about Photoshop, I use the GIMP (which 1010011010 linked to in post #106) and think it’s a superior product for my needs. I would pay for it rather than steal Photoshop if given the choice–but if it were for-pay software, it wouldn’t be as good, because open-source software is almost always superior.
No, and why should I? I have no idea what that game is, don’t care enough to find out, and I don’t pirate games anyway. I mean, I’m sure I have at some point in the past, but I only play free games, myself. The kinds of PC games for sale these days don’t really interest me. But what can I say? 80-90% of people in the world are assholes. Is that news to you?
Technology has rendered the difference minute, at best. At this point, everyone and their grandmother can (and probably does) rip a borrowed CD onto their computer and/or burn a new copy themselves, despite the lender’s best intentions (or not).
I said shitty service, not shitty product.
I said more painful, not harder. When I buy music legally, I run the risk of:
Limited functionality (can I burn it onto a CD to listen to in the car?)
Installing a rootkit on my computer (NO. Just NO. NOT going to happen.)
Losing the music which I have paid for forever because the DRM decides I’ve used it irresponsibly
None of these risks come with pirating music. Again, you can’t provide a shitty service for pay and expect people to ignore the free service that’s better.
:rolleyes: Yeah, whatever. You can’t take some little game that none of us has heard of and generalize out to all of us. Not if you want to be taken seriously, anyway.
Seems perfectly clear that you are talking about musical quality. If not, what were you getting at?
Sounds like you’re scratching around trying to justify you wanting to get something for nothing; none of those risks comes with Amazon MP3. You also missed a few risks of pirating:
Misnamed files,
viruses, trojans and other exploits hiding in any downloaded files,
the risk of lawsuits.
I guess the RIAA needs to sue a few thousand more people into bankruptcy to encourage use of legal services.
I was “getting at” the main thrust of what the record industry has done to music in general, IE the shitty pop glurge that oozes out of the radio at all hours of the day and night. Lots of more innovative music, which I highly enjoy, exists at the fringes of the industry. In paying for some of that music, I would subsidize the mainstream record industry’s tactics of shaping music based on marketing, rather than artistic, concerns, not to mention the RIAA’s policy of Internet terrorism.
Cite? If you can prove that, Amazon may well win itself a new customer.
I’m willing to take those risks for a free service, and employ the countermeasures necessary against hidden exploits, whose prevalence in today’s pirated music and movies is overstated anyway. I’m not at all willing to pay for risks that do not come with the free service.
Internet terrorism has the exact opposite effect. Personally, I’ve been on the receiving end of it (mildly, granted, and from a movie studio, not the RIAA), and it’s only encouraged me to do what I can to punish the companies and industries involved. Compromising privacy is wrong and I refuse to subsidize it, which is (a small) part of why I don’t buy CDs or give to the Republican Party.
On the very first page: “play anywhere, DRM free music downloads”.
I honestly don’t understand. Your solution to this problem (which seems to have been created out of whole cloth: there’s loads of great music being produced even in the mainstream) is to not pay for anything, even for the bands that you like? How does that help similar bands get signed by record companies? How does your getting something for nothing improve the situation?
You base the observation that the number is too high on the fact (sic) that it “seems too high”? Gee, thanks for that, Karl Popper.
Right, and if you had bothered to read 2Dboy’s own post you will see that they accounted for this by tracking user profiles, coming up with a figure of 1.3 IPs per profile. They then accounted for multiple profiles per installation, and multiple installations per user, and still only managed to reduce the calculated piracy rate to 82%. This would then be bumped up again by users behind NAT routers, which would cause multiple installations to present as one IP address. So your sniff test is looking rather whiffy itself, if you ask me.
They certainly didn’t say the latter (indeed they mentioned another study suggesting they could’ve expected a maximum pirate-to-sale conversion rate of 0.1%), and they only originally mentioned the piracy rate in passing - it was others who picked up on it.
As I’ve repeatedly said above, however, this is not about 2Dboy or their response to piracy - it’s about pirates’ response to 2Dboy’s actions. Provided with everything they need to make an informed choice about whether to buy the game, and provided with a consumer-friendly product with no DRM, people still thieved the shit out of it. Which suggests that for the vast majority of pirates, these holier-than-thou justifications have absolutely nothing to do with their decision to take things without paying. I repeat: this thread is not about what companies should sensibly do in response to piracy; it is about why people think it’s okay to pirate.
So, let me get this straight: a small independent publisher releases a game sans DRM, and you think it’s all a nefarious plot to further the cause of DRM? Did you even bother to read their blog post that I linked to? Y’know, the one where they said:
Yeah, these people are clearly seditious bastards out to wreck your computer. Can’t trust wankers like that, can you?
If they’re associated with the RIAA or other organizations whose practices I find reprehensible, then yes.
It doesn’t, I hope. I’d rather similar bands stay independent.
Wait. Stop right here. What the hell does “the vast majority of pirates” have to do with a game nobody has heard of? Why do you have such a hard-on for this one game developer? Lotsofpeoplemakegreatgamesforfree.
I don’t have such a hard on for this one game developer, and I don’t see what the fact that you haven’t heard of the game has to do with anything. Their data merely proves to me that pirates are not, by and large, motivated by punishing DRM-implementers or big-name publishers. They take products because they want them, but don’t want to pay. Otherwise 2Dboy wouldn’t have seen such a high piracy rate.
I don’t see why you’re having a hard time understanding this, to be honest. It’s not tricky. Pirates keep telling us that they do what they do because publishers are evil in various ways. Here is one that is not evil, and yet it still gets pirated. Ergo, pirates don’t actually give a shit who they’re taking from.
Yes. I know. And I’m sure their products all get rampantly pirated, too. I’m just using the 2Dboy example because it’s a relatively prominent case (and yes, the game has received quite a lot of positive attention) for which data is available. You’ll have heard of data; it’s what we use to find out facts (unless we’re Justin, of course, in which case we just assert them).
I’m a little hesitant to fully enter this discussion, since it’s a bit too emotional for my liking, but just on the point of the hurt done by pirating, here (pdf) is a study done by two independent economists that concludes that “downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero”, at least when it comes to the music industry.
That in itself doesn’t make it morally right to pirate, of course, but it shows the harm that’s being done to be rather overstated.
How does one case of an application of minor importance prove anything? Their methods for determining the 90% number are suspect, as 2dboy admits on his own page, and this could very well apply only to fans of DRM games and 2dboy’s games. You’re not exactly applying a rigorous standard of intellectual curiosity when you link one relatively obscure case to an entire sociocultural phenomenon that spans the globe.
Bullshit. The plural of anecdote is not data. Nor is the plural of “poorly-thought-out fraction problem” data.
Are you? Then I’m sure you can explain how, exactly, one might “pirate” an open-source game.
That’s rich, coming from you.
If that’s true–and I’m just going to have to take your word for it, I guess–then rampant piracy has resulted in an explosion of name recognition for 2dboy, whose sales numbers can only benefit from same. I’ll tell you what, if I put out an album/game/program/movie/whatever, I’d be tickled pink if its piracy or theft became an international phenomenon. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, after all.
It’s called “falsification”. A claim is made (e.g. that pirates pirate for ethical reasons). A counterexample is found (a company that ticks none of the pirates’ unethical boxes, yet is still pirated). The claim is disproved. This is really quite basic stuff, you know.
You keep wittering on about this game not being important (whatever that means), but that is to completely miss the point. And he didn’t “admit” his method was suspect - he agreed that the direct IP:licence ratio wasn’t the best measure, and ran through a number of extra steps to make the figure more robust, still arriving at a very high piracy rate. I don’t understand why you’re trying to make this process sound shifty - this is the day-to-day stuff of factual research.
Care to justify that in any way at all? He got lots of publicity (for an independent game) pre-release because his game was quirky, original and he released a good demo. This had nothing to do with piracy, which only started after the game was released. This “piracy benefits the publisher” line is so much crap.
That’s nice for you. You’d probably want to consider releasing under a creative commons licence, then, and soliciting donations. That way people would be able to share your work without breaking the law. Other people prefer to be paid up front for their work, and that is their right too.
But again, has 2dboy made any mention of whether or not they’re happy with sales? Because every game is going to be pirated, that happens, but it rarely affects the bottom line of the company beyond a wholly made up figure.
And I say the 90% is too high because that number just seems absurd and is likely a backlash against the fact that the game is $20 (which many gamers view as too high for this kind of thing). Couple that with Jonathan Blow’s (Braid) recent hissy fit over the fact that not enough people bought his quirky and unique downloadable game to keep him in ramen and chunky glasses and there’s your reason to pirate. Oh and Luc Bernard’s (Eternity’s Child) hissy fit over reviewers panning his quirky, unique game.
Basically, it’s a bad time to be an indy developer of quirky, unique games because so many of them appear to be assholes. (To be fair, I’ve heard the 2dboy guys are really good people, so this shouldn’t apply to them).
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