Piracy

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Yes. Also, in some jurisdictions, grabbing a copy from the shelf might be a much lesser crime than downloading, at least per the letter of the statute. It's even possible that a small theft, say shoplifting of a single game, would be a misdemeanor, whereas downloading would be a normal crime. That's rubbish.

 

You are correct that I am not looking for one because I do not believe there is a difference. If this offends anyone here all I can say is that is too bad. I stand by what I said. I do not believe that we have the right to do as we please simply because it pleases us.

If someone writes a story and you steal the plot and concepts that is plagiarism,= and is illegal and immoral. You didn't steal the book but you stole the creation of another person. No player buys a game. They buy a license to play the game.I have a lot of disks with games on them. I own the disk but not the game. The only game I own is one I created myself. If someone develops a mod for a game and uploads it for downloading it does not belong to those who download it. It belongs to the modder and the owners of the original game.

Someone once stole some expensive gloves and Christmas ornaments that I had made. The ornaments were not worth anything in monetary value but I was more upset by their theft than the theft of the expensive gloves. Taking without permission something, anything, which does not belong to you is stealing. It is wrong.

There is no difference from stealing a game disk from a store or downloading illegally a game.

 

AMaster's point is logically compelling. Conflating copying or software piracy with theft is pretty disingenious logically and legally.

Theft is taking something away from the owner or proprietor, which he thus physically loses.

Downloading a game means merely obtaining a copy of the data, which leaves the property of the owner unchanged. You do not take away any of his '0s and 1s'. You duplicate them. It is not theft by any stretch of the definition. What he loses are prospective sales.

That is an important distinction technically, logically and legally. It is important where theft statutes are being used against software piracy. Nulla poena sine lege suggests that criminal law must not analogously applied. The problematic implications of this distinction make it imperative that criminal law embrace software piracy as a category of its own, if criminalising it is desired.

 

And as long as the law is not clear about it a grey area exists

 

But Montresor is right in saying that it is like photocopying a book out of the library - which is also illegal. Of course, it is much more labourious than downloading digital information, and therefore much rarer. Of course, when you're a student and can't afford the £50 book that you need in order to pass your course, spending an evening whatching the flashes of the photocopier is a small price to pay...

How exactly? Employ a small army to go through everyone's downloads by hand? I would just love to hear my ISP explain why they have to monitor all my incoming and outgoing packets of data. They wouldn't stay my ISP for long...

 

Ragusa, you almost had me agreeing with you. Good post but....Piracy by any name is still taking something that does not belong to you and if you then either give it or sell it to another person you have compounded the problem. Maybe those who pirate wouldn't buy the softwarein the first place but that does not make it right and only hurts those of us who get our software legitmately.

Please refer to Montresor's post. He said it quite well.

 

I am going to repeat myself a third time. How you feel about piracy is irrelevent. It is a fact. We all find earthquakes horrible but there isn't much we can do to stop them. What we can do is to minimize the damage they cause, build houses to withstand them and so forth and so on. Right now most countries have copyright laws that make a huge chunk of their population into criminals. A crime is only a crime as long as society views it as such and whether you agree or not there are as many if not more who do not view piracy as a crime or simply not care. Instead of *****ing and moaning and branding more than half of the population of the western world under the age of 50 as immoral criminals work with the technology, not against it.

 

I do put myself in these people's shoes - hell, I don't even need to half the time - their postings on the internet are plain for all to see. Some get angry, some don't care, some see the good sides, and others are pirates themselves. Given that I fully intend to be one of these people whose livelihood depends on people buying something I've made, I've put a good deal of thought into how I would feel about people pirating that thing.

You talk as though pirates are all these horrible, horrible people who just pirate everything and leave the people who produce the stuff they enjoy to hang. That's a ridiculous caricature that has absolutely no bearing on the reality of things. I say that as someone who has pirated versions of both NWN2+MotB and a legit version of NWN2 Gold sitting in front of me, mp3s from albums that I now own, et cetera.

It just isn't as clear-cut as you like to portray. A few weeks ago I was on the forum of a torrent tracker for RPGs. Someone requested a copy of the game 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars. The person who stripped the watermark and posted it on Rapidshare was the same person who noted that if they enjoyed the game, they should buy them game. These anecdotes in no way show that piracy is good, but I'm really sick of this nonsense perception that pirates are all arseholes. They're not, and the demonisation of pirates is ridiculous.

Why should I? I can have my cake and eat it too, and it doesn't change the practicalities of the matter at all. Me not playing the game and me pirating the game have exactly the same impact on the publisher - no sale.

See, I don't understand your side of this argument. Why do without it? It's there for the taking, and the developer gets the same amount anyway (nothing).

For instance - I can't ever see myself buying Flash in the forseeable future. It's an $800 program - I just can't afford it. However, it's also extremely convenient for me to have it for a uni course I'm doing. Why shouldn't I pirate it? I just can't see any good reason not to - Adobe make as much money from me if I pirate it as if I do without and greatly inconvenience myself.

I agree (I think). If someone can justify the cost of something they want to themselves, then not buying it is probably being selfish (yes, I've twisted your words a bit ).

Pirates are leechers - much like someone in a torrent swarm who downloads but doesn't upload. Leeching isn't bad, as such - you don't cost anyone anything - but equally it's not that nice either.

That's the same basic stance that most indie PnP developers seem to take, from my reading on Story Games.

Also, the basic idea behind his second point - even if piracy is morally wrong - it's not going away. There are no measures drastic enough that any organisation can take that would stop it (and I sincerely hope I'm right about that, or the internet is going to turn into a vacant corporate ****heap). Railing against it isn't going to help - there are millions of people who don't find it wrong enough to stop doing it.

The only thing to do is accept it, because the non-acceptance of it is irrelevant. Pirates are going to ignore you and your frantic flailing to stop it. All the litigating and DRM in the world is never going to help. There are perfectly valid ways forward that don't involve all companies creating stuff to go out of business (indeed, just continuing on as-is will probably not make them go out of business, though it's hardly optimal). It's just a matter of giving up on how things used to be done and dealing with the current reality of the matter.

Sorry, but that's really stupid. Got a spare penal colony to send the odd, oh, I don't know, several million people to? There's a good reason to colonise the moon right there, so we have somewhere to put all those dastardly pirates that are ruining everything!

Also, as you seem not to realise, there are many valid uses for p2p. Taleworlds, for instance, distributes Mount & Blade through torrents to save on bandwidth.

Also, would someone please listen to joacqin before he has a stroke?

 

I was going to reply to joacqin's last post, and then I read Montresor's response, and realized I would just end up repeating his first two sentences.

The problem I have with this arguement is that I suspect a lot of pirates use this as a convenient excuse to justify what they would do anyway. Oh, I have no doubt that they believe it to be true (and maybe it is to a certain extent), but if there really was no way steal a particular piece of software, how many of those pirates would bite the bullet and buy it anyway? I suspect quite a few. Once you get used to stealing software that you really wouldn't buy anyway, it becomes easier to steal software that you would buy.

 

I think part of the problem is the perceived value of what you buy. Its also the reason why music piracy is huge, and is compounded by the rising costs of games, music and movies, and the dropping quality and replayability, and lately, the nickle-and-diming that so many software companies are guilty of.

In more detail...

People pirate things because they dont attach value to them. A movie file on a server has no value to them. They dont get excited about it, they just download it, because its there. Movies represent little value to them, because of the high price associated with them.

I think the problem is even worse with music, and thats because the cost of music is disproportionately high. People just dont think its worth the asking price, and so they pay what they feel its worth - usually nothing. The experiment by radiohead should show at least that much - when people were asked to donate what they felt the album was worse, what they donated was generally a lot less than is normally asked for.

In some ways, the problem is as bad or worse than games. I dont pirate games, I stopped doing so when I finished university, got a regular job, and became able to afford games. Should I have pirated them earlier? No, I'll admit that much. In fact, the problem with piracy, is that because games are so freely available, you actually lose much of your enthusiasm for them. Now I'm proud of my game and movie collection. The thing is with games, is that when it becomes obvious that an addon is in development at the same time as the main game, in order to reap more money from innocent customers, people stop to think "You are putting business decisions above game enjoyment". And thats when the perceived value of a game drops, and piracy runs rampant. Same thing with making a 10 hour game and selling it for full price. People hear about it, and dont bother with buying it.

Oh yeah, game development costs are rising, there is no doubt about that. But what people forget is where that impetus comes from. the most succesful and well loved games of all time have generally had bad graphics, even in comparison to their contempories. Look at BG2, StarCraft, Diablo 2, Pokemon... all top selling games with distinctly underwhelming graphics, but marked out by good gameplay and high production values. Developing top notch graphics, ala Crysis, may be expensive, but paradoxically its also completely lost on gamers long term.

On a related note, I just discovered that my Pokemon FireRed is almost 100% certain to be pirate. I picked it up cheaply off eBay last year, after getting hooked on Diamond. I'm actually upset about it, feel bad. Also, theres a good chance it wont interact properly with my Pokemon Diamond because of its pirate nature. Sigh...

(before anyone disses Pokemon, its a criminally addictive RPG, albeit with a lousy story)

I can definitely see how, in the case of Nintendo, a closed platform is a good counter piracy measure.

 

But it isn't stupidity Tal, if paedophilia was absolutely rampant and accepted by a large part of society if not most then it would be decriminalized sooner or later despite that we might find it abhorrent. Right and wrong lies in the society, there is no eternal truth that theft is wrong, it is just something we have all agreed to be wrong because we don't want our stuff stolen. Producers of digitalized products have the opportunity to use and exploit the most efficient means of distribution ever and what do they do? They fight it, they criminalize the use of it. It is ridiculous, there are PLENTY of ways to make money from products without the actual sale.

Mark my words, the only way to stop "piracy" is to walk the path of the police state and even then it will fail and in 20 years everything will be up for grabs and the creators of the products will make more money than ever.

 

Hokay, Joacqin, you just pushed one of my buttoms. If paedophilia was legalized it would still be morally wrong. Once upon a time everyone thought the earth was flat that didn't make it true. Replace the word piracy with any other crime that society says is wrong and you get the same thing. I believe there was a thread on morality and legality a few months ago. The two may be related but are not the same thing.

Further as Tal pointed out if all or the majority of us decided to pirate whatever software we want developers would stop producing software. Nada, nunca, no software for any of us. Piracy is wrong because you are taking without permission something that does not belong to you. It does hurt us all. It raises the price of software or in the exteme will stop software development.Maybe I hold myself to a higher standard than you hold yourself but even when I download free software I donate at least a small sum to the developer or publisher. It is my way of saying thank you for their time and effort.

When it comes to software I usually wait to buy for two main reasons. 1) Bugs 2)Price.

 

I have yet to see any hard numbers of it stopping production of anything, for every prospective sale you lose due to piracy you gain at least one prospective customer due to them actually being exposed to your product. The only numbers I have seen are from the music industry and despite them griping a lot about piracy they do not seem to lose much money. The artists sure dont seem to lose much, more and more artists embrace the internet and "piracy" because they understand that what tehy might lose in a CD sale they gain by more people listening to their music and thus going to their concerts and stuff like that.

I am not going to go into it anymore, if people can not understand that it is pointless to fight something whether they like it or not I won't convince them. A lot of you seem to prefer police state like measurements over the fact of piracy and I do not agree with that. One idea I have liked since I heard was to levy a fee on your ISP kinda like how Radio stations pay to play music, here in Sweden it is called STIM. You see, I do not think we should let everything be free, people need to be paid somehow but the old way obviously do not work so instead of struggling to keep something that is horribly flawed and impossible to control we need to find other ways. The ISPs collect an extra fee from their users and then they somehow distribute it among the producers of, well just about anything. Plenty of details to hammer out but it is one way to go. Any protection inside the code of a product itself will be cracked and has been pointed out more often than not it is the paying customer that sits there with a cumbersome protection while the pirate has smooth sailing. NWN2 did a pretty smart thing, I downloaded the game when it was new to check it out and there was no problem at all, until I tried to trade with the vendor which I couldn't do. Small things like this work, I went out and bought the game (almost a year later but still). Allow the pirates a almost workable demo but some small annoying detail left out, sure they will crack it but it will take a while for them to even notice it is there and by then the people who really want the game will probably have bought it.