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Copy Protection Firms Encourage Piracy?
Ars Technica has a reflection on the revelation that StarForce had linked to pirated versions of Galactic Civilizations II. From the piece: "It's not hard to see why the publishers use the stuff; after all, no one wants to spend a couple of years on a project only to see their efforts rewarded by flat sales and a robust pirate market. Still, in the quest for better protection, these copy protection schemes have grown in both sophistication and invasiveness. Some schemes now install their own hidden device drivers that monitor your computer's optical drive access, trying to prevent copying and other unapproved uses. (If this sounds familiar, it should. Game copy protection, after all, is just another form of DRM.)"
They sell a product that solves (or at least claims to solve) a "problem".
They have an interest in making that problem as large and as wide-spread as possible.
I'm not sure that copy protection encourages pirating but I won't install a bought game on my machine without a no-CD crack, etc. as well. The original games are safest when in the jewel case packed in the box on a shelf.
Trolling is a art,
The article speaks about the invasiveness and general irritation that DRM causes and I think when they state that DRM may be contributing to the problem of piracy, it's the same thing where legit Windows buyers have to jump through the Product Activation hoops and rigamarole. I know of at least one person who legitimately bought WinXP but installed a pirated version to avoid the hassles. Legitimate, law-abiding users pay the price.
I'm all for the Valve's Steam method of distribution. It's the wave of the future...
"They sell a product that solves (or at least claims to solve) a "problem"."
OSS
"They have an interest in making that problem as large and as wide-spread as possible."
Proprietary Software.
Fact: Anti-Piracy software developers are doing the same thing that regular software developers are trying to do: sell software.
Fact: Anti-Piracy software does not stop piracy.
Fact: Anti-Piracy softare adversely affects legitimate players.
Fact: Not everyone who pirates a game is a guaranteed sale/loss of a sale.
Fact: Pirated software is another model of distribution which helps create product recognition with your audience.
Partial Fact and Opinion: Many people, myself included, use access to pirated software as a tool for determining what games are worth our monetary support. I can not count the number of times that piracy has either
a) saved me from buying a horrible piece of software that marketting led people to believe otherwise, and
b) caused me to buy a game (many, many times) that I would have otherwise never looked at or had a chance to try in another form.
I wish everyone had this state of mind. Obviously that's not the case, but I also feel that the latter group of individuals also encompass the demographic that would not grant your title a sale even if they did not download the title. That is, they are usually either downloading it for the sake of downloading it, or have no access to the funds to purchase games regularly.
There are as many beneficial reasons to piracy as there are negative aspects. The lies given by anti-piracy software developers are underhanded scare tactics, and not worth a publishers time. I hope the majority of educated individuals agrees when they weigh the facts in.
I work on a computer all day. I rip all the music I buy so that I don't have to carry around loads of CDs or bother swapping them around all the time. Digital media is more valuable to me than physical media, but I will only buy CDs because a) I want some kind of physical master copy in case my hard drive dies or anything like that and b) I want lossless compression.
So what does the copy protection do? Lock the thing I value most away from me. If I'm lucky, I get crappy MP3s on a data layer. No thanks. You know what I do if I find out an album I want is copy protected? I download it.
The simple fact of the matter is that, where copy protection is used, anonymous pirates provide a better service than the music labels. And the sad thing is that this isn't due to the record companies falling short in some way, it's because they actively choose to harm their own product.
The reason they can get away with this is because there is no competition when it comes to media. I'm not talking about the RIAA cartel, I'm talking about the basic nature of copyright. If somebody owns the rights to a particular song I like, then no competition exists for that song. I either buy it on the terms the copyright holder chooses, I don't buy it at all, or I obtain it from a black market.
For a free(r) market to exist, with competition acting the way it should, artists should be legally prohibited from signing exclusive contracts. Reduce the record labels to investors and publishers instead of the people with all the power, because right now, the situation is upside-down.
I agree, especially since I don't belive in the starforce system. The best check you can have is requiring the player to have an online account linked to a serial number. You sign in, you play and no cd is required, and you can use as many computers as you would like to play from. Heck I play my games on several different computers depending on what I have going on, ie rendering/compiling tasks, on the road ... and toating a cd around is painfull. In addition physical media is on its way out to distribute content.
- MOSKIE
I appreciate Epic's approach with the original UT and UT2004. For a few months after each game was released, you needed the CD in the drive to play the game. After a few months, a standard patch is released that removes the CD requirement, after the most significant piracy problems have died down. From then on, you no longer need to deal with the original CD.
Honestly, the best way to stop piracy of all kinds (for all mediums) is to adopt a new marketing model. Consider digital distribution as a model ...
... at $1 per song people are still willing to hunt the music down and steal it ... at $0.25 why would you bother?
For the average game it will probably cost less that $1 (definately less than $5) per copy sold to deliver the game to the customer via download through the internet; at the same time you no longer need an expensive distribution network nor do you have to cut a retailer in on the sale. This means that the only people who have to make money on the sale of the product are the developer and publisher (and in the case of a console the licence provider); Publishers tend to take in the money at $5-$15 per title and then give the developer their cut (licence providers [like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft] tend to get $5-$10 per title). This means that you could sell the average game for between $10-$25 and still make the same ammount of money. If you could buy the average new release for $15 why would you bother to steal it?
If you look at music
Not exactly. As the MPAA v. 2600 case showed, linking to illegal material can get you in trouble. The only reason why StarForce is able to do so without a legal challenge is because they are based in Russia, where it may be legal. Stardock, based in the US, cannot do the same thing in return.
People should really look at what all this SF fuss is about: read what they ACTUALLY did and judge for yourself whether it's worthy of all this media attention. Hint: It's not.
(Basically, some guy proved a point that it's easy to find pirated copies of a game that wasn't copy-protected. So what. A 13 year old with three minutes on a 56k can do that... it's not like they hosted and distributed it)