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Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately
An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting:
"iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
Every. Download. Is. A. Lost. Sale.
It's an empirically proven fact.
That's the second post from that blog in as many days - they were the ones that did the Humble Indie Games Bundle, weren't they?
Slashvertisement?
But this doesn't hold water for PC games, where getting a pirated copy of the game is much simpler (googling for a torrent of the game) than jailbreaking your phone.
So yeah, the estimates are still probably really high, but I bet they are higher for PC games than for iPhone games.
still no sig
Because that isnt how they see it, duh! And it's not even how the law sees it. It's a private transaction between me and the previous owner, if he makes a copy before selling (or giving, which is just selling for $0) it to me then that's not my problem. So if you want to make it a legal issue you need to look at the unauthorized copying by the seller (or gifter) and once you start doing that you're immediately going to run into the second hand market. Think about it, if the law prohibited second hand sales, that would be unjust - wait a minute, we're talking about iPhone apps right? The law *does* prohibit second hand sales. See how quickly moral arguments about copyright get silly?
Copyright isn't a moral issue, it's a legal one, and the proponents of copyright are all people with vested interests who take no care not to overstep the social contract, is it any wonder the public has no respect for them?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Jailbreak detection?
Are they admitting that they spy on their users phones outside their running apps?
In some countries that might get them jail without possibility of jailbreaking.
"only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
That's just as wrong as claiming that every pirated copy is a lost sale. 10% of potential customers isn't the same as 10% of the sales.
Lost sales are impossible to measure accurately because they are a hypothetical scenario: "What if the game couldn't be pirated, what would have happened?" Nobody can answer that question. Maybe it would have sold a lot more copies, maybe it would even have sold less as it would have remained largely unknown. We just don't know.
No one is arguing it's right to pirate games. What's being said here is that the methods used to get the numbers in the statistics published are wrong, and the actual numbers are much, much lower. Whether this is on purpose or simply honest mistakes is left to be seen.
Is killing people wrong? Certainly. Shouldn't we call out people that say that there are x murders per year, when the actual number is much lower? Bloody hell yes. It makes your country (or state, or wherever the numbers came from) look bad, and portrays an inaccurate reality, which is the opposite of what statistics are about.
Most people without jailbroken phones won't bother with your crappy app.
Most people who jailbroke purely for piracy are eager to try anything they can get working on it. (Those who jailbroke for any other purposes not included)
I could see a 1:4 ratio between the two groups, depending on the app.
So let's apply this to PC-Games
100% of the PCs are jailbroken, so at most 100% of their customers are potential pirates, which means they lose at most 100% of their potential sales to piracy.
The more interesting question is, why do these people think they're somehow obligated to take something that doesn't belong to them and without pay?
Why is it more interesting?
I find the difference between the imagined and real economic impacts on gaming industry much more interesting than a debate about why people would rather not pay for things.
because I stopped playing video games. I love the old keyboard and mouse. I love the PS3. I love the Xbox. I don't love how ham-fisted the publishers are getting with DRM and all the rest. If popularizing a game increases the chances it'll be pirated, I won't participate any more.
Sig not found.
How much of their potential customers are ninjas?
I was with them until the cited Blizzard...
Blizzard isn't more successful because they are better games developers, it's successful because they require use of a subscription service for the game to be interesting at all. In other words, it's because they are tied to external content that remains under their control.
-- Terry
PS3 is so far warez free, stop bitching and develop only for this platform.
What? You like even less Sony then pirates? Bad luck.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Living in one of those not so "rich" countries (but with real broadband) I can definitely tell you that I'm less inclined on spending money on games that people around me can play for free without any sort of consequences before they even hit any retail store.
Nowadays I only buy PS3 exclusives.
Lost sales are impossible to measure accurately because they are a hypothetical scenario: "What if the game couldn't be pirated, what would have happened?"
It's not so hypothetical when you consider video games for the PLAYSTATION 3 console. It just got cracked, and the crack hasn't yet been weaponized for mass infringement.
I love the old keyboard and mouse.
But do your friends and family who visit your house love having to wait their turn to use the keyboard and mouse instead of hooking up controllers 2, 3, and 4 and playing immediately?
I love the PS3. I love the Xbox.
But do you love the consoles' entry barriers against small developers?
Okay, iPhone, whatever... sure.
But PC games? I'm sorry, when we can see 2 million copies of the game reporting to our stats service the day after launch, and know that only 150,000 copies had been sold by that sime, then its pretty damn obvious that more than 10% of the players are pirating it. Piracy rates of 80-90 % are an unfortunate reality for AAA games, and have been for many years.
Why else would companies be willing to risk offending their paying customers with things like DRM that requires a constant Internet connection? Its because converting even 1/10th of the pirates into paying customers would give their sales a huge boost. I just hope they don't fall into the same trap that Star Wars Galaxies fell into (knowingly pissed off all of their existing customers in order to change their game to something they hoped more new people would pay to join... but they lost more players than they gained).
Say my indie developer team has a feature-complete PC game. How do I get in touch with Sony in order to start porting the game to PS3 for release on PSN? Do I have to start a company, get a dedicated office, and publish an unrelated PC or iPhone title first, like I would with Nintendo's WiiWare (source)?
Even though I don't believe piracy to be a large problem, that sentence is completely illogical. A single customer is not limited to buying a single game.
Especially the model you can slip in your pocket and make phone call with.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I find the discussions about which part of the mental masturbation is more "real" interesting.
Hint: if it costs you nothing that I copy your game, you didn't lose jack shit. If you don't like it, make your game more entertaining than the pirated version.
You can play World of Warcraft on a nearly unlimited number of free private servers with the client you download from Blizzard for free; you can even roll your own. But in terms of quality, they're at most marketing for the real thing.
If Blizzard wanted, they could make it impossible for the private server developers to keep up. Nobody would bother to reverse engineer an encrypted protocol that changes with every patch. What do they do instead? They add content to their own and swim in the money it generates.
It's interesting that this particular platform enables measuring piracy with something resembling statistical certainity. While not the figures, the logic also works for music and films, for example. Next thing is go tell the politicians: Listen, guys, you are taking a couple cents off everything that can store a bit as a compensation for music and/or films piracy (in Spain; your mileage will vary by country). Of course they don't call it compensation for piracy, but they still take the money. Now, dear politicians, look at this example and tell me that its logic doesn't apply and that your argument stands as it is. Say it loudly and publicly if you dare.
I'm assuming only jailbroken iphones can run pirated games, according to the estimates at most 10% of the phones are jailbroken. The article seems to assume that the other 90% are all paying customers for a specific app. Not true of course, no app/game has 100% market share. For example if an game is installed on 11% of the iphones, of which only 1% are non-jailbroken, then they could be losing as much as 91% of their sales to piracy. I say "could" because not everyone would buy it....but it is by no means limited to 10%.
i will NEVER EVER buy another game that i do not pirate first.
you bastards have just burnt me way too many times to be trusted ever again without heavy investigation on my part.
now, if you change the policys that say i can not return a game that i've bought. well, i'll think about it.
you lost my trust long ago. if you want it back you'll have to EARN it.
and if by some chance you come up with the unpiratable game. i guess i'm just done being a gamer.
i'm getting kinda old anyway. and theres lots of other crap i can try and waste money on. from industrys that have not fucked me over every chance they got.
Android market supposedly suffers badly from piracy. Boo hoo hoo evil pirates, not giving money to developers who deserve them.
I downloaded Maverick Lite recently. I decided it's a cool app and wanted to buy the full version.
Until then I was puzzled by lack of paid apps in the market. Now I saw "Maverick Pro" not found.
I checked, double checked and found:
Only 12 countries support paid apps and mine is not one of them. I checked, Maverick Pro was only available through Android Market, not any other online store of Android apps.
I faced two options: .apk from SD card.
1. download a torrent of paid apps for Android, and install the
2. root the phone (voiding warranty), install "market-enabler", back-up the current SIM Id, spoof it with ID of one of providers that offer paid apps, then purchase the app from app store.
Guess which one I choose...
The second one. Yep, I hacked my phone and purchased the app legally.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
</Morbo>
Magic 8 Ball says: Just a different aroma of bullshit.
"Potential" customer are not equal. Someone who has expended effort to get your product is a lot closer to being a purchaser than someone who's never heard of you. That's why demos exist. That's why marketeers aren't all out on the street giving handjobs for crack.
10% lost "customers" is just as ridiculous a metric as 80% lost "sales". Adding another bad metric doesn't inform the debate, it just gives the other side mud to sling as well.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
These that don't want to buy something, don't need to.
Yesterday "Pay what you want" 5 games pack has made to the authors $342.000.
The money is not on the people that don't have money (students that piracy his games), the money is on the people 35 years old, with childrens, and a love for gaming. Tryiing to extract more money from these students is stupid. Is like tryiing to extract juice from rocks, having a river nearby. GO AND FUCKING FORGET THESE ROCKS, AND GO TO THE RIVER!.
The river is fucking awesome, or maybe I am stupid and $342.000 is nothing. Also, the owners of Steam must be stupids too, and seriusly, It a system that is probably losing a lot of money. Sure? nope. It just don't work that way. Steam is good for these that want to pay for his games. Hence, is making money. All these systems like SecuROM, Ubisoft cracked DRM, and GFWL ... are misguided and stupid,.. "don't get it".
You will not make money from the pirates, these people is not your public. Is a public, but one that don't want to pay for stuff. Your public is the people that have money and want to use it to buy nicenies things. Give the awesome to then, and forget the pirates.
-Woof woof woof!
I think it's a fairly good assumption that iPhone users are not a representative sampling of the whole "gamer" universe, since it is a closed platform. It seems obvious to me that being a iPhone user should be somewhat correlated with "don't mind paying for stuff as long as they are quality stuff". This correlation is not perfect, of course (hence, the 5% jailbreaks). The fact that you have to jailbreak your phone to "pirate" stuff on the iPhone "garden" (i.e. illegal, not trivial for non-technical people and may void your warranty and whatnot) probably means that one isn't going to bother with it unless you're going to pirate a lot of stuff (or, put another way, "since you took the time/work necessary to jailbreak your phone, you might as well reap the rewards"). This closedness basically splits the continuum of (payers / try-before-buypeople / casual pirates / heavy pirates) that you see across the PC "gamer" population into two sub-populations (payers / heavy pirates), which is a phenomenon that had already showed its face with the consoles (i.e. people who modify their PS/Xbox ARE going to pirate like crazy simply to "make their investment worthwhile"; it's a psychological thing). So, I say you would probably see different numbers if the chosen platform for the analysis was "PC" or "Android phones".
In the end, it may be beneficial (from Apple's point of view) to do this if most of the borderline people end up becoming "payers"; not so much if they decide to become heavy pirates or simply ditch the product/platform.
to take something
You've never test driven a car I take it? You've never heard a song on the radio, then bough the CD? Rather you always go to the record store and by CD's of artists you have never heard before? You always pick your doctor at random out of the phone book and never ask family/friends for a recommendation?
Let me put it to you another way: Why do software companies think that they can fork out buggy, shoddy games and expect their customers to fork over $40-50 without the possibility of complaining (or even reselling the game)?
I admit that I have "pirated". The games that I like, I later bought. However there are a hell of a lot more games that have been deleted from my hard drive, and here I consider that I have saved myself from being ripped off. For example, I OWN a copy of Silent Hunter III. I OWN a copy of Silent Hunter IV which, IMO, was not as good as Silent Hunter III. So I downloaded a copy of Silent Hunter V. After 10 minutes, I wiped it from my hard drive and thank goodness I didn't pay for that piece of crap. Had it been a good game, I would have bought it. Just like I bought every other game I like.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
This is only true if there's no connection between wanting to game and having a jailbroken iPhone, which I assume is very false. Very many people don't care about jailbreaking because they use it with no, free or few applications, the value of jailbreaking to them is very low. On the other hand, if you want to play lots of games (where lots of games * money = lots of money) then jailbreaking has a high value. The data presented doesn't preclude the possibility that 80% of your market is within the 10% that are jailbroken.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Those who can't pirate, won't. Somehow claiming those who can't pirate, 90% of the "world" (since when do iphones even count?) has never seen a pirate copy of ... what exactly? ... is sort of like the Greeks saying they aren't bankrupt, not so long as Germany is paying its bills. Well, yeah, okay.
Exposed. Cleavage. And. Titties. Are. Making. The. Earthquakes. Happen.
It are true, because of my learnings.
If 100% iPhone users are divided in 10% jailbreakers and 90% regular users and we assume that 100% of those jailbreakers actually pirate software (which is not given for sure) and pirating aswell as buying a software means you have a general interest in the software then we have a total of 12,5% iPhone users interested in a software which is divided into 10% (pirating iPhone users aka jailbreakers) plus 10% (jailbreakers) / 80% (pirates in software-interested users) * 20% (non-pirates in software-interested users) = 2,5% (amount of non-pirate iPhone users interested in software). But if you think about it most of the pirates would actually lose interest (aka not buy) the software if they couldn't pirate it and thus propably equalize with the amount of interest from non-pirate users. So what is the total amount of interest for software from iPhone users if they cannot pirate: 2,5% (non-pirate users interested in software) / 90% (non-pirate users) = 2,0% (users interested in software) That means only 2% of the total iPhone users are actually interested in the software if they couldn't / wouldn't pirate it. But if only 2% of the 10% pirates would actually buy software if they couldn't pirate it, then that would mean, that only 10% (jailbreakers) * 2% (users interested in software if they couldn't pirate) = 0.2% of all users currently pirate software that they otherwise would buy. That is like - nothing? And it is exactly 10% of the current number of users buying software. So instead of increasing sales by 400% software developers would increase their sales by a "whopping" 10%. What a pitty.
Is killing people wrong?
I'm sure we could debate that one all day.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
PIRACY involves the true (not imaginary)loss of actual monies specifically spent on the the stolen product, with cash from a real customer that goes to the PIRATE in exchange for stolen treasure, thus PIRACY.
Downloading media that is not generating revenue, nor taking actual cash dollars in exchange for stolen or counterfeit inventory, is just listening to tunes, like last century "hearing the music on the radio" was free bandwidth with copyright material that could be recorded off the air, sold the license or suggested piracy. It was Fair Use.
I have heard zillions of "stolen" songs on the radio and paid for zero - it never cost anyone a sale. However, I have spent many tens of thousands on music and concerts and media and swag and fashion, audio gear, etc... Nowadays, no more "old style" radio worth hearing, I use the streaming web, or mp3s or rip off ipods, which function like 20th century radio..like the free radio. I don't make disks, or duplicate and sell it, and it ain't piracy no matter how many times the greedy corporate scum executives of the entertainment industry rape and pillage, and have been robbing artists and customers revenue for years. Its their only skill. This is why nobody believes the whining of rich assholes anymore - they never cry when they grab the cash, only when they can't get everything from a supersaturated market.
I wish the RIAA, MPAA and BSA all had magic, unbreakable DRM that made it impossible to use their products at all with paying. I want to see their reactions when their revenues go down as people just DO WITHOUT their unnecessary crap.
FOSS software and CC media would go thru the roof.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Nintendo have:
Nintendo has blamed piracy for a 45 per cent drop in DS game sales in Europe between April and December 2009... Last June Nintendo monitored ten overseas websites that allowed people to illegally download software. It found that games had been pirated a total 238 million times, translating into one trillion yen ($10.7 billion) in lost sales.
And Sony, EA, Activision, Microsoft et al have all claimed the same thing at one time or another. They seem to be smartening up nowadays, though.
The statistics that have been published are how many pirates vs. customers the game has, and those have been accurate.
And the numbers are almost certainly not accurate, anyway. Some people DL several versions of the same game - some people buy several copies. Some people lend games to people, thus making customers into pirates, and some people lend copies to friends, making a single pirate into a counterfeiting ring. The actual numbers are completely impossible to determine by any means other than watching what every single person in the world is doing every second of every day.
Be smart, help people!
I pirated Farmville.
I run the NOCD cracks for all the games I buy. It's just more convenient that way. Who wants to keep dozens of CDs floating around their desk getting scratched up? I've got C&C4 on my laptop running the crack patch so I don't have to be online to play it. And I wasn't even considering buying Assassin's Creed 2 until the crack came out - now it has, and now I have. Are all of those considered pirated copies?
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
I've apparently been pirating games since it was hard to find Commodore 64 games in stores. I don't think it was even called pirating back then. The simple fact of the matter is that you do buy when you can, especially from smaller publishers. But the vast majority of games that get traded end up being effectively "demos" because you don't play them much. That REALLY doesn't translate to direct sales.
If they want real numbers and real sales based on the same sort of effect you get from pirating game companies would have to offer a free or low cost subscription that lets people freely try any of their games for a set period. Demos work fine too but you'd probably require a forum or something to get the kind of "culture" effect you can get from places like Pirate Bay where people stop by and share info about their experiences with a piece of software. And you're kind of working against lousy street cred at that point too, which makes it more difficult. So many companies have spent so much time and energy alienating their audiences with bad advertising and lies about their privacy practices that it sometimes seems like the norm from the consumer point of view. It's really not but the companies that do make such a huge mess of it that it's noticeable.
Oh and lastly... If I've been a pirate all these years, damnit where do I pick up my hat? Yarr!
This is funny, and reminds me that something can be a fact while still being untrue.
Empirically proven, with a *slight* nod towards the inclusion of spurious and vacuous opportunity costs.
It creates the same difference here as it does with climate data:
The people in charge only care to calculate those factors that will make their case and line their coffers.
As an aside, I feared this would happen one day.
And here I am, watching the real-life unfolding of both Huxley's Brave New World, and Idiocracy, simultaneously.
Wow.
Per download is definitely a flawed system.
I have personally downloaded the same game or movie many times over, downloading is simpler then searching though your collection or saving space on your computer.
And I download many things all the time that I never actually use.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
That is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out analysis. Too bad it's bullshit; Congress knows they're really losing 230% of their profits to pirates, the media company has shown them the pie charts.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
agree. after the tenth or twentieth game I dropped hard earned cash on, after reading the stellar reviews and "omg the bestus game ever" fanbois, I decided to stop giving my money away. I will not buy a game until I have downloaded and played it at least a couple of times, for an extended amount of time. And by doing so, I have saved myself tons and tons of money. I did not even buy WoW until I used the 10 day trial and leveled two toons to 20. I will not be ripped off any more. And when I can't download a copy or a very good trial, then I will not even consider buying a game. Stupid game companies would make more money by producing solid, good games, charging a reasonable price and stopping the grind of same game, slightly different, costs more and sucks. I would rather buy games and be able to return them if they suck ass, but since the game companies refuse to allow this, then fuck them. They will have me previewing the cracked game and usually not buying it because it sucks. Because the number of games I buy any more due to them sucking is minuscule at best.
I'm sure we could debate that one all day.
No we couldn't. /me looks at watch.
And some people buy the game but have to download the RAZOR1911 crack to make the game work properly or to avoid having to install some toxic DRM software.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The other side of the coin is that a person is not going to buy the application or game in the first place so in fact they have actually lost nothing. This would have never been a sale to start with.
Copyright isn't a moral issue, it's a legal one
Nonsense. Law is simply morality that's been codified. We believe killing people is wrong, so we make a law to reflect our shared morality. We have also decided that it's right that the people who create artworks deserve some reward for that work. The system to make that reward possible is copyright. Saying the system is not working properly, and that you want to change it, is a very different statement from saying that breaking copyright isn't about morality. This is, at its core, *completely* about morality...the question is only whether the law reflects your moral view (or, better, society's overall moral view).
Your "private transaction" argument is also legally questionable. For physical things, (and in US law) if you buy something you have reasonable reason to believe is stolen you will also have committed a crime: Receiving Stolen Goods. It's designed to allow the state to punish fences as well as the thieves themselves, but laws like this will be cited in any discussion of similar behavior online. If you have reasonable reason to conclude that the person you're dealing with is selling you an illegitimate copy of a game, you are not free from liability. Your liability is certainly less than the person selling the thing, but you're not completely innocent in the exchange.
Of course this isn't how they see it. Numbers are for manipulating to whoever's benefit.
So if they are claiming that 80%-90% of games are pirated, it doesn't matter whether the games are all being downloaded by 1 person or 10% of jailbroken phones worldwide.
As for laws, if the EULA prohibits a second hand sale (iPhone), that may be something that has to be argued in a court do to applicability of laws in various countries. With regards to second hand sales of games and software in the US, the gaming industry is looking to legislate second hand sales so that they can earn profit on those second hand sales...
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
I've had to do this. When I bought Mass Effect for a friend for his birthday, we couldn't get it work on his PC no matter what we did. We ended up having to download the crack off ::name redacted:: so he could play the game that was LEGALLY PURCHASED.
Insanely stupid.
Living With a Nerd
don't be bringing facts into the story
Basing pirating on jailbroken iPhones is ridiculous. About half the people I know who have iPhones have jailbroken their iPhones, but they did this so they could get functionality that SHOULD be built into the stupid thing to begin with. Basically, they use it as a way around Job's bureaucracy, not as a way to pirate games.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Hint: if it costs you nothing that I copy your game, you didn't lose jack shit.
Sigh. Opportunity cost. If the pirate would have purchased, but didn't, then it does cost them the profit they otherwise would have made. That's precisely why this article is trying to estimate the number of lost customers, compared to those pirates who were never going to buy it if they couldn't pirate.
If you don't like it, make your game more entertaining than the pirated version.
If you don't like what the game companies are doing, why not protest by not playing the game? Same logic, I'm not sure why they have to do something about it, and you don't.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
You claim that law is morality, instead of say, perhaps more accurately, that it should be based on morality. In complex systems, there are unpredictable effects, and the legal system is about as complex as systems get. Effectively, this means that most results of the legal system are reified rules of what morality might say (if it was codified badly.)
The system is broken. We can argue all day about whether this or that is moral, but it's nearly impossible to map those ideas onto what the laws say, so I would say it's not worth trying. Treat them as separate systems.
Is copying games moral? Probably not, but some people feel that I.P. cannot be owned, so assuming this, and assuming that intention of the creator is irrelevant, maybe it is.
Is it legal? No.
I'm a concientious
2. Not every game pirated is still for sale by the publisher. The older the game, the higher chance it is being frequently downloaded as part of a collection/bundle. You could argue that devaluing the resale market hurts new game sales, but the publishers seem more than happy to devalue used game sales themselves.
3. Just because someone plays a game, doesn't mean they would have paid to play it. Specifically, I mean that games without free demos available will be tried out by pirates for a short time. There are way too many awful games out there. I won't buy a game unless I am somewhat familiar with it already or have read glowing reviews. If someone lends me a game i never heard of, I will probably try it. This would distort pirating figures for less known games more than for the blockbuster titles.
4. Pirates download games as soon as they come out, or rather without regard to pricing trends. Consumers purchase games with price as a major consideration. I will make a few preorders each year, but almost every other game I wait until it has dropped to at least 1/2 price.
5. There's only so much time in a day. I have bought dozens of games I've never played...stretching back as far as PSX (in the NES and SNES days I had much more free time). If a pireate downloads FFXIII, Oblivion, Fallout 3, etc...how is he going to have time to actually play all those? People posting high scores just means they are playing some of a game. if you limit yourself to games you buy, you'll be much more likely to finish each game...which means you'll have to choose only a few out of the dozen 50+ hour-to-complete games you could have pirated.
This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
This is so bad it ain't even lies and statistics. It assumes a random slice of the users jailbreak their iPhone, that there are no correlation between jailbreaking and playing games.
This is like saying that Gerber controls 20% of the baby food market, but because babies represent 10% of the population, they cannot increase their sales by more than 10%.
To use a car analogy, Toyota has 10% of the market and therefore only 10% of their cars have accelerator problems. Thank His Noodly Appendage they don't control 100% of the market, or we'd suffer a continuous stream of accidents!
Am I making sense? I hope not.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
I say that right and wrong are just labels we use. Clearly the natural state of things is for people to be dead.
In many ways, this follows the quote by Stewart Brand, which I am mangling horribly:
"On the one hand [people] want to be [alive], because [life is] so valuable. [Being alive] just changes your life.(Sic) On the other hand, [people] want[] to be [dead], because the cost of [keeping them alive] is getting [high]er and [high]er all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
I'm a concientious
Games where cool back in the 80's, 90's, but now they're not. The game market, I'd say, died with the ps2 xbox gamecube market. Many different computer and software companies died in the 90's and 00's; its just that the video game tech companies refuse to die.
I don't care about pirating!
It hasn't changed from the very beginning!
No one cared about it back then because they where a small business that made enough to pay everyone.
Games suck anyways because they have HUGE dev teams with an equally large dev team that makes lockout shit.
THE GAME MARKET IS NOT HOLLYWOOD AND NEVER WAS DAMN IT!
Sure, people play the game. But Piracy only basis this on the Story of the game if there is one.
Most publishers release a patch, one that cannot be downloaded easily, only to users who register their purchased game allowing for multiplayer versions or server logins to be possible.
Console systems may seem to be the best line against piracy, but that's not true, because your LIVE account doesn't keep track of CD keys. If you modded your system to play a copied game, then your home free, and the servers know none the wiser.
Call of Duty, no 2 keys can be online at the same time when playing multiplayer, so the only way to obtain one is to purchase the game or play when the other user is not online at the same time.
But here's where piracy works. One PC copy that is used for a multplayer is not hindered for LAN games, because there is no check other then the game initiation. But this entails coordination from friends and playing time.
So, what does piracy boil down to? Playing a game that you only want to try for a period of time that extends Demo or trial time? Or does it mean that a bunch of friends want to play at the same time but all cannot or don't want to pay for the game?
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
But isn't opportunity cost just code for hypothetical questions? Last time I checked, hypotheticals have no weight because they are exactly that, hypothetical...
"Hypothetically if he wasnt a thief, and hypothetically if he had morals, and hypothetically if he had money, he may or may not have purchased that game..."
Hypothetically they should be paying me cause hypothetically i'm the owner of the business... see, gets kinda silly quick.
Opportunity cost is a sham and should be discounted, becuase the opportunity to make money never existed, it only hypothetically did.
I love to slaughter the english language.
Boo bad articles/internet postings!
Hooray, Beer!
(This would be the Red Stripe way of looking at it, at least...)
This whole story reeks of bad juju...
--Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
Originally the false statistics were done on purpose but now they have been repeated so often that even the game companies believen them. As usual with lies.
In fact, in this case, according to the article, it would be like saying there are 1 million murders in the US per year, all committed by evil people with no heart, and we need to round them up, and torture them and murder them in public, and kill their families in a similar manner (as far as how badly the punishment for piracy is so much worse than the effects of the piracy. You can pirate a 1 dollar song, and cost the selling company $0 because you wouldn't have purchased it anyways, and have to pay them millions). Not to mention accepting the most ridiculous coincidence as proof of a murder. Like if you reported a gun stolen and it was used to shoot someone, you would be prosecuted in full (if someone pirates on your wifi). What a terribly fun military fear inspiring country that would be to live in.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
I have been legally entitled to 3 versions of autodesk inventor, not to mention several different games and other software. The DRM has always been so terrible and messed up that it would destroy itself, and all the files I made using it after a couple weeks or so. So now I have just stopped buying software, it just isn't worth losing all of my data. If I feel a game is worth paying for, I buy it to support the developers, but install a pirated copy so that I can be guaranteed it will actually work.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
If the pirate would have purchased
How do you distinguish between an imaginary downloader who would have paid for the game and one who wouldn't have?
Until you can prove that your imaginary friends are more real than mine, we have nothing to talk about.
Arguing about the terminology is missing the point. A lot. Yes we all know that Copyright Infringment != Theft and that Piracy == (Sailing ships && Cannons && Cutlasses). The morality and legality of piracy/copyright infringement are the points that should be discussed.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Is killing people wrong?
I'm sure we could debate that one all day.
Maybe you could. I could not. Killing people is wrong. Period.
(My challenge to you is for you to spot where I don't deny it sometimes being unavoidable. It's still wrong, though.)
Hold on there. Lending a game to a friend is not piracy. That may be what the media companies want you to think, but the first sale doctrine supports the right of the owner of the game to lend or sell his own property.
Nonsense. Law is simply morality that's been codified. We believe killing people is wrong, so we make a law to reflect our shared morality. [...]
I call bullshit. The one of astronomic proportions. We use laws where morality (as in a shared common set of rules and norms everyone agrees upon) fails, else we would not need it. I do not want to be killed, you do not want to be killed, so we make a law that makes it punishable to kill you or me or anyone else. In contrast neither you or me need a law to make us greet people back when they greet us. Courtesy demands it.
With copyright morality obviously has reached a limit to its applicability. There is no consensus on whether and in what form and to which degree creators and distributors of intangible goods shall be compensated and what rights they should have and what limits they should be able to declare on the use of their works.
"We" have not decided anything.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Unfortunately, when it comes to shitty digital media laws, we don't own our video games. We own licenses to play them. :(
Well, that's exaggerating a little, but they would most certainly have an impact. Think about it for a minute, think about all the time that gets invested into an MMO. Most console games have a total play time of maybe, 10-20 hours? For an MMO we're taking at least 10 hours a week for months on end. That's -one- game that is taking up the time that could have been spent playing dozens of other games. I know that when I had played MMOs I had stopped playing most other PC games and certainly stopped buying them. There is a certain obligation that comes with MMO gaming. The financial one: the fact that you're making monthly payments to play this game so when given the choice between the mmo and playing another game, you should probably spend your time in the game you've already invested in. And the social obligation: When other guild members are expecting you to contribute your time and the requirement to keep leveling to stay on par with your friends or risk playing alone when they start outlevelling you.
So while the gaming industry grows, so do MMOs as a portion of PC game sales (they're not really going to affect console game sales, relatively speaking). And consequently as MMO popularity grows within that PC games sector, other game sales are bound to suffer on a factor more than what is going into the growing MMO portion.
And with so many game companies trying to jump onto the mmo bandwagon, it's only going to get worse. It's a chain reaction that will make MMOs the only financially sensible type of PC game to make (other than browser based, ad-fueled game market that target casual and non-gamers)
The problem with rational ethical discussion is that people fixate on edge cases.
Is killing people wrong? Yes. Well what about the death penalty? What about self defense? What about killing one person to save a million people?
Sure, there is room for debate there, but those don't represent the majority of cases. The question with killing is personal: should you or your family members be allowed to be murdered, out of the blue, for no reason? No.
See? It's easy. The same logic applies here: Is pirating video games wrong? Yes. Well what if I can't play it because of shitty DRM? What if I lost the media? What if I think the company that made it is morally bankrupt?
The situation that needs consideration is the personal situation: if you made a game, would you want someone obtaining a copy without paying for it, assuming that you've set a price on the game? No.
Once you agree on the basic premise, then you can have a rational discussion about the fringe cases that may or may not prove to be exceptions to the rule.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
No one is claiming that ALL of those people would buy it if they couldn't pirate, of course that is ridiculous.
But suppose I can convert even 5 % of those "non-paying" customers into paying customers, by making it too difficult / inconvenient for them to just pirate it, so that getting the legitimate one is easier for them?
5% of 1,850,000 is 92,500. So actual sold copies would increase by up to 61% from that. Now in the real world, you'll lose some fraction of your original customers by pissing them off with DRM. No one is sure what fraction of them you will lose (yet), but if its less than 10% then the whole exercise was still hugely worthwhile. If we could somehow convert 10% of the pirates, it would be even more worthwhile -- sales would be doubled, or more. (I don't believe they will ever be able to convert more than 10% of the pirates into paying customers, most of them are either broke teens or university students, or else they are so used to freeloading after 10+ years of being pirates that they are not about to start paying full price for their games).
Disclaimer: I personally disapprove of the stronger DRM measures that the publishers are imposing on PC titles these days, and I refuse to buy any PC game with such anti-customer stuff built into it. However, customers like you and I are currently in the minority. The majority does not care much about the DRM as long as it doesn't prevent them from playing the copy they paid for.
actually it's not piracy until you pull up beside them and board them.
Q: What does the ethical relativist think about *insert ethical question here*
A: Who gives a shit?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I agree, there isn't going to be a hard and fast answer (at least, not one that's real). However, there is some number of pirates who would have bought your game, which is the real cost of piracy on your game.
The best you can do is get an upper and lower bound on the number, and compare that cost of lost sales to the cost of DRM. I guarantee that's what the game execs are doing right now.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Tax Codes are not based in morality but more in practicality. The government needs money.
Unauthorized copying (remember: "Piracy" is that thing done on sea where people get killed) has been around forever, and will be around forever. Consider that a fact.
How you act with regards to facts of the outside world says a lot about your personality. Basically, you can accept them, you can cry and whine about how unfair it all is, or you can try to change things. Usually, you don't fall into one extreme but a mixture with one dominant trait.
The music, movie and computer games industry largely falls into the second, with a slight bit of the third. The problem with people like this is that the feeling of "the world is soooo unfair" is close to "I am entitled to be treated better". Which leads to irrational and counterproductive actions (the 3rd trait).
For example, copy protection has long since left acceptable territory and entered ridiculous. And in many parts, has already crossed ridiculous and entered offensive. If you hit Google with "SecuROM" and a few terms of your choice, you'll find it fucks up people's machines, causes crashes and sometimes makes the entire system unbootable.
As a legitimate customer, I've long tired of being treated like at the airport in the privacy of my own home. No, your stupid game is not important enough that I'd give up the confidentiality or integrity of my entire work environment. No, you can't have root access. You want to be sure I am a legitimate customer, fine. But I want to be sure that this is still my computer, which means not handing you the keys. I don't give the TV people access to my fusebox either, just because I watch their program. I don't give my car keys to the guy washing the windows. Know your place, then we can have a business relationship.
As it is, there's a good number of games that I would buy, but don't, because I'm not putting up with this shit.
And, quite frankly, there's a lot of times where I'm happy the crackers got it done, just because maybe, just maybe, the stupid fucks who put money into pointless, evil DRM schemes may learn that it's not worth it.
Use some customer-friendly, easy copy protection, that's ok with me. Unique key, ok. Some CD checks on the installer, fine.
Having to have the CD in the drive to play? Have you idiots heard of notebooks?
SecuROM, Starforce, any-other-DRM-crap? See above.
Limited number of activations? I'm sorry, if the doctors don't consider you insane, the doctors should hand back their licenses
Most importantly: Make good games. There is still a short list of companies out there where I know I'll buy their next game for sure. Because they've never let me down, and they don't fuck with their customers, they please them. And you other stupid gits in the industry better learn that fucking and pleasing are only the same thing in a different "business".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's not theft, theft involves me taking something away from someone else. I didn't take anything away from them, I made a perfect copy and then put it in my house. If I made a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa and put it on my wall, I did not steal the Mona Lisa.
...only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
What??? No!
Comparing pirates to all iPhone users by calling them "potential" customers is meaningless at worst, deliberately misleading understatement at best.
Rubbish. Not all law is based on moral grounds, and even the portion that is reflects the morality of the legislators at the time, not necessarily of society as a whole even then - let alone of a radically different society generations later. And plenty of law has its roots in peoples' views of right and wrong, but lots more is simply there to make something work the way that the legislators want it to - not because there's any great moral imperative behind it. On copyrights and patents, the decision was only secondarily one of reward; the primary one was a pragmatic one: that allowing people to have a short term monopoly on new ideas and works would encourage overall creativity.
As for "We have also decided..."? "We"? Sorry, but "we" didn't. That decision was enacted by people long dead, with their own agendas, at a time when the sort of issues now facing us could (quite literally) not have been conceived. The law tomes are replete with examples of fossil laws which ceased to be enforced, or simply ceased to be relevant, long before they were repealed; the fact that they were still on the statute books didn't make them "morally right", rather it made the statute books a laughing stick. In the case of IP law, the body of law in question arguably still works well in some cases (the ones which would have been understood by its originators) but is manifestly ill-suited to others - and it's disingenuous of vested interests to try to claim otherwise and tar complex issues with a simplistic "moral" brush. Until "we" hold a sensible and mature debate on the matter of what *society* believes and wants, I refuse to accept that questioning the status quo, holding contrary views, or even acting in defiance of bad law, is in any way "wrong" - and a significant portion of society demonstrates by its actions every day that it shares a broadly similar position.
Simply, the moral high ground is not, currently, with the law.
But isn't opportunity cost just code for hypothetical questions?
No, opportunity costs are very real. For example if for a given 4 hour period you can work and make $100, but instead play video games, your opportunity cost is $100 to play games. Likewise, your opportunity cost to work is 4 hours of enjoyment. The question, of course, is if those 4 hours of enjoyment are worth $100, or if you are better off spending that time working and using the $100 at a later time for more enjoyment.
You could claim that this isn't an opportunity cost issue, but you'll have to have a better argument than 'opportunity cost is fake'.
"Hypothetically if he wasnt a thief, and hypothetically if he had morals, and hypothetically if he had money, he may or may not have purchased that game..." Hypothetically they should be paying me cause hypothetically i'm the owner of the business... see, gets kinda silly quick.
Good work on the straw man, just add hypothetical to everything. Although, I find it interesting that you call pirates 'thieves' yet don't have an apparent problem with it. Usually that word is called out as pure rhetoric...
But isn't that the same way 'shrinkage' in a store works? If the person who stole the item wasn't a thief, and had money, they would have made $X more. The only difference is there is no loss of inventory, just the loss of a customer, but it still adds up over time.
The simplest proof that piracy can have a real cost? If there's 100% piracy, they make $0 in sales. That's a very real cost, even if the sales they should have had are purely 'hypothetical'.
Even if only 10 people out of the 1 million who pirated would otherwise have purchased the game, the company has still lost money to piracy (about $600). The goal is to quantify that cost accurately, and determine what is acceptable and reasonable. It seems most people on /. are angry that the game execs are being unreasonable with the numbers, yet mistakenly rail against any quantification of them.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
You are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to being paid to play a game. The only way you get money from a company is by direct employment, a lawsuit or the stock market.
You can't say you're entitled to have that copy and have any legitimate basis for that claim, regardless as to the cost to the business. You didn't pay for the creation or distribution of their creation; you lay no claim to a copy, regardless as to the excessive cost to actually buy it, stupid DRM issues, crappy corporate policies, or lack of costs incurred on their part because of your actions.
I will not buy a game until I have downloaded and played it at least a couple of times, for an extended amount of time. And by doing so, I have saved myself tons and tons of money.
Keep saving money. That way, game companies won't have as much sitting around to put into development.
Seriously. Most of you guys really don't understand that the way to get companies to change isn't by pirating the game. You get a company to change by forcing them to adopt customer-friendly business models through litigation or economic impact. That doesn't have any bearing on your actual claim to a copy of the game. It's still not yours.
Is it legal? No.
In some jurisdictions it is.
I agree completely that the system is broken.
So if you get injured in an automobile accident that is not your fault, and you can't work for three weeks, you will not press a claim for lost wages from the other person's insurance. After all, you didn't work the hours, so you didn't have any money coming to you.
Apparently people are reading my response completely 180 degrees opposite of my intent. My intent is not to advocate piracy in any way, i'm just trying to point out that alot of the arguments for opportunity cost are very poor. My argument was to state that people use hypothetical questions too seriously (when all they are is a thought experiment, i.e., just a "What If" question/statement, and therefore should cary very little if any legal weight unless proven true, in the exact way that any actual thought experient works). Additionally, up to present, most opportunity cost arguments (at least ones i've heard) were all purely hypothetical when used in terms of piracy, and were therefore easily discountable.
I love to slaughter the english language.
The image that immediatelly came to my mind was that of a painter selling a painting.
Note that copyright was not required or involved in any way and yet the creator of the artwork got rewarded for that work.
In fact, the only way copyright would be involved would be if someone made a copy of the painting. Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Here's another one: do you know that if you whistle a tune on the street it can be considered as an unauthorised public performance?
The natural law is that people freely exchange ideas. That includes telling others about ways of making things, singing, whisteling and playing music, telling stories and jokes that you read/heard-from-others and more.
Copyright actually goes against the natural law of free exchange of ideas - it assigns ownership to ideas and restricts exchanges of ideas to require (often paid) authorization from third-parties.
In fact, even though it's perfectly possible for a copyright owner to do so, they won't charge someone for whisteling the tune they own the copyright for in the street because:
a) They can't catch you easilly enough to make it worth the trouble.
b) The public outcry on such heavy handed uses of copyright might very well kill it.
The only reason Copyright exists is because some thinkers in the 17th century decided that a time-limited mechanism to reward the makers of new ideas would promote creation and exchange of ideas more than it would hinder it. This fine balance (assuming it ever worked) has been thoroughly broken in the last century.
Simply put, you can't sell FUD with "only 10%".
You are under the impression you own the game; you do not. You own the, very limited, rights to play that game. These rights are not transferable to friends.
Here is a demonstration of where your logic fails:
No, you didn't hear 'zillions of "stolen" songs on the radio'. The broadcast of those songs were paid for by the radio station. The radio station got the money to pay for the broadcasting of those songs from "advertisers" who paid for these things called "commercials" that are played between the songs.
To recap: The songs you hear on the radio are paid for by those commercials you hear between the songs. They are not free.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I think that my be the most awesome setup for the RIAA ever...
Buy disk with DRM, save receipt.
Download disk save uTorrent stats showing you leeched it (no upload).
Get sued.
Counter Sue for torturous interference/racketeering/SLAPP
???JURY???
Profit!
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Back in 2003 I worked for a little independent games outfit. We made a one-off puzzle / action game that sold for $10 in stores or $2.50 online. It had an online high-score system that counted IP's so we had an idea of how many people were playing any given day.
We sold around 30,000 copies total, but our average unique visitors per day on the high score system was around 500,000.
Now the game had no DRM, and there was a free online version that you could play as much as you wanted to that didn't let you access the high score system. This strikes me as being about as nice as you can get for a paid-for product, and we still had a 94% "piracy" rate. Even if you allow that some legitimate users may have been on dynamic IP addresses, there's no way that game wasn't being primarily played by pirates.
Since then I've had trouble believing anyone who claimed software piracy didn't cause game makers to lose money.
I have one (honest) question for you Mr SatanicPuppy:
If *you* made a game, would you DRM it?
If yes, to what extreme?
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
How do you distinguish between an imaginary downloader who would have paid for the game and one who wouldn't have? Until you can prove that your imaginary friends are more real than mine, we have nothing to talk about.
We can't distinguish between them. However, we're pretty sure it's above 0%. People often get mocked for claiming every act of piracy is a lost sale - implying that 100% of the pirates would've bought. But, pirate-defenders make a bold claim: that 0% of them would've bought. It seems to me that both of these positions are wrong, and you'd have to know exactly what's inside the heads of every pirate in order to make either of those bold claims.
one other number they really should look at is the number of copies pirated *and* not bought because of the DRM.
In reality we all want to believe that everyone who claims they bought the game did so, then downloaded to bypass the DRM (which I find morally in the clear). However I suspect there is at least some reasonable group of people who figure "Oh this game has DRM... F it I'll just download it", but never buy the game, though had the game been DRM free they would have.
I don't buy games with DRM on them (except console games). Of course that means I really like the MW4 is free now as I can play it to my hearts content and that is actually the newest game on my PC that I "own". Next most recent game is Warcraft I.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
"This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
Unless, of course, fifty percent of the demographic that they're going for is amongst those 10%. It's a bit dishonest to draw this kind of conclusion.
Hint: if it costs you nothing that I copy your game, you didn't lose jack shit.
Out of curiosity, I wonder how you'd react to these statements:
- If everyone decided tomorrow that they would pirate everything and software companies went out of business, they can't claim that they "lost jack shit" to piracy.
- If I sneak into a concert without paying, the musicians don't lose anything. (At worst, they lose a little space around the stage - but that's more of a problem for other concert goers, and they would've lost that space if I had paid, anyway.) Therefore, sneaking into concerts is okay.
- If an apartment is for rent, I should be allowed to live there for free until some real renters come and rent the place. Therefore, squatting is okay.
- If I park in a pay parking lot, but I don't pay, and that lot never gets more than 95% full, then the parking lot owner didn't lose anything. Therefore, everyone should be allowed to park in the parking lot for free, and the owner "didn't lose anything".
Even if only 10 people out of the 1 million who pirated would otherwise have purchased the game, the company has still lost money to piracy (about $600). The goal is to quantify that cost accurately, and determine what is acceptable and reasonable. It seems most people on /. are angry that the game execs are being unreasonable with the numbers, yet mistakenly rail against any quantification of them.
Although I am a filthy pirate, I tend to agree with most of your assessment. The problem, to me, is twofold.
First, there is no method to accurately determine how many pirates have also bought the software in question to avoid particularly draconian DRM (Venn diagram!). This happens at least some of the time, and there is no way of which I am aware to quantify that behavior.
Second, there may be an advertising component to piracy. If, picking a number out of my.. hat, one in five copyright infringements result in a purchase, it could easily be argued that loss by piracy is only 80% of a fair and accurate infringement estimate. And the vendor estimates are always and without deviation inflated. I can imagine a situation where piracy results in net sales increase, a la Stardock, but I assume these are outliers and not the general rule for software. Perhaps it is closer to true for certain kinds of music, but that is supposition. Of course the other side of that conjecture is that a sale gained through piracy could become a customer gained through piracy, which is worth a great deal more to a business than a single sale, and would tip the balance further towards a net gain.
Anyway, I personally rail against suspect quantification which does not account for all factors. I am strongly in favor of accurate estimated quantification - because no number will truly be accurate, of course. I would love to see an organization offering an accurate estimate to businesses, but it would be corrupt before it opened its doors, so I suppose that's just the criminally optimistic side of me.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Yes, some laws are codifying morality, like laws against theft and murder, but copyright isn't one of them. Receiving stolen good codifies the morality that you shouldn't knowingly purchase stolen property.
Copyright and patents were historically merely a practical means to ensure that larger publishing houses and manufacturers didn't exploit authors, smaller publishing houses, manufacturers etc. Trademarks are also not codified morality, they just let consumers easily identify the manufacturer, merchant, etc.
In fact, intellectual property laws simply cannot be said to codify morality even in the modern world since they don't truly take intention into account like receiving stolen goods. For example :
(1) We all accept there is nothing wrong morally or legally with downloading mp3s, movies, etc. but there are legal issues once you upload content, which bittorrent requires during downloading. Yes, seeds are juicier targets of course, but even leeches who never knowingly seed have broken the law, which places the law on a purely practical footing.
(2) Asset forfeiture drug laws are similarly purely practical from a legal perspective, well you don't even get a trial there.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Nintendo have:
Nintendo has blamed piracy for a 45 per cent drop in DS game sales in Europe between April and December 2009...
Thats the significant part in your post. Sales are down 45 percent. This is the main indicator of piracy in the DS market. The 2nd one is the prices of the games that are released. The price of DS games (even AA titles) now drop after a few weeks whereas a few year back those prices would be the same for at least 6 months. 3rd indicator is the game catalog. We get fewer niche games because they don't sel enough to warant distribution. (the latest Phoenix Wright wasn't released in the BeNeLux region because of this)
The drop in DS game sales is one of the main reasons for Nintendo to relaase their 3D handheld in 2010. They want a new platform thats free of R3, M3 or other 'development tools'
Law is no more and no less than a system to resolve disputes. It has little to do with morality or justice, even though these are words that one hears often in connection with Law. Some Laws are unjust, some are immoral.
you know...
We always like to argue this here, but I recently encountered just that (not with the mona lisa though).
I was at an exhibit of King Tut's crap from the Cairo Museum. They have a no photography rule. My assumption as an advanced photographer is that this rule is likely about the xenon strobes used in flashes and the non-trivial amount of UV they produce. I noticed someone taking a picture (with a flash) and the rapid approach of a docent. I got closer so I could hear the exchange. In a nutshell, the Cairo Museum was asserting that the display was copyrighted and that was why photos were not allowed. The person was 'required' to delete the photos from her digital camera.
This prompted me to talk to the docent after the person had left. They had no real answers to my questions, only evasion.
I pointed out that statements of fact are not copyrightable, that the antiquities are not copyrightable. Thus photos taken that show only statement of fact or the antiquities are not actionable by them. That said, I respected their request not to take photos, as that was a condition of sales of the tickets to the museum, but I did get the curators name and complained.
The response from the curator was more illustrative. The museum was required to take that stance by Cairo or else they would have not been allowed to carry the King Tut exhibit... The curator personally agreed that while flash photography is very bad, taking pictures without a flash (monopod and a steady hand) *should* be ok, but in this case isn't.
In a complete opposite encounter at the Getty Museum I was viewing old bibles and other texts. I brought my photo gear, and a tripod. As I was setting up for a shot a docent came over ready to jump me for using a flash, and once I pointed out that my camera had no flash, and the external unit was nicely tucked away in the bag, they became the most helpful people in the world, diverting people and drawing a blind across a reflection on the bullet proof glass case, just so I could get a perfect shot.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
That would only be the case if I had agreed to such a limited license at the point of transfer. It would also be false advertising in that we are constantly asked to "buy" and almost never to "license" a game. These words have meaning, you can't get around that without some serious chicanery.
Problem with the playing 4 hours vs working 4 hours is that the working hours that you can achieve PAYABLE are finite, only a certain amount of jobs with the pay, who will let you work extra and it will cap off probably. So it'd have to be hypothetically working 4 extra paid hours to add more to the argument I guess
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
A thief is a thief is a thief. It cost them something to produce the product you're copying and you're depriving them of the reward for that labor and initial outlay. It's still theft no matter how you justify it.
What a facile viewpoint. There are two ways to define theft, of course. There is the legal definition, and there are definitions based on personal ethics.
The former does not include copyright infringement. It simply doesn't. (well... okay, not in the US - I don't know about other nations' laws) Rail all you want, this fact does not vary (... in the US) based on your loud but ill-informed assertion.
The latter could be based on any number of things, but is ultimately only relevant to the individual who subscribes to that ethic. You may well raise your voice and insist others adopt your set of ethics, but it is entirely unreasonable to expect the world to conform to your personal sense of appropriate behavior. Ultimately, we can only control our own actions within the context of our environment.
I suppose I shouldn't respond to an AC, but I think this is a point worth making.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
You can't say you're entitled to have that copy and have any legitimate basis for that claim, regardless as to the cost to the business.
And you are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to tell me what I can or can not do with my computer, and what subset of the base 256 representation of pi I can or cannot download with the internet connection I paid for. It cost money to create it? Tough shit. Sue the guy who uploaded it. If you can't find him, that has nothing to do with me.
Also, if the number of pirates is as high as these companies suggest (which would also mean that there are also many people who agree in principle, but don't do it for whatever reasons), shouldn't that invalidate any laws against it in a democracy by default? Think about it: how many people breaking the law does it take to change it, if the majority of the population is at least neutral to their cause?
If you think the examples are absurd in this context, you're right. But in 15 years, we'll remember this as the dark ages where corporations roamed the tubes hunting for dead people, and have not yet adapted their business models to reflect the inherent freedom of the internet. Or we'll remember this as the good old times, when you could modify the OS on your computer without going to jail for non-compliance with the Computing Device Copyright Infringement Monitoring Act. Which one of these lies ahead of us? You choose. We all do, day by day.
My proposed solution: a) extend Fair Use to the whole of the internet for personal use (even Hungary has that fercrissake), b) slap on an optional and reasonable Entertainment Fee/Tax to designated connection plans, to be distributed among the content creators based on measurements, and possibly c) zero tolerance among those who opt out, with fines based on the tax, not $2M for an album.
Radio stations, at least in the US, don't pay anything to recording companies. They only pay a relatively small fee to songwriters. Money from commercials supports the station itself, not performers.
Copyright only ever needed to control the main stream distribution channel. I'd say the best approach to copyright would be :
(1) creators get a five year "prior restrain" on mass reproduction, meaing they may sue anyone who distributes the work.
(2) creators get a subsequent 5 year right to issue entity-wide reproduction restraint orders.
If you don't like Disney or YouTube publishing your video, you may order them to cease distribution, and they must comply. In fact, the order applies to all companies present and future under the same overall managerial control, although you may need to prove that control for damages if you sue a different company than the one you ordered to cease distribution. You may not however issue an across-the-board restrain on distribution.
Any distributor like youtube that doesn't control their distribution channel should have be permitted temporary violations provided they remove offending content promptly, ala DMCA takedown notices.
(3) creators get additional subsequent years to issue entity-wide reproduction restraint orders if the copyright has never been sold or only minimal work for hire was involved in the work.
In other words, all copyright enforcement after 5 years should require DMCA takedown notices, but these notices have more teeth for distributors that actually control their channels like Disney.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The courts seem to disagree with you. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars
Oh, the poor victimized game publishers. Weep for them! Pity them! Because of rampant, unstoppable, evil piracy, they're only making billions and billions of dollars every year!
Start blaming the actual perpetrators—the smug rich bastards with all the power to do something about this rather than just trying harder and harder to control everything and rake in more money! MORE!
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Although I am a filthy pirate, I tend to agree with most of your assessment. The problem, to me, is twofold.
Personally, I see these two pitfalls as reasons not to pirate as a response to DRM, or as a try-before-you-buy extended demo. Both are indistinguishable from piracy-in-place-of-purchase. So to the executives, it looks like theft, sounds like theft, and acts like theft.
So, if instead these pirates just didn't play the game at all, instead choosing only to support games with sufficient demos and no DRM (Stardock, for example) the justification for the bad companies would dry up, and the companies who were consumer-friendly would get the support they needed.
Instead, though, Stardock's Demigod was pirated extensively, with pirates outnumering customers 9:1. The extra load crashed the servers, even. They managed to make the tough decision to stay true to not having DRM and did make money on the game, but it's easy to see where another company would make the seemingly obvious choice to use DRM. Shouldn't we start rewarding this behavior with purchases, instead of just pirating from the companies we hate?
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
"Hint: if it costs you nothing that I copy your game, you didn't lose jack shit. If you don't like it, make your game more entertaining than the pirated version."
LOL. Seeing as how the pirated version is an exact copy of the original, I don't see how you can even make this argument. Especially because once a company makes the game more entertaining, the pirates just copy it.
You are making it sound like piracy is open source software. Pirates don't innovate. They are just copying, nothing more.
"If Blizzard wanted, they could make it impossible for the private server developers to keep up. Nobody would bother to reverse engineer an encrypted protocol that changes with every patch. What do they do instead? They add content to their own and swim in the money it generates."
Would you be happy with all software being a service?
That is becasue the DRM "anti-counterfeiting" measures only serve to punish people who legally buy the game - obviously the pirated version will have such silly restrictions absent. This has happened to me twice in the past also - paid for a game only to have the DRM it was packaged with not let me run the game I had purchased. Had to go out and get the pirated version even though I had paid for a legal copy already. Which took me all of about 2 minutes to find. Yay for the companies adding all this crap into their software. Obviously it is working as there are no more places to download pirated versions of software!
"But this one goes to 11!"
Please provide a source for your claim.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Right, I tried to be specific. And yes, there are inefficiencies (jobs usually have fixed hours, etc, we're ignoring this for the sake of example).
To fix the numbers: for a given 12 hour period, you can either work 8 and play 4, or skip work (unpaid sick day, for example) and play for 12 hours. Moreover, let's assume it's release day for a game, to make it realistic. If you make $10/hr, the opportunity cost of skipping work to play the new release is $80. It's a real cost because, at the end of the day, you're out an extra $80. The reason you factor it in is to make an effective decision on skipping work. If 12 hours of a new release is worth $140 to you, then go for it. Otherwise, take the 4 hours of play that day and still be up $20.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
DRM as a whole is a waste. You're hurting honest people, and mildly inconveniencing dishonest people.
I think the "best" way to go about such things is to go about it like Blizzard tends to: hardly any DRM, but good luck playing multiplayer without a valid key (the bnet-only multiplayer thing is an obvious extension of this).
I think that sort of thing strikes a balance between people who want to try it out, and people who are playing it to the point where they ought to have paid. The situation with the Demigod launch was terrible (the pirate's argument that more players adds value to the game breaks down when the excess of players kills the server.)
People complaining about the price of games, etc, I have no sympathy for. They get cheap, if you wait. You want it early? It's going to cost more. You don't get to pirate it just because you can't afford to pay for it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
My argument was to state that people use hypothetical questions too seriously (when all they are is a thought experiment, i.e., just a "What If" question/statement, and therefore should cary very little if any legal weight unless proven true, in the exact way that any actual thought experient works). Additionally, up to present, most opportunity cost arguments (at least ones i've heard) were all purely hypothetical when used in terms of piracy, and were therefore easily discountable.
See your sibling post about worker's compensation for missed work due to injury. That is a very real and common example of opportunity cost, and it does carry legal weight.
You still haven't explained why opportunity cost is any more hypothetical or less real than the opportunity cost of an injury causing missed work. Would you care to?
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
My iPhone is jailbroken, and yet I do not have a single "pirated"[sic] app on it. All my apps are either freeware, open source, or paid for.
Why the jailbreak then?
* Backgrounder
* Winterboard and the endless tweaking/skinning it allows
* sbsettings
* bash, crond, openssh
* ability to use my iPhone as a mass storage device through sshfs (manage the phone via Linux)
* extended context menus
5x4 springboard and 6 icon wide dock
I doubt most phones are broken for piracy; in fact you do not even need to jailbreak to "pirate" apps (I've taken free apps and installed them on friends' phones - NEVER copied paid apps though). I think most are jailbroken to free the phone from Steve Jobs' control, and to make the springboard look how the OWNER likes it, not how Steve Jobs likes it.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You are under the impression you own the game; you do not. You own the, very limited, rights to play that game. These rights are not transferable to friends.
Lol wut? Maybe if you buy a game through something like STEAM.
Common law is fairly clear that if I buy something tangible, it's mine to give away, set on fire, or keep under my pillow.
The only exception I can think of to this general rule are things like gengineered seeds.
Companies can put whatever they want in their EULAs, that doesn't make it legal or enforceable.
Or are you seriously saying that I was breaking the law by swapping Nintendo cartridges amongst my middle school buddies?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm sorry, but I wasn't very impressed with this article.
First of all, it starts by misrepresenting the "lost sales" argument. The piracy argument isn't that every pirated copy is a lost sale - it's that the piracy rate represents a significant number of lost sales. In essence, you can divide the market into hard-core (those who will buy the game no matter what) and a much larger casual market. The piracy takes a chunk out of the casual market, where if people can download a game instead of buying it, they will. And, it's not a 1:1 ratio of pirated copy to lost sale, but, besides there being an argument to be made that the game would not have been downloaded if there wasn't at least SOME interest, the sooner the protection is cracked, the more people who would have bought the game otherwise will have just downloaded it.
Second, the article completely ignores using authentication servers to track the percentage of games being played that are legitimate vs. percentage being pirated. This isn't necessarily a complicated calculation. If you've sold 200,000 copies, and you get 800,000 games trying to authenticate, well, it's basic math to figure out how many are pirated copies.
Third, although I haven't had a chance to take a look at these numbers yet, and so I can't really comment in detail on them, Assassin's Creed II held off the pirates for a very long time, as opposed to Assassin's Creed I (which was heavily pirated from the outset), and so it is possible to compare the PC sales figures between the two to get at least a rough sense of how many lost sales there might have actually been.
All of this is more accurate than the poll cited by the original article, which, I might add, basically takes the people polled at their word. It reminds me a bit of those employment tests where they ask you if you've ever stolen anything - if you HAD stolen something, you're not exactly likely to reply with "yes"...
There is a much better and more detailed article on the subject here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
The image that immediatelly came to my mind was that of a painter selling a painting.
Note that copyright was not required or involved in any way and yet the creator of the artwork got rewarded for that work.
In fact, the only way copyright would be involved would be if someone made a copy of the painting. Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Interesting that you should bring up selling copies of a painting...a moral question for you: is it fair for someone to mass-produce copies of a painting, making significant money from them, and not recompense the original artist? is the Chinese painting clone shop (or the simple mass production of prints) fair to the original artist?
From your example, the original artist would only make money from their sale of the work once...we, as a society, decided that this situation was unfair since it puts the people with distribution systems (publishers/printers) in an enormously unfair position over the painter. Hence, some system was necessary to re-balance that equation.
That's what copyright is all about. Whether the system has become unbalanced in the other way is an interesting discussion to have, but I really want to shoot down this pernicious idea that copyright decisions are independent of moral decisions.
Frame the argument properly, and we'll make progress...but as long as one side talks morals and the other ignores that, noting will ever get solved.
What you say makes sense, but that does not make it a reality. People think they are buying a game (and rightly so) and game producers think they are licensing you the rights to play the game (usually with lots of DRM to enforce these rights).
And you are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to tell me what I can or can not do with my computer, and what subset of the base 256 representation of pi I can or cannot download with the internet connection I paid for.
So because you paid for the internet connection, there is no limit on what you can do with it? How does that make sense? Because I bought the car and paid for the gas, I can drive it on your land without asking?
It cost money to create it? Tough shit. Sue the guy who uploaded it. If you can't find him, that has nothing to do with me.
If you're a willing participant, it has everything to do with you. I'm against exhorbanant fees for simply downloading (thousands of dollars per song, for example), but that doesn't mean I think downloaders have no liability. You should be liable for the cost of the good (about $60, plus some nominal penalty for repeat offenses), and the uploader should be liable for much more.
Also, if the number of pirates is as high as these companies suggest (which would also mean that there are also many people who agree in principle, but don't do it for whatever reasons), shouldn't that invalidate any laws against it in a democracy by default? Think about it: how many people breaking the law does it take to change it, if the majority of the population is at least neutral to their cause?
Not by default. Notice that is both of your cases, the law was rewritten through the process of a representative democracy. The exact reason for a representative democracy is to prevent this kind of 'everyone is doing it, so it's alright' mob-rule.
My proposed solution: a) extend Fair Use to the whole of the internet for personal use (even Hungary has that fercrissake), b) slap on an optional and reasonable Entertainment Fee/Tax to designated connection plans, to be distributed among the content creators based on measurements, and possibly c) zero tolerance among those who opt out, with fines based on the tax, not $2M for an album.
This is reasonable, but none of it justifies piracy now, since it's currently illegal. You need to change the law first.
And don't give me some bullshit that free access to a luxury entertainment item is a human right, equivalent to being treated equally regardless of the color of your skin.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Actually they are. The company may put technical measures in place to prevent games being shared, but console games at least don't generally fall victim to this technical chicanery. And no matter how they word it, you absolutely have the right to do whatever you want to hardware that you have purchased. You're not entitled to make copies, but you can certainly sell/give/pass on the cartridge/disc/whatever to anyone you so please.
You are under the impression you own the game; you do not.
When a game studio can produce a contract that I signed agreeing to that horridly twisted concept, I'll agree with it. Until then: hell yeah I own the game, just like I own the toaster and book I bought at the same time with the same debit card at the same cash register. I obviously don't own the copyright to the game and can't make illegal [1] copies of it, but it's otherwise mine to do with as I please.
[1] I'm dropping "unauthorized" from my vocabulary. If it were up to the publishers, I wouldn't be authorized to do anything with my game other than play it once per each time that I pay them. I couldn't care less about what they generously authorize me to do; if a law doesn't say I can't do it, then it is my opinion that I'm allowed to.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'd hope so. However, that still hasn't stopped software makers from shipping all products with DRM that enforces these "rights" they have given me to use their software. It would appear the courts haven't really enforced this ruling on any sort of large scale.
This is the problem with software; you can't apply laws that were made for books to it. You can't make a book whose text disappears if you give it to a friend, but you can do this with software. If first-sale applies to software, then the courts should make DRM that prevents exactly that illegal. However, nothing is being done, so I would still say software is firmly in the gray category.
Do I think you were breaking the law? No. Did Nintendo, back then, think you were? Probably not. Would a game company now think you were? Most definitely yes. My statement is not something I believe in, but what the game producers are actually doing (or at least believe they are doing). I was trying to make a point, because it really is an absurd statement.
Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Fun Historical Fact: People making and selling copies of original artwork nearly bankrupted working artists in the 17 and 1800s, which is part of the reason we have copyright laws. If you want art in your society, you don't want to encourage copying of that art in a way that bankrupts your artists. Of course, most people really are too ignorant to understand that art is a desirable quantity for reasons other than simple entertainment.
You are 100% wrong in almost everything you just said. First, let me start out by pointing out that there are two classes of laws -moral/rights based laws and utilitarian/instrumental laws. Only the former is about morality. Laws in the latter class are not based in morality but are rather intended to achieve some particular goal. Copyright law, at least in the US, Canada, and the UK, (among others) is a utilitarian regime (France, for example, has a rights based system of copyright). This is why the US constitution limits the power of congress to create monopolies in works, requiring that such monopolies must be in service of the promotion of progress in science and the arts (that is the utilitarian aim of the law) and must be for a limited period of time (recognizing that granting a monopoly in intellectual products is or may be a necessary evil). In conclusion, you couldn't be more wrong in your opinion of copyright, which is a regime intended to promote progress in science and the arts. If it ever fails to achieve that, for example by preventing people's preferred enjoyment of intellectual products, then it has failed in its essential purpose and should be amended.
Intellectual products are not physical things, and it is completely erroneous to use the analogy of physical property. Copyright was never even referred to as "property" until recent history, and this change in language was largely a rhetorical move by rights holders intended to shift the opinions of people like yourself. Turns out that this was a good strategy, judging by your overconfidence in your flawed views. Copyright is a system of rights that may or may not make the purchasing of infringing copies wrongful, but whether or not it does, and the extent to which it does, will be based on policy considerations concerning the goals of copyright, and not moral considerations about the wrong of "stealing" someone's "property". In Canada, for example, it is perfectly legal to accept a CD with infringing copies of music, even if you know them to be infringing. What is prohibited is the reproduction of the songs, not the accepting of them.
don't need to. My argument was specifically scoped to deal with hypotheticals surrounding piracy and nothing else. *points to phrase "hypothetical when used in terms of piracy"* Your question is out of scope of my argument.
I love to slaughter the english language.
This is one of the worst flamebaiting articles I've seen in awhile. The title is
Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately
But then they go on to prove something completely unrelated:
This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
How exactly does this make the piracy number any easier for developers to swallow? They put their hard work into a game and 80% of people using their work have not paid for it. The only thing we really learn from this article is that people will do anything to spin piracy into a positive action.
only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales
10% of iPhones are jailbroken != 10% of potential customers are pirates.
To establish that you would have to show:
1) ALL owners of jailbroken phones are also pirates - rather obviously not necessarily true. This might still leave the second part of the statement true - where you qualify with the phrase "at most", except for:
2) ALL iPhone owners would also have to be potential game sales as well. It seems likely - though I have no evidence to back it up at all - that jailbreakers would be more likely to be game-players (more technologically saavy, therefore more likely to use it for other things than a phone) which would _allow_ but not force your piracy rates up.
The fact that you are countering someone else's bollocks science is not an excuse to use bollocks science yourself - rather it is a mandate to get it right.
Dear Software Pirate Brothers and Sisters,
Please reply with your address.
I would like to try out your TV, nap in your bed, and sample your fridge. If they are to my liking then I may choose to purchase them. More than likely I'll just use them for a while until I get tired of them.
Don't worry - soon I'll move over to one of your friends house and try out all of their hard earned stuff without paying them either. Screw rent - goods were designed to be "free". At least that's how I understand the essence of commerce.
Thanks,
Your Fellow Software Pirate
Hint: if it costs you nothing that I copy your game
It costs me "nothing" (as in, I have the same amount of money in my pocket as I did before) when someone slanders or libels me, yet we do recognize those as economically harmful, and therefore criminal.
"People think they are buying a game (and rightly so)"
Most people DO buy a copy of the game as per normal sales laws. Such a sale has nothing to do with copyright and often the purchase is not from the copyright holder but from a store.
"and game producers think they are licensing you the rights to play the game (usually with lots of DRM to enforce these rights)"
Depending on country that is a nonsens sale since there is no need to purchase such a right, there is nothing forbidding you to play it to start with. Even if one do need such a license, and the sale is of a licnese, one still then needs to get hold of a copy of the game so that one can use the license. How would that be done? Well, as far as I can see, any license is typically sold together with a copy of the game. So one can in those cases argue that they sell BOTH a license and a copy of the game. In the end one to buy a copy of the game in either case.
Regardless, I still only see the claims 'losses aren't real if they're hypothetical' and 'losses for piracy are hypothetical, unlike other opportunity cost losses'. If that's not correct, please make your point more clearly.
Neither have any support beyond your claim that they exist. Either support what you claim, or give it up.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
This is close to the truth but not entirely correct. The precursor to modern copyright were the licensing laws put into place with the invention of the printing press. Printing anything without a license was made into crime, and this license to print -the copyright- was given to a printer only after the work had been deemed to be non-blasphemous and non-seditious. In other words, the inception of copyright was a regime of censorship.
After the censorship regime was eliminated, the printers had become quite a powerful industry. They lobbied for the ability to continue charging money based on the printing rights they held. This is when the argument you spoke of comes into play. The printers argued that if copyrights are not granted, the production of art will slow down or cease because it will be too hard for creators to turn a profit.
This is so painfully obvious I wonder why the industry doesn't see it. If you can get something for free, you'll grab a lot more than if you would have to pay for it. Also, there are a lot of 'pirates' who download games they come across "just in case" but never end up installing. I even knew a guy would download and burn games to disks just to collect them, even though he rarely got around to installing or playing even a quarter of the # he downloaded.
Hint: if it costs you nothing that I copy your game, you didn't lose jack shit. If you don't like it, make your game more entertaining than the pirated version.
Hint: I didn't make it for you to play it for free. And the more I see this attitude, the less I want to continue making games for people with your sense of entitlement to take. I don't work for you - I work for those who pay me.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up the viewpoint of a good chunk of the industry.
Of course, first sale doctrine says that they can go screw themselves, but hey, that doesn't stop them from spreading FUD long enough for people to believe it.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Of course, most people really are too ignorant to understand that art is a desirable quantity for reasons other than simple entertainment.
It's a good thing video games aren't considered art. ...wait, what?
I obviously don't own the copyright to the game and can't make illegal [1] copies of it, but it's otherwise mine to do with as I please.
Except the DRM they ship with most games doesn't let you do with it as you legally please. Further, the DMCA prevents you from circumventing these measures, so it is, in fact, illegal to make pretty much any copy of the game, other than an unplayable, direct bit-for-bit transfer.
The point of the article was that the "opportunity cost" of the piracy of these games are significantly lower than that 80-90% figure would suggest.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Yes it is moral to do so. Is it moral for someone to take the fruits of someone's labour and not only garnish the entire revenue of selling it (more labour) but also punish them (by incarceration) just because you did some work on another thing?
The copier did work. You want their money. Why is that moral to demand it AND punish them for their efforts?
Then there is no piracy because the only thing being sold is the limited license which ISN'T being P2P'd.
Best friend during Cricket season.
The point of the article was that the "opportunity cost" of the piracy of these games are significantly lower than that 80-90% figure would suggest.
Yes, but it's likewise impossible to claim that it is instead the 5-10% value that they claim. It's almost certainly somewhere between 10% and 80%.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
I don't see the article as saying that the figure *is* 10%, but rather *is at most* 10%.
In other words, it's not saying that all jailbreakers are pirates, but rather that the number of pirates is less than or equal to the number of jailbreakers, which seems to be a valid statement.
In other words, if the application were somehow completely copy-protected, the largest number of new customers that you'd get is limited by the 10% that are potentially affected by this change.
Of course, the potential new sales from this change depends upon the correlation between jailbreakers/non-jailbreakers and who actually wants the app. If these are independent, then it's valid to say that overall sales wouldn't increase by 10% based upon this change alone.
What part of "I will not buy a game until I have downloaded and played it at least a couple of times" do you find hard to understand? It seems to be written in English. I do not buy a game until I test drive it first. If I download a game I want to buy and play it and it turns out to be a PoS like 95% of them do now a days, I delete it and do not buy it. I don't keep copies of downloaded games on my computer to play and replay over and over. I test them, see if they are worth the 50-60 bucks and then if they are, I go buy copy. If not, I delete it. Maybe you should get off /. and go back to remedial English class and learn some reading comprehension for the terminally stupid.
Languages change and evolve, even within a generation. Fighting the colloquial use of piracy as 'copyright infringement' or 'drm removal' is a losing battle.
Dictionary.com:
piracy
2.
the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: 'The record industry is beset with piracy.'
http://blog.slaingod.com
You're aware that Opportunity Cost is a patch in the theory to support the fact that you can't choose between an infinite ammount of choices, right?
(Oh well, maybe you don't.)
Also O.C. is about choices YOU make, not about the choices others make that affect you.
The constant 'public service' messages about the death of radio I hear on my local stations if congress passes a law requiring them to pay performers for the airing of their works.
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h848/show
is the bill that would provide performers compensation parity.
http://blog.slaingod.com
Something tells me they either don't look at the lower bound very much or the lower bound is higher than the actual lost sales.
That's a false equivalence, which if accepted creates a tautology.
The law in some jurisdictions provides for a death penalty. The fact that a death penalty is authorized by law does not automatically make it moral -- it is moral to some, and immoral to others. This is but one example.
The law may reflect particular versions of morality, but it is even more frequently amoral. Building codes specify how your house must be built. There is nothing inherently immoral in building a non-compliant structure or owning a non-compliant structure (excluding fraudulent sales to others), yet the law does not allow it.
The law of copyright is 300 years old. The morality of copying is subject to debate. Your general proposition appears to be that it is immoral to copy a work. If so, one must question why it is immoral to copy a work the day before a copyright expires yet moral to copy the same work the day after the copyright expires. Note: the morality of complying with copyright is not in question -- you've argued that law is codified morality, and not than that it is immoral to flout the law.
Nonsense. Law is simply morality that's been codified.
What morals does exceeding the speed limit by 1mph , walking down the street or being a passenger in a vehicle with an open container codify?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I stand corrected, though the correct citation is USC17 110(5)
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
He owns the disc(s) and has the right to do whatever he so wishes with said disc(s). A one sided licence is not a sufficient substitute for common sense.
Actually, people argue it is right to pirate games on this site almost constantly. These are the people who say it is ok because they buy the games they like, or its ok because they show it to friends and their friends buy games, or those that say DRM is offensive so they have to pirate it so they can play it their way, etc etc.
Piracy is wrong. It isn't as bad as company's report. It is important to educate both the consumer on why it is wrong to pirate and the game industry why it is wrong to implement draconian DRM based on inflated piracy numbers. Both sides have been acting like morons and it only seems to be getting worse.
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This is dumb. Not every game is an MMORPG. Most games don't require a server farm for them to be enjoyable. WoW doesn't have this problem because of the nature of the genre, not because it is doing something "right" to get more customers.
It's your attitude that is the reason why companies want DRM. The selfish "well, it doesn't cost you money, why should you care" thought is juvenile. If everyone shared that attitude we wouldn't have almost any of the most popular games today.
Yes piracy is a problem. No, it isn't as bad as the industry reports. Yes, game companies should be allowed to try to protect their hard work. No, they should not use draconian forms of DRM to accomplish this.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
You can't make a copy of the car that you are test driving and return the original. Hearing a song on the radio or listening to a CD in a store are legal ways of demoing a product. You can also ask your friends how the like a game, just like you can ask for references for a doctor.
You really suck at analogies since everything you list is a legal way to find out about a product or a service. You can ask a friend to try playing the game they bought, you can play a demo if it is available, you can find reviewers that have similar taste in games and buy games off their recommendation. You have options, you choose to ignore those options and break the law because you know you will suffer no repercussion. That's fine, but don't try to morally justify it. You are in the wrong.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Heck, in my case I've bought games on Steam that I already owned, just because it was worth spending the $2.50 to not have to dig through my old CD stack to find the install disc.
I don't read AC A human right
Well of course losses are not real if they are hypothetical. Hypotheticals are not considered real until proven, by the very definition of Hypothetical: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Hypothetical syn: suppositional, theoretical, speculative.
;)
Hypotheticals should never be used in courts of law because they are not yet truth, but thats just my opinion, and nobody cares about that
The other statement you referenced is based on that most arguments I've seen, and were made by my original post's father and were hypothetical in nature. There were assumptions made on the hypothesis that the company would have made money if the thief had not stolen the item, which is unfounded, because in that statement they do not disprove that they wouldn't have made money if he hadn't. The company's intent was that this should be taken as fact (when it is not fact yet) and thus be applied as an opportunity cost, which only has basis in fact, not on hypothetical possibilities of an unproven nature.
I love to slaughter the english language.
Replace "Painter" with "Book" and your whole argument falls apart, unless you think books should be as expensive as 1st edition paintings.
I've thought for a long time that they should put this on their tax returns. If they are experiencing an 80-90% loss on piracy, claim it and let the IRS sort it out.
So basically you say that an action is moral or immoral depending on which country it is done. I didn't know geography had anything to do with ethics.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
It is wrong because you say so, but the only source of absolute morality is religion. If you take the reason alone, what's the proof for "killing is wrong"?
Even more difficult is: what does it mean to be "wrong"?. How do you define "evil"?
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Unfortunately, when it comes to shitty digital media laws, we don't own our video games. We own licenses to play them. :(
Not tested in court. I don't agree with the EULA's, and I say so at the time I open the packages. I try modifying the terms and conditions, but the program doesn't let me, so I really have no choice to voice my opinion. Since no one gives refunds on opened software packages nowadays, either, I am being forced into accepting an agreement which I didn't agree to. However it is clearly posted in my bedroom that I am not licensing the software but rather own a copy of it like I would own a book, and that agree to use it personally and not copy it/distribute it/profit from it. I also have it written down that by not coming to my house and telling me otherwise, the software companies in question are agreeing to my modification of the terms.
A contract is something agreed to by BOTH parties.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Even if only 10 people out of the 1 million who pirated would otherwise have purchased the game, the company has still lost money to piracy (about $600).
No, they lost money to a certain type of piracy - pirates who substituted piracy for purchase. Not piracy in general. And that's ignoring the whole piracy generates publicity effect.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
we, as a society, decided that this situation was unfair since it puts the people with distribution systems (publishers/printers) in an enormously unfair position over the painter.
And this situation applies even more so for copyright distribution cartels today. At least without copyright others, including the original artist, can distribute under their own terms.
The reward of copyright is proportional to the amount of distribution, not the amount of creative effort, by many orders of magnitude. That's wrong and has lead to severe market distortion.
but I really want to shoot down this pernicious idea that copyright decisions are independent of moral decisions.
Nothing pernicious about it, just you trying to impose your moral judgements on others. The law frequently has little to do with morals and copyright is but one example amongst many.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
That's what an EULA is for.. when you click "i accept" your consenting to their license.
Law is simply morality that's been codified. We believe killing people is wrong, so we make a law to reflect our shared morality.
Some law is codified morality, some is not. For example, the fact that it's illegal to drive on the left side of the road is not a question of morality. It's an arbitrary convention needed to make traffic work. In fact, the vast majority of laws deal with procedures, technicalities and arbitrary conventions necessary to make society work, but which are not moral in themselves. Those parts of the law are just tools for society, not ends in themselves.
In the USA, copyright started out as a method to "promote the progress of the sciences and useful arts" by creating an economic incentive for creators - i.e. a tool, not an end in itself. It has subsequently came to be viewed by many as a sort of moral right. Whether it really is useful for society, and whether it really is a moral right, is up for debate.
I download cracks for legally purchased games in order to play them on my netbook, which doesn't have a CD/DVD drive.
In fact, I download cracks just to avoid swapping in and out the original, legally purchased disks on my desktop computer.
You are under the impression you own the game; you do not. You own the, very limited, rights to play that game. These rights are not transferable to friends.
That is what the rightsholders (game companies, book publishers, etc) try to claim, but so far it hasn't held up well in court.
First, no matter what, you own a physical copy of the game.
Second, the rightsholder can't restrict your right to resell the game. In the USA this is called the First Sales doctrine.
Third, in my jurisdiction (Sweden) you do not need the rightsholder's permission to play the game (or to run any computer program, for that matter). The rightsholder only has exclusive rights to publish and to manufacture copies, nothing else. There exists no such thing as an exclusive right to run a computer program (or to read a book, or to watch a movie). Once you have a physical copy, you can do anything you want with it, except publish or copy it. Rightsholders often try to claim that the temporary copies created in the computer's memory when you run the softwaer constitute infringing copies, but the Swedish copyright law has an explicit exception for temporary copies that are created as a part of a technical process. I'm not sure how it works in US copyright law, but I doubt the rightsholder can restrict how you run a computer program without first binding you with a contract (license agreement).
Not every copy download would be bought. That's a simple fact of life, you don't even need statistics to understand that. If they want that statement to be true, prices would at least have to be halved and then still it wouldnt reflect the situation accurately. I myself sometimes just download something, just to see how my computer holds up against it, only to delete it after 'testing' or maybe 1 day later. I shit you not, and if i do this, maybe other people do this too. Piracy is not the real problem here, not the base of the problem at least
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
Copyright law & first sale doctrine disagrees - the rights are fully transferable.
Some technical restrictions may make lending/selling your copy harder, but it doesn't mean that you are prohibited to do that.
An EULA may claim that you don't have some rights and the company owns your soul, but these points of EULA aren't valid and binding.
> Further, the DMCA prevents you from circumventing these measures, so it is, in fact, illegal to make pretty much any copy of the game
You don't have to circumvent DRM (as per the DMCA) to make a copy of the game. The pirates/hackers circumvent the DRM (might even be legal in their country).
So you buy the game, and then download (leech) a working copy to use as you please, courtesy of the pirates/hackers.
Win-win right? The game company gets your money, you get a working copy and the hackers get to show how 1337 they are.
Maybe so, but I'd wager the bank that 10% is a HELLUVA LOT CLOSER to the truth than 80%!
To recap: The songs you hear on the radio are paid for by those commercials you hear between the songs. They are not free.
I understand your point, but let me point out an important distinction here. They don't pay a cent more if I turn on the radio and listen. Or if a million people do. That "paid for" song is exactly that, in the old paradigm: IT WAS PAID FOR. They didn't make you pay for it over and over again, or monitor who was listening, or whether they taped the "king biscuit flower hour" on KLOS. That fee agreement was an extortion settlement with broadcasters since they generate advertising revenues from others. It was lawsuit insurance protection payoff. But don't delude yourself into thinking that it "pays" for the song in the same way that it is in digital domains. What payed for music then was record sales - and that only happens if WE HEAR THE SONGS. That is why the record companies were giving PAYOLA that was 1000 times the ASCAP/BMI licensing agreements. When radio broadcast that song for 3 cents, it made NO DIFFERENCE to the cost, and it made NO ACCOUNTING if I or anyone had the radio on or off. It was a FLAT FEE. It also had no adjustment to the cost if I record it to a cassette tape. Copyright laws pertain to that situation in analog technology where ONE copy of a broadcast was ruled FAIR USE after Sony Beta arrived. BUT THE TERMS OFFERED TODAY ARE BY NO MEANS FAIR WHEN DRM ACCOUNTS FOR EVERY EAR AND DEVICE AD NAUSIUM and restricts your media and devices, and mines your market data. You can argue the moral relevance of apples and oranges, but bottom line is that the "piracy" that occurs is a direct response to the "rip off" greed that knows no bounds in the Corporate meat grinder. If the price for listening to the song is priced like it was in radio days - in other words, a flat nominal 3 cent fee PAID FOR the broadcast - no matter how many ears were tuned in or tape decks rolling, then there would be no need to "pirate". But the licensing arrangement proposed at this point of technology is preposterous, and I ain't paying, and nobody is going to buy if its not worth it. I am not stealing it either, I am just not a customer - not like I was when I felt I got what I paid for ONCE. Today, I'll occasionally buy tunes directly from the artists, at the concert, or on their web, but Sony and Universal Thorn EMI and Warner's Polydor, Apple, whatever can kiss my ass goodbye. Ultimately, a marketing plan that works will be the one that offers the bast value in the current social economic and cultural landscape. I've outgrown that demographic, I'm over that hill. But I really believe that the rip off is a two way street. "Pirates" are the "customers" once they decide they want to buy the product. These twits want to charge for the commercial, and only lend a license you intend to own. If it ain't worth stealing, it ain't worth paying for either, and nobody is hearing it at all. Given the choice of selling 1000 $1 tunes or a million pennies, the latter is always preferable, especially when its made out of a download of digital bandwidth. Its frigging electrons - and its prolific distribution is exactly what they want no matter how much they piss and moan about not getting paid enough. If that were really true, they would be dentists.
On your second point - or my second point; they appear to be the same - we agree. Not all jailbreakers necessarily want the app. But its possibly (I'd even venture probably) a larger percentage than for non-jailbreakers. As an extreme example, if 10% of people are pirates, and 10% of non-pirates are potential sales, but 50% of pirates are potential sales, then stopping all of the pirates would raise your sales by more than 50% (For a million people, thats 90k sales with piracy and 140k sales without; 140/90 = 155%.) I'm not saying those numbers are correct, of course, but I am saying that without knowing what they are you can't say that there is a 10% cap.
But for your first point, I'll just quote the original article again:
only 10% of their potential customers are pirates
Not "at most 10% of their customers are pirates". Only. Perhaps it was just a slip of the tongue, but round Slashdot stating that all jailbreakers are pirates is flame-bait extrordinaire...