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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
No, Slashvertisement would be me saying: "I bought the bundle yesterday, Gish alone is worth half the 15$ I decided to pay, and having played gish and WoG I'm pretty sure the rest of the pack will easily be worth the other half."
For example.
How much of their potential customers are ninjas?
You'll have to extrapolate this to the sales charts for Pirate Gaiden and Teenage Mutant Pirate Turtles.
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.
Please elaborate about how are Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft not interesting at all without paying a subscription service.
Sure over 90% of your -players- pirated the game. That's clear.
Now what percent of your -potential customers- pirated the game?
Because from that 90% likely less than 10% would buy the game if they couldn't download it. The rest would simply "do without".
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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.
Except it is also easy as hell to get PC gamers to buy, it is called giving them a good value instead of squeezing them for that last penny, duh! I'll use myself for a couple of examples: 1.-I bought MoH:10th anniversary, even though I heard the latest game in the series sucked (which it did BTW) so why did I buy? Because they gave me extras that made it worth buying like the original MoH:AA plus the expansions, Moh:PA Directors Cut, plus a couple of CDs worth of soundtracks and making of behind the scenes.
Another example is Good Old Games which has gotten me to buy plenty of games I normally wouldn't have, simply by offering x64 compatibility along with no DRM and plenty of extras like soundtracks and strategy guides. They make the purchase so easy and painless that it is literally easier to buy from them than it would be to pirate the game. After all with a pirated version I couldn't be sure it would run on W7 x64, nor would I get any expansion packs, all the extras, and have it as simple as 1 click and I'm done.
So if you want PC gamers to buy it really isn't that hard. Don't try to get us to pay $50 for a 5 hour long badly ported x360 game, if you really think your game is worth $50 then throw in a couple of your older titles you aren't selling any more so we don't feel like we are getting ripped off, and make it easy to buy from you without making us jump through bullshit DRM hoops (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft!) that simply make the pirated version a better value. If you find the right price or incentives you CAN convert pirates to customers. Hell I can't even count how many guys I know that ran formerly pirated XP Pro that are now running W7 thanks to the $50 HP offer. MSFT hit the right price and many decided it was just easier and less hassle to buy the new OS than pirate it.
Ultimately though, I have to wonder if all this "evil piratez" bullshit isn't actually a cover for the fact that certain big game companies want their PC games to fail so they can stick with the consoles. Lets face it, since the days of code wheels many of the big companies have been more about control than anything else. The x360 for the first time gives them "black box computing" where they can nickel and dime the living hell out of the players and kill multiplayer for game A when sequel B comes out. Of course if they simply dropped their currently profitable PC games division the shareholders would have a shitfit, so instead they purposely go out of their way to treat their customers like absolute dogshit. When the PC gamers avoid them like the clap they can say "See? PC gaming is dead" and stick with the 360 without shareholder screaming.
So I have to wonder how much of the "evil piratez!" is bullshit seeing how companies like Valve can make money hand over fist even on old games that were probably the most pirated in history. Plus piracy makes a damn fine excuse for when your game sucks, like the company that made Titan Quest which one of the developers tried to argue with me in the forums that the fricking demo I was playing "Had to be pirated" because the shitty code would CTD after less than 20 minutes. And sorry about the length, but as a PC gamer that has watched PC gaming go from one of the greats to a bunch of shitty 360 ports for frankly crazy money with worse nastiness than most viruses I really don't feel much sympathy for the game companies ATM.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Still infringing IP, though.
So is singing the "Happy Birthday" song, but everyone does it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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</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!
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.
Yeah, you've identified that only 150,000 out of 2,000,000 users paid for the game.
You can't identify how many of the remaining 1,850,000 would have bought the game had they not pirated it, which is kind of the point.
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
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!
Your aim is to make sure that people in category 1 stay there for your next product, and that as many people in category 2 move to category 1. Anything else is a distraction.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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
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
Well, they certainly cause a tremor in my pants.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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,
I've told you a million times, you really can't do a good console game as a one man in a garage setup. You do a prototype, using Flash, pygame + SDL, whatever. That, you put in your portfolio to show off to potential employers/ dev houses/ publishers/partners. Then you do that, and that either gets you money or access to a devkit.
If you want to be a console developer you actually have to DO stuff rather than whine about the barriers to entry all the time. Take vacation time to interview if you have to, but just do something.
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.
Unfortunately, when it comes to shitty digital media laws, we don't own our video games. We own licenses to play them. :(
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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!"
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.
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.
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?
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.