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Sometimes It's OK To Steal My Games
spidweb writes "One Indie developer has written a nuanced article on a how software piracy affects him, approaching the issue from the opposite direction. He lists the ways in which the widespread piracy of PC games helps him. From the article: 'You don't get everything you want in this world. You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both. Most of the time. Because, when I'm being honest with myself, which happens sometimes, I have to admit that piracy is not an absolute evil. That I do get things out of it, even when I'm the one being ripped off.' The article also tries to find a middle ground between the Piracy-Is-Always-Bad and Piracy-Is-Just-Fine sides of the argument that might enable single-player PC games to continue to exist."
Much like indie music producers, many love to have their music 'pirated' because it means exposure. Like the old shareware days. Remember when Radiohead did that pay-what-you-want scheme? Not a bad idea. The sooner the content producers adapt to the new distribution models, eliminate the middle-men cartels that get all the cuts (old-school mentality), the sooner the gangsters of profit are shown that information generally wants to be 'free', finding a way to make people pay for it through their own generosity and good-will obligation, as to arm-twisting and draconian DRM, the sooner quality information can flourish, the sooner garbage that keeps our current signal-to-noise ratio so low begins to become weeded out.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there needs to be a front company to sell the work of somebody else. But I believe this should only be true for circumstances in that the producer(s) can't maintain the quality of their work, nor the channels of distribution in a manner that maintains the quality of the original product. But something that is self-contained awesomeness that has a fairly hands off approach, well, find ways to monetize it other than arm-twisting and litigation. This guy seems to get it.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both.
http://www.fedoraproject.org/
Palm trees and 8
All those middle men are not ripping off their artists. They are ripping YOU off.
In the arts, powerful middle men sell fame to artists, and sell product to consumers. Artists get an acceptable deal if they reach the end of their contract while remanning creative, as they'll sell more shit for vastly more then.
Yet *some* artists would achieve fame anyways, maybe very different artists. YOU are deprived of them because some middle man made another choice about who becomes famous.
And middle men are ripping off the best artists by preventing an egalitarian competition for fame, obviously.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
And no one is entitled to prevent me from helping my neighbour just because it interferes with their business model.
He was speaking in terms of PC games. I've not seen a lot of high-quality PC games given away (Alien Swarm is the one recent exception that I know of).
The whole point of this article is what I've said in every piracy argument I've been involved in: if no one buys quality PC games, they won't be made any more. Buy the games you play. I'll go even further than the author: don't just buy one a year, you cheap schmucks. Buy anything you play for more than 10 hours.
The more money we sink into the PC games market, the healthier it will be. The more quality titles we support, the more we'll see of the same level of quality.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
You cannot look at top grossing games (or movies or music) to get an idea of the economic impact of software piracy. You have to look at the not so successful games.
The kinds of games that are going to have problems from piracy are the games that are good but not great. Think of any game that you do not ever see a commercial for on television. The impact of piracy on a high profile title is probably the difference between making 50 million dollars and 40 million dollars profit. Significant, but not really that damaging to the company that made that title.
The impact of piracy on a low profile title is probably the difference between making a modest profit and having to shut down the studio that made it.
An indie title is probably not going to be popular enough to attract that much piracy.
END COMMUNICATION
Hm, I suppose that is true technically, but I think you're not really on target there.
Your problem is the second use of the word 'explicitly.' That word isn't in the ninth amendment. Instead the rights reserved to the states and the people are merely those that are neither granted to the United States, and not denied to the states. This, especially in conjunction with the elastic clause, leaves the door open to implicitly granted powers, which are fairly like penumbral civil liberties that are also not expressly protected but can be understood to be present by careful reading. (E.g. the First Amendment expressly protects a right to speak freely, but not a right to listen -- since the lack of the latter would effectively gut the former, and this would be an absurd result, we must infer that the latter is also protected)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Copyright is just an arbitrary social convention. Three hundred years ago, composers were happy when their music was used by others. Today, the staff at restaurants can’t sing the Happy Birthday song to their customers because it would constitute an unauthorised commercial use.
Copyright was a legal construct the printers (not the writers!) lobbied for in order to increase their profits, and soon, people got used to it and started seeing it as a god-given right. Perhaps in the future it will be possible to copyright individual sentences, and speaking them without the permission of the originator will be seen as ”stealing”. Perhaps there will be moral outrage, like the one over piracy, when people insist on speaking any sentence they like without paying the appropriate fee.
There are some morals which are very basic and vital to society, like the taboos against murder or theft, but copyright is not one of them. Copyright is a legal construct which gives priveleges to some (primarily large media corporations) at the expense of others (consumers). Copyright should be judged on how beneficial it is for society as a whole. It is an economic instrument meant to stimulate the production of literary and artistic works, not to ensure the income of writers and artists.
What other than DRM would stop a single player game from working when their network fails?
Do you think in a capitalistic society that having no copyright is going to promote the production of goods such as video games? Or basically any work of similar nature?
"I've not seen a lot of high-quality PC games given away"
You could at least define "high quality". If you mean high FPS, lots of bling, lots of gore, and flashing lights - yeah, you're probably right. Linux doesn't have a lot of high quality games. To me, nethack is pretty high quality.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That's why Obamacare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) was passed under "To lay and collect taxes [for] the general welfare". If you don't buy a product, the government reserves the right to tax you for its value and give it to you. Think of it as eminent domain run in reverse.
I don't have to much of a problem with that when it's something that everyone needs, and it works out cheapest when it's centralized: roads, power and data networks, and public healthcare seem to fall under that banner.
The problem for me is that because we are all paying the same amount, everyone (or the government) thinks that we should not be allowed to take any risks with our own bodies, otherwise we'll "be a burden on the healthcare system".
That fucks me off. Again have no qualms about state run monopolies when: A) private companies are legally allowed to compete with them, B) everyone pays for real value of their own, so that I can smoke crack and ride a Harley with no helmet on, if I so choose.
No, the Constitution is an agreement between sovereign states to create a federal government, and delegate certain powers, and only those powers, to that government.
The Supreme Court is not meant to be the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution means. Congress, the President, and the judiciary ALL swear to uphold the Constitution, and if the President (for example) believes something is unconstitutional, he must behave accordingly, regardless of what the Court says.
But in any case, the ultimate arbiters are the states themselves. An entity created by an agreement cannot have the final word on what the agreement says. That just doesn't make any sense.
When the OP used the phrase "high quality" I read it to mean "expensive, technologically complex and with bells and whistles like voice acting/cut-scenes/whatever".
If your sole measure of quality is gameplay (and that's a damn good thing to base your judgment of a game on incidentally) then you don't need any of the above. Hell, there are games made fifteen years ago I still play. Bells and whistles don't age as well as core game mechanics.
All that being said, I would be a little sad to see the Starcraft 2's of the world die out, or migrate entirely to the consoles. So I'm going to back the person who wrote the article in the first place: Buy your games. I've no problem with people trying before they buy, or pirating abandonware they can't get legitimately (or otherwise unavailable through legal channels), or cracking games you own to get rid of obnoxious DRM schemes. But if all else is equal, we (the computer gaming community) should buy the damn things.
Because otherwise, the cost of making games gets spread around that many less legitimate customers, and I think the people who do pay have a right to be a little pissed off paying for someone else to play for free.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
And why should Blizzard's network have any impact at all on my ability to play a game, that I bought, in single-player mode, on my own pc?
Because my right to play that game must be verified via authentication against Blizzard's server.
That qualifies as DRM.
Here's why. Every individual has two commodities they own: 1. Time. 2. Money. People with #2 tend not to have #1, and vice versa. So for someone with a good income, it's just not worth the time involved to locate a torrent, download it from the few people seeding it, etc., etc. (Even if YOU could find it quickly, there's still a learning curve involved for the average person.) The people who pirate software almost always are those who wouldn't buy it in the first place, simply because they don't have any money. But by getting your software, a certain tiny percentage will help you via word of mouth, which in the end helps your bottom line.
You say you reject moral imperatives, but you create moral imperatives of your own which you seek to impose on other people. You assign infinite value to freedom of information and berate people who value it differently. What is it that makes your view superior? You're taking issues with vast configuration spaces and reducing them down to one bit of information. Oversimplifying anything this much is stupid. You're trying to optimize one variable without considering what you're doing to all of the other variables.
I see in you an example of how people can become the mirror image of the things they hate. You're so eager to negate the things you hate that you just flip them in the other direction and end up creating a structure which shows flaws congruent to the original's flaws. Your opponents have certain problems that they want to avoid and you have certain problems that you want to avoid. Your opponents want to avoid their problems even if it means that the problems you want to avoid blow up. You want to avoid your problems even if it means that the problems they want to avoid blow up.
The only way that you're helping society is by acting as a counterweight against elements on the opposite extreme. But what would really be better would be for people on both ends to move a bit closer together and find some common ground.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
I believe Randseed bought the game digitally, which meant he would have had to download the entire installer. Of course he could've done this several days in advance, as Blizzard made the downloader available beforehand to help people avoid the inevitable congestion issues, and simply activated it while installing the game on release day.
Let me get it straight. Your need to earn money is more important than the right of all of the human kind to freely access information?
I have information in my head right now that you probably do not have. If I refuse to share any of this information with you for free (or just refuse because I don't want to share it with you), am I violating your rights?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
It had nothing to do with DRM. Blizzards network broke under the strain. That's why smart people wait a few days before buying a game that popular.
Actually, smart people don't buy products that require the publishers network to be up in order to play a singleplayer game. Having to wait a few days because of network load is a bit of a slap in the face when we're all subjected to the constant pre-order culture where playing on release day is the most important thing.. Paying for that just sends a message that its okay for publishers to pull that shit. Although, I guess if nobody bought it, they'd just blame piracy anyway...