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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."
You get piles of stuff for free with any Ubuntu distro, and none of it is pirated (at least I haven't heard of any "Linux for Pirates", but maybe it exists)
which is totally what she said
Me, I prefer the moral clarity that comes from seeing everything in black and white. If the founding fathers had taken the "middle ground" we never would have ended up with the Constitution, the most error-free and infallible document ever created.
You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both.
Why not?
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
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
For those that read it (yes, I'm new here...), I liked the article and the reply by a user named Aleks. I did the same exact thing a long time ago with Commander Keen. Although I never payed for that game, I got all my friends playing it, and many of their parents eventually payed for the game for them. Would they have played and purchased the game without my prodding? Who knows. I'm no saint, but I pay for games that entertain me, even if it's just a dinky flash game on the interwebz.
For best results, avoid doing stupid things.
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
Reasonable people recognize this and go through life without calling people names.
You may feel piracy is wrong, and that's fine. We can agree to disagree. The Amish feel cell phones are wrong. We can agree to disagree. Tom Cruise feels psychiatry is wrong. Ok, he can go fuck himself.
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
It helps *him* because otherwise very few people would play his games, as very few people would pay money for them.
Seriously, if people are not *PAYING* for your games, any distro is good distro. On the other hand, if you sell your games for money, obviously if people are pirating your games, you're not making money on them, and this is not good for you.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
a few of my buddies pirate games sometimes. but they usually end up buying the games because very often it is either very hard or impossible for them to get it to work online, which is where they play most of the time. so, basically, they pirate the game to see if they like it, and how well it works on there system, than, if it works well, and they like it (which is usually the case) they buy the game. so basically, it seems that if game companies made a demo (and a usuable demo, that was basically the full game with restrictions of some kind), they could cut down on some of the piracy. Like, Planetside, they had the entire game free for a while, but u could only level up to a certain point (level 6 if i remember, which isnt much, but it worked). and my friends and i played it for a while, and loved it, so we decided to pay for it so we could do more in the game, it just seems like a much smarter idea.
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
"Information wants to be free." That's a fine statement to make if you already know what's being discussed--that is, you know the difference between free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer, but it's not a statement that is at all productive when speaking to an adversarial or even a divided crowd. Part of the problem is that the default meaning of "free" to most people is the "free beer" version. Put quite simply, most people spend far more people in their day to day lives thinking about money than they do about abstract legal concepts like free speech, and so whenever a well-meaning debater says, "Information wants to be free," that translates into most people's heads, by default, into: "I don't want to pay for information;" that is, you want to get everything for free. Yes, yes, I know that's not what the statement means, but it's a statement so easily misconstrued that it should really never be mentioned in a persuasive argument about copyrights, patents and trademarks if you want to actually try to persuade someone.
Similarly, I don't like to use the words "Intellectual Property," as that confuses the concepts of copyrights, trademarks, and patents with those of actual property, For the same reason I don't like the new mindset of calling such things "Imaginary Property," which in my mind is as juvenile as those people using M$ to denote Microsoft. Instead I try to use the acronym "CPT"--for Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks--as a more accurate, and shorter, qualifier.
Yes, these word choices are a bit overly pedantic, but we need to be more diplomatic in our speech if we don't want discussions on CPT law to devolve into the same partisan shouting matches that everything else falls into.
It's not stealing, and it's not Piracy. Stealing is taking a physical good, in a way that after I take it, I have it and you don't. Piracy is robbing ships on the open seas.
He is talking about Copyright Infringement, and since Copyright shouldn't exist, it is ALWAYS ok to 'infringe' on his imaginary rights.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
You get piles of stuff for free with any [Linux] distro
True, any GNU/Linux distribution distro either comes with a free repository set up or lets the user adds free repository. But not all Linux is GNU/Linux; embedded Linux tends to be less open. For example, the TiVo DVR runs a Linux kernel, but it's much more like a video game console because it verifies the digital signature of every piece of software from the bootloader on up.
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
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
Given what is known about console game developer qualifications, Sony and Nintendo appear to be under the impression that micro-businesses "can't maintain the quality of their work".
The article is about games. Fedora doesn't even have Tetris or DDR, and the games that Fedora and Ubuntu have still have what westlake called "an early 90's freeware-shareware look to them."
You're stealing someone's hard work.
Say I'm developing my own video game, and I'm trying to write the soundtrack. How do I avoid "stealing someone's hard work" by accidentally including a series of notes that matches the hook from some old copyrighted song?
If you don't pay for it, you don't get to benefit from it.
Then how do I pay for, say, a copy of the film Song of the South or a copy of the English version of the video game Mother? What should be done about copyright owners that don't even want to take my money, in a way that "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
Nor, it appears, do you understand where the cost of games comes from.
Wherever it comes from, it could be paid for by advertisers (e.g. Sneak King), or by companies or governments who use the game's engine for a training tool (e.g. America's Army), or by a bounty of preorders after the free demo is released (the Street Performer Protocol).
Copyright protected works cannot work by "free market capitalism" rules (and free market is an abstraction, BTW). Each copyright owner has a monopoly on his own copyrighted work, whereas free market is based on competition. I can only get a Harry Potter book written by Rowling, and whoever happens to be her publisher. There is no possibility of competition. Similarly, I can only get a game from its publisher/developer. There may be other similar games, and there is competition in that sense, but this is indirect competition. You can't replicate the exact experience you get with a piece of software with another. Copyright and patents create state-approved monopolies. The idea is that the incentive to explore your own monopolie would drive innovation forward. So there are no valid comparisons with the (mythical, anyway) free-market that are valid in this case.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
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.
I think it is more a question of justice. People who pirate a game and don't buy it are getting something for nothing. The assumption that all the pirates would buy the game if the game was impossible to pirate is, of course, ridiculous; there are very few games that are so good that everyone wants them no matter what. $28 for a straightforward RPG game with indie content is a bit high. But then, DND RPG is just not my kind of game, so I'm not even tempted to pirate it.
So what a pirate really is is not a lost sale, but a freerider. Someone who benefits from your work without rewarding you. Someone who gets something he does not deserve. And there lies the moral issue: not preventing theft, but ensuring that nobody but the paying customers enjoy your games. Sounds a little different when you put it that way, does it not? How much time and effort are you willing to devote to the pursuit of economic justice?
The founders believed in the principle that once an idea is shared, even if it's simply one person relating a story to another, the second person has a copy of the idea in his head, and that both people now "own" the idea. That person can then share the idea with others, and that ideas, whether they be musical, artistic, pure science, or engineering should be shared - and in fact could not be owned. That society and one's ideas are built on the foundations of the ideas that came before them.
They also recognized that if an author, engineer, or what have you couldn't make money off of his ideas, he was much less likely to bother to create them in the first place, or if he did create them, he'd do it in the guise of trade secrets that would never become part of the public domain, or private showings in the case of copyright. If an idea isn't shared, the public domain doesn't grow, and advances in the sciences can actually regress because an individual or corporation never shared how to create something.
To encourage works to eventually enter the public domain patents and copyrights were created, granting the author a monopoly of the distribution of his works for a limited time to gain a return on his works. In return, when that time expired his ideas would be available, for free, to everybody. The government makes sure of this by keeping a copy of the registered copyright or patent.
I'm perfectly willing to argue the benefits of a much reduced copyright term, and to explicit DMCA exemptions to allow fair use. That playing the radio at a restaurant doesn't equate to a live performance, and that the adds on the radio are sufficient payment for the rights to play the radio at a work premises. The copyright term could be as little as the founder's 14 years. I believe life of the author OR 25 years, whichever is longer, is equitable, but the term of the copyright could certainly be expanded or contracted. I have no problem with copyright being longer than patents as a patent generally will be used in the creation of other things, while the copyright is very specific and only protects a very specific work.
What I'm not willing to grant is that anything that's ever been written or produced is free game for everybody to download, gratis, the moment the work is published. Even if I were willing to grant this, and lawmakers embraced it, I doubt that freeloaders would get what they wanted. Quality works of art, music, video games, and other media, as well as inventions, take a TON of work. Not as a hobby. Not as something to be done for fun outside of your "real" job or just for the love of it, but AS your real job, and more often as the real job of a whole host of people.
I think a ton of people would stop producing media, or do it in such a fashion that the media becomes much more exclusive. Live concerts only, no pressed CDs, for instance. "Yeah, that's the way it should be man!" Never mind the guy saying this might have gigs of downloaded, studio produced CDs. Forget the PC unless the game requires a net connection. We're into console games only, or games where all the content is run off of some centralized servers and you have to pay to get access to said content. A lot of the applied sciences would dry up as corporations become even more cliquish, hording all of their secrets, rather than protecting them for 25 years - or hording them more than they currently do. And, no, I don't think killing off whole industries or types of content so that we can all get everything for free is healthy. It won't be free, and it'll be MUCH more encumbered than what we currently have.
Unfortunately there's not a great way to stop piracy, but there are ways to limit it. Having a convenient way - ala iTunes, Steam, or other popular digital distribution channel - to get ones work is one way, especially if it's more convenient and safer than torrents or rapidshare. Careful pricing is another. NOT ticking off the paying customers with adds against piracy - that the pirat
We can agree to disagree about copyright. We can't agree to disagree about actually hurting each other.
Hope that helps.
Some people make games for the love of making them.
I doubt that many would disagree that Cave Story, Iji, Knytt, Dwarf Fortress, or Seven Days a Skeptic are excellent examples of their genre.
All of them are given away free.
The article implicitly assumes both that game developers only make games for the money, and that a front-loaded payment model is the only way to go; both of which are not necessarily true. For example, Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress) earns his living entirely through donations. People torrenting his game actually help him by decreasing the bandwidth cost of his website.
So no degree of piracy or lack of piracy is ever going to cause good single player PC games to cease to exist, and, similarly, you'll be able to get piles of cool stuff for free... well, as long as net neutrality holds out, at least.
Captain Obvious ran thataway ;)
Yes, I know Amish are allowed to use phones outside the house.
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.
I knew as soon as I read the title this was going to involve him.
He's been around forever. I can remember when I first found exile so many years ago. Floating around a BBS.
It was probably one of the greatest games I played in the early 90s. I probably spent most of time between it and Curse of the Azure Bonds.
I hope some day he turns around and writes a book about how he did it. I don't know that you could duplicate what he has done now. He started at a time and built up his fanbase when the world was a very different place.
Well color me black and call me Kettle, Pot.
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
I, as a professional ISV owning developer, can only pay my bills because of copyright. This way, I can write software for a living and sell licenses of my work to my customers. What you wrote is IMHO one of the most stupidest things I've ever read about copyright: why would someone who created something NOT own that work? You seem to think that person doesn't own that work, 'society' does.
Sorry, but that's just an excuse for ignoring the fact that you don't own the hard work of other people, they do.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
So we will get the occasional single player game that doesn't require a team of artists, programmers and musicians.
We will basically get the Linux gaming supply.
Sorry but 99% of the gaming world does not consider that to be a pile of cool stuff.
... the artist wants piracy, but is not being honest about it with himself or his fans. If he wants piracy, he knows this, and shares it with his fans, then it's not evil, but it's also not piracy. I really wish that more artists would seriously consider allowing sharing, for a number of reasons, the least of which is that sharing is good for my pocketbook:
1) There are lots of claims that business can/cannot be conducted with unrestricted sharing, and both sides make some good points. It would be good to see particularly the long-term effects of adopting business models that aren't copyright-based, and see whether everything remains hunky-dory, or whether (as I myself have predicted on numerous occasions) people would stop feeling an obligation to pay artists, prices would rise, and artists start abandoning ship.
2) It would give us more legitimate choices in how we buy our entertainment. Even if no business model ends up reigning supreme, we would still be left with legitimate choices.
3) I have a theory that pirates download not because they particularly want what they download, they just want to listen/watch/play something new, even if they think it's crap. Having a healthy portion of free-to-download entertainment out there would mean that pirates would not be nearly so compelled to violate copyrights.
4) If you thought that point 3) was too pro-producer, the upshot of this is that copyright holders choosing to distribute via these means would looks significant mindshare. This would prove to be an invaluable tool in slowly reversing the almost monopolistic stranglehold that big media has on certain parts of the market. Once we can tear the teens away from being big label stars, and latch them onto being indie label stars, we've won most of the battle.
5) We get change, but more safe, effective, friendly on the artist, and (frankly) better thought out than simply dropping copyright or allowing sharing (commercial or non-commercial) regardless of the artist's wishes.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
It's well established that a wide range of intellectual works would not be created if not for copyright.
Sorry but teams of hobbyists do not organize themselves on the weekends to create financial analysis software.
Most copyright holders are individuals so at least do some research before giving your evul corporations speech.
The way this submission was written and half the comments are further proof that most pc gamers are in fact pirates and want to rationalize their actions.
It sickens me that excuses are made for even piracy of $10 indy stuff or mobile games.
Oh but you told your brother's friend about the game so yea that allows you to make some weird marketing rationalization. Tomorrow I'm going to dine n dash and but I will tell 10 people about the restaurant to make up for it.
All these lame excuses and shoddy rationalizations just lead me to the uncomfortable truth that pc gamers are disproportionately cheap and probably don't deserve a lot of single player games. Get ready for MMO saturation, have a look at Asia if you want to see what the future of pc gaming looks like thanks to piracy.
It's sad really. PC gaming piracy has gone from something that teenagers and the unemployed do to a common trait of anyone that owns a $200 video card. Very sad.
You're taking the hard work of others without payment. It's just as unethical as theft.
Piracy is potential money that you may or may not have made had the purchaser been forced into the choice of paying for it or not playing it. In much the same way, had I decided to invest in the right shares, I would be exceedingly wealthy. They didn't buy your game, I didn't buy the shares.
If all those pirates were eliminated, piracy would go down to zero. As a result, sales would increase by uhm... zero.
"Ah", you say, "but that's not the point. The point is that if those pirates had purchased the game then sales would increase, and they clearly want a copy", to which I say "exactly". Rathe than prevent piracy, publishers need to find a way to convert these pirates into paying customers. Making piracy harder is a possible way but it clearly has limited success. Forget about taking extreme measures to stop piracy. Focus on real profits and not hypothetical losses.
Don't take everything literally. In fact, I refused to reply to a reply you did to a post of mine some weeks back because you simply are too literal minded and have problems with nuance
You can either convince someone else to generate comparable content under terms you find acceptable, or you can generate it yourself.
Even when I generate comparable content myself, the author still might sue. Konami v. Roxor.
The Wikipedia article about Obamacare cites a Boston Globe article about tax implications stating: "Starting in 2014 everyone will be required to maintain health insurance. If you go without insurance, you will be subject to a tax of $695 per year."
If you can only sell 50 copies a week a $1, but can move 25k copies per week at $0, you need to find a way to make money off of $0. Find a sponsor, insert some advertising. That's a 50,000% difference in market reach between $1 and $0. Even if you can only figure out how to make $0.01 per customer, you've increased your revenue by 500%. This is the trap that the traditional media companies fall into--thinking they need so many units of product at the same prices they've always charged. It's a different platform, you need a different model.
It's your prerogative to deny man's capacity to create
It's not that as much as the fact that people who use "creator" tend to conflate the roles of author and publisher.
I can't wait until we live in a world where the only games are US Govt-funded FPSes
Counter-Strike was originally a fan-made mod of Half-Life. If fans can mod Half-Life into Counter-Strike, then surely they can mod free military training tools. And then watch fans of a webcomic mod an advergame into a about the webcomic.
Damien (tepples) is autistic. 'Literally' is the only way he can process words.
Most importantly, the author talks about his need to feel like his life has meaning. I think almost all of us share that sentiment, at one point of our lives or another. I'd counter, though, that it's irrelevant to his piracy discussion. I mean, it sounds like he's trying to define his life having meaning by knowing his work on game development brought joy/entertainment to others. Great, but that should be kind of an "automatic" if you're writing games -- correct? If not, then you're probably not any good as a game developer and you need to get into a different line of work! The more relevant question along these lines is probably one of, "Have I done something with my life that is LASTING? Have I created anything that will outlive me?" This one may pose a problem for a software developer, once he/she realizes that all of his/her hard work on a program can be rendered worthless in a matter of only a few years. Computers evolve rapidly, and "popular" software titles only have a very limited window of time in the limelight. One good friend of mine went from a career doing software development to a new one in wood-working and building furniture. This is exactly why. He realized that when his daughter grows up, she just might use one or two well-constructed pieces of furniture he built for her, even after he passed away. Good furniture that's hundreds of years old is still in daily use, and highly-regarded by many people. Will any of his software be of any use to his kid after she grows up? Will anyone even have hardware that could still run his old code, 100 years in the future?
I'm sorry, have you even played dwarf fortress? Have you hit magma? This game has depth that blows big-name commercial titles out of the water. Civ, the sims, and spore can't hold a candle to it. It's cool.
Spelunky is a procedurally generated platformer with a Indiana Jones theme and nethack elements. How cool is that?
and Nethack, Freaking NETHACK.
But oh, you didn't want that. You wanted more pixels in the bouncing breasts of DOA volleyball. Let me tighten up the graphics on level three for you.
Aye, to Mr. Vogel,
May be all be so lucky to do what we love for a living.
Who decides which are the "sometimes" you can agree to disagree?
Stop! Dremel time!
We can agree to disagree about copyright. We can't agree to disagree about actually hurting each other.
Hope that helps.
So who agrees as to the definition of "hurt"? I bet some people whose copyrights get infringed upon feel rather hurt by it.
I know, In fact I assumed he was autistic spectrum before I googled him and confirmed it, and I did warn him that prospective dev house employers would find that out...he didn't get the hint though.
Didn't you think about checking to see if the situation might have changed?
I apologize. Does anyone know which version of Fedora readmitted the Tetris clones?
It's not also not called gnometris, but quadrapassel.
I was aware of the rename, but in some people's minds, that's not enough. Last year, The Tetris Company sued Biosocia, maker of a Tetris clone called Blockles. They settled with Biosocia agreeing to replace Blockles with a different game (also called Blockles) based on Sega's Puyo Pop instead of Tetris. And then again, someone else might have a problem with the name "Quadrapassel".
They may feel hurt, but there is no actual damage. They'd have to do some rather intrusive investigation to even know it was happening.
you're taking their work without paying and that is theft. Sneaking into a movie theater doesn't result in a net material loss for the theater but it is still just as much a case of theft as stealing from the food counter. The courts don't care if you left the theater with empty pockets. You took a service without payment, that is theft.
Yes, the courts apply copyright law, but that's not the point. Here, don't copy this string:
lksndf098sdfjn23409fgjnvdclkr098245n
I sell that string for 20 English pence, and if you ctrl+c and ctrl+v and don't pay me, thats piracy. And you don't even get a tasty chicken dinner or a box of cakes for your trip to court.
Good for you! My advice? Ignore the assholes here (myself included!): Contribute from your own understanding, first :)
I look forward to such.
Best regards,
dj