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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."
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.
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.
it's a different story for the producers of mainstream games who have no need of exposure whatsoever
I don't think that is entirely true. Why do game producers continue to make titles based off of the same tired-ass hollywood kids movies. How many games have you seen clutter the shelves at Wallmart, "Barbies Adventure in X" or "Comic Book X Action Game" or "SpongeBob's New X". Kids relatives, grandmothers, etc, continue to buy these games because of exposure. So saying mainstream games have no need whatsoever is a bit to closed minded. And if you contest those examples as not being mainstream, then what is mainstream? What the 'pro' gaming community deems quality? Well if thats your argument, then those games need even more exposure to sell, especially if they don't have some cookie-cutter Hollywood blockbuster to pound the IP into the heads of the masses. Mainstream needs exposure.
Remember the original Call of Duty? Fairly low key developer, but it was a bad-ass game, free demos were available online, the game received glowing reviews and gained a fan-base. There were dedicated servers, mods, etc. Then as it went mainstream, my personal opinion is that the quality went down. No dedicated servers. Rehashes of old maps being piece-mealed off ala the Sims series, and other blatant abuses of their mainstream status.
Counter Strike. Started of as a free mod. People loved it. Spread everywhere. Indie-devs were exposed to the mainstream through word of mouth. They didn't need massive advertising campaigns. And look at the games longevity. You don't see ads on television for Counter-Strike, and yet people still play on the dedicated servers. Compare that to Halo 2 for the original Xbox. Massive advertising from a 'mainstream producer'. And what do you get? Kicked off of your gaming experience once the company deems it 'unprofitable'. Sure they have to make money, but I am not arguing for money, but instead the longevity of longstanding, quality content. And generally, it comes from those who are not ruled by greed, control, and margins.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
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.
Okay, how about the Humble Indie Bundle then? They made over a million dollars in a month, with basically no advertising other than word of mouth (which turned into news coverage), despite the fact that the games have no DRM and were--and still are--easily pirated.
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)
Yarr... we be workin' on that, matey. These peg-fingers make the work slow, and it be difficult to motivate without promise of any booty. Ye have me word on the pirate code that it will be free as in grog when we be finished, yar.
See, you have people like me who DO. For a classic example, Starcraft II. Starcraft II is a high-budget game, which Blizzard spent a lot of money marketting. All that is good. I was going to buy it. Here's what happened: I bought the thing, was confronted with a 36 hour download time, and used a version that I happened to have which was a torrented predownload. For reasons I still don't understand -- maybe it was regioning, whatever -- their DRM prevented me from using the game that day. I had to wait until July 28th, a day after it was released, to play it at all. On the release day, I'd tried numerous times to "authenticate" my copy, all of which failed. I went to my battle.net account, which claimed that I'd somehow activated too many copies. I called Blizzard and got hung up on numerous times with an "unfortunately, we're experiencing a high call volume" load of crap until I finally got through, at which point the hold time was 56 minutes. Now, I did the right thing. I bought the damned thing for $60. Blizzard's DRM caused a major screwup, which made me wish that I'd pirated it so at least it would work.
This is the reason that the FSF pushed so hard for Linux to be GPLv3'd; the FSF is more concerned about user freedom than about spreading the software as far and wide as possible as quickly as possible. This, however, is not the position that many open source developers take, as many felt that the use of Linux in TiVo meant both greater exposure (and hence more developers) and code being made available to others (i.e. TiVo's modifications to Linux). This is where free software philosophy and open source software philosophy diverge.
Palm trees and 8
Actually, there *is* an alternative repository that is 100% binary compatible with the enterprise editions of the distro you refer to. You may have heard of it...
http://www.centos.org
The distro you refer to also has their own totally free Linux distro/repository, which you also may have heard of...
http://fedoraproject.org/
The business model of your example is not simply repository access. What you're paying for with their "main distribution" is easier access to support and updates/patches.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I bought an older game. Just Cause. When I installed it, the DRM wasn't compatible with Windows 7 and there were no patches available, I had to go download a NOCD crack to play a game that I legitimately purchased.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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