Pirates Finding It Harder To Crack New PC Games (engadget.com)

schnell writes: Engadget reports that a few recent top-tier video game releases using updated DRM technology have gone uncracked for more than a month and left DRM hackers stymied thus far. The games FIFA 16 and Just Cause 3, using an updated DRM system called Denuvo, have thus far frustrated experienced Chinese crackers' best efforts far longer than the usual 1-2 weeks it takes for most games to be cracked. Although the article is light on technical details about what makes the new DRM system harder to defeat, it does note that "Based on the current pace of encryption tech, 'in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,' said one forlorn pirate."

Comments

If it can be played, it can be copied

[Ivan Stepaniuk]

They are only gaining some critical time at launch

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[greenfruitsalad]

the article isn't talking about videos or music

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[110010001000]

This isn't true anymore. Try to copy a Xbox One or PS4 game. Won't work.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... go ahead and believe that. the PS4 pirate scene is still young but doing just fine.

Is it wide open like the old PS1/PS2? no but the PS4 has not been out that long and the hardware not completely reverse engineered.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[110010001000]

Really? So you can pirate PS4 games now? How? Was it even possible to pirate PS3 games?

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a PS4, but I can tell you that PS3 piracy is rather simple. You need a console with an old enough firmware to crack. Crack it. Install 3rd party launcher software. Upload games to the hard drive (preferred method, especially for Blu-Ray), or burn them to a DVD. Play.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

PS4 is closer to "normal" (unlike the PS3 Cell technology), so without being part of "the scene", I would assume it'll be easier to reverse engineer/crack the PS4.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[RogueyWon]

It's not currently possible to play pirated PS4 games.

The PS4's security does appear to have been at least partially compromised, however. A recent video appears to show Linux running on a PS4, along with a version of Pokemon. Note that we don't yet have independent verification of this, so there's a chance (albeit probably a slim one given the track record of the group in question) that this is a hoax.

It's still a long way from being able to play pirated games, although it is certainly a first step on that road. More to the point, however, it is even further from being able to make full use of pirated games, given the extent to which the full functionality of many PS4 games is tied to online features. History (e.g. the situation with the Xbox 360) suggests that console manufacturers are pretty good, over time, at detecting consoles running pirated software when they connect to online services and locking them out of said services. A PS4 which can't access the PSN is not much of a PS4.

As for pirated games on the PS3, it was possible. Sort of. There was a specific firmware version which, if you didn't update past it, could be tricked into running pirated games (via a USB dongle, if I recall). However, you should note that firmware updates on the PS3 were mandatory both to use online services and to play games released after that firmware version was issued. So in other words, if you had an old PS3 you kept at the right firmware version and never tried to use it online, you could play pirated games which did not require a more recent firmware version. So it was of limited use for most people and was only ever really a proof of concept.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really the problem.
But there is no good emulator for PS3 at the moment so the interest in cracking games is lower since it only is of interest for those who have the console.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? So you can pirate PS4 games now? How? Was it even possible to pirate PS3 games?

Yes, the PS3 has a pirate scene. The exploit is based on some old ~3.5 firmware; which is why you'll see people asking where to obtain it. They are basically looking to run pirated games.

There isn't anything for the PS4 yet. The current exploit was patched 16 months ago, and only works on the old 1.76 OS. At the moment they're still trying to run privileged code. So at best, you're talking basic home-brew on what is very much an underpowered PC. There's a further weakening of the performance recently discovered: Sony's harddrive IO uses the USB bus (eeooow), which is why replacing the system drive with an SSD fails to get a worthwhile performance boost.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[jbmartin6]

Perhaps that is their goal. If the bulk of the sales revenue comes from the first month or so after launch, it might be worth their while to implement DRM even if they know it will get cracked eventually.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[DThorne]

I'm not so sure. A dev I know has been using a certain copy pro package for a few years now and since starting it, has yet to have a crack show up in the wild. And yes, it's a well known app that is a classic target for cracking, and no, the copy pro isn't remotely obnoxious or privacy-shattering since the dev is a privacy aficionado. I think the tech is getting there. Add to this that many games offer real benefits to network connectivity and you might see AAA cracks go away. Then there's the awesome Witcher devs, who simply flip the bird to copy pro altogether, I still see cracks(aka copies, in this case) show up for witcher 3 but the game has done fabulously, simply because it's awesome, everyone loves them and wants to see them be successful for making something so wonderful and for steadfastly refusing to be dicks about DLC. That's the best copy pro of all.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[argStyopa]

I actually thought that MMOs were the industry's evolved response to the perceived "threat" of piracy: a game which FUNDAMENTALLY had to interact with a centrally located, company owned server. How much more locked-down could you get?

Well, it shows how much I know; the resourcefulness and frankly brilliance of the emulator programmers that black-box reverse-engineer server systems so people can run private servers of WoW, etc leave me pretty impressed. Some are a little wobbly, sure, but by and large there are private servers running WoW that you couldn't distinguish from running the commercial version (the only distinction being player numbers and a network back end that is far more bandwidth constrained, which itself leads me to respect the original games' challenges preventing that from being more apparent in the original...)

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

"copy pro" as in "copy professional" or "copy protection"? Please don't truncate.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[TheReaperD]

^^^ THIS! ^^^

I have troubles understanding why most game/software devs can't get this through their thick skulls. These days a lot of piracy is do to the crap DRM that publishers put on titles. I've known several people that download and run pirate version of software even though they have a legal copy because they actually fucking work! I've even done it myself with multiple version of MS Office, even though I had legal copies as it didn't start giving me activation errors every 26 or so days. (Enterprise licences.) The other pirates that don't have a legal copy aren't going to miraculously go to the store a pay retail price for something because the DRM is tough. They'll either wait for the crack, sneak through a licensing hole or go without. They aren't going to buy your fucking product, period.

Software devs, get this through your thick skulls!

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[bfpierce]

I haven't had this problem in over 10 years with DRM on games or enterprise software.

Did you just step out of a time machine or something?

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[110010001000]

So basically they came up with a scheme that can't be realistically cracked. The point is that the statement "if it can be played, it can be copied" isn't true any more. Similar story with the Apple TV's. The ATV3 was never cracked. I doubt the ATV4 will either.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Faust6]

That's true, though it seems increasingly less relevant with the rise in availability of these titles for the PC, which are reliably cracked for the most part. Titles missing are typically console exclusives few in numbers.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[TheCarp]

One. I have one game, and its more than 10 years old. JFK Reloaded.

I paid for it new, and even tried my hand at the competition. Within a few years, it dissapeared from the internet and now, the cracked version is the only way to play it; since they used an online token based DRM to handle full versions vs demo.

I paid for the full, I want to play the damned full.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a pirated market of PS4 game in Brazil, it requires BIOS dumping and a bunch of other thing but it seems to works: http://wololo.net/2015/04/24/ps4-jailbreak-service-rumors-incoming-from-brazil/

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the article is having a dig at Chinese people. The inclusion of "Chinese crackers" was wholly gratuitous, as crackers are an international team, and the best game crackers are still from the US.

Fuck you, racist submitter.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[p0p0]

There is at least one modchip that works on almost any version PS3. They don't recommend updating because of security fixes, but they aren't very far behind.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Install Office 2013 H+S on a laptop that has one fixed and 2 removable network adapters.
2. Activate it.
3. Remove the removable network adapters.
4. Now it wants to be activated again.
5. Activate it.
6. Add the removable network adapters.
7. Now it wants to be activated again.
8. Go to 2.

Slightly older Acer Aspire with internal 10/100, ExpressCard GbE NIC and a USB2 802.11n dongle.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[DrXym]

They are only gaining some critical time at launch

And that's the point. They probably don't give so much of a damn if a game is cracked 3--6 months down the line because the vast majority of their sales are during the launch period. The more time it takes to crack a game the less sales they're going to lose as a result.

Personally I'm surprised that piracy is even a problem any more. It should be pretty straightforward to pad a game out with anti-piracy measures which take a frustrating amount of time to find and disable.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[eth1]

They are only gaining some critical time at launch

Copied, yes, but potentially not played, if they hold it hostage to connectivity requirements back to the mother ship.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

it is possible the pirates are focusing their efforts on the PC and since they already cracked it there aren't bothering with the console ports.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the team mentioned is from china and considered one of the best, particularly against the drm company used for dragon age and just cause.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[lgw]

No, it remains true that "if it can be played, it can be cracked", as unencrypted bits are needed at the moment of playing, and are right there in the CPU.

Back in the day, you could buy hardware CPU emulators (ICEs) that would emit a transcript as you ran a program. If you had debugging symbols, they'd give you working source code for everything you executed. Far beyond the price the typical hacker team could pay, but we used them professionally. These days you can virtualize far cheaper. "Trusted computing" is the possible countermeasure, but encrypting a video stream isn't the same as encrypting the executing object code.

It's possible the "trusted" computing architecture could be extended in years to come, especially for consoles, but until art assets and graphics/CUDA code move encrypted from disk to video card memory, it won't help (and even then, it has to be decrypted somewhere on the video card).

Since I can't see PC games restricted to FIPS 140-2 Level 3 vid cards, it will remain true that "if it can be played, it can be copied". At what price though?

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[pr0fessor]

If you purchase the latest console, a few accessories, titles, the TV you are going to connect it to, add to that a broadband Internet connection you could easily spend over two grand. Games are not the only entertainment product that is considered an everyday thing but is priced like a luxury item. I know people who always have the latest games, cell phones, see all the new movies, and go to concerts but they generally live on credit. Eventually that runs out and they are broke and in debt with no where to borrow anymore.

This is why games, movies, and music are pirated, they have created an artificial need for luxury priced entertainment products and it's bound to fail.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

We still sell a lot of games with our DRM on it.

The idea that people aren't going to buy games anymore is pretty silly, what will you do, go outside and play instead? nonsense.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[jones_supa]

The PS4's security does appear to have been at least partially compromised, however. A recent video appears to show Linux running on a PS4, along with a version of Pokemon. Note that we don't yet have independent verification of this, so there's a chance (albeit probably a slim one given the track record of the group in question) that this is a hoax.

Yes, they got in through a FreeBSD security vulnerability. The Pokemon game is running in a Gameboy Advance emulator. No, it's not a hoax. Team Fail0verflow has a GitHub repository with all the patches needed for Linux and its GPU drivers. You can follow their Twitter account for updates.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

The the older PS3 was thoroughly hacked and works with pirated games without a dongle or a modchip. There are possibly a few games that do not run, but most 'recent' AAA titles (e.g. The Last of Us) are available and run just fine.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not run everything perfectly full speed. But there is a PS3 emulator out now that will play commercial games. It's made incredible progress in the past month and a half.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[KGIII]

I know this might come as a shock to you but, yes. I go outside and I even "play" outside. This morning, I was out puttering and getting in the way of the lawn crew. I went for a jog on the beach and the missus and I walked all the way to the State Park and back yesterday. If I were back home in Maine, I might have been out on a snowmobile, ATV, plow truck, or even hopping on a sled and going down the mountain like a five year old.

I not only go outside and play but I'm officially 58 now and I *still* go outside and play. I used to play some video games but then I bought a game called Fallout Tactics and that was the last straw for me. I've not been a gamer since. :( Well, not a serious gamer. I have picked up Fallout and Fallout 2 and replayed them a few times since then. I've not played either of them to completion in a lot of years.

At any rate - I get brave enough to face the Sun once in a while. It's bright, it hurts my eyes, and there are people out there but it's not too bad once you get used to it.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[KGIII]

I seem to recall reading that they have managed to overcome that obstacle in a number of different ways. Sometimes they edit the binary files and strip out the call, sometimes they emulate a server and feed it back the correct information (gleaned from packet sniffing, presumably), and sometimes they go whole hog and create their own servers that authenticate. I believe some of the Windows versions can be pirated and connected to a temporary authentication server that stays up and running for a while until someone (Microsoft, probably) manages to get it taken down. I'd imagine there's a way to do it locally though I'm not sure if such has actually been done yet.

However, I'm neither a gamer nor do I have to pirate software so I don't really know - I just pay attention to the comments here and on other sites. I imagine it wouldn't take too long to use Google and at least find a forum of willing helpers. It seems some folks do it just because they like to and they enjoy the challenge. I don't really have much in the way of paid software except for my VMware. I'm pretty fond of it so I buy the new versions as they come out. It's one of the things that keeps me from going to GhostBSD on the bare metal.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[dissy]

Then there's the awesome Witcher devs, who simply flip the bird to copy pro altogether, I still see cracks(aka copies, in this case) show up for witcher 3 but the game has done fabulously, simply because it's awesome, everyone loves them and wants to see them be successful for making something so wonderful and for steadfastly refusing to be dicks about DLC. That's the best copy pro of all.

Funny that is the first example I see provided.

Just Cause 3 has been in my Steam wishlist since it was announced at E3. The "This game requires 3rd party DRM registration" message that showed twice in a row kept me from pre-ordering, but remained in my wishlist on the off chance it was some mistake or typo.

Unsure of the exact release date but I first saw it Dec 4th (A Friday) and it wasn't out the weekend before, so was sometime that week.
The multiple 3rd party signup warning was no mistake or typo. And I still refuse to purchase it.
Each week I am in steam catching up on the prior five days of wishlist additions and new releases, I keep debating on removing it.
I generally drop over $100 per week at steam, and in some cases with many good games coming out (this past November and December being good examples) occasionally 2-3 times that. Those two months combined I spent just under $800.

Witcher 3 I dropped the $60 for right after release (again on the weekend - such is the free time schedule these days)
I've since also purchased the full expansion pack (aka season pass) for another $25, so a total of $85 spent so far.

This also urged me to purchase Witcher 1 to complete the series (I already had Witcher 2 from a few years ago, also bought it on release at $60)
I think #1 cost $15 or $20 for the enhanced edition by the time I bought it.

That's a total of $160-165 in a 6ish year period going just to CD Project Red - exactly because they spend their time and developer man hours catering to me, the paying gamer.

Just Cause / Squenix however spends their time and developer hours catering to non-paying "pirates", literally at the expense of people like me, the paying gamer.
They went out of their way to cripple my experience to instead make exactly zero dollars more than they would have before, except they also lost at least my $60 if not very likely more.

All due to DRM that accuses me of being a thieving criminal because I paid them money, and prevents me from playing the very game I paid money for.
I never hear that complaint from pirates, who so far have always gotten to play the game they paid nothing for, even if not on release day as being the only trade off.

Fuck that, and fuck DRM.

These companies need to learn that it is NOT the pirates that will pay their bills and paychecks, it is only us paying customers that can do that, and only if you don't smack us in the face with legal threats and insults while giving us a shittier product than you give to the non-paying customers.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[WizMorgan]

Your take on the intent of the article might be a little clearer if you RTFA, or if you RTFA that article points to. Then maybe you might be able to make an informed statement about the actual contents of said articles. Not holding my breath here, though.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

The software devs get it. The publishers are the greedy ones.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

"no free games to play in the world"

Get a job, work for a few hours and buy it then.

People put in a lot of time to build games, the rest of us don't want to subsidize you through higher prices.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

A PS4 which can't access the PSN is not much of a PS4.

Perhaps that's the reason why there's yet to be a break on the PS4; I assume there's been less effort because pirates often don't want that online connectivity. Sure, the vocal/stupid pirates do because they want to play games with their friends. But the rest of us pirates just want to play a variety of games in solo peace.

I mean, seriously, the good games that are multiplayer are good because of the other players. That means you can play 10+ year old multiplayer games, become really good from all that play time, and really have little reason to move to "New PC games". Same with MMOs, especially as they're so grind heavy and you have so much to lose to move to another MMO. (Although I gave up on MMOs (well, MUDs) a long time ago after losing my progress once; that taught me well how much of a waste of time it was.)

Anyways, obviously this is all IMO. But nothing about the PS4, XBone, or WiiU really have sold me on anything. For the previous generation, the Wii was only particularly good because of WiiWare, VC, and Gamecube backwards compatibility--not to say they're weren't any good Wii games, but I'm not inclined to buy a whole new system based on a few good games. Meanwhile, I'll happy drop money on various Indie or Steam bundles because the per game price is enticing enough without any real overhead.

In the end, if there wasn't a way to pirate? I'd probably not own a Wii and be playing more used SNES games. I might buy a few more PC games, but they would still be 2-10+ year old games that are on sale and in bundles. And it still wouldn't benefit developers much, if at all. After all, gaming is a luxury. And once I own a solo game, I can play it indefinitely without worry of other players or developer support for it to keep running and be fun. So, why not play 20+ year old games that I've got in my collection instead of wasting money on more games?

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[trewornan]

Besides which "cracker" is a racist name for caucasians not asians.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[aliquis]

Luxury prices?

Visit Humble bundle or use sales and accept that games are the price of a coffee/soda - pizza.

If you think you may enjoy the game as much as either then what's the problem with buying it?

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same issue with Office 2013 H&B. I activated the key card on the wrong account, so I asked Microsoft to remove it. However, they seem to have forgotten to reactivate the key to allow it to associate with a different account, so I am stuck with an "unlicensed" copy of Office.

Then I AutoKMS'd it and left it alone.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and Christmas cracker is a racist term for Santa Claus.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[johncandale]

They are only gaining some critical time at launch

Games today are like movies, all frontloaded.. If they don't do well the first weekend, they bomb. Games suck, movies suck, their business model sucks. It's all baed on what is marketable, not what is good.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Humble Bundle & co do not satisfy the impatient type. The recently-released or preorders are still priced fairly high. In fact, take a look at the current weekly bundle: The Division preorder is $75, with 2+ year-old games at $10 or lower. Steam sales are not that much different: 15-30% for recently-released games, and only let loose at 66%-90% off for older games.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

pad a game out with anti-piracy measures

And thus, add more bloat. My ISP thanks you for the over-usage charges that they are about to receive.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[DrXym]

A game's executable is only a fraction of the size of a download. Adding some code which only triggers on the first Sunday of the month, or when you choose to do the optional side quest on the 7th level, or when your inventory contains 20 mushrooms is not going to have any significant impact on the download size. It might require the company extra time to QA the game, but the impact on legit customers, even those who download it legally is negligible. For pirates, it becomes an enormous pain in the ass and prestige hit when the cracked title turns out to be broken for a litany of random hard to reproduce reasons.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it "bound to fail"....? Most people don't live beyond their means, aren't bad with money, and put needs before wants.

I assure you number of people who can safely afford video games (and other luxury items) is large enough to support the survival of the industry.

The most important rule to not sucking at life is "Don't be stupid"
The most important thing to remember is "You're not as smart as you think, so remember the most important rule"

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Darinbob]

Except that DRM hurts legal owners of the games as well. DRM is not copy protection, it also includes restrictions on where, when, and how you can play the game. Since most DRM games are cracked very quickly the point was never to stop piracy but to stop reselling the game for a cheaper price (which is allowed legally in most countries).

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[tepples]

Get a job

Child labor laws.

work for a few hours and buy it then.

Region coding. It took well over a decade for Mother to come to North America as Earthbound Beginnings and for Mother 2: Earthbound to come out in Europe. In the meantime, plenty of people pirated it. The world outside Japan still doesn't have Mother 3.

Also console exclusivity. It takes well over "a few hours" to buy a console just for one game, and people who wanted to play Earthbound Beginnings but did not already own a Wii U just pirated it.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

First Denuvo isn't a DRM scheme, it protects the steam or origin or whatever DRM that is used. This is an important distinction because the weakest part of DRM is the part is in memory. Debuggers are used to grab the decrypted binary from memory, and then then rewrite the binary. Denuvo Makes this harder because the binary isn't decrypted from memory. To crack steam they need a decrypted binary.

Denuvo can be used without a DRM component and all it does is protect the game code from being reverse engineered (to make trainer/cheat programs), it doesn't prevent it from being copied. In the case of a MMORPG this makes it a big deal because you want to protect the binary from being hooked, and to keep the connection crypto keys from from being extracted. Once those keys are extracted, it opens the game to "bots" that destroy the game environment.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Caucasians are just asians with penises.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Please present a coherent argument that:

1) You are subsidising pirates;

2) You are paying more due to piracy.

Lots of people put in a lot of time to things, but that doesn't mean they're owed anything for it. That's Marxist socialism: eat or starve. Capitalism says you don't take other people's stuff. Since nothing is taken when you copy something, there is no sin.

If you DON'T want something of yours copied, don't produce it. There will be millions more talented than you prepared to take your place while accepting terms consistent with freedom. Almost all software I've written - i.e. except in my early career - has been under an open source licence. I've spent tens of thousands of hours writing things that others have been able to download freely and use without legal, let alone moral, impediment. What deficiency prevents you doing this?

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[TheReaperD]

The problem with loosing the activations with MS Office were with Office 2007 and 2010 when you used a licensing server. We had some issues with Windows 7, but were mostly able to cheat our way around that problem. The first problem was that the activation server wouldn't work with VLANs that took Microsoft years to fix, then that was still a problem with laptops that were rarely connected to the LAN as VPN and wi-fi connections were more restricted than hardwire connections. Microsoft's "answer" to this problem was to use their single activation licensces but, since we routinely re-imaged PCs, we burned through those like toilet paper.

So, for TL;DR, this problem is a current issue as these software versions are still in use.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using Enterprise licensing and the activation isn't working, you're doing it wrong, or you're using a dodgy method for activation.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[IamTheRealMike]

It is their goal and the bulk of all sales come immediately after launch. People who love piracy for some reason (presumably because they pirate games themselves) invariably treat any crack as a "win" and celebrate it, although all that does is push more developers to be console only. But they also ignore what should be obvious - nobody gives a shit if you break the DRM on an Amiga game from decades ago. It's obvious that the DRM on that game is worthless due to the age of the game. And yes, there aren't many companies living fat and easy off games they made 5 or even 10 years ago, with the possible exception of subscription MMORPGs like WoW.

The stats I've seen from when games and BluRay makers discuss piracy is that if the DRM lasts more than about a month, that's a win for them, as they can measure the difference it makes in sales. If the game is cracked after that then the lost sales are minimal. If the DRM lasts six months that counts as total victory for them.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[TheReaperD]

Fair enough. I'll grant that it's the middlemen and the PHBs that won't get a clue.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[IamTheRealMike]

They'll either wait for the crack, sneak through a licensing hole or go without. They aren't going to buy your fucking product, period.

Ah yes. The classic "everyone in the entire industry are morons who enjoy burning money" explanation.

Guess what? The people who buy DRM products, and they virtually all do, are not idiot savants who have the intellectual capability to make an AAA video game but somehow can't do basic maths when it comes to their own sales figures. I've seen one sales graph from an indie game where the sales dropped the day a crack became available, and the moment the exploit was patched, sales went back up again (it was a multiplayer game iirc).

You have to be really naive to think that everyone who pirates software is some sort of hard-core PIRACY OR DEATH ideologue. No, it turns out when the data is sifted that - surprise - 99% of them are lazy cheapskates who could easily afford the game, they'd just rather not - but if their only option is buying it then a significant number will go ahead and do so. That's sort of why companies have consistently developed DRM since, well, since the dawn of video gaming itself.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm old enough to remember that Rockstar (or their publisher?) used the pirated version of Max Payne to re-release the game years later... apparently they were so lazy they weren't able to remove their own, outdated DRM.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[AmiMoJo]

On the other hand, intrusive and dangerous copy protection/DRM is stopping me buying some games at all. I think GTA 4 was the biggest one I wanted to play but in the end skipped due to the DRM. I'm hoping GTA 5 is better, when the price hits £20 I'll find out. Steam has a good return policy, if the game fails to install without administrator/UAC permissions.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[AmiMoJo]

Actually the best people are mostly from Europe. Back in the 80s and 90s Europe had a lot more crackers, probably due to computers being more popular compared to the dominance of consoles in the US. That's also why a lot of the DRM systems are developed there too.

But yeah, Slashdot needs to stop the clickbait summaries, with their unsubtle racism and political biases.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

"no free games to play in the world"

Get a job, work for a few hours and buy it then.

People put in a lot of time to build games, the rest of us don't want to subsidize you through higher prices.

Cry moar, faggot.

Just because of your whining, I'm going to start pirating more games this month, even if I never intend to play them.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Utter nonsense. Everywhere I look I see crackers. There's plenty around.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

So why are you here commenting? Does "you're not as smart as you think" not apply to you?

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, take your rich man syndrome and shove it. Getting in the way of the lawn crew is not going outside to play. That's like Massa saying he was out picking cotton when all he was doing was whipping his slaves.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

No the unencrypted bits are only technically needed to play the game *exactly* the way you play it. There is no technical hinder to encrypt and decrypt the bits depend on exactly what you do in the game and in what order.

That means (if we ignore the resource use and development effort) that a game could dynamically decrypt the game in different ways depending on how you play it. If you add procedural content creation in client then depending on the way you play the game that means that the only way to decrypt the code to be able to enter the next room (using your cracked decryption) is if you actually picked up the SMG and have 9 bullets left in the magazine. If you don't the next room will be created slightly different and another decryption key will be needed.

While this sounds really far fetched of course I'm just trying to show that that while a movie or picture may always be copied if it can be viewed the same is not universally true for a game which does not need to be static.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever try an ubisoft game?

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism does not say " don't take what's not yours". It says that everything anyone wants to produce can be sold at a price, so that such price includes the costs for production and a revenue. From food though clothes and basic utilities, everything costs, because of that. People who works on software do eat, dress, educate and dwell. When you bypass the model you're changing the rules, getting the product without paying for it - instead of exerting some alleged "freedom". Remember that freedom goes as far as your neighbor's. What you do is rebellion, a mock to the genuine effort and coordinated work of thousands, just to skip paying a few tens. Just to feel you are teaching the system you're free beyond the established rules. Time to grow up.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than uplay being redundant and annoying, I have played a ton ofUbisoft games without issue. What specific problem are you having?

If uplay is your only issue, then minimize it. I know it's tough, but you'll live.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the fucking dumbest thing I ever heard. The PS3 is wide open and you can play every game available on the system by using a tool to digitally sign the ISO you downloaded (if the scene group hadn't already signed it prior to release)

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[TheReaperD]

Microsoft's licensing server software is dodgy as hell, but you're legally required to use it unless you use the one-shot activation licenses that you go through like toilet paper if you routinely reimage your workstations like we do. The problem is that Microsoft never wants to take into account that you might want a firewall between your servers and your workstations. Except for Windows built-in firewall, they expect a two-way open communication and stuff wants to break at semi-regular intervals when you don't. I don't know the exact reasons as that was our network team's problem.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[pr0fessor]

I buy used games, CDs, and usually wait for movies to come out on DVD, but when I was in high school I never complained about the price of these things. A movie used to cost $2.50 to get in and granted 1.25 soda was over priced I'd spend about $10 to take my girlfriend to a movie and I made about $100 a week. Things have changed since then, a teen working a minimum wage job probably isn't making 40 hours a week anymore and although the pay has doubled everything else has gone up much more. Today the teen with a minimum wage job will need to spend more than %20 of their earning to take their girl to a movie.

Re:If it can be played, it can be copied

[cwsumner]

... If the game is cracked after that then the lost sales are minimal. If the DRM lasts six months that counts as total victory for them.

And some game makers, such as Egosoft, have sometimes released patches a year later that removed all DRM. And that also resulted in a boost in sales!

But those games last a bit longer than simple fps types.

Re: If it can be played, it can be copied

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like Massa saying he was out picking cotton when all he was doing was whipping his slaves.

Management is always like that.

Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thieves deserve jail time. Not free games.

Re:Good!

[dskoll]

Don't know why parent was modded down so much. He/she should be modded up.

I don't agree with DRM, but the proper response to DRM'd games (if you don't believe in DRM) is simply not to buy them. It's not to steal them.

Re:Good!

[ArmoredDragon]

Probably because he sounds like a "tough on crime" advocate. Putting marijuana users in jail was bad enough. If you put every pirate in jail, then half of the US would be in jail right now. I'm not sure how you'd fund that.

Re:Good!

[TheCarp]

Why? What does he add to the discussion? What could what a person deserves or doesn't deserve possibly matter? The world isn't fair and the world doesn't owe you anything, including people getting what you think they deserve.

Re:Good!

[RavenLrD20k]

I think the problem the mods are having with GP isn't so much about the sentiment, but the semantics. For right or wrong, there are people that don't see this form of piracy as stealing as it's generally thought that a software pirate wouldn't have been a lost sale since the software pirate wouldn't have bought the game to begin with. The people modding him down are probably the same ones that held the mantra "Copyright Infringement is NOT Theft" and shouted it across the lands of /. until their fingers fell off. Now they no longer have the fingers to type out yet another argument, so they just mouse click the down-mod on those who refused to listen to them.

Re:Good!

[Zaowulf]

Privately, of course.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

What could what a person deserves or doesn't deserve possibly matter?

It matters because piracy is all-too-often treated on tech forums as a victimless crime and pirates are celebrated as "sticking it to the man," when in reality pirates inflict a real harm on the developers who make these games (and all their employees and investors).

It's the Jesse James phenomenon. Jesse James became a folk hero of sorts to people thanks to dime-store novels and ridiculous folk songs. But IRL, he was just a murderous thug who killed and stole because he was a greedy shit who didn't want to have to actually work for a living.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

>I don't agree with DRM, but the proper response to DRM'd games (if you don't believe in DRM) is simply not to buy them. It's not to steal them.

I agree, don't steal games. You're hurting local business when you do that and putting cash in the game maker's pockets. Shoplifting only hurts small business owners (and the local managers of large stores).

Pirate them instead.

Re: Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

You dear sir are a moron. You have one apple to sell. I come by and take a picture of your apple, I never intend to buy it, mostly because it is either not delicious or you are a greedy bastard selling the apple at a price of a steak diner. I then 3D print an apple from apple sauce based on the picture I took. So now I have an apple, and you have an apple. See, I didn't steal anything from you, you still have an apple to sell my dear moron. Years later when you are selling your own apple sauce 3D printed copies of the apple at a regular price I come back and buy your copy too. How did I steal anything from you? I didn't, you still had what you wanted to sell, it was in your possession the whole time. //too lazy to log in

Re:Good!

[David_Hart]

Probably because he sounds like a "tough on crime" advocate. Putting marijuana users in jail was bad enough. If you put every pirate in jail, then half of the US would be in jail right now. I'm not sure how you'd fund that.

The problem is how you define "pirate".

Personally, I believe that everyone should pay for the content that is consumed be it a game, video, music, digital book, etc. Where I disagree over DRM is a combination of fair use and public rights. The DRM laws, as they stand today, are in direct conflict with the fair use doctrine and they prevent creations from becoming part of the public domain when abandoned. Under the current law, anyone bypassing DRM for these otherwise legal uses would still be branded a "pirate".

So, while I agree with the stance that crime should not pay, I can't, in good conscience, agree with the "tough on crime" stance given the current bad laws.

Re:Good!

[TheCarp]

Except that most pirates are nothing like Jessie James. In fact, most evidence i have seen, both from studies and from my own experience is that the same teen and 20something pirating games 20 years ago is paying top dollar today now that he has a job and less time to play games.

In fact, the only people I have seen continueing to pirate much past that point have been both poor and physicaly disabled. Leaving them no extra money but plenty of time to consume volumes and volumes of media.

So basically.... as far as I can tell very little money is lost to piracy because anyone who can afford the game and wants to play it buys it. The only people who pirate it are the ones who wouldn't have otherwise bought it, generally because they couldn't afford to anyway.

So I can't imagine this issue actually matters at all, since the net result of it being different is almost 0.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with you to simply not buy them, this is what I do, I don't agree with the parent that running software equals to stealing.

Stealing is when you steal a box with a copy of the game in your local game store. Spreading information should be protected by free speech. In my opinion some organizations which have a lot of influence on the general opinion and thus also politicians (like the media industry) have profited from the fact that our technology has advanced so much that the majority of our communications goes through digital gadgets. They profit from this advancement by reinventing copy right laws that are only put in place to protect their own interests. Just like copy right was originally invented to protect the interests of the Catholic church or the absolute monarchs in the modern/pre-French revolution times.

Although it is simply put in place to maximize the profits, the laws are their, ready to be abused. I personally don't care for pop-culture or games so much. But I do care when some material that should be free to everyone is simply blocked from publishing by these stupid laws.

Re:Good!

[ComputerGeek01]

Consider for a moment that those of use who are doing the cracking have already bought the game. It's not about piracy or theft for some of us, it's a puzzle. Since becoming a Dad I haven't had anywhere near enough time to be familiar with this scene, but from what I remember it can be extremely engrossing. Piracy is a byproduct of cracking, not the otherway around.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps it is modded down because it is misinformative flamebait?
Copyright infringement still isn't theft.

The continuous misuse of that analogy alone makes me want to pirate stuff, but since I don't buy it anyway it will unfortunately not harm anyone.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations operate under the assumption that the right course is whatever is the most profitable to them, even when its ethically and morally questionable and/or outright illegal. I simply apply the same reasoning to my personal life. I have no respect for the rule of law so clearly perverted into a tool of oppression instead of protection.

It's not about "Freedom", its about the complete lack thereof. We are what the world makes us and the world makes us apathetic.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

And you just jeked off on that? Ahhh... good for you.

Re:Good!

[bfpierce]

Jail time is a little strong.

If you walk into wal-mart and steal a game you're not going to end up in jail. It's called petty larceny. Huh, interesting that, we actually have a law for this, that can be applied.

Rather than allowing these companies to sue you for millions of dollars they don't deserve.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not to infringe on their copyright. FTFY

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll tell you what. Our boys have taken up piracy! One of the worst and coolest of crimes.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you put every pirate in jail, then half of the US would be in jail right now. I'm not sure how you'd fund that.

WoW gold farming?

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an exception. I purchase games but commonly "pirate" games. Single-player ones, anyway. That's because I'm sick of silly restrictions like having to get the CD/DVD off the shelf and put it in the drive to validate that my purchase is legit, or wait for some kind of on-line validation process that is irrelevant for a single-player game, so I often get the "no-CD" cracks and install those mods. I buy the game legitimately, then break the DRM (and the law, technically) for the sake of convenience. I don't buy decent hardware and install software on an SSD only to be told I have to jump through DRM hoops before I can use it.

All this "unbreakable" DRM probably means is that I will never buy those games or play them.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I forgot one other reason for breaking DRM: to get it to run when vintage games fail to work on more recent systems for no reason other than the incompatible DRM.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Proto-fascists shriek about leaches on society. You sound as bad as a Trump supporter.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who equates piracy to theft is either a fucking idiot or a fucking shill.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

No-CD cracks? I feel like you're posting from 2005 or something.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

How about when it's not consumed, and the user just watches or listens to the media, leaving the recording intact? Capitalism has warped your mind.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright violation is not equivalent to theft.

Besides, when considering whether to throw a person in jail, you should consider the damages that person has caused. Who is damaged if I play a cracked copy of Minecraft instead of simply not playing it? What does it change if I play a cracked FIFA 16 instead of simply not playing it? Who's worse of?

The creator of the damned Minecraft made about $3 billion dollars with it, and you're gonna bitch because some kid who can't afford it got a copy from The Pirate Bay?

Your self-righteousness, hell, your whole moral compass is completely off.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Self-righteous dumbasses will always claim that having their derp modded down proves that they're right.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this is uniformly true, but in any case I think supporting developers tends to trump distaste over a publisher or console manufacturer's moves. That doesn't necessarily have to figure as a game sale but it usually does. I think in contrast to music it's harder to flirt with piracy and still give just dues. There are a multitude of reasons for that but a major one to me is means of showing support.

Re:Good!

[TheReaperD]

Copyright infringement is NOT theft. Read the legal definition of theft:

"n. the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale)."

To be the legal definition of theft, you must remove the item from the person's possession. That is why legally, it is called copyright infringement instead of "petty theft" or "grand theft" which would be the charges if it met that legal definition. So, for the hard of understanding, if I come and take your physical copy of your software without your permission, depriving you of its use, then it is theft; if I make a copy of your software, with or without your permission, but, do not deprive you of its use, then it is copyright infringement. Many companies have tried to make a case that copyright infringement is theft to the courts and they have failed to convince even one court that it is theft. Which is why they cannot use the term theft when talking about pirates because that is libel or slander (depending on the medium) as they would be accusing them of a crime they did not commit.

As far as the lost sales, the RIAA and MPAA's own studies showed that piracy does not typically hurt profits. Often the most pirated titles are also the highest grossing titles and the most prolific pirates are also their highest paying customers. There are exceptions such as bad movies, music and software. Once people realize how horrible something is, they're not going to pay money for it. Thanks to the internet, it is much harder to pedal garbage and make a profit. Between the internet and Germany changing their tax laws, it broke Ewe Bowl's business model. He couldn't make a profit on crap movies anymore so he went into the lawsuit business (extortion) instead.

Re:Good!

[Faust6]

Unless it's cleverly designed, relatively non-intrusive DRM consumers don't recognize as such (i.e. Steam). But yeah I agree. Game piracy has turned into such a hassle I imagine that fewer are engaging. Mind you, I see the value in hobbyist hacking/modding consoles and emulation, particularly for older stuff.

Re:Good!

[TheCarp]

lol I think 2005 was about when I started getting most of my games through steam. However, I still go to stores and see box software and games, so I assume someone buys it and....I dunno, do they still do that?

I thought the rage now was to sell the DVD with only partial content so an internet connection is required anyway. The DVD is essentially little more than a partial installer cache to speed up the install.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you have the right to a game someone else made. LOL. Dumb fucker. I'm having fun burning mod points.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

ArmoredDragon - Pirates are breaking the law. How about me and my merry band of cheapskates siphon a cent or so from your account? Oh yeah, there are millions of cheapskates in my merry band.

Piracy is not a punishable crime by putting people in prison, nor is smoking Mary Jane. I don't know where you're from where potheads are rounded up and sent to jail.

Don't know why you're post is modded up. It is quite uninsightful and misleading. Maybe too many kids on slashdot. Fuck, this place is going downhill.

Re:Good!

[RavenLrD20k]

Adding my bias in where I tried to remove it in my original post. I completely agree with your stance... unfortunately we can yell this up and down the tree until we're blue in the face and people like the the GP I was talking about before STILL won't understand this fundamental flaw in their argument; whether it be through ignorance or shilling is in material to the fact that they will continually spout it off.

In the case above, I decided to forego the use of my mod-points and instead use my nubs to rationalize why the GP was getting down-modded to the Parent. Unfortunately, in my attempt to remove evidence of my bias, I seem to have made it appear that I was entirely arguing a point that was against my own point of view. Though now I almost want for my mod-points back because he's now an AC that's overrated at +1 for not contributing anything to the discussion at hand and the sentiment is most certainly not interesting as the modifier suggests. Almost.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong thread. We're talking about pirates here, not thieves.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

While true that a lot of people devote huge amounts of effort to things for no apparent reason, I think it is a fallacy to state that there is no actual reason. If you enjoy it, you were probably peer pressured by a bunch of alpha dweebs who felt entitled to steal whatever they please.

Re:Good!

[epyT-R]

Nah, if you wanted to be the ultimate tyrant, you'd make The People fund their own oppression.

Re:Good!

[epyT-R]

I think both are appropriate responses. Not buying the software only sends the message that the product is undesirable in some way. Breaking the drm repeatedly demonstrates why.

Re:Good!

[gfxguy]

While I agree with some of what you say, believing that playing a game is important enough to violate copyright law shows a worse lack of moral compass than someone who thinks game publishers ought to be compensated for their product. How much a company or person makes is irrelevant... if someone creates a popular product, they deserve the reward.

That said, I'm no fan of DRM, and I don't see how advances in DRM are a good thing. People can still play games they legally purchased for old game systems that haven't been produced in decades. Why should I forfeit my right to play games I legally purchased because the manufacturer no longer supports the platform? People are able to play their ps and ps2 games years after the fact... if the companies "win," in a few years, if your system breaks, you won't be able to play your legally purchased games ever again. Used systems will only last so long.

However, the fact that you may not be hurting someone is not justification for violating someone else's rights in order to play games.

Re:Good!

[epyT-R]

or maybe people like you should get real jobs instead of expecting the state to back your artificial scarcity.

Re:Good!

[epyT-R]

Nowadays, the publishers give them incentive. Treat paying customers like crap with abusive drm schemes and they'll go elsewhere.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that most pirates are nothing like Jessie James. In fact, most evidence i have seen, both from studies and from my own experience is that the same teen and 20something pirating games 20 years ago is paying top dollar today now that he has a job and less time to play games.

So the fact that they won't steal when they're older makes it okay for them to steal now?

So basically.... as far as I can tell very little money is lost to piracy

Developers would seem to disagree, so much so that they're willing to spend a considerable amount of money and effort to add DRM to their games. If piracy were indeed just a trivial cost, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't bother.

And also, keep in mind that pirates don't just hurt developers and their employees, they also hurt PC gaming in general. Every time a PC game is pirated, it moves the developer closer to going console-only with their next release (or only releasing a PC port as an afterthought much later). The fewer people actually buying a title on PC (as opposed to pirating it), the less chance that a developer is going to prioritize a PC port in the future. That's one of the reasons why you see so many AAA game developers treating the PC as an afterthought these days.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you walk into wal-mart and steal a game you're not going to end up in jail.

You will if you do it 1,000 times, or if you set up a business selling the stolen goods, or if you openly brag about doing it repeatedly.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

why not both?

Re:Good!

[dskoll]

I certainly don't think all people who violate copyright should be jailed; that would be crazy. The penalty should be proportional to the loss they cause. So an end-user who casually pirates a $50 game should probably be fined around $100. The fine needs to be a bit higher than the price of the game to act as a deterrent, but not orders of magnitude higher.

But large-scale copyright violators who can be shown to have caused massive losses, in the $250K and up range? Yeah, they should be subject to criminal sanctions.

Re:Good!

[Coren22]

No one has been sued for millions of dollars for downloading a copy. Now, making the cracks/copies available to millions of people, sure that could get you a huge fine.

Re:Good!

[gfxguy]

Personal property includes IP, and why the courts use the terms "theft of IP" all the time. They don't turn around and look at the lawyers and say "nuh uh, you can't steal IP."

That said, the equating of copyright infringement to piracy is the poster child example for hyperbole.

I also think that DRM is anti-consumer, your RIAA and MPAA examples are the best examples. They spend millions of dollars on DRM - licenses to use DRM, DVD and BluRay players have to license and build the technology to decrypt, and who ultimately pays for all of that? The consumer... so the consumer legally buys some media (that includes a price for the DRM built in) and a player (that includes a price for decryption) and can't make a legal copy (device shift), or they move to a different country and buy a new player and their library will no longer play. All because they want to prevent people who wouldn't have paid otherwise anyway from making a copy. And the consumer is forced to pay for the technology restricting their rights. Then the millions these companies pay lawyers and all the millions of tax payer dollars they use going to court... it's all incredibly counterproductive.

That said, there's simply no excuse for copyright infringement in order to play a game without paying for it. None.

Re:Good!

[present_arms]

You should put down the spliff before you post, even as anonymous

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

That’s what taxes are for.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now here is the ironic thing. Remember as a kid, you were told that if you didn't copy that floppy, that game prices would go down?

Well, back then, I'd pay $50 for a game.

Now, with a 0% piracy rate on consoles, and piracy going down on PC games, I pay $75-99, then have to pay a few C-notes for the DLC that comes with it. If I sell the game, I get $15, and the next owner pays about 90-95% of the cost of a new game... and has to buy the DLC again.

Hmm... $50 where all the content was present, versus hundreds of dollars for a beta-quality game that will not be useful and not playable once EA or whomever switches off their servers?

Looks like we all got lied to. To boot, games a few years back were innovative, not just another Halo, Call of Duty, or another FIFA, so I'm paying for the same IP as last year.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think there's a human on Earth without some sort of obnoxious habit. Yours is being a douchebag. At least the hippies are mellow.

Re:Good!

[ChrisMaple]

Not every wrong is stealing. Trespass isn't stealing. Murder isn't stealing. Forgery isn't stealing. Battery isn't stealing.

Copyright infringement is wrong, but it is not stealing, and your electric charges argument is both technically wrong and silly. If you are unable to distinguish copyright infringement from stealing, that's your loss, and you shouldn't be polluting the intellectual atmosphere with your smoggy hypothesis.

Re:Good!

[KGIII]

To be fair, he probably doesn't actually realize that many of the "non-cunt" people he meets are stoned as fuck but still very much functional and normal. They're not even smelly hippies who are heavily into a drug culture scene.

Re:Good!

[KGIII]

Why? What does he add to the discussion?

Judging by the number of comments, quite a bit.

Re:Good!

[Bert64]

How about you and your merry band of cheapskates don't give me $50.

Piracy does not remove anything from the author, it is completely different from siphoning cents from someone's account. It's not a lost sale because you have no way to know if someone would (or even could) have paid if a pirate version was not available.

Also, what about someone who buys media but then decides to also download a pirate version and use that version instead because it's better (ie no drm)?

Re:Good!

[Bert64]

Also people in poor countries who couldn't otherwise afford to buy the media in question...
If not for piracy, Linux would likely have a dominant marketshare in countries like China because users can't or wouldn't pay for any software.

Re:Good!

[blazer1024]

Last time I looked at the PC games section at a store (Target), it was... pretty much only the Sims (3 and 4)... maybe Starcraft II and some random bargain bin junk.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

And what will you do if 50% of the people refuse to pay the fine and won't let you take (or, to them, steal) their stuff?

All government punishments lead to violence at some point if the punished refuses the punishment. When the majority are punished, revolt is an absolute. This is why few to no pirates are ever punished and the laws on the books are of little force. Full enforcement of them is simply impossible without the government imploding or convincing people they are horrible for pirating. The latter just isn't working, so the former is the current result if it were tried.

Re:Good!

[malditaenvidia]

Not to mention console games used to be actually expensive to produce back in the day (cartridges, specifically), nowadays it's either cheap plastic discs or just digital downloads. They still somehow justify charging full price for something that costs nothing to distribute.

Re:Good!

[Ralph Wiggam]

Why would you want to play a game created by evil people?

Re:Good!

[AlanBDee]

Completely agree. For the "real" pirates I know cracking the game is the game.

Re: Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit and y'all know it.

A pirated game, movie or song is a lost sale. A transformed copy is not. The MPAA/RIAA/BSA/ESA etc, don't see it that way. They see both a transformed copy and a counterfeit copy as lost sales. This is the one point that pirates and fair use advocates agree on.

But, pirates are either pirating because they are cheap, feel the content is worthless, or it is not available in their region. Fair use advocates know it's wrong to download anything they can buy legitimately, and tend to restrict their pirating to content that hasn't a snowballs chance in hell of ever being available, eg import games, movies, tv shows. This is because things like the steam, iTunes, or whatever else store is used to prevent access to foreign content, entirely because of price discrimination. That has the collateral damage of not being able to acquire foreign content without someone first licensing it for the US market, even if all they do is change the title to work around a trademark issue.

If the price discrimination (parallel imports) were not happening, then a lot of DRM schemes would be unnecessary.

There are at least two games I like to play that were only ever released in Japan, as they are a licensed property of a company over there, there is no way a PC or SNES game from 1993 is going to be made available on the WIi U there or here. So my only option is to play a pirate copy in a SNES or PC emulator because these games were never officially localized.

I don't pirate any PC software that I can buy on Steam or GOG. There are plenty of non-English games around the world that do not exist on either. They won't either because many European and Asian games have adult content in them that would make them unsuitable for US-based Steam.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Personal property includes IP, and why the courts use the terms "theft of IP" all the time. They don't turn around and look at the lawyers and say "nuh uh, you can't steal IP."

Wouldn't be surprised that it is stated, doesn't make them right though - and yes, if I were a lawyer, I'd say "stop making up laws/crimes," and.or "that is not a real crime, use the proper terms" - as more should, as IMO concision and precision matters, especially in an area as semantically driven like law.

Re:Good!

[tepples]

So the fact that they won't steal when they're older makes it okay for them to steal now?

I doubt they're shoplifting in any substantial numbers. Copyright infringement is not stealing, and stealing is not copyright infringement.

very little money is lost to piracy

Developers would seem to disagree, so much so that they're willing to spend a considerable amount of money and effort to add DRM to their games.

Developers or publishers?

Every time a PC game is pirated, it moves the developer closer to going console-only with their next release

Which leaves an opening for another studio to enter the PC market. In fact, a new studio has to enter the PC market first because console makers require studios to show financial stability and experience.

Re:Good!

[preflex]

Which is why they cannot use the term theft when talking about pirates because that is libel or slander (depending on the medium) as they would be accusing them of a crime they did not commit.

"Piracy" is the act of robbery or criminal violence at sea. Therefore, calling copyright infringers "pirates" is just as slanderous as calling them thieves.

Re: Good!

[ArmoredDragon]

Bullshit and y'all know it.

No, it's not, and I'll show you why below.

A pirated game, movie or song is a lost sale. A transformed copy is not. The MPAA/RIAA/BSA/ESA etc, don't see it that way. They see both a transformed copy and a counterfeit copy as lost sales. This is the one point that pirates and fair use advocates agree on.

You could argue a that a counterfeit sale is a lost sale to an extent, but somebody downloading a torrent or copying a CD isn't. This comes down to simple price elasticity. Here's a real world example:

At the college I went to, a soda vending machine typically sells sodas for $1.50 per 24 oz bottle. One day, during a long economics course, during the break time, a student walks out and comes back with a soda, and announces to the class that the vending machine is erroneously selling them for 5 cents a bottle. So, most of the class gets up and buys a soda.

Had the soda been regular price, almost none of them would have purchased a soda, except for the one student that found the price to begin with. In such a scenario of it being regular price, does that mean they lost a sale from those 20 something students? Of course not. It just means that at regular price, the demand for a soda is lower, and those people never would have paid for a soda anyways.

The same thing applies for downloading free copies off of torrent sites or copying a CD: When the price becomes free, then more people want a copy. However those same people still wouldn't pay for a copy otherwise.

So you see, that's why each pirated copy doesn't result in a lost sale. However that doesn't mean that no sales are lost. Because some people know that there's a way to get it free, they might just say "meh, I won't pay anyways" even if they really want a copy. It's difficult to quantify just how many people that is, but the reality is that for some 90% of pirates, no matter whether they can get it free or not, they just won't pay for a copy, even if piracy wasn't a thing at all. Usually what they do (if they can't get it free) is opt for a substitute good, which when it comes to entertainment, can be just about anything that's fun and (for the person) free, anything from swimming to masturbating.

Now let's consider a counterfeit sale; let's say that the counterfeit copy was sold at half price. That does mean that if the publisher did sell the copy at half price themselves, they could have made that extra money instead. And guess what, they do actually do this: In some markets where people have less money, (especially Eastern Europe and Asian markets) they know that they can't ask the same prices that they can in first world markets. So, in order to get any sales at all, they sell at a lower price there. This is exactly why movie studios love region locks: They like to make sure that Westerners don't buy an identical copy of the same movie in cheaper markets, because they want to charge the Westerners more. Game studios do the same thing, by the way.

Anyways that's somewhat going off topic, but even a basic understanding of economics should tell you why a pirated copy isn't a lost sale.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot violate copyright law by downloading and playing a game. You violate it by distributing it (which you do when you use Bittorrent). It used to be that even distributing it wasn't enough, there had to be a profit motive, but the laws were changed after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in lobbying by the entertainment industry. It wasn't always a criminal offense either, but nowadays it is, with tragic results (see Aaron Swartz).

It's unbelievable to hear a seemingly articulate and intelligent person such as yourself speak of copyright law as if it were a conscientious, sacrosanct holy grail, as something that really had the public interest and the protection and compensation of our most creative and industrious people in mind. It is nothing like that.

The companies you mention WILL win. In fact, they have already won. Your only recourse is "warez", but maybe not for long if the "three-strikes" and similar legislation spreads.

This is not about playing a game (and "violating people's rights" in the process). This idea that we can mobilize and change the laws by simply well-behavedly obeying them in the meanwhile is ludicrous; as is this other idea that because it contradicts the law, it's immediately "wrong". Businesses use money to change them; we need our own tools. A free internet, free sharing, and encryption are our most powerful ones right now.

Finally, your last statement is meaningless, it contradicts itself. If you're violating someone's rights, you're "hurting" them. And if you're not hurting them, then what rights are you violating exactly? Where is the damage? Do I need to mention that games are breaking profit records nowadays? "Piracy" seems to be HELPING them make more money (excepting, maybe, the small developers and publishers, but we're talking about the aggregate here).

P.S.: I think you meant to say "game creators/developers", not "game publishers". Publishers do nothing but distribute and market it, and are way overcompensated for that by anyone's measure.

Re:Good!

[bzipitidoo]

I believe the problem is deeper Copying is easy, been getting easier and easier for years, but it's not that. Seriously, one of the main protections of the audio CD when it first came out in the early 1980s was simply that it contained too much data for easy handling, 700M at a time when hard drives weren't even 40M, there was no mp3 format, and wide area networking for the masses was done on 2400 baud modems, which would need days to transmit all the data on one CD. Also no CD ROM drive, though no doubt an audio CD player could have been hacked to rip CDs. Anyway, it's not that, not that copying is easy, and enforcement of copyright against millions of individuals is all but hopeless, it's that copying should be a basic human right.

Sharing of knowledge should be a basic human right Perhaps sharing could be regarded as a form of speech, and therefore protected under the 1st Amendment. But if not, sharing deserves no less protection, maybe should be even better protected. A system that attempts to compensate artists by regulating and restricting the sharing of knowledge in order to impose a toll, is fundamentally broken. There is no essential difference between teaching children the 3 R's, and copying songs. Both are a transmission of knowledge. Sharing of knowledge is fundamental to civilization and humanity. Our ability to communicate and cooperate better than any other animal put us on top of the animal kingdom. We sure can't compete with most animals on hardiness, strength, or any purely physical measure. One man, naked, no weapons or clothes, just bare hands, vs one lion is going to end in victory for the lion 99% or more of the time. But with the knowledge to build weapons, now it's the other way around. The lion has no chance whatsoever against a man backed with modern weapons tech. To give control of that power into the hands of a few is to put the rest of us in the same fix as any wild beast, utterly helpless to resist their will whenever it conflicts with our own. The 2nd Amendment is the right to bear arms. Maybe it should've been the right to bear pens, since The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword.

A typical objection to removing these tolls and restrictions on the sharing of knowledge is that artists will starve. How can any artists make any money without copyright? Well, there are other business models. Patronage is one. The usual objection to patronage is that it doesn't work, can't possibly work, which ignores that patronage has been around for centuries. The next objection I usually hear is based on the thinking that patronage has not changed, only the wealthy can afford it, which overlooks that now, thanks to the awesome expansion of communication the Internet has made possible, we can "crowdfund", as it has been called.

So, please, when you call copying a crime, think of piracy as a moral wrong, you are merely parroting the propaganda of the copyright extremists.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I believe that everyone should pay for the content that is consumed be it a game, video, music, digital book, etc.

Personally, I believe that copyright was created to advance the arts and sciences by granting for a limited time the exclusive rights to the author(s) of a work. Meanwhile, today many copyright holders have every incentive to make a limited batch run of a game or an otherwise limited time sale that results in people paying a set fee of the copyright holder's choosing and then "putting it in the vault" to possibly never allow the vast majority of people to legally "consume" that game in their lifetime. So, the overall objective has failed because what it has done is created the perverse incentive to not advance the arts and sciences in a meaningful way but to slowly kluge forward making minor improvements, totally obsoleting the older software/game (aka planned obsolescence) purely for the intention of trying to force further consumption.

At which point, I can only barf in my mouth. The supposed beauty of capitalism is that it provides a variety of goods and it motivates people to buy new things (and "consume" them) because the new things are genuinely improvements; mere kluges will exist but be sufficiently wiped out with new advances in competition. Well, that does happen to an extent; see the wide spread of cheap indie games. Yet the other supposed reason for copyright is the long-term preservation of the cultural heritage of society. Ie, people need to listen to Beethoven or read Shakespeare to be inspired by it. So, no matter how many reinterpretations you get, you can look at the "prototype" of what was and have a good sense on exploring wholly new areas.

That's where the public domain is supposed to kick in. And it's why it's not enough to think people should pay for that which they consume. Because at some point, you're no longer paying for a song or a play or a game to be directly amused but to see one's cultural heritage and that's not something owned by any individual. But if you feel it necessary that authors be paid until their death + 70 years. Or even the absurd 70 years, provide a way for us to actually "pay for the content that is consumed". Require compulsory royalties after a set number of years. Let us legally play Batsugun and Secret of Mana without paying the unrelated and author unrewarding used market markup.

"encryption tech"

[Anonymous Coward]

Security by obscurity, you mean. The client necessarily exposes the algorithm and any decryption keys, and it's always a matter of undetectably analysing them. This isn't cryptanalysis.

Re:"encryption tech"

[Anonymous Coward]

Think constantly morphing executable in memory with thousands of triggers built into the game to crash or cause issues when a certain check fails.

Even if they delay the piracy of a title for a month, they've won. They gain additional revenue from sales if nothing else.

Re:"encryption tech"

[Anonymous Coward]

They believe to gain additional revenue from sales

FTFY

Re: "encryption tech"

[guruevi]

Besides that it's also about will and market share. Who really wants to spend time on cracking the yearly iteration of a sportsball game or shooter? You can get almost any EA game with the same game experience at the same quality on a PS3 with its 2010-2014 iterations. The PS4 and its games are way less popular than its predecessors and thus it will take longer to crack them because there are less interested parties.

Re:"encryption tech"

[petermgreen]

The problem with that sort of thing is that it can get your game a reputation for being a buggy peice of shit either because the pirates don't disclose that they are running a pirate version or because your triggers accidently get set off by some legitimate users.

Re:"encryption tech"

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't even English.

Oh, please

[Anonymous Coward]

Once the new scheme is figured out, it will be off to the races again.

It will never last...

[SJ]

... because then the studios won't have a boogie man to blame when their crappy game doesn't sell.

Studio Exec: Oh noes, our awesome game isn't selling because people are pirating it instead.
Random Underling: Sir, no one has cracked our DRM yet....
Studio Exec: Oh shit, hurry up and leak a crack before the shareholders notice our 80 million dollar game sucks

Re:It will never last...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it certainly is a strategic business risk. If the industry was built on piracy, and if kids cant pirate games and become avid customers when they grow up, I wouldnt want to be owning any EA shares right now... How do shorts work?

Re:It will never last...

[phishybongwaters]

Well in this case your statement doesn't hold water. Just Cause 3 was anticipated and is selling quite well considering the crowded field of games out there right now. But I feel what you are saying and for a lot of games it's 100% true. This is why almost every game coming out has some form of online connection to something, severely limiting the game while offline if it even plays at all. Honestly, if the game companies would hire some of the crackers and modders to help make products that aren't broken at launch and highly overpriced, piracy likely wouldn't be as big of an issue here in NA.

Re:It will never last...

[Anonymous Coward]

... because then the studios won't have a boogie man to blame when their crappy game doesn't sell.

Studio Exec: Oh noes, our awesome game isn't selling because people are pirating it instead.
Random Underling: Sir, no one has cracked our DRM yet....
Studio Exec: Oh shit, hurry up and leak a crack before the shareholders notice our 80 million dollar game sucks

Underling: Perhaps if we didn't spend $70 million advertising to a market that will always buy year +=1 games, we'd make more money, sir?

Re:It will never last...

[SJ]

If it's a good game, then it will sell well. If Just Cause is selling, then I'm assuming it's a good game.

I was referring more to the games that should never have gotten past initial design, or ones that are so completely unplayable due to buggy software.

Re:It will never last...

[110010001000]

Shorts are like long pants. You put them on in a similar fashion.

Re:It will never last...

[TechnoCore]

Yeah it doesn't work like that... Most studios are not "BIG EVIL GAME CORP", but rather small, and work their ass off to make a game. If the game is crappy and sucks, it won't get pirated in any major way anyway. If the game is o.k it will be in risk of being pirated a fair bit, meaning the studio will take a hit in revenue. That revenue could have been used to improve the game, or to make another better game. Only games with free-to-play revenue models (read micro-transactions) will benefit from not getting paid up front. Guess you like them.

Re:It will never last...

[tepples]

How do shorts work?

They keep your private parts in place and warm under your shirt.

Now to others interested in your original question: You can short a stock by borrowing shares from someone else and selling them. To set up a short position, you'll likely need to upgrade your brokerage account to a tier allowing short selling, and you'll need to keep a lot of margin in that account that can be liquidated in case the stock pays dividends or its price rises. The process is described Wikipedia and Personal Finance Stack Exchange.

Short sales of real estate are unrelated, being more similar to foreclosure of an underwater property.

Re:It will never last...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well in this case your statement doesn't hold water. Just Cause 3 was anticipated and is selling quite well considering the crowded field of games out there right now.

Wait, there's a crowded field of games just now? I was just thinking last night "I haven't gone so long without a game I actually want to play in years". The only non-shooter and non-sports games out there are Just Cause and Fallout.

Re:It will never last...

[Anonymous Coward]

Much as many people who pirate games would like to think that games cost a lot because of advertising, it's really not true. A typical game budget is 80% paying the wages of artists, 10% paying the developers, and 10% advertising.

Re:It will never last...

[Cederic]

Crikey, where do you get your games news? There's never been more choice in gaming.

Re:It will never last...

[malditaenvidia]

Honestly, if the game companies would hire some of the crackers and modders to help make products that aren't broken at launch and highly overpriced, piracy likely wouldn't be as big of an issue here in NA.

Funny as it is, GOG.com routinely uses scene cracks to get the old games they sell to run on modern systems.

Re:It will never last...

[ChrisMaple]

The only non-shooter and non-sports games out there are Just Cause and Fallout.

Leisure Suit Larry.

Re:It will never last...

[bobbied]

I wouldnt want to be owning any EA shares right now... How do shorts work?

Shorts are easy, you sell something you don't actually own and promise to repay (cover your position) later by buying what you previously sold. If the price goes up before you cover a short position, you loose money, but if it goes down you make a profit. I used to have stock options though my company and I often would sell short above the option price to lock in the gains, then cover the short by exercising the option and sending the stock to my broker. I used this to take the risk out of the process because it would take a couple of weeks to get the shares once I paid the option price. I think they call that "shorting the box" where you sell a security short in your trading account but you actually hold it someplace else. However, selling short is not that hard to understand. Just remember your risk is literally unlimited (the stock price can always go up) and your profit is limited to your short price (the Stock price can only fall to zero and no more).

Might I suggest "options" as a better alternative. In options trading, you can leverage a bit more and if you are careful you can limit your risk. Options are a bit more complex to understand and effectively use, but basically you are buying or selling Calls and Puts which are contracts which entitle their owner to either buy or sell a security at a specified price before a specified date. You make money in options in two ways, selling contracts and exercising contracts you own which are "in the money". I'll leave it to you to figure out the strategy of options trading, but I caution you to carefully think though all the "what if" scenarios before you start selling contracts because your risks can be greater than your investment when selling contracts. Buying contracts is not so risky, in that you can only loose your initial investment if the contract expires before it's "in the money". If you are careful though, you can make more money on the same amount of stock price movement in options with about the same level of risk as trading the stock directly, but I cannot stress enough that you need to know what you are doing or you will get slaughtered by the program trading houses...

Not mentioned in summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Metal Gear Solid V.

Took forever to get a crack out, and when a crack did come out by 3DM it took a few more days for a version 2 to be playable. Only when you set your timezone to a chinese one were you able to play. Sometimes on a specific set of hardware you needed a new crack made. You had to skip certain chapters of the game because they crashed.

And after 5 days or so? Music started playing. Shifty crack, even in the pirate world, never fully working scene release even to this day.

As a pirate, I can only salute the guys who made Denuvo.

Re:Not mentioned in summary

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the "crackers" who made Denuvo.

OMG The Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG, The Horror of expecting to be paid for putting blood, sweat, and tears into creating a product the market wants.

Re:OMG The Horror

[Tukz]

"OMG, The Horror of expecting to be able to run a game I've paid for, but the DRM mess up so I can't and have to rely on third party cracks to get it to run"

Re:OMG The Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

I do that with games that get polluted with programming by-products like windows live in gta4

Re:OMG The Horror

[um... Lucas]

That's the exact attitude that Slashdotters took during the Napster era in trying to protect the products that musicians created.

Re:OMG The Horror

[bickerdyke]

OMG, The Horror of expecting to be paid for putting blood, sweat, and tears into creating a product the market wants.

And it's not a figure of speech if you're talking about EA games....

Re:OMG The Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a few dozen games like this. Windows 10 was not nice to securom. The ones I have been able to crack I can continue to play.

Re:OMG The Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

Just Cause 3, one of the examples in the article, is notorious for being a buggy, terrible mess. The game drops to 15FPS on consoles and requires massive amounts of RAM on the PC to run well, and even then tends to bog down the longer it's been played, generally needing to be restarted if you've been playing longer than an hour.

One of the theories behind why is due to this DRM scheme they're using.

So, uh, yeah. Good on them for making a game that's hard to pirate, or whatever. Too bad that's also translated into one that's hard to play.

(Of course, it might not be the DRM. The fact that the game gets 15FPS on consoles suggests that it's just poorly optimized. Then there's the part where if you read any user review, you'll see that it's not worth playing anyway due to boring, repetitive gameplay and the addition of "challenges" that, rather than mix things up, serve only to frustrate.)

Re:OMG The Horror

[thegarbz]

If they created a product the market wants there would be no more DRM.

Spoken as someone who routinely cracked games I purchased which:
a) constantly asked for something at start-up.
b) needed an internet connection for no reason.
c) needed a CD for no reason.
d) was tied to one PC because some studio thinks their EULA trumps ownership rights.
e) after a coffee I'm sure I can come up with more.

Re:OMG The Horror

[gfxguy]

I used to crack my legally purchased games to avoid DRM, and I won't argue there aren't other fringe cases for cracking DRM, but let's not be dishonest to suggest that that's why these people are cracking DRM. The vast majority of it is for people to play games without paying for them, and that' s just not cool.

Nowadays the DRM I've encountered is much less annoying. Having to look up some code on a code wheel in order to play a game was bad enough - I had one game that would just stop in the middle of game play and give you a page, paragraph, sentence and word number to find in the manual. It didn't do it just once, just randomly during game play. I was ridiculous - and it negatively affected game play. But that's just not true anymore, that's not how modern DRM works.

I do have a problem with companies that don't consider long term rights, and I applaud all the programmers who've been able to keep old Nintendo, SEGA, and PS games alive through emulators and hacking, so I'm not suggesting these people should stop trying to crack DRM. But let's face it - the vast majority here are cracking games because people don't want to pay to play a game. This isn't stealing bread to feed your family, it's a f#@king game, and if one can afford the game console or the computer to play it, then one should pay for one's games.

Re:OMG The Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority that play the game without paying wouldn't have paid if there was no crack, so what's the harm?

I used to gank stuff all the time when I was a poor high school or college student. Now that I have an income I pay for everything. There's no reason that the poor should be kept from cultural media.

Re:OMG The Horror

[KGIII]

I usually avoid posting in these types of threads because, really, I'm not a gamer and I do pirate music and documentaries - I just admit that I'm a horrible person. At any rate, over the years of having these debates, I've kind of formalized my standard debate response. It works reasonably well and I've had people try to shoot holes in it before (which is something I truly enjoy and there's no ego involved so I'm okay with being wrong and modifying my argument) and this one has held up fairly well for a while now:

http://games.slashdot.org/comm...

That covers most of it - though I throw in some mean and nasty just to be a prick because they've got Manning in Snowden in their signature (I'm quite a fan of Snowden) while they're arguing that it is okay to abuse other people and strip them of their rights. The gist of it is, depriving someone of the fruits of their labor is what we called slavery. The pirate is using something without having paid for the right to do so, thus depriving them of their rights and their liberty to be compensated for their work by those who make use of it - in the manner that they insist on (so long as such is lawful, of course).

It's copyright - the word "right" is in the name for a reason. You have a right to control access to the outcome of your labor. When you don't have that right, you are a slave. If they want to give it away they can. If they want to license it then they can do that. If they want to sell it with all rights included - including distribution then that's okay too. The pirate does not have that right.

I think a legitimate argument could be made that those few that crack the DRM for their legally purchased games, so long as they go no further than that, shouldn't fall into that category as a fair use exemption to copyright. I also think copyright should not last nearly as long as it does. I also don't think that one has a right to everything they want - so if it's not available then it sucks to be them. They probably can't afford lots of things, that doesn't mean they're entitled to have those things.

Re:OMG The Horror

[ChoGGi]

Personal anecdote here, JC3 works for for playing a few hours at a time.
There was a bug in release that would make it bog down after a very extended period of play, it does seem to be fixed with the latest patch

Though I play it in offline mode (with a cheat for those retarded "challenges")
I won't say it isn't repetitive gameplay, but it's nice for relaxing (it's pretty much JC2 with a facelift)

Re:OMG The Horror

[gfxguy]

The vast majority that play the game without paying wouldn't have paid if there was no crack, so what's the harm?

You're simply not entitled to someone else's IP whether it "hurts" them or not. It's a morally bankrupt justification.

I used to gank stuff all the time when I was a poor high school or college student. Now that I have an income I pay for everything. There's no reason that the poor should be kept from cultural media.

Because it's bullshit that someone can buy a computer capable of playing these games (or spend their money on a console) and then plead "poor." If you can't afford the games, you can't afford the console. And please don't be disingenuous stating people are playing these games on $200 laptops they got for school.

The fact is that if someone has the disposable income to buy a gaming computer or console, then they have enough to pay for some games - maybe not as many as they can illegally copy. So instead of buying one or two, they illegally copy 10. So I do buy into the notion that, given a particular game, a person would otherwise not have paid for it anyway, but I don't buy that they'd never buy anything if they couldn't copy anything.

The bottom line is nobody is entitled to someone else's IP for free (unless that someone else wants it to be free).

Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, won't touch the stuff ... greedy, selfish, irresponsible and abusive corporate suits are just thieves producing a lot of over-priced and under-supported crap. These corporations couldn't compete in a free market, so they have to corrupt and control their way to domination. Thank goodness for open source and what's left of democracy ...

Re:Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[Anonymous Coward]

Many? Are you sure about that?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/many

Re:Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[RDW]

... greedy, selfish, irresponsible and abusive corporate suits are just thieves producing a lot of over-priced and under-supported crap. These corporations couldn't compete in a free market, so they have to corrupt and control their way to domination.

Perfect partners for FIFA, then.

Re:Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, you are in the range of 1/~1000 of the consumer base for these kinds of video games.

Re:Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[tepples]

Without digital restrictions management, what's to keep people from casually infringing copyright in a video game? Should video game publishers instead follow the RIAA tactic of speculatively invoicing alleged infringers?

Or do you mean many people abstain from the video game market altogether over DRM?

Re:Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[CastrTroy]

The only reason that DRM is so rampant is because society has proven that they can't be trusted. The law can do nothing to stop stuff from being privately copied, and therefore the publishers of the software have to take their own measure to stop pirates. Similarly to anti-theft tags on clothing, DRM is there because there actually are a lot of people who will just pirate software given the chance.

I agree that certain types of DRM that have been employed in the past (like the Sony Rootkit) go way beyond just protecting the content into the realm of damaging user property. But that doesn't mean that publishers shouldn't be able to use some means to protect their software.

Re:Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[Anonymous Coward]

"The only reason that DRM is so rampant is because society has proven that they can't be trusted"

No the reason piracy is so rampant is because copyright law is corrupt and people know when the world is unjust even if they can't articulate it, the corporations stole the public domain first. Even if most of the public is ignorant of copyright law they can still smell the evil of corporations and their bought and paid for laws.

This is not new in history:

"Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Copyright_term.svg

The piracy debate is always one sided and privileges business instead of talking about the criminal corporations/businessmen who's been taking your rights to own shit away and trying to pass piracy off a bad thing when games never reach the public domain because it was stolen by people like yourself and valve. Game licensing is a scam, games never go into libraries and are held in "intellectual property" limbo. The whole concept of IP and licensing when applied to games is a legal con and the fact that ignorant people like you eat it up and want to be corporate slaves is sickening.

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/265083-barely-any-us-culture-will-enter-public-domain-year/

http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131231/23434825735/grinch-who-stole-public-domain.shtml

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131231/23434825735/grinch-who-stole-public-domain.shtml

Piracy is the only way things like video-games for instance will be preserved given that the source-code is confiscated/locked down and not going into libraries. Corporations stole our culture an illiterate like yourself is chastising the "thieves" when corporations are the biggest thieves of all time.

Re:Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[Cederic]

It's possible to acquire a large number of games that are not encumbered with DRM - between free games, re-releases on sites like gog.com, small developers that can't afford DRM technologies, sensible developers that understand economics and realise DRM doesn't help their overall revenue and ethical developers that choose not to fuck over their customers, there is a tremendous amount of choice available.

Re:Many people don't and won't buy DRM software

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you've definitely got the "not being able to articulate it" part locked down; appears you're also going strong on the "not being able to understand things" front. Please go take a shower. --Love, Legal.Troll

Re:stolen, not free

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.aaideas.com/wp-cont...

Piracy is not theft. It's Piracy.

Related concepts? Maybe... but you're an idiot if you think they are the same thing.

the new piracy is grey market keys

[Anonymous Coward]

the new piracy is grey market keys - I've gotten most of the new titles, even pre releases at a fraction of the cost via steam/origin/ect through these sites, I think they buy games in other markets where they don't cost just a high price for retail box then sell that key in the US

Launch time patches/"updates"

[Anonymous Coward]

This has absolutely nothing to do with encryption, DRM has been doing it for decades and the simple solution is to have the original executable perform decryption, pause execution and dump the decrypted binary. It's just a matter of time to find the decryption routine and a nice breakpoint.

Even custom DRM isn't hard to crack, the difficulty lies in uncertainty of having found all DRM hooks. In most cases you'll have to play through half or most of the game to find them all, making the cracking process tedious.

The real cause are launch time patches and "updates". The vast majority of software nowadays are released with a myriad of problems that magically passed QA (read: forced by publisher) and crackers simply wait a few weeks in order to obtain a stable version so they don't have to bother cracking the same thing two or three times.

IAAC (I am a cracker)

DRM-Doesn't really matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you like driving away paying customers. If you hack, you hack. If you pirate, you pirate. We can all feel high on our moral superiority all we want about not paying vs. paying, while we do pay to bomb children all over the world with nary a raised eyebrow. Fuck it all.

Tons of free games out there.

[Anonymous Coward]

'in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,'

There are tons of free games.
Many games studios open up there engines to be used by indy game makers and you can find make great games to play tho not cutting edge on the graphics.
Tremulous - tremulous.net
Renegade X - renegade-x.com
Stream has a ton of free to play games just check out there website (Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Warframe)

Play real free games if you don't want to buy not cracked games.

Re:Tons of free games out there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but there are so many -cheap- games out there as well. And regular Steam sales--I spent about $20 and got 9 games during the winter sale. Stuff that was highly acclaimed when it came out, too.

You just have to be willing to pass on new releases and get them when they go on sale. By that point you can generally get the GOTY edition with all DLC as well.

I look forward to playing Fallout 4 for $15.

Re:Tons of free games out there.

[malditaenvidia]

Reminder that Dwarf Fortress is free and it's the only game you'll ever need.

Re:Tons of free games out there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever since I found out about Humble Bundle, I have not made much purchases during Steam sales. Only a few here and there for the DLCs that did not come with the bundle.

"No free games in the world"?

[Anonymous Coward]

typical leftist BS; there are endless free games to play, just not the brand-new ones that people just finished spending money to make.

This is the same old "I want it, therefore I deserve it for free" logic.

Re:"No free games in the world"?

[L. J. Beauregard]

"Leftist BS"? Hey waitafugginminute, I though open source software was "leftist BS"!

Re:"No free games in the world"?

[PopeRatzo]

No, stealing stuff is leftist, unless you're stealing land out West to graze your cattle for free. Then it's divinely inspired patriotism.

Re:"No free games in the world"?

[Anonymous Coward]

typical leftist BS; there are endless free games to play, just not the brand-new ones that people just finished spending money to make.

This is the same old "I want it, therefore I deserve it for free" logic.

If a comapny wishes to put their game out for free are they not allowed to? Its theirs after all? How is it leftist? They give there game way and yes its not new but still a good game. Could check out Heroes of the Storm for a new free to play game. The "I want it, therefore I deserve it for free" would be if I said I deserver to get a "brand-new [game] that people just finished spending money to make [and didn't put it out for free]." A colection of people coming together to make a game and distribute it to people for free is not leftist or right or "I want it, therefore I deserve it for free" they give there time and money to produce something they want to share.

Work-alike

[tepples]

You can program your own work-alike of the game playable on PC. In some cases, that's still copying.

Definition of stealing

[Roodvlees]

Requires the stolen object to be missing.
Pirating is copyright infringement. Why does the government even protect copyright?
Many people would rather live in a world without copyright.
In that sense I think anarchy would be great. Those who want copyright can live in a city where those monopolies are protected.

Re:Definition of stealing

[Anonymous Coward]

Requires the stolen object to be missing.

Pirating is copyright infringement. Why does the government even protect copyright?

Many people would rather live in a world without copyright.

In that sense I think anarchy would be great. Those who want copyright can live in a city where those monopolies are protected.

Consider living in China then, where copyright isn't respected much.

Or join the open-source movement. I haven't pirated a game since I was a child. Haven't bought any games either. Still play lots of games:
* free games on web pages
* free android games
* open-source games. Some of these are clones of older commercial games, but way better. Once a game gets cloned, it keeps getting improved beyond the original. See openttd for a good example.

Re:Definition of stealing

[tepples]

Say a video game developer wants to "join the open-source movement" as you suggested. Traditional means of funding development of free software don't apply quite as well to video games. Distributing the software as free software and selling related services works only for an MMO, and not all games are MMO. Making software available for others to improve in hopes that they'll offer further improvements upstream works for libraries but not as much for software intended for non-technical home users.

open-source games. Some of these are clones of older commercial games, but way better. Once a game gets cloned, it keeps getting improved beyond the original.

Unless the game's developer uses copyright to shut down clones.

Re:Definition of stealing

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people would rather live in a world without copyright.

That's because many people don't have anything of worth to copyright.

Re:Definition of stealing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's your personal definition, but that is not the common use of the word. You can steal an idea or data; intellectual property is property.

Re:Definition of stealing

[umghhh]

The unfortunate thing is that anarchy although in theory a nice system requires that most people hold to undeclared and unwritten rules and that there are no masses of huns that take or destroy everything at will. In fact the anarchist society built on free will and cooperation seems to attract bullies and said huns which then enslave those nice educated free people. It is enough that the huns destroy things on occasion for the free people to want to give up their freedoms and to have a king that organize knights to kick ass of the barbarians. Once a king and police and the rules are in place you have no choice as to accept the rules or face consequences. t is all the same with property rights etc - there is no god's given right to own any piece of land in private hand. It is our agreement to do so because we found out it works better than any other systen.

I love anarchy in principle. As all ideal systems however it does not work. So now we are stuck with an asshole neighbour who as drunk and uneducated as he is, has the same rights as you do, stuck with a corrupt political class that if its members have any sense they keep big parts of population fed and under mind control.

So here we are - with our copy right shit that is in hands of crooks and extended in perpetuity. As long as they do not rob you because you listened to one pirated song, played one pirated game and saw one pirated pr0n so long all is well.

Re:Definition of stealing

[KGIII]

What an interesting signature you have - and all the more amusing when you so casually talk about taking away the rights of others.

As I've mentioned, I'm a huge fan of Snowden and I don't want to project but I suspect he'd not be impressed with someone who so casually takes away someone else's enumerated rights for their own gain. Maybe those who want their 4th Amendment Rights should go live in their own city too or is it just the rights you want? You want the right to privacy and to be secure in your papers (presumably - seeing as you too believe Snowden is a hero) but also want to give up all your rights (which is what anarchy is, by the way).

You're just a whole fruity bowl of logical inconsistencies, entitlement, and hypocrisy. I don't think I've ever seen quite that same combination or at that great a scale before. I'm truly flabbergasted as to how you manage to rationalize all those inconsistencies. I can only presume you've not actually given any thought to it.

Do you know what it means when a person doesn't have a right to the fruits of their labor? Slavery... We outlawed that but, well, maybe that's your one logical consistency in that you don't believe that people should have rights. I'm not sure how you managed to fit Snowden into your signature. I'm kind of wondering if you have any original thoughts of your own or if you just parrot what looks popular without bothering to see how those ideas all mesh together as one.

Yes, when you infringe on copyright you're taking someone's rights away. It's right there in the name. I dare say that taking away someone's liberty is a crime worse than theft. I'm pretty sure you'll still figure out a way to rationalize it but you may want to reach a point in life where you're at least honest with yourself. I, for instance, pirate documentaries and music because I'm a horrible person and an asshole. I take away their rights for my own ease of access - it's not even about the money, I've got money. I pay for both Netflix and Hulu but never use 'em. I just pirate that shit or find someone who has and I stream it. Why? I'm a self-centered, lazy, prick.

At least man up and admit it to yourself. In the mean time, you do Snowden a disservice by associating his name with you. That's really cool of you.

Somoli Pirates

[Anonymous Coward]

The Somali Pirates can easily crack it.

Once they capture game developers, they just ask or the keys (and ransom).

If that doesn't work, just shoot the game ( and developer ) and throw them in the sea, as Pirates don't actually play many games.

Shit games

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe nobody is cracking them because they suck?

Cracked games were a thing back then

[bickerdyke]

Cracked games were a thing back at the schoolyard, when we could barely afford the blank floppies to copy the 12 discs of "Another world" or so, Fiddling with cracks and P2P to download stuff isn't simply worth the time anymore when after a few weeks, you can get the game at a decent discount at Steam.

Re:Cracked games were a thing back then

[Anonymous Coward]

Another World was 1 disk. It sounds like you're trying to copy Star Wars Chess

why would you want to copy Star Wars Chess

Fifa x

[LordWabbit2]

Look I don't play sports games much (or more like at all) but a friend does and was complaining about how they are all the FIFA's are the bloody same. Slightly better graphics and an updated player list is all that the new release really brings to the (ahem) field. Just Cause 3 I bought shortly after it came out and it's good fun, someone I know who does not have any spare cash to hand (at least not for a game I suppose) was also complaining about there being no pirate version out as yet, just the usual douchebag fake torrent with a password.

Re:Fifa x

[Anonymous Coward]

it's soccer/football. WTF do you want? it's not like they change the rules every year. same with american sports.

Re:Fifa x

[gl4ss]

jc3 seems to be out though.

engadget seems shitty again.

more publishers will just waste more money on this shitty drm.

da inquisition was shit btw.

Re:Fifa x

[Anonymous Coward]

Dinosaurs.

Re:stolen, not free

[Anonymous Coward]

Justify it any way that helps you sleep at night.

I think there is a metric-ass-ton-load of copyright injustice going on in the world today as much as the next guy but you can't tell me that one person buying a game (or movie, etc.) and making a copy for the whole rest of the world is just.

Advertising much?

[Kid CUDA]

That article sounds suspiciously like an advertisement for Denuvo. Low content, high keywords, no research...

Re:So, creative people don't deserve to get paid?

[Halo1]

I raise you a blog post by the head of an actual game development company: http://www.lar.net/2012/01/02/...

Re:stolen, not free

[tepples]

If companies want to glorify pirates, then let's all pirate Sid Meier's Pirates, Pirates of the Caribbean, Jake and the Never Land Pirates, and One Piece.

why bother

[PopeRatzo]

Just wait for the sales and you can get that $60 game for $14 (or less). Unless you play on a console, in which case you don't care because your parents are paying for the games anyway.

Steam, GOG and others have made gaming reasonable enough for anyone.

Re:why bother

[bfpierce]

Can't tell if uneducated or just a trolling neckbeard.

The consoles have pretty much adopted the steam model of sales and direct downloads at this point.

Re:why bother

[JustNiz]

Sorry but thats clueless.
After also buying the season pass, Fallout 4 cost over $100 and it isn't coming down anytime soon.
Sure I could wait a year or more and save maybe save $20 but I'm not that much of a tightwad.
Its going to be probably 5 years if ever, before Fallout4 hits your $14 number. Skyrim is still 19.99 on steam. and it was released in 2011.

Re:why bother

[Type44Q]

Just wait for the sales and you can get that $60 game for $14 (or less).

Not to mention the hardware requirements: while they tend to remain the same (additional horsepower demands from software patches notwithstanding), the costs for said hardware (epecially vidcards) should drop significantly over the [18 to 24 months?] that it takes for a high-profile title to drop over 75% in price...

Re:why bother

[omglolbah]

A lot of power-hungry titles tend to get great boosts in performance after a few weeks to a few months after release as the GPU-drivers get optimized for the game.

Just look at the release notes of the latest nVidia or AMD drivers and you'll see a bunch of "Game X sees ##% increased performance in single GPU configurations" etc.

Re:why bother

[CronoCloud]

Unless you play on a console, in which case you don't care because your parents are paying for the games anyway.

Smile when you say that pardner. :-) My first console was an Atari 2600. When I first owned it there were new sealed games in stores for it. I have a PS4. Now think a moment and realize how old I probably am to have owned a 2600 when you could still buy new games in stores for it and that I'm old enough that I could vote when Solaris for the 2600 came out.

Steam, GOG and others have made gaming reasonable enough for anyone.

Also PSN. There's plenty of free/cheap content on PSN.

Re:why bother

[Nidi62]

Just wait for the sales and you can get that $60 game for $14 (or less).

That's me. Fallout 4, AC:Unity(at least until it was released and everyone saw how bad it was), Far Cry 4, etc. I want to play them all. Can I afford the $50-60 price tag for each? Sure. But why spend that much when I can wait a year (and in the meantime get anywhere from 2-4 games for $20 total to play during that year) then pay $15-20 for the games, with all DLC and preorder goodies (which if you bought at release you could only get 1 preorder goody depending on where you got it) a year later when it goes on sale on Steam? I don't care about multiplayer on any of the new games. If I want multiplayer I just fire up Insurgency or RO2(although I admit I will definitely buy RO2:RS2 day 1, if not preorder). I have been tempted to buy the new Star Wars battlefront game though, but only because I grew up playing Stars Wars games like Tie Fighter and Dark Forces and Played a lot of Battlefield 2 and 2142 in college, so it does have that nostalgia component.

Re:why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you play on a console, in which case you don't care because your parents are paying for the games anyway.

Or i buy my own games because i'm 30 and don't want to keep a windows machine around for the hour or two of gaming I do a week...

Re:why bother

[PopeRatzo]

My first console was an Atari 2600. When I first owned it there were new sealed games in stores for it. I have a PS4. Now think a moment and realize how old I probably am to have owned a 2600 when you could still buy new games in stores for it and that I'm old enough that I could vote when Solaris for the 2600 came out.

You should be ashamed of still having your parents pay for your games at that age. :-)

Re:why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought Skyrim Legendary Edition on the steam christmas sale for 10.99 CDN, and Fallout 4 for 60 CDN.

Don't buy from Steam when things aren't on sale ya nut.

Re:why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

Xbox Live Gold has been giving me two free games a month for the 360 for the last couple of years. I believe is the same for XBone. The games are usually older, but good titles, like Witcher 2 or Bioshock: Infinite.

Price-wise the xbox store holds up against Steam, IMO.

Re:why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

Skyrim can be gotten on sale fairly regularly for $5 on sale. It's been down at that price for a couple years. It did take a while to drop, but it did eventually, just like everything else.

Re:why bother

[CronoCloud]

Ha ha, left myself wide open for that one, but there are console gamers with greying hair who buy their own games. Console gamers aren't all 13 year olds playing "Medal of the Battlefied that Duty Calls: Black Honor Flashpoint Master Shooty Sergeant Edition to the Max" or "Seasonal Sports Game"

In fact I don't have ANY CoD or Battlefied games, and zero NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA, or FIFA games.

Re:why bother

[PopeRatzo]

Console gamers aren't all 13 year olds playing "Medal of the Battlefied that Duty Calls: Black Honor Flashpoint Master Shooty Sergeant Edition to the Max" or "Seasonal Sports Game"

I'm gonna be honest with you: I'd totally own a PS4 but my wife says no, I've spent enough building my sweet gaming PC and anyway, I'm not allowed to sit in the living room playing games in front of the big TV in my underwear because I make funny faces and noises when I play.

I really have a hard time arguing with that logic, so until I can build a gaming wing onto the house, there's no PS4 in my future. And by the way, I would totally play Medal of the Battlefield that Duty Calls: Black Honor Flashpoint Master Shooty Sergeant Edition to the Max. That game sounds awesome.

Re:why bother

[CronoCloud]

I'd totally own a PS4 but my wife says no, I've spent enough building my sweet gaming PC and anyway, I'm not allowed to sit in the living room playing games in front of the big TV in my underwear because I make funny faces and noises when I play.

Heh. Though if you ever do have the spare cash for the PS4, you could hook the thing up to your PC's monitor (if it has HDMI). That actually works fairly well if you play the MMO's available on console, or ran Linux on your PS2/PS3, or both.

How do I know if a game is worth playing?

[davidwr]

I can go to a brick-and-mortar store and play the demo (maybe).

I can play a friend's copy (maybe).

I can borrow a copy from a public library (maybe).

I can play an official free demo (maybe).

I those options are gone, there are 2 real options left:

I can "steal" a copy and buy it if I like it.

I can do without.

There is one more option but it's not gonna happen for anything more than a few bucks: I can buy it and risk getting screwed.

Re:How do I know if a game is worth playing?

[Anonymous Coward]

You find it on steam, purchase it and if you play it less than 2 hours you can request a refund.

You have up to 2 hours of playtime for 2 weeks to try it out.

Enjoy!

Re:How do I know if a game is worth playing?

[lactose99]

That's excellent, I had no idea Steam offered that, thanks for the info!

When works are forced on me

[tepples]

I believe that everyone should pay for the content that is consumed be it a game, video, music, digital book, etc.

Then who should pay when works are forced on me, such as a roommate blaring the TV or a store playing popular music? And who should pay when William Shakespeare's plays are performed?

and they prevent creations from becoming part of the public domain when abandoned

Copyright term extension does a fine job of that by itself, thank you very much.

Re:When works are forced on me

[David_Hart]

I believe that everyone should pay for the content that is consumed be it a game, video, music, digital book, etc.

Then who should pay when works are forced on me, such as a roommate blaring the TV or a store playing popular music? And who should pay when William Shakespeare's plays are performed?

I find it hard to believe that you realistically think that I was talking about paying for content within your listening range or even paying for public domain content, especially given my comments about fair use. My comment, for those that need it spelled out, was concerning paying for the copy of commercial copyright content (per the article on computer games) that you have on your player, computer, etc. that you use, play, etc.

Pus, I also firmly believe that if you pay for content you should have the right to shift it to any format.

and they prevent creations from becoming part of the public domain when abandoned

Copyright term extension does a fine job of that by itself, thank you very much.

Yes, but copyright term is a separate issue from DRM, even though it also needs to be fixed. In theory, copyright terms will have an end date at some point. The added problem with DRM is that even when that date is arrived at, these works will still not end up in the public domain.

Re:When works are forced on me

[Calydor]

a roommate blaring the TV

The roommate.

a store playing popular music

The store.

when William Shakespeare's plays are performed?

The theater goers.

Re:When works are forced on me

[tepples]

The roommate.

That covers who pays. Thank you for your answer. I now have a follow-up question: Now who compensates me for having been tainted with "access" to the copyrighted works that the roommate or store plays?

The theater goers.

That covers who pays. Thank you for your answer. I now have a follow-up question: To whom shall royalties be paid for a performance of a play by Shakespeare?

Re:When works are forced on me

[Calydor]

The roommate.

That covers who pays. Thank you for your answer. I now have a follow-up question: Now who compensates me for having been tainted with "access" to the copyrighted works that the roommate or store plays?

The same people who compensate you for seeing a piece of art you don't like, or who puts people in jail with opinions you disapprove of. Ie., no one compensates you.

The theater goers.

That covers who pays. Thank you for your answer. I now have a follow-up question: To whom shall royalties be paid for a performance of a play by Shakespeare?

I would have to look it up to be entirely sure, but I suspect Shakespeare's plays are in the public domain by now.

Re:When works are forced on me

[tepples]

no one compensates you.

Then what steps should someone who has been tainted with knowledge of those works take to avoid inadvertently infringing copyright in those works when creating his own works?

I suspect Shakespeare's plays are in the public domain by now.

And you are correct under current law. But hypothetically, if copyright were restored to them, as it was restored to works whose author had died between 50 and 69 years ago when the EU adopted a standard life plus 70 year term in 1993, who would get the royalties?

don't count abandonware / peopel who don't rebuy

[Joe_Dragon]

don't count abandonware / people who don't re buy software (in our eye you are a Thieve for not re buying the game that comes with dosbox) when you use your old cdrom and dosbox.

Solve the free rider problem

[sjbe]

Pirating is copyright infringement. Why does the government even protect copyright?

The reason we have copyright (and patents) is because of the free rider problem. If you have a way to deal with that problem more effectively then maybe we can do away with copyright. But so far nobody has come up with a better solution. The free rider problem has huge and measurable economic costs. It results in Pareto Inefficiency which I recommend you study.

Many people would rather live in a world without copyright.

Many people want all kinds of crazy things. Doesn't make it a good idea.

In that sense I think anarchy would be great.

So go live someplace like Somalia where anarchy is basically the de-facto system of government. I think you'll find it isn't so pleasant as you imagine.

Re:Solve the free rider problem

[mattventura]

From your own link "Free riding is considered an economic problem when it leads to the non-production or under-production of a public good". So unless there's actual evidence that the losses due to underproduction outweight the gains from some people being able to pirate it who wouldn't have otherwise bought it, then the net effect of piracy is positive.

Re:Solve the free rider problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason we have copyright at all is because of a free rider problem. The reason we have life+70 years copyright is Mickey Mouse, which is something altogether different.

Re:Solve the free rider problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe one idea is to have a clearinghouse by each country to handle it, where part of people's taxes go to fund said clearinghouse, and people get a royalty to how often their content is downloaded or seen.

Of course, rules have to be written up of who gets paid and how much, but artists would get far more cash than what they get from streaming services.

Done this way, there wouldn't need to be copyright laws. Patent laws can be handled similarly.

Can someone enlighten me on

[Kartu]

What on earth has "harder to crack" have to do with "encryption tech"?
I'd understand "encryption" talk in the context of PS4/Xbone, but we are talking about PC games here.

Who wins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids with money buy EA's shit right off the shelf anyway. No difference. Kids without money who used to wait for the torrent and learn to use computers to maybe become avid paying gamers later are basically just shoo'd away. In the short term game makers win or lose nothing, in the long term they may lose a significant slice of the next generation to other kinds of entertainment. Nerds will buy a franchise they love anyway, even if they have spent hundreds of hours on a pirated copy beforehand. I could have easily gotten the next Mass Effect or Witcher from KT, but liked the previous titles enough to buy all of their games now. If however a new Witcher kind of thing comes along and I can't try it out via pirating, I'm not going to pay 50 € for a pig in a bag either. So for Blizzard, EA or CD Projekt Red, pay for DRM to make no difference, for an up-and-coming game dev: pay for DRM so you could remain in obscurity. New books, movies, games and apps pop up every day, the amount of free time people have is ever declining. DRM certainly has a cost and it looks like it may benefit no-one but the maker of the DRM software. It's the same as with Hollywood anti-piracy guys who think I'd pay 12 $ to see John Wick if only TPB didn't exist.

crappy games

[phorm]

It could also be that these aren't exactly A-list games (regardless of how much they might want to hype up "Just Case 3"), so there are less people working on a crack.

Re:don't count abandonware / peopel who don't rebu

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn how to spell thief, moron.

The real statistics...

[wardrich86]

The important statistics should be:

How much more money they made VS other games that have been cracked right away?

How much worse is this DRM for my computer when compared to other DRM methods?

Game abundance & indies make pirating obsolete

[Qbertino]

Piracy getting harder? That's not a problem.
Videogame abundance and the mass-move towards indie-development makes pirating obsolete anyway.

I get all my Games for 10 Euros or less out of the bargain bin. The occasional totally DRM-free 15 Euro download for Shadowrun Hong Kong (Kickstarter Project / Indie Game) adds to that. I'm OK giving 15 Euros for a very neat DRM-free game to an indie studio. It's still dirt-cheap.

Currently I'm playing Deus Ex:Human Revolution for XBox 360. Cost me 9.99 for an original mint copy of the directory cut special edition. Awesome game, pricepoint is a steal.

No one needs piracy or the triple-a publishers in a time where Gamedevs are going indie left, right and center (Hideo Kojima anyone?) and games drop hard off the 60 dollar benchmark as soon as they're published on non-current gen platforms or mobile or the novelty effect has worn off.

And nothing of value was lost.

[Anonymous Coward]

Realistically you only need to buy 1 or 2 games per year, and they are all released by paradox.
So yeah, I'm not really worried about what fifa and just cause are doing.

Re:And nothing of value was lost.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this up! If you become bored of a game before you reach one thousand hours played, it was never worth purchasing or playing to begin with.

FIFA 16?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone play, cracks, or even looks at that?
There are 10 billion 9.99 eur indie games that are more interesting than the AAA stuff.

Street Performer Protocol

[tepples]

Doesn't the Street Performer Protocol, as implemented by services such as Kickstarter, solve free rider? No pledges, no game.

But can everything actually be bought?

[tepples]

Go fuck yourself and actually buy the stuff you use.

Tell me a site where U.S. residents can buy lawfully made DVD copies of the film Song of the South, the film Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, and the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea, and I'll do my best to stop pirating.

Re:But can everything actually be bought?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://classicmoviereel.com/sots.html?gclid=CKy1za7DmsoCFVE7gQodJP4LGQ

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pinocchio-And-The-Emperor-Night/dp/B000ATJK98

http://8store.8thman.com/belleanime.html

Now, uphold your end of the deal.

Re:But can everything actually be bought?

[Coren22]

Pinocchio: Sorry, this Seller doesn’t deliver to the United States Learn more

The other two, are you sure they are legal sources?

Re:But can everything actually be bought?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. Just because there are problems with copyright doesn't mean copyright is a bad idea. Limit the length and it would be wonderful. But most folks simply want free shit.

Re:But can everything actually be bought?

[KGIII]

Wait, what? You don't actually believe you're entitled to lawfully purchase anything you want - do you? They're not exactly required to make everything available to you. I know that might sound odd but you're not actually entitled to view those movies. Sheesh...

Also, why are you wearing a dress and gloves while raking your lawn? It does look comfy but the gloves really stand out.

At any rate, we all know copyright's absurdly long but one doesn't necessarily have a right to access anything they want - no matter how easy it would be or how silly it is to not make it available. You're perfectly free to not provide lawful products to Zanzibar if you want. It's silly not to but it is your right. It might be annoying, frustrating, and straight up stupid - but we're not entitled to everything we want.

I just accept that I'm a horrible person because I have both time and means to get most anything I want but I still pirate music and documentaries. I'm okay with that. On the scale of horrors that I could commit, well, that's pretty trivial. I pay for Netflix and Hulu and never actually use 'em, so there's that. Actually, over NYE weekend, I gave my Netflix name and password to someone else - a someone that actually visits this site and comments fairly frequently. I'm not only a horrible person but I enable others to be as bad as I am. (I'm pretty sure that Netflix is only supposed to be shared with members of the household. I have never actually read Hulu's policy.)

At any rate, being able to lawfully buy Song of the South and Pinocchio and Emperor of the Night and the others is immaterial to the argument. If it's unavailable to lawfully purchase that doesn't make pirating it any more justified - it just means you're now not only taking away the rights of the rights holder in two ways instead of one.

Not really news

[Anonymous Coward]

Every now and then a new DRM tech gets launched that is hard for the crackers to break.

Securom was one I remember when that hit it took more than a couple of weeks to be broken properly.

Sure this one currently is tricky but its not actually DRM, I took this from their website:

"Denuvo Anti-Tamper technology prevents the debugging, reverse engineering and changing of executable files to strengthen the security of games. It is not a DRM solution, but rather, Denuvo Anti-tamper protects DRM solutions"

So basically it is resisting debugging / reverse engineering. But as any Virus researcher will tell you this is something that is constantly happening and there are way's around it. I doubt that this system will remain uncrackable. And while this means piracy it also means that virus's and trojans can be debugged as well. If an unbreakable tech existed it will be used by the good and the bad guys and then we would all suffer.

Console games

[swb]

The local Microsoft store generously donated an XBox 360 to our school's charity raffle, probably 6 months after the XBox One was released.

We didn't own any gaming system at all, and my son immediately griped that there would be "no games because its old". The day after we got the console, we went to a local pawn shop and bought 5 games for $30, all of which played just fine. I think we might be up to about 15 games now, and I'd doubt that even with the 2 games my son has bought new, we're out more than $150 on games.

I think with consoles, this is the way to do it -- there are so many used games for the previous model that if you stay just slightly behind whatever's current, you have an endless supply of cheap games.

Maybe this is a problem for someone who's really into gaming, wants the latest and greatest, but honestly, for an 11 year old boy (and a 49 year old man...) I have a hard time understanding what you're missing on a brand new console for the extra money.

Re:Console games

[Anonymous Coward]

My son got his 360 about two years ago. Previously all we had was a Wii and a PS1 and 2. We've also been hitting the thrift stores, etc. for games. Probably have $300 invested in games in two years. There is literally so much content for the 360 that we could never play all the great games (not to mention the crappy ones). We just discovered Dead Island and it seems like we'll have several weeks of entertainment out of that $5 game. It's cool enough I'm thinking of getting another 360 and another copy so we can play together.

The PS1 and 2 games are getting a little dated, but 360 and PS3 (and even the Wii) has so much viable content still, I can't see shelling out $500 (or $349 or whatever they are right now) for the new ones.

Re:Console games

[cfalcon]

Well, YOU are missing a few things.

First, some of games require online drama. When older, these games are in some cases entirely unplayable, and in other cases are missing whole game modes. Obviously you're smart enough to dodge those games, but the point is, you HAVE to dodge those games. If you want online multiplayer (which an 11 year old and a 49 year old probably don't), you're going to need to go much more modern, because it's based in large part on the actions of other people. I'll bet you that in 6 years, your son will either not care about games or care enough to want to play a modern thing.

Second, even absent that entirely, if your son makes friends with people who game, or simply wants to talk about current games with those people (IRL I'm assuming) he won't really be able to. He may or may not care, but even if he doesn't, recognize that many would. When I was a kid, no one would talk about the Atari 2600- it was too old, even though it had a huge library of games, many of which were fun.

Third, new games really do offer new experiences. Maybe not as many as they used to, but to someone who plays a lot of games, they'll want the latest and greatest even absent social reasons or multiplayer reasons.

Fourth and finally- note that many games companies are looking for ways to "obsolete" their older games. Microsoft almost shipped the Xbone in a way that they could remotely cancel all the games at a later time (the system would need to check in, etc- picture if Atari had had that requirement!). They failed, but the presence of used games, and the fact that game companies are trying constantly to target them (for instance, many games ship with "downloadable content included", which, when resold, is not accessible to the next guy in line). This isn't going to be a problem for you or your son, but it's likely going to be an issue for someone in 10 years.

The big thing you are correct about, however, is this: The number of games is large and increasing, and the older games are still very fun. They will probably always be fun. Pacman and Mario I are still fun. Someone in a hundred years won't be having the conversation in the same way we are now, and somewhere between now and then gaming will have to shift. I can't really predict how, simply that it must in some way.

Re:Console games

[swb]

I get that the old console strategy has its limitations, especially if you're older, want to get into online content, etc. You gotta pay to play, at least if you want to play at the current release.

What's kind of funny is that he has a fairly modern PC (well, maybe not gaming wise, it's a top of the line NUC) and if given the choice for screen time, about half the time he will play stupid flash games from some web site they have access to at school.

It's kind of like the old story about Christmas day, where the kid has more fun playing with empty boxes than the new toys they came in.

Game pirating that common?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, with Steam making things so quick and easy, is game pirating even that pervasive these days to warrant such extreme DRM measures? I'm thinking the only people willing to risk installing some shady Chinese executable from a torrent site is likely too poor to buy the game in the first place. I think the big game studios are interpreting shifts in the gaming market as "everybody's pirating".

Re:Game pirating that common?

[captjc]

In Developed countries, no. Companies like to bitch and moan that it is the profitable markets like we are doing most of the pirating, but that is just plain false. Claiming that it is the US and Europe is just ways to get stockholder and government sympathy. The piracy rates of developed countries is the lowest in the world [1].

The problem areas are the rest of the world where this stuff is openly sold on the streets and people just don't care. So when people bring up things like Steam Sales and cheap games they are right, stuff is too cheap for the majority of us to pirate, but elsewhere in the world, it is not.

[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/co... info/stats/Crime/Software-piracy-rate

Wrong

[BitZtream]

Not sure about FIFA, I can imagine that at this point no one cares about the same game with the name changed from 15 to 16, however I can assure you that JC3 has been cracked even if its not yet public.

If you think it hasn't been cracked, you just haven't looked.

Re:Wrong

[JustNiz]

I admit I haven't tried downloading a supposedly cracked game for years, but even back in the day it was at best maybe a 1-in-10 success between downloading something that claimed to be a "l33t full 100%haxored game" to actually getting what it claimed to be. Most of the time you'd get something that obviously wouldnt even run and/or was just basically a bundle of virusses and trojans that would take a dump all over your PC. Even though I haven't personally tried, I can't imagine these days that success rate is anything but a whole lot worse, and even trying is more dangerous.
Basically its just not worth it. Honestly I'd rather just buy whatever game I want off steam, at least that way you also get a reasonable level of peace of mind about what it really is that you're actually installing on your PC.

Traitor tracing

[tepples]

I wonder why video game developers haven't resorted to traitor tracing by distributed copies of the program with the subroutines and variables in different orders for each copy. In early 2010, I did a little experiment on a homebrew NES game I made called Concentration Room. I added a preprocessor that would randomize the order of variable declarations between lines and subroutine definitions within a file. Even with an executable on the order of 16 KiB, I was able to theoretically generate more unique, identically functioning copies than the number of atoms in the universe. Squared.

Re:Traitor tracing

[Anonymous Coward]

Because making customized game discs is a lot more expensive than mass printing them, and it's even harder to connect the signature to any given person. And if you only traitor-trace online copies, then the pirates will get an offline copy from a physical shop and just distribute that instead. It only takes one copy...

Re:Traitor tracing

[ChrisMaple]

Writable disks are more expensive than stamped disks, and aren't as durable. Stamped disks are difficult or impossible to individualize (AFAIK). I suppose it would be possible to laser-write something individual on each stamped disk, but even that would add cost that somebody would have to justify to the accountants. Resold disks complicate matters, and disks sold in countries that don't respect copyright or otherwise flout the law don't provide the manufacturer any protection.

Still, it seems like a good idea.

Re:Traitor tracing

[tepples]

Writable disks are more expensive than stamped disks

I addressed that in my reply to Anonymous Coward.

I suppose it would be possible to laser-write something individual on each stamped disk

Every GameCube disc and every Wii disc includes information laser-written into the Burst Cutting Area, as well as some extra pinholes in the lead-in. These are used to establish a decryption key.

Resold disks complicate matters

They have been complicating matters since the release of Half-Life 2, the first major PC game to require online activation.

Re:stolen, not free

[Anonymous Coward]

>I think there is a metric-ass-ton-load of copyright injustice going on in the world today as much as the next guy but you can't tell me that one person buying a game (or movie, etc.) and making a copy for the whole rest of the world is just.

Can you explain why it is wrong without involving the myth of the lost profit, or the schoolyard reasoning of "He made me feel sad and I cried"?

Some crimes are easy to explain why they are wrong, for example, murder. Only the mentally ill or severely handicapped wish death upon themselves. Stealing is also easy to explain as wrong, nobody wants to risk their stuff disappearing when they get home.

However, copyright infringement is very tough to try to explain as wrong. After all, we have huge groups of people who try to give their knowledge away willingly, and we consider this laudable. The only arguments I ever hear are "It makes the author sad", which is a worthless argument (There's a lady who feels sad when she is near pickles, should we make pickling a crime?). And I hear the argument of the lost profit. That ever piracy case is a lost sale. That argument died when the RIAA demanded the GDP of a small country from a grandmother because she would have somehow had that money to allow the RIAA to profit from it.

So... what's left? I have heard of arguments that suggest piracy slows development and progress. But then, how is China doing so well and progressing so rapidly? Why is Linux flourishing when the entire concept of GPL thumbs its nose at copyright?

You can't just sit there and assume people agree with you that piracy is wrong. Defend your position. I'll provide a few pro-piracy arguments: Piracy allows those with no money access to goods they need to improve, or at least tolerate their lives at no cost to the producer of them. Piracy allows everyone equal footing to the world's intellect. Piracy provides consumers with a mechanism to acquire something that the author prices outside of what it is worth, thereby keeping prices in line with value without any cost to the producer. Piracy allows humanity to access the knowledge long after the DRM keys are gone.

Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the AAA games are just a platform for micro-transactions anyway. You cant progress in these games until you pay EA for the privilege.

I dont even consider them games anymore. Why on earth would i pirate that?

Re:So, creative people don't deserve to get paid?

[serviscope_minor]

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/g...

Re:So, creative people don't deserve to get paid?

[davids-world.com]

thanks, a lot of truth in that... (Doesn't apply to video games though, does it..)

Windows

[fluffernutter]

I was going to say there will always be free Solitaire, but I guess Microsoft took that away too didn't they.

Re:Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is FUD. The same solitaire that has always been free still is. There are some paid versions for a solitaire pack that includes other things: http://mashable.com/2015/08/03...

Re:Windows

[zlives]

no its their new UI

Re:Game abundance & indies make pirating obsol

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the issue is that we've had a games industry for several decades now, so a gamer has hundreds of good-to-fantastic games to choose from before they need to resort to buying an expensive triple-A title that might turn out to be terrible. For my part, at least, I have a bunch of awesome late-90s RPGs that I still want to play before I look at more recent offerings.

It takes long to crack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe noone cares about cracking the 100th re-release of the same old shit?

Re:It takes long to crack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trackmania Sunrise Extreme (2005) still has yet to see a proper working crack.

I said "U.S." and "lawfully made"

[tepples]

lawfully made DVD copies

http://classicmoviereel.com/so...
[...]
http://8store.8thman.com/belle...

There are lots of bootlegs floating around. What evidence do you have that that DVD is lawfully made?

site where U.S. residents can buy

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pinocc...

"Sorry, this Seller doesn’t deliver to the United States"
"Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)"

Denuvo punishes paying customers

[timrod]

Ever since game devs started using Denuvo, I've refused to buy anything that uses it on the grounds that it unfairly punishes the paying end-user. The devteam behind Lords of the Fallen, which was one of the first games to use Denuvo, admitted that they were sacrificing large amounts of performance (as much as 10 to 15 percent framerate) in order to use it. There were also a lot of concerns from SSD users, because Denuvo uses up a ton of read/write operations due to constantly encrypting and decrypting files, putting far more stress on an SSD than a non-Denuvo game does.

If game developers are going to sacrifice performance and the potential for mod support to use the most draconian DRM they can find, I'm not going to be buying it.

Re:Denuvo punishes paying customers

[gfxguy]

Good to know. The casual game buying public (me, at least in the last ten years) is completely unaware.

I'm fully against DRM - as fully against it as I am against illegally copying.

Re:Denuvo punishes paying customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Very worth noting. Any game that negatively impacts the life of my hard drive with massively increased and needless writes to it is not worth the money in my opinion.

I can understand games that need to use it a lot as part of the game, but having it added on just to keep others from copying it is too much and can have major impacts if it is adopted by more and more apps and games so you are stuck with it running more and more.

Personally, I am a former bootlegger of games (I don't call it piracy because I have never been at sea and I have never taken by force or even actually stolen anything). During the 1990's till the early 2000's I basically bootlegged everything because I was too broke to do otherwise. Now I have gone 100% completely legit from my games to my Apps to my Windows installs. Half the games I own now, I never would have bought if I hadn't downloaded them for free years ago, With me, it actually has earned them more money than it cost them. And no, I don't buy them $60 games, I refuse to as they are not worth it. I wait till they go on down in price even if I have to wait years. While I am not a high school or college student anymore, that still doesn't mean I have money to throw around like that.

Re:Denuvo punishes paying customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just Cause 3 released to loads of problems on PC, ridiculously shit performance and the game slowing to a crawl when you so much as turned the camera. It seemed a bit of coincidence that if you had 16GB rather than 8GB of memory the problems pretty much went away. Either the devs left a pretty serious memory leak in there or Denuvo is causing the game to run like shit because of all the stuff it's constantly doing. We don't really know since as far as I'm aware it still hasn't been cracked but I know which one I think is more likely.

Re:Game abundance & indies make pirating obsol

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure we do. At least in the long run, if anyone is going to use DRM for their games...I'll want to be able to play the game I payed for for the next decades, long after they've shutdown their online services supporting the DRM. I'm still playing games from 20-30+ years ago...I fear I won't be able to say that 20-30+ years from now.

wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say you create software.

500,000 people use it. Cost $20 per license.

Only 100,000 pay for it. The rest are pirated.

You get $2M. You should have gotten $10M but the other $8M was stolen from you. That money was removed from your possession because YOU NEVER GOT IT WHEN YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO.

It is exactly like when an employer stiffs you on your paycheck.

Theft does not require me to take something you already have. Theft can require me to take something you are entitled to but you haven't received it yet.

Using your argument, if I take your paycheck sitting in your mailbox because you're at work now, it is not theft since you haven't taken possession of it yet.
Or if you earned $1,000 but I cheated you out of $800 by giving you a $200 check and running, that's not theft since you haven't taken possession of it yet.

Re:wrong.

[qpqp]

Most of these 400'000 would not have bought your software in any case. Get. That. Into. Your. Head!

Re:wrong.

[tnk1]

If only 100,000 people *could* pay for it, then you lost nothing.

Certainly, if there are those who pirate games in the group of people with disposable income who could reasonably buy it, that could be seen as loss of revenue. You can't argue realistically, however, that a game I would have never bought if it cost money is somehow a loss to a business when I get it for free. It isn't. If it wasn't free, it wouldn't have been bought any more than I would have to automatically buy a car if I could not hitch rides. I'd have to simply do without either.

And I know a lot of people who pirated games when they were younger who are happy to buy the sequels of those games now that they are older and have more income.

I even know someone who pirated Minecraft, realized that he'd been playing it long enough that it was definitely worth buying, and proceeded to purchase it, even after he'd spent something like 200 hours of play on it.

Piracy can be a grey area. You can certainly lose revenue in the sense you are talking about if the revenue loss is in the actual group you could realistically expect to be paid by. However, by increasing the population playing the game, you enlarge, and even create, a new market for follow ons, which can be worth a great deal to you.

Consider that Microsoft is happy to let people pirate their stuff up to the point where it may impact their core market segment who has the money. They do not seriously prevent you from pirating Windows or Office (with the usual caveats about security and non-support) because every person using those tools increases their market penetration and makes them familiar with the MS way of doing things.

MS then runs software anti-piracy initiatives to pick off businesses who have hit a certain critical mass of users and revenue so that they now the capability to pay. This is brilliant because if you do use unlicensed MS products to build a business, you're basically creating new revenue for MS if you become successful. All they need to do is keep an eye on whose head pops up above the unwashed masses of pirate software users, and either convince them to join the fold, or lop their heads off. And if you really do rely on MS products for your successful business, you probably can and want to pay for full service.

It is different for games, of course, because businesses are unlikely to buy entertainment in the amounts they would business software or operating systems. Nevertheless, the building of a network through piracy is real, while at the same time, they don't have to declare that they are devaluing their game as a loss leader. They get to keep their prices high, while they still get the effect of discounting their games. With the amount of money that many of these companies are making on their AAA games, it is difficult to see how piracy has really affected them. They have to cry about it because they have to show that they are defending their copyrights, but especially in the case where their DRM is sufficient to delay cracks until after the launch, it is win-win for any publisher of a good game.

And really, no one actually wants to steal a game. Cracked games can be buggy, unstable, and filled with malware. The problem is that some people don't want to allocate 60-80 dollars upfront on a game that they are going to end up not playing because it is buggy or they dislike it. I think piracy might well go the way of the dodos if they manage to bring prices down and/or ensure reasonable return policies like some distributors have.

Re:wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the $8M was never in your possession it wasn't stolen from you. You may feel like you have a moral right to it. You may even have a legal right to pursue it. We have distinctions between theft, fraud, and copyright infringement because they are different things. Notably, copyright infringement wasn't even a thing before the Statute of Anne, and the US didn't respect foreign copyrights until the Berne Convention; many of Gilbert and Sullivan's works were "pirated" in the US.

When you remove a check, it's theft. When you intentionally underpay someone, that's probably fraud. When you make an unlicensed copy of a protected work, that can be copyright infringement, subject to certain fair use exceptions.

And to gfxguy, courts do not use the term "theft of IP". Courts can and must distinguish between theft and other crimes, and works protected by copyright law, trademark law, or trade secrets. Lawyers writing contracts, and possibly lazy judges writing orders or judgments may refer to such things, but the idea that the legal system in general does not distinguish between theft, infringement, and the aforementioned types of intellectual property is like suggesting that programmers don't distinguish between operating systems and that there is no difference between RAM and disk space. Courts do in fact say, "Nuh uh, you can't steal IP," because theft of IP is not a crime and no one may be charged with it.

Re:wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trying to be stupid? Your "arguments" were debunked years ago. You just don't get it...

Re:wrong.

[dissy]

Theft does not require me to take something you already have. Theft can require me to take something you are entitled to but you haven't received it yet.

I am entitled to a million dollars of your money.
Since that check hasn't arrived or cleared, you are a thief. I hope you go to jail for it :P

Re:wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're making the classic fallacy of "every pirate is a lost sale". Most pirates would skip using the software instead of paying for it. Some pirates go on to buy an official license after they've been impressed by the pirated copy.

Your paycheck example is horrible; it's theft of a physical object, not copyright infringement. If you took a picture of it instead and cashed it, *and* if the bank would still honor the original as well as your image of it, that would be a better analogy.
Your $200 check example is fraud, not copyright infringement.

You should study the particulars of copyright infringement before you spout off about it.

Re:wrong.

[Bert64]

If those 400,000 people could not pirate it, the vast majority of them would not have used it at all - they would have used something else that they could obtain for free.
Not only that, but how many of the 100,000 users might have heard of the software through word of mouth or network effects from the 400,000?

You weren't supposed to get anything, and might even have got considerably less had none of those users pirated.

Re:wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say you create software.

500,000 people use it. Cost $20 per license.

Only 100,000 pay for it. The rest are pirated.

You get $2M. You should have gotten $10M but the other $8M was stolen from you. That money was removed from your possession because YOU NEVER GOT IT WHEN YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO.

Idiot!
The money you 'lost' were never in your possession. You didn't make any sale so you got no money. Are you working for RIAA or something?

Re: wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem here is that you are entitled to those profits, but the people doing the pirating likely aren't using it very long.

Many software products are pirated by people who like to collect or crack software, but don't really use it. This is why it is unconsciousable to pirate Windows, Office or Photoshop if you use the products to make money from their use. A game that you play for an hour and then throw away, fine nothing lost, except maybe some negative reviews on a gaming site.

Piracy goes beyond just the lost profits, it is also lost PR from people who didn't buy the software and see no value in it.

There are many "free" OSS products I use too. How many of these have I donated to? Zero.
If I like to buy software, software I can use for free, (eg web browsers) I have no qualms of dropping for "better commercial software", but pirates will use pirate commercial software without even considering OSS software, this that is a loss to the OSS community. Instead of promoting that the OSS software is better, Pirates using the commercial software are telling the OSS community that the OSS product is inferior.

If OSS projects want to get funding they need to be seen as superior products, and pirates preferring commercial software just says the OSS product isn't yet ready.

Re: wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very true. See the Microsoft bizspark program. Free ms licenses for your company. If your company succeeds, you need to pay for the licenses after a certain period of time.

Day one patch

[tepples]

And if you only traitor-trace online copies, then the pirates will get an offline copy from a physical shop and just distribute that instead.

Then include only the installer and non-executable portions on the disc, and push the actual game out as a day one patch.

Humble Bundle

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.humblebundle.com/. That's the way to go. Pay $1 or $5 or whatever for a whole bunch of games... And a good chuck of your money goes to charity. (I like donating to the EFF when you can choose.)

I wouldn't touch the current weekly HB. It's Uplay. Google past slashdot stories about Uplay. Frigging toxic.

But most HumbleBundles are Steam, or DRM-free straight downloads. I've got a few hundred games right now on my Steam account. (And Steam lets me share them with my kids. They loved Goat Simulator for some reason...)

Definitely the way to go! Games for under $1 apiece. Often very nice games, like Kerbal Space, Reassembly, etc.

Re:stolen, not free

[Coren22]

Companies also do some funny things to pirates:

http://www.cracked.com/article...

A while back, I was reading about a game that if you pirate it, you turn into a pirate in the game, but I didn't see the game in a Google search.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

DRM malware

[Anonymous Coward]

If the DRM is so onerous that a crack is not feasible, why would I ever purchase a legal copy and allow it to infect my system?

I've read stories of DRM irreversibly fucking up the system's ability to read discs in the optical drive. Windows operating systems don't respond well when DRM gets its tendrils deep into the system.

My friend

[Anonymous Coward]

My friend Wobbler has copies of all of them already. And PDFs of the manuals.

Re:stolen, not free

[ChrisMaple]

Piracy provides consumers with a mechanism to acquire something that the author prices outside of what it is worth,

Although "worth" can be objective (Nails are worth a lot because they hold my house together.), many uses of worth are subjective. Your claim leads to the demand "I find the author's work to be worthless, therefor he must allow me to copy it for no charge."

Just as a person owns the product of his physical labor and has the legally protected right to keep or trade that product, so he has the ownership right to the product of his mind and (within certain limits) that right is legally protected. The BASIS of intellectual property is the individual, not societal utility. You don't have a right to what I created, except on my terms, and I don't have a right to what is yours.

Re:stolen, not free

[lactose99]

As a content creator, if there's no right for me to profit off of my work, I would give second thoughts of spending the time and effort to create it in the first place. I have to eat, I need a place to live. If I am to spend any significant amount of time creating something (and plenty of games have significant development cycles), I need money simply to live in order to do that. Therefore my creation has value, insofar as my cost of living while creating it. I need to recoup that cost somehow.

Yes, many people create content for fun and give it away for free, and that's certainly their right. Hell FOSS thrives under this model and I'm incredibly grateful for it (and hence give back in my own contributions). Most developers, even FOSS ones that aren't in school any longer, usually work for dev shops that produces some content of value that is sold or licensed. They make their living in that fashion so they can give other works away for free.

As a content creator, it should be up to me what the value of my content contributions are, and if I feel they warrant a price I should be able to set that and have the free market determine if others think it valuable.

Note I'm speaking in the general sense of piracy and copyright, not in the edge cases mentioned in various threads here like DRM preventing you playing an old game that doesn't work on a modern OS. Those are different scenarios entirely.

Steam is the only DRM I'll accept

[Anonymous Coward]

If a Steam game says it requires 3rd party DRM I do not buy it no matter how popular or good the title may be. Yes that means I've been boycotting Battlenet, Origin, and UbiPlay with zero regrets. Even MMORPGs on Steam like RIFT I once use to enjoy made the boycott list after they created their own mandatory buggy hassle of a DRM platform Glyph. Lost customers send a clear message to studios/publishers and I've proudly converted a few hundred friends over to Steam since this decade along with the friends they've brought as well. Viva la Gaben!!!!

Only Chinese Hackers?

[BrendaEM]

Story has an provocative propaganda payload.

Re:Only Chinese Hackers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still in the habit of calling MMO gold farmers "Chinese gold farmers" because I've dealt with them in person while working retail and they are as shady as the stereotype fits. They even tried to use fake travelers checks to purchase the game they wanted (every single copy of a particular MMO we had in the store) and I had to call the cops. Left a very negative impression that stays with me to this day.

Pirates are not the villans here

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather they invested the money in making the game actually worth paying for instead.

Good

[Ryan McLaughlin]

If you want to play a game, pay for it.

The Lost Cause.

[westlake]

Copyright infringement is NOT theft. Read the legal definition of theft.

The geek has been fighting this war of words for as long as long as I can remember. He never wins.

18 U.S. Code Chapter 113 - STOLEN PROPERTY

2319. Criminal infringement of a copyright
2319A. Unauthorized fixation of and trafficking in sound recordings and music videos of live musical performances
2319B. Unauthorized recording of Motion pictures in a Motion picture exhibition facility

U.S. Code > Title 18 > Part I > Chapter 113 - STOLEN PROPERTY

In popular usage, the notion that the pirating of copyrighted works was theft was current while the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean.

The geek thinks he is being clever when he names his site The Pirate Bay [and settles in somewhere 10,000 distant miles distant from the U.S.,] but all he has really accomplished is to bind file sharing and theft even more strongly in the public mind.

No free games?! BS.

[intnsred]

'in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,'

That's absurd. First, there will always be DRM-free games. People like me will not buy them. I don't care if I have to wait 5 years before I play a game, selling my soul, privacy, control of my computer, and all the other hassles of DRM is not worth it. Eventually software companies will realize that they're losing out on people like me and our money, and eventually they'll come around.

Secondly, aside from DRM-free, closed-source, non-free commercial software, there are numerous free software games out there of varying quality.

Re:No free games?! BS.

[ADRA]

"That's absurd. First, there will always be DRM-free games. People like me will not buy them. I don't care if I have to wait 5 years before I play a game, selling my soul, privacy, control of my computer, and all the other hassles of DRM is not worth it. Eventually software companies will realize that they're losing out on people like me and our money, and eventually they'll come around."

I don't care specifically about the issue anymore as I haven't pirated a game in well over a decade, but you're absolutely deluded if publishers will ever care about anti-DRM absolutists. If anything, the group has shrunk proportionately with the PC gaming audience as a whole. If anything, the PC world has moved largely to online linked services even more than consoles (possibly to stem cracks). Many developers may want to sell DRM free PC games, but instead sell it to consoles where the cracks are far less likely and revenues far higher. There are certainly many DRM-free dev's out there, but they generally aren't respected or honoured for their choices. I will give a nod to http://rimworldgame.com/ as its a pretty fun builder game. If you're looking for something DRM free, you may want to consider it.

Online games end forever

[tepples]

You just have to be willing to pass on new releases

But not so long that the publisher turns off its matchmaking servers. This goes double for things like FIFA, where the vast majority of players have moved to this year's edition with this year's rosters.

Many games are still region locked

[tepples]

It did when a video game was still in arcades. Now it does when a game is in a "timed exclusive" on some console, or not released in your country...

Was that strip from before Kickstarter?

[tepples]

The Oatmeal doesn't appear to give dates of first publication of its comics. The "Exposure" strip might have applied before the Street Performer Protocol was widely implemented. Nowadays I guess exposure pays when the developer's next project reaches its Kickstarter goal with room to spare. So, saying exposure is worthless is like saying education is worthless, just because it doesn't pay for life's necessities over a week's term.

Reminds me of smurfberries

[tepples]

From "The pirate in me":

That’s why I’m a believer in the pay as you go model. If I play for one hour, I’m happy to pay a reasonable price

That sounds disturbingly like the present trend of microtransactions. Further:

On cloud gaming as a future: [...] I also don’t want to end up in the hands of one or two monopolistic portals.

Except that's how it ended up going. PlayStation bought up both Gaikai and OnLive.

Who said it was?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said it was talking about videos or music? If you want the game to run, it has to be loaded into memory in a running state. If you have control over your hardware, operating system, drivers, etc. it's just a matter of time and expertise before the game is cracked.

  The only exception I'm aware of is where there is non-trivial game content on a remote server.

FIPS 140-2 Level 3 console GPUs perhaps

[tepples]

Since I can't see PC games restricted to FIPS 140-2 Level 3 vid cards

All that means is that certain major-studio games will remain console exclusive, such as all but a handful of games by Nintendo and any game by the division of Sony that didn't become Daybreak.

DNAS 103

[tepples]

Perhaps [online multiplayer and other services provided through PSN are] the reason why there's yet to be a break on the PS4 [...] I mean, seriously, the good games that are multiplayer are good because of the other players. That means you can play 10+ year old multiplayer games, become really good from all that play time, and really have little reason to move to "New PC games".

Ten years of online multiplayer on PlayStation? I must have missed some change over the past decade, because when I bought games for my PlayStation 2, I would take the disc out of the shrink wrap, put it in my PS2, and be greeted with a DNAS error saying the publisher had permanently shut down the matchmaking server.

Re:DNAS 103

[Anonymous Coward]

That'd be precisely my point. You will find some ten year old PC multiplayer games--especially if they're not MMOs and aren't fixed to some master servers--that still have plenty of users. But everything else is a fad with churn to push you on the latest minor update^W^W"major version". The whole model of the PSN and XBox Live are about getting you to, of all things, pay for the privilege of the limited ability to play games with other people for a while. The only reason Nintendo hasn't done something similar is because they're generally incompetent*. It's isn't for a lack of greed or like-minded malice.

*They general make great games, but I'm talking about everything else involving business. I mean, look no further than the whole Let's Play "we want a cut" shakedown.

Allowing outside play is child endangerment

[tepples]

I know this might come as a shock to you but, yes. I go outside and I even "play" outside.

I'l let a headline answer that: Mom lets kid play outside, faces jail. "Stranger danger" hysteria has taken over.

Re:Allowing outside play is child endangerment

[Anonymous Coward]

Our current society is far more dangerous to children than any of these imaginary threats.

Re:stolen, not free

[jonwil]

Calling it piracy is wrong as well since it doesn't involve ships at sea.

If everyone would call it "illegal copying" or something accurate instead of calling it theft or piracy, things would be much better.

In time

[corezz]

This post is longer than the article. Given enough time it always ends up cracked. Because one group in the world hasnt cracked it doesnt mean that it is uncrackable. The bigger the challenge the more interest it gains.

How does unavailability "promote the Progress"?

[tepples]

Also, why are you wearing a dress

Why do the Chipmunks wear "dresses"? Why does John from Peter Pan wear a "dress"? Why do many men in the Middle East wear "dresses"? Why did Jesus wear a "dress"? (source)

and gloves

To prevent blisters.

It's silly not to [make a work available to all markets] but it is your right.

In what way does this right to act like the dog in the manger "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?

you're now not only taking away the rights of the rights holder in two ways instead of one

If I don't pirate, the publisher is leaving money on the table. If I do pirate, the publisher is leaving exactly the same amount of money on the table. It shows that the publisher doesn't believe in a "potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

Re:How does unavailability "promote the Progress"?

[KGIII]

I should probably joke about you wearing a dress and worrying about your girlie hands. ;-)

How does it promote it? It encourages people to produce stuff - that way they're assured of protections for it, for a limited time, and that they have a chance to profit on it if it is marketable.

The price is not one concern - it's their rights that you're infringing on. Obviously, it should be a much shorter time, by the way. It promotes the progress by giving enticement for people to create and invest in them. But you knew that.

Either way, we can just conclude that you're comfortable taking basic human rights away from people. The Constitution doesn't give you rights, it enumerates rights you already have (or should have). The only thing it does is stop infringing on your rights in certain areas. "We hold these truths to be self evident..." And here you are trying to justify violating someone's basic human rights... Sheesh indeed.

Also, concerning your other post... Someone needs to be cracked in the jaw for that. I'd suggest the mother start with her nosy neighbors and work her way up through the police and the district attorney. The kid was 120' away and in a gated community... Yeah, that's endangerment. Man, I'd have been in prison. I let my kids be kids. Meh, they turned out okay. If someone had kidnapped 'em, we'd have just built another one. (Only partially kidding.)

No free games?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly he hasn't heard of tux racer and xbill!

Change the roster and renew the server lease

[tepples]

They change the rosters. Online opponents are unlikely to be willing to settle for outdated rosters, even if the publisher chooses to keep running the matchmaking servers for versions with outdated rosters.

Inflation, for one

[tepples]

Remember as a kid, you were told that if you didn't copy that floppy, that game prices would go down?

Well, back then, I'd pay $50 for a game.

"Don't Copy That Floppy" was in 1992. The Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator estimates that $50.00 in 1992 had the same buying power at $84.58 last year (2015). Moreover, the play-through time of a modern game is far longer than that of a typical NES game.

Heard of ASCAP?

[tepples]

Maybe one idea is to have a clearinghouse by each country to handle it, where part of people's taxes go to fund said clearinghouse, and people get a royalty to how often their content is downloaded or seen.

I think that's what collecting societies such as BMI, ASCAP, and Harry Fox were supposed to be for. But unfortunately, not enough kinds of work have collecting societies.

Star Fox

[tepples]

The game drops to 15FPS on consoles

Star Fox drops to 15 FPS on consoles yet still sold. What makes Just Cause 3 materially different from Star Fox in this respect?

Answering your likely next thought-terminating cliché: What makes oranges materially different from apples?

Did you try doing without?

[tepples]

There are at least two games I like to play that were only ever released in Japan, as they are a licensed property of a company over there, there is no way a PC or SNES game from 1993 is going to be made available on the WIi U there or here. So my only option is to play a pirate copy in a SNES or PC emulator because these games were never officially localized.

Now I'm waiting for KGIII to pipe up and call you an entitled whiner. As KGIII explained in a reply to one of my own comments to this story, you have the option to do without the game, and in fact, doing without is the only legal option.

Copyright is not a right, despite the name

[tepples]

How does it promote it? It encourages people to produce stuff

Except often, someone who produces stuff gets sued by someone who produced older stuff, claiming that the new stuff is too similar to the older stuff.

The price is not one concern - it's their rights that you're infringing on.

Despite its name, copyright is not a right but a privilege. Again, how does the grant of the privilege to withdraw a work from availability "promote the Progress"?

The Constitution doesn't give you rights, it enumerates rights you already have (or should have).

Copyright is not listed as an enumerated right of the people. It is listed there as an enumerated power of the Congress, one that it may choose to exercise or not to exercise. And unlike several other enumerated powers, it has its purpose ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts") written directly in the Constitution, ostensibly to give the people a way to measure whether the Congress is doing its job.

"We hold these truths to be self evident..."

Sorry, wrong document. This appears in the Declaration, not the Constitution.

Re:Copyright is not a right, despite the name

[KGIII]

In order...

Irrelevant, but I'll answer anyhow. They were not first. Sucks to be them but we don't all get to win the race. Not to mention, it's copyright - you can pretty easily get around it IF you're doing something that's new and (reasonably) original. If you're not then, well, sucks to be you. Come up with your own ideas instead of trying to deprive others of their rights. You'll notice the distinct lack of shortage of media and even software. If copyright were truly onerous we'd not have LibreOffice, AbiWord, OO.org, and Leafpad. It's not. There's still plenty of things to create, plenty of ways to do so without depriving others of their rights. Again, you're not entitled to anything you want just because you want it. Sorry, it doesn't work like that in a society that outlaws slavery.

Yes it is - in fact, it's created on inception. As soon as I post this, I have copyright. How does granting the privilege to withdraw a work promote progress? Ownership, it's a thing. Why create if you don't have ownership? When you refuse to give someone the fruits of their labor it is slavery. When you fail to compensate someone for the fruits of their labor, it is slavery. These are pretty basic concepts. It's called ownership and with ownership comes the ability to revoke access. Without complete and total ownership, including revocation, why not work? Ownership is complete - that's what ownership is. It promotes the arts and sciences because they're able to control it and thus decide how it's used, when it is used, and who gets to use it. See GPL for a good example of exercising ownership to ensure their will is met.

It is an enumerated right. Perhaps you have a funny definition of enumerated. I believe it is something like Article 1 that gives congress the right to make such a law and they have done so, justifiably so, albeit they need to lessen the duration.

I know where it's from - one follows the other. They were then listing rights that they have. Rights aren't given to you by the government. You already have them by grace of birth. Do you have to ask the government to breath? For the fruits of your labor? To think independent thoughts and not be forced to disclose them? Why not? Because you already have them - that's why they're enumerated, it's to make sure the government can't (without justification - such as public good) take them away. But, just because the Declaration had ended doesn't mean that the same process isn't carried through to the Constitution.

Do you say you only have the right to the freedom of speech because the government grants you that right? Of course not. You have that just for being human. It was up to Congress to set the regulations (and be able to adjust them as needed - which they've done poorly at) for copyright. That's why it's in there - because it is a right and something for them to do and to adjust as needed without having to amend the Constitution when it needs reworking because the process to get an amendment is pretty damned hard - and for a reason.

No, you have a right to the fruits of your labor. You own your labor and may control access to that. Anything else is slavery. If you want to argue for slavery then go ahead and do so. If you want to say that the law is currently fucking broken then we're in complete and total agreement.

Oh - I forgot to mention this earlier. I'm not entirely sure but I think the Chipmunks were in "night shirts" which are sometimes called "dresses" or "night dresses" though we've probably not called them that in a long time. At least not normal people. It looks comfy though. I'd so sport that out in public. I'm even moderately dark skinned - I bet I'd scare the shit out of people down here in Florida if I wore something like that.

The bastard regulation that we do have is horrific, that is true and not even something I'd bother debating. The right to the ownership of the fruits of one's labor, to maintain control of one's property, is an essential liberty. The ability to own it, to control it, even to revoke a

Re:Copyright is not a right, despite the name

[tepples]

Irrelevant, but I'll answer anyhow. They were not first. Sucks to be them but we don't all get to win the race.

So before I publish a work that I created, what can I do to tell whether it unintentionally violates another's copyright?

Yes it is [a right] - in fact, it's created on inception.

Yes, under current law, the privilege of copyright comes into being when a work is fixed in tangible medium. But when copyright begins is independent of whether it is a right.

When you fail to compensate someone for the fruits of their labor, it is slavery.

Is our failure to continue to compensate the heirs of the inventor of patent leather "slavery"?

Ownership is complete - that's what ownership is. It promotes the arts and sciences because they're able to control it and thus decide how it's used, when it is used, and who gets to use it.

How are you certain that absolute ownership is a better way "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" than something other than absolute ownership?

I believe it is something like Article 1 that gives congress the right to make such a law

Article I, clause 8, gives Congress the power to create copyright but not the obligation to do so. This differs from the Bill of Rights, which gives Congress the obligation not to create certain laws by taking powers away from it.

Rights aren't given to you by the government. You already have them by grace of birth. Do you have to ask the government to breath?

Yes. People had to petition the government for the Clean Air Act.

For the fruits of your labor?

Fruits of one's labor include externalities. And yes, in general, people do have to petition the government for exclusive rights to extract rents from externalities. Copyright is a rent extracted from the externality of the existence of a work of authorship.

The ability to own it, to control it, even to revoke access (an unfortunate side effect but must be included because it's ownership, by right) is a basic human right.

Say I build and sell you a chair. Should I have the power to demand that you return that chair because I want "to revoke access" to its design? I disagree with you that the right to revoke access to something that has been published "is a basic human right". And no, I'm not the only person to believe that way; Leigh Beadon agrees with me and disagrees with you.

the GPL that I know you're familiar with and (as I recall) a fan of - is also based on copyright and gets its powers from copyright regulations. Should someone just be able to take the code, edit it, and sell it without giving back to the community and not give out the source when they do so?

If there were no copyright, it would be lawful to disassemble proprietary software, thoroughly comment the disassembly, and distribute the commented disassembly to others. In fact, I'm pretty sure that that's what Richard Stallman had originally planned to do in the printer driver kerfuffle that kicked off the whole GNU project.

Re:Copyright is not a right, despite the name

[tepples]

I'm not entirely sure but I think the Chipmunks were in "night shirts"

Which fits in with the apparel of John Darling and Mickey "the Yellow Kid" Dugan, which are called nightshirts in canon. In fact, the big reason that men don't dress that way all the time is because of cavalry. But now that vehicles have replaced horseback riding, trousers are obsolete technology.

Where'd you pick it up?

I buy most of them from the men's section of AlHannah.com. When I explain it to others on the bus, I sometimes call it "Al and Hannah's" to disguise that it's an Islamic clothing store. You can find other places selling them by searching the web for "thobe" or "dishdasha". When it gets cold, you can wear over-the-calf socks and a shorter (knee-length) flannel nightshirt under it. Just make sure to wear typical western-world headgear with it, not anything obviously Arabic, and don't grow a long beard.

Fortunately, there's no copyright on the act of wearing a nightshirt with a top hat. US law largely considers costume designs "useful articles" rather than works of authorship unless they have a pictorial work printed on them. It's "fruits of one's labor" yet not subject to exclusive rights.

steal steal steal steal

[Anonymous Coward]

cp is steal. cp is steal. stop stealing. stop copying, because copying is stealing. steal steal steal. pirate pirate pirate. infringe infringe infringe. MOO.

One correction

[yacc143]

The system mentioned is not a drm, it's a code obfuscation system that makes sure that the steam (or whatever) drm stays in and cannot be just easily removed.

Pirating is a nice option to have.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have over 400 games on Steam, but sometimes I play the cracked version of them to avoid annoying DRM. I've always enjoyed the option to play cracked versions of the games I own.

Re:So, creative people don't deserve to get paid?

[Boronx]

No, creative people don't deserve to get paid. If there were not multi-billion dollar market for each of movies, games, books, the world would keep spinning. Civilization would not collapse. We would even still have some books, movies and games. Whether we want to maintain these markets is a fair question, but it's not a moral issue.

Give it time

[djnforce9]

Just give it time; Ubisoft's online DRM also took a long time to crack (over a month if I recall) but it happened. DRM is completely useless by nature and no scheme will ever be unbeatable.

TMI

[Anonymous Coward]

The one guy who goes outside more than once a week decided to respond to my post, and he's from the 1960's. Big surprise.