There is a difference between customers purchasing games and customers purchasing software development services. I'm pretty sure the only game consumers who would demand copy protection (other than shills for DRM et al.,) are those so uninformed as to believe the protection some how keeps their computers safe from intrusion. "Copy protection" does have a nice "security blanket" feel to it. Yet for legitimate users, it contributes absolutely nothing positive to the gaming experience.
Now, those 95% and 60% numbers seem odd to me. For one, the methods used to collect data on piracy are invariably shady. I suppose a creative researcher might come up with a credible way to get an accurate sample of who uses what, but people peddling DRM and copy protection products have no history of being interested in accurate data. Still, I suppose pointing out that the very best work in this area is haphazard stuff like seeding P2P networks with a specific bug and tracking tech support activity is not the same as proving that piracy is not a widespread phenomenon.
Still, I do not dispute that it is widespread. I only dispute the idea that the activities of pirates provide any justification for hassling paying customers. This is because I remain unconvinced that copy protection, DRM, et al. generate any sort of positive return on the investment. Even if one grants the bold assertion that piracy accounted for 95% of the game play anywhere ten years ago, and had since fallen to 60% of the game play in that same place, so what? Making piracy go down is meaningless. Only rising sales would even begin to justify deliberately hassling paying customers the way DRM and traditional copy protections do.
As I recall, ten years ago copy protection inflicted real pain on legitimate users and only the most trivial inconvenience on users of pirated software. Today it is no different. Nothing has been invented that prevents game crackers from distributing executables modified to be stripped of their nuisance features while retaining the full glory of the relevant game. The argument that this sweeping change was caused by copy protection efforts fails to recognize the completely unchanged ease with which games could be pirated throughout the interval in question.
If I had to guess, I'd suspect the place was China and the figures were a half-baked estimate derived from the real trend of increasing appreciation for the legal doctrine of intellectual property. Many cultural traditions give ideas a place of greater stature than mere baubles. The practice of letting people own ideas may not be unique to capitalism, but it is uniquely necessitated by the lack of any other mechanism to sustain creative works in a purely capitalist society. As China continues to embrace all things capitalist, old attitudes about the importance of sharing knowledge and art give way to new attitudes about the importance of hoarding wealth.*
Even if there were some magical way to end all software piracy forever and ever, it is questionable if this would be a good thing for software sales. Do pirates never buy games they have previously played illicitly? Do pirates sometimes buy games they would never have considered but for the illegal free taste? One could argue that piracy increases software sales -- it is a thin argument, but the arguments that piracy drives down software sales are based on similar speculation and similarly dubious reasoning.
If we take China as an example, and we grant that piracy has declined dramatically there in recent years, what are we to conclude? Did something magical happen to make the easily-cracked games of 2008 less fun to steal than the easily-cracked games of 1998? Could it instead be that cultural and economic factors largely beyond the control of game publishers drove a noteworthy trend?
I suspect if anyone does come up with a valid empirical method of gauging the scope of software piracy, trends in its popularity w
In what way is piracy a problem? This is a lot like the argument that gay marriage will somehow ruin heterosexual matrimony. Of course, I would not argue that software piracy ought to be legalized. Intellectual property is one of several huge yet necessary evils without which capitalism would make no sense at all. So I grant that prohibitions on software piracy are a legitimate matter for the criminal justice system, not some form of discrimination.
Yet the parallel is meaningful. Developers can write, produce, market, and distribute their games perfectly well even if a million little Jimmy Hopkinses happens to get their seratonin fix with pirated software. Heck, there could be a setpillion sentient beings scattered across the galaxy, each playing around with human software covertly downloaded from our networks, with not one contributing a penny to fund that software; -and still- the hard numbers in the legitimate software economy would be unchanged.
Every single dime developers squander by waging war on software piracy is one dime less spent on making a quality products. Pirates almost never personally suffer any of the hassles generated by copy protection efforts. Legitimate users consistently do. Much like invading a secular fascist state is a stupid way to fight radical religious terrorism, giving the shaft to millions of paying customers is a stupid way to fight however many players do not pay their way.
If this issue raises any problem at all, it is the problem of mediocrity in the halls of power. Groupthink goes unchallenged only when leadership is compromised. Groupthink is the only explanation for the savage waste that past copy protection efforts constitute and this DRM movement could do much to amplify.
Incompetent executives get this idea into their head that it is important to have a big strong response to "fight" against piracy. Yet their big strong response only gives crackers additional entertainment value while failing to make rank and file pirates so much as bat an eyelash.
Given the choice between doing something and nothing, sometimes nothing is the best way to go. If you doubt this, I offer you a choice between shooting yourself in the foot or doing nothing.
I appreciate how passionately some people want to see action taken in this area. However, if taking action results in no progress, how can anyone justify the cost? Developers and legitimate game buyers figuratively do shoot themselves in the foot through perpetuation of significant copy protection efforts in 21st century software distribution. The only winners in this mess are the latter day confidence artists peddling DRM as if it were a service with legitimate value.
No doubt Brad Wardell (of Stardock and Galactic Civilizations) has already come up in this discussion. His position is eminently more sane than anything to come out of the monolithic distributors. In one line, it is, "pirates don't get a vote." Idiots take that to mean "yeah, we need to stick it to the pirates as hard as we can!" The rest of us should be able to see Mr. Wardell's original intent.
Most forms of piracy countermeasures, even the classic "must have disk in drive" stuff, create a condition in which legitimate paying customers are given a less satisfying product. Yes, vast sums are spent trying to make these defenses less obtrusive. Yet this is like spending vast sums to make a race war less brutal when the alternative is to simply stop fighting a race war!
Copy protection is fine for making games less fun, but there is zero credible evidence that it makes games more lucrative. Far worse than television advertising, people in the DRM industry engage in wholesale fabrication of data to justify bold claims about consumer behavior being influenced by their achievements as career nuisances.
There may also be no hard evidence substantiating the claim that copy protection measures serve as a gateway to expand the scope of software piracy as a subculture. Still, that pontification supported by precisely as much legitimate empirical data as any half-baked speculations that rationalize the continued existence of these economic parasites manipulating game publishers into charging at the windmill of piracy curtailment.
Adrift with insufficient evidence, the best thinking comes from sound analysis. I believe sound analysis supports the position that people who steal games will continue to steal games even if bypassing piracy countermeasures requires switching from no-cd cracks to some other method. Always there will be eager and capable people stepping up to make piracy both safe and virtually effortless for those with a modest amount of security savvy (since P2P networks, serial code searches, et al. require a touch of sense to avoid malware exposure.) A 12-year old online in 2008 shouldn't be challenged by the effort.
Unless someone is gullible enough to buy into the bluster and falsifications used to support huge expenditures to incorporate DRM into commercial releases, there is no reason to let a single decision, right from conception to distribution, be influenced by the existence of software pirates. On the other hand, from the dimmest business school instructors to the brightest minds in management, there is little dispute that paying customers should get a "vote."
Chucking the entire DRM industry would be a win for honest consumers as well as game developers. The user experience would involve fewer hassles, and game budgets would no longer involve one common counterproductive expenditure. Also, it can't be helpful to force collaborations between the honorable hard-working people adding value to electronic entertainment products and the sleazebags who would take a paycheck for sucking the life from a creative industry.
Would this be a win for pirates too? Certainly not in any complete sense. Perhaps the childishly simple task of pirating a game would become a little more simple. However, the demand for unauthorized executables designed to circumvent copy protection would vanish overnight. Dedicated game crackers would feel the loss of a satisfying hobby. (Speaking of which, I know from my own much-belated successes that devising a method to defeat copy protection on past Sacred games was an especially fun brain teaser.)
So, I suppose if the big boys in the gaming industry were driven by the usual petty motives of corporate America -- the desire to compete by tearing down others, a preference for destroying things rather than letting them be appreciated without proprietary authorization, and a general obsession with marking every little bit of turf with foul odors -- they mi
I don't believe automotive hydrogen fuel cell technology is all that astonishing. I do believe the basis for this story is malarkey, but not because it is implausible with existing technology to concentrate elemental hydrogen for purposes of powering a vehicle. Insofar as oxygen is required, it can be drawn from the air, no less easily than internal combustion engines inhale that useful chemical. The problems of containing hydrogen, while not trivial, are dealt with much more practically than in the days of the Hindenburg.
The shortcut to seeing through this is understanding that the final product of hydrogen fuel cell power generation is water. Any process that starts with water and ends with water is not likely to be a wellspring of useful new energy. Hydrogen powered cars are simply a means to keep the industry rolling when real world concerns (sensible public policy or exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves) demand that energy production take place with a mix of centralized facilities and natural collectors (wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal.)
A lightweight reserve of hydrogen fuel can power a car over a fair distance, and vehicular power demands energy be concentrated in some sort of lightweight feature of the vehicle. Perhaps battery technology will change this situation, but in the mean time fuel cell technology is worthy of continued development. However, public confidence in that work may be undermined by trickery like this ridiculous notion that a car might be powered by turning water into hydrogen fuel, which would then be returned to water on consumption. Unless the Japanese effort involves something really sci-fi like a working fusion reactor, it is simply not plausible that it produces more energy from hydrogen fuel than it would expend to extract that fuel from water intake.
For the most part I concur. It is conceivable that a civilization might develop astronomy yet not deploy a vast interferometry network. For example, the inhabitants of a high gravity world would face much greater challenges in developing their earliest spacecraft. Inhabitants of a perpetually cloudy world might become very advanced before developing curiosity about astronomy and astrophysics. That said, the technological gap between Hubble-like capabilities and a much more powerful platform is narrow.
In fact, deploying a constellation of space telescopes capable of detailed observations of extrasolar planets is already a human possibility. The GPS constellation(s) provide proof of concept in terms of the logistics, and existing space telescopes demonstrate the viability of that technology. It would certainly be a less ambitious effort than sending humans to Mars, and it might even be less challenging than a return to the Moon. I've long supported a global space interferometry network because one end result of these efforts -- detailed images of extrasolar planets -- could revive an aspect of human imagination and inspiration that seems to have fallen dormant since the Apollo Program came to an end.
I've read some good back and forth on this from skimming the discussion so far. Yet I did not see this issue raised. Why is it that some people are so quick to draw definite conclusions from this? It doesn't take much brainpower to see that the original source is an online ideological cloister, desperately grasping at any pseudo-scientific straw they can use to prop up firm political convictions about empirical findings in the realm of climate science.
With one breath they insist the science behind anthropogenic global warming simply must be bogus, and with another they use two weeks of data about a much less well-understood complex of systems to make bold forecasts as to its long term behavior?!? This discussion also shows a number of instances where beliefs in matters of science are driven primarily by political passions. This unusual solar activity is a good subject for the daily dispatch, but surely it didn't need to be presented in context established by a blatant political hack on a personal crusade to "debunk" science that happens to establish an inconvenient truth and thus inspire negativity in him.
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There is a difference between customers purchasing games and customers purchasing software development services. I'm pretty sure the only game consumers who would demand copy protection (other than shills for DRM et al.,) are those so uninformed as to believe the protection some how keeps their computers safe from intrusion. "Copy protection" does have a nice "security blanket" feel to it. Yet for legitimate users, it contributes absolutely nothing positive to the gaming experience.
Now, those 95% and 60% numbers seem odd to me. For one, the methods used to collect data on piracy are invariably shady. I suppose a creative researcher might come up with a credible way to get an accurate sample of who uses what, but people peddling DRM and copy protection products have no history of being interested in accurate data. Still, I suppose pointing out that the very best work in this area is haphazard stuff like seeding P2P networks with a specific bug and tracking tech support activity is not the same as proving that piracy is not a widespread phenomenon.
Still, I do not dispute that it is widespread. I only dispute the idea that the activities of pirates provide any justification for hassling paying customers. This is because I remain unconvinced that copy protection, DRM, et al. generate any sort of positive return on the investment. Even if one grants the bold assertion that piracy accounted for 95% of the game play anywhere ten years ago, and had since fallen to 60% of the game play in that same place, so what? Making piracy go down is meaningless. Only rising sales would even begin to justify deliberately hassling paying customers the way DRM and traditional copy protections do.
As I recall, ten years ago copy protection inflicted real pain on legitimate users and only the most trivial inconvenience on users of pirated software. Today it is no different. Nothing has been invented that prevents game crackers from distributing executables modified to be stripped of their nuisance features while retaining the full glory of the relevant game. The argument that this sweeping change was caused by copy protection efforts fails to recognize the completely unchanged ease with which games could be pirated throughout the interval in question.
If I had to guess, I'd suspect the place was China and the figures were a half-baked estimate derived from the real trend of increasing appreciation for the legal doctrine of intellectual property. Many cultural traditions give ideas a place of greater stature than mere baubles. The practice of letting people own ideas may not be unique to capitalism, but it is uniquely necessitated by the lack of any other mechanism to sustain creative works in a purely capitalist society. As China continues to embrace all things capitalist, old attitudes about the importance of sharing knowledge and art give way to new attitudes about the importance of hoarding wealth.*
Even if there were some magical way to end all software piracy forever and ever, it is questionable if this would be a good thing for software sales. Do pirates never buy games they have previously played illicitly? Do pirates sometimes buy games they would never have considered but for the illegal free taste? One could argue that piracy increases software sales -- it is a thin argument, but the arguments that piracy drives down software sales are based on similar speculation and similarly dubious reasoning.
If we take China as an example, and we grant that piracy has declined dramatically there in recent years, what are we to conclude? Did something magical happen to make the easily-cracked games of 2008 less fun to steal than the easily-cracked games of 1998? Could it instead be that cultural and economic factors largely beyond the control of game publishers drove a noteworthy trend?
I suspect if anyone does come up with a valid empirical method of gauging the scope of software piracy, trends in its popularity w
In what way is piracy a problem? This is a lot like the argument that gay marriage will somehow ruin heterosexual matrimony. Of course, I would not argue that software piracy ought to be legalized. Intellectual property is one of several huge yet necessary evils without which capitalism would make no sense at all. So I grant that prohibitions on software piracy are a legitimate matter for the criminal justice system, not some form of discrimination.
Yet the parallel is meaningful. Developers can write, produce, market, and distribute their games perfectly well even if a million little Jimmy Hopkinses happens to get their seratonin fix with pirated software. Heck, there could be a setpillion sentient beings scattered across the galaxy, each playing around with human software covertly downloaded from our networks, with not one contributing a penny to fund that software; -and still- the hard numbers in the legitimate software economy would be unchanged.
Every single dime developers squander by waging war on software piracy is one dime less spent on making a quality products. Pirates almost never personally suffer any of the hassles generated by copy protection efforts. Legitimate users consistently do. Much like invading a secular fascist state is a stupid way to fight radical religious terrorism, giving the shaft to millions of paying customers is a stupid way to fight however many players do not pay their way.
If this issue raises any problem at all, it is the problem of mediocrity in the halls of power. Groupthink goes unchallenged only when leadership is compromised. Groupthink is the only explanation for the savage waste that past copy protection efforts constitute and this DRM movement could do much to amplify.
Incompetent executives get this idea into their head that it is important to have a big strong response to "fight" against piracy. Yet their big strong response only gives crackers additional entertainment value while failing to make rank and file pirates so much as bat an eyelash.
Given the choice between doing something and nothing, sometimes nothing is the best way to go. If you doubt this, I offer you a choice between shooting yourself in the foot or doing nothing.
I appreciate how passionately some people want to see action taken in this area. However, if taking action results in no progress, how can anyone justify the cost? Developers and legitimate game buyers figuratively do shoot themselves in the foot through perpetuation of significant copy protection efforts in 21st century software distribution. The only winners in this mess are the latter day confidence artists peddling DRM as if it were a service with legitimate value.
No doubt Brad Wardell (of Stardock and Galactic Civilizations) has already come up in this discussion. His position is eminently more sane than anything to come out of the monolithic distributors. In one line, it is, "pirates don't get a vote." Idiots take that to mean "yeah, we need to stick it to the pirates as hard as we can!" The rest of us should be able to see Mr. Wardell's original intent.
Most forms of piracy countermeasures, even the classic "must have disk in drive" stuff, create a condition in which legitimate paying customers are given a less satisfying product. Yes, vast sums are spent trying to make these defenses less obtrusive. Yet this is like spending vast sums to make a race war less brutal when the alternative is to simply stop fighting a race war!
Copy protection is fine for making games less fun, but there is zero credible evidence that it makes games more lucrative. Far worse than television advertising, people in the DRM industry engage in wholesale fabrication of data to justify bold claims about consumer behavior being influenced by their achievements as career nuisances.
There may also be no hard evidence substantiating the claim that copy protection measures serve as a gateway to expand the scope of software piracy as a subculture. Still, that pontification supported by precisely as much legitimate empirical data as any half-baked speculations that rationalize the continued existence of these economic parasites manipulating game publishers into charging at the windmill of piracy curtailment.
Adrift with insufficient evidence, the best thinking comes from sound analysis. I believe sound analysis supports the position that people who steal games will continue to steal games even if bypassing piracy countermeasures requires switching from no-cd cracks to some other method. Always there will be eager and capable people stepping up to make piracy both safe and virtually effortless for those with a modest amount of security savvy (since P2P networks, serial code searches, et al. require a touch of sense to avoid malware exposure.) A 12-year old online in 2008 shouldn't be challenged by the effort.
Unless someone is gullible enough to buy into the bluster and falsifications used to support huge expenditures to incorporate DRM into commercial releases, there is no reason to let a single decision, right from conception to distribution, be influenced by the existence of software pirates. On the other hand, from the dimmest business school instructors to the brightest minds in management, there is little dispute that paying customers should get a "vote."
Chucking the entire DRM industry would be a win for honest consumers as well as game developers. The user experience would involve fewer hassles, and game budgets would no longer involve one common counterproductive expenditure. Also, it can't be helpful to force collaborations between the honorable hard-working people adding value to electronic entertainment products and the sleazebags who would take a paycheck for sucking the life from a creative industry.
Would this be a win for pirates too? Certainly not in any complete sense. Perhaps the childishly simple task of pirating a game would become a little more simple. However, the demand for unauthorized executables designed to circumvent copy protection would vanish overnight. Dedicated game crackers would feel the loss of a satisfying hobby. (Speaking of which, I know from my own much-belated successes that devising a method to defeat copy protection on past Sacred games was an especially fun brain teaser.)
So, I suppose if the big boys in the gaming industry were driven by the usual petty motives of corporate America -- the desire to compete by tearing down others, a preference for destroying things rather than letting them be appreciated without proprietary authorization, and a general obsession with marking every little bit of turf with foul odors -- they mi
Clean air whispers truth.
Scam car cuts the breeze.
Yet no green bliss follows.
I don't believe automotive hydrogen fuel cell technology is all that astonishing. I do believe the basis for this story is malarkey, but not because it is implausible with existing technology to concentrate elemental hydrogen for purposes of powering a vehicle. Insofar as oxygen is required, it can be drawn from the air, no less easily than internal combustion engines inhale that useful chemical. The problems of containing hydrogen, while not trivial, are dealt with much more practically than in the days of the Hindenburg. The shortcut to seeing through this is understanding that the final product of hydrogen fuel cell power generation is water. Any process that starts with water and ends with water is not likely to be a wellspring of useful new energy. Hydrogen powered cars are simply a means to keep the industry rolling when real world concerns (sensible public policy or exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves) demand that energy production take place with a mix of centralized facilities and natural collectors (wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal.) A lightweight reserve of hydrogen fuel can power a car over a fair distance, and vehicular power demands energy be concentrated in some sort of lightweight feature of the vehicle. Perhaps battery technology will change this situation, but in the mean time fuel cell technology is worthy of continued development. However, public confidence in that work may be undermined by trickery like this ridiculous notion that a car might be powered by turning water into hydrogen fuel, which would then be returned to water on consumption. Unless the Japanese effort involves something really sci-fi like a working fusion reactor, it is simply not plausible that it produces more energy from hydrogen fuel than it would expend to extract that fuel from water intake.
For the most part I concur. It is conceivable that a civilization might develop astronomy yet not deploy a vast interferometry network. For example, the inhabitants of a high gravity world would face much greater challenges in developing their earliest spacecraft. Inhabitants of a perpetually cloudy world might become very advanced before developing curiosity about astronomy and astrophysics. That said, the technological gap between Hubble-like capabilities and a much more powerful platform is narrow. In fact, deploying a constellation of space telescopes capable of detailed observations of extrasolar planets is already a human possibility. The GPS constellation(s) provide proof of concept in terms of the logistics, and existing space telescopes demonstrate the viability of that technology. It would certainly be a less ambitious effort than sending humans to Mars, and it might even be less challenging than a return to the Moon. I've long supported a global space interferometry network because one end result of these efforts -- detailed images of extrasolar planets -- could revive an aspect of human imagination and inspiration that seems to have fallen dormant since the Apollo Program came to an end.
I've read some good back and forth on this from skimming the discussion so far. Yet I did not see this issue raised. Why is it that some people are so quick to draw definite conclusions from this? It doesn't take much brainpower to see that the original source is an online ideological cloister, desperately grasping at any pseudo-scientific straw they can use to prop up firm political convictions about empirical findings in the realm of climate science.
With one breath they insist the science behind anthropogenic global warming simply must be bogus, and with another they use two weeks of data about a much less well-understood complex of systems to make bold forecasts as to its long term behavior?!? This discussion also shows a number of instances where beliefs in matters of science are driven primarily by political passions. This unusual solar activity is a good subject for the daily dispatch, but surely it didn't need to be presented in context established by a blatant political hack on a personal crusade to "debunk" science that happens to establish an inconvenient truth and thus inspire negativity in him.