Name a released (or available via warez) game with DRM that hasn't been cracked.
The existence of a crack does not imply that 100% of people who want to copy the game are going to find a crack and use it. And quite frankly I'm disgusted that you think so highly of piracy that you would think it would be.
Name a type of weapon that hasn't been used to kill someone. Name a safe that hasn't been cracked. Oh what's that, there aren't any? Well, guess we should allow people to run around killing others, and don't bother storing your money in a bank, just stuff it under your mattress, I'm sure that's just as secure.
Or alternatively, how about this: name a DRM system for software that makes the product less secure than it would be without DRM.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
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What exactly is the point of police? Your lack of response means you agree it doesn't stop killers. Is assaulting innocent people really that important to you?
And just an FYI, no, saying that pirates with access to a non-existent product are able to crack the protection on said product is not an agreement that such protections are useless in 100% of cases.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
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Review: Spore
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I doubt very much DRM WOULD help, when criminals have infiltrated such levels as to have access to a product which doesn't even exist yet.
FYI, Jack the Ripper killed at least 5 people and was never caught. The Zodiac killer killed somewhere between 5 and 37 and was never caught. Police didn't help much.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
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Review: Spore
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It does if you're a realist.
And DRM != rootkit either.
"A lot of people say games are addictive. Well, they're addictive in the sense that anything you like doing you repeat endlessly. But no one would say, 'Mr Kasparov, you have a chess problem,' or 'Tiger Woods, you have a golf addiction.'"
This is how most database games work. Online games like Travian or MySQLGame seem like they have good strategy and gameplay elements; but really when it comes down to it, it's just a race to see who can begin the game first. Pretty much the only rule I've ever seen setup to counter this fact is newbie protection; but of course, if you're capable of infinite expansion, and/or newbie protection doesn't allow you to become equally as powerful as any other player, the whole system is useless. "Strategy" for these games means joining some uber alliance you don't want to, or playing while you work/sleep so you don't die out while having a life.
Games like Ground Control/World in Conflict demonstrate drop-in multiplayer that can be done right - basically you set a resource pool for each player, and new players start with a full pool. Strategy here doesn't mean sacrificing equality, a life or drop-in multiplayer; NOR does it mean that every player must have exactly the same units/abilities.
I don't really think your comment applies to WoW, since as far as I know, it has a level cap, and you can choose not to go PvP until you're ready to. But what you've said definitely has merit, and is the case in many online PvP games with drop-in gameplay.
Game games are NOT usually the "full, uncrippled thing"! Have you even played any game demos yourself before??
Hence why I was talking about the music equivalent of demos, radio, and wondering why even the full, uncrippled thing was inadequate for you to determine if you liked it. Or did you perhaps think I was talking about the type of game demos that get distributed over the radio?
Hey, what's with that? I already paid for the rights to the album the first time - yet just because I wanted the same thing on a more modernized version of the media it plays from, the recording industry ripped ME off, making me pay for the same rights TWICE!
Oh yeah, I know what you're saying. I bought this TV in 1953, it was black and white, but they were all like "it's the latest technology!" and "best picture yet!". But then only like 30 years later they come out with this color TV, and they want me to buy ANOTHER TV? And I'm like "they totally ripped me off". So then I just went and took one because I deserved it. Yeah, I'm such a great, moral person, not a criminal at all.
I do maintain that piracy helps artists via free promotion.
And yet, you conveniently ignored all the ways to promote an artist for free that DON'T involve stealing their music. Even after I pointed them out to you using simple words so you could follow. Hmm...this couldn't be purely about your criminal greed now could it? Surely not?
Counterfeiting obviously creates negative consequences for all users of the money in question, by artificially de-valuing it.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! Counterfeiting devalues money, in the same way piracy devalues digital content. That you still fail to put 2 and 2 together is yet further proof that you're being deliberately ignorant, or you really are stuck so far in your criminal mindset that you're simply incapable of the basic logic.
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Completely irrelevant to our discussion at hand, really.
Ha ha ha, that's gold.
Oh, wait, you were serious? For real? You're really that stupid? Replace "money" with "music" and "government" with "artists", and it's exactly the same fucking thing! Word for fucking word! How are you even still breathing?
IMHO, it's quite a stretch to label a person a CRIMINAL for merely exchanging copies of some content, without commercial gain being a factor.
From this statement, I gather you're ok with stealing, as long as the thief pretends like the victim wasn't harmed in those actions. You also seem to be ok with the idea that making illegal duplicates of something is ok, since it results in your personal, but non-commercial gain. Alright, but I have a better idea: why don't you just counterfeit some money, then use that money to buy the goods? After all, it's not like anyone gets hurt by you printing your own money, right? You're not doing it for "commercial gain", since you still end up only buying this content you were going to steal anyway (I'm wondering what you mean by "commercial gain" though, because clearly pirating digital content allows you to gain a financial benefit). And, even better than piracy, the artist (and all those along the chain needed to get that product out) are paid for their work. It's win/win, an incredibly better situation than piracy, and you can still go around pretending like your actions promote the artists, causing other people to buy them (but, unsurprisingly, not actually doing that). But you don't even entertain the idea of counterfeit money, when clearly it's the better option. Why not?
Just because you're looking out for yourself and what happens to benefit YOU the most, doesn't mean those actions don't also have beneficial consequences for others.
But piracy doesn't have beneficial consequences for others - unless you're talking about providing the ability for others to pirate off of you.
Further back, you claimed that piracy helps artists via free promotion. Yet, strangely, I don't see you actually promoting any artists. You'd think the internet would be the perfect platform for you to promote the artists that you enjoy and want to see more of, but would rather get others to financially support them for you. You also don't take consider the possibility of promoting them without pirating their stuff. Or, worst case, pirating their stuff to determine whether you like it or not, then (if you do) spreading the word about them and deleting the content until you can afford them. Or, simply not doing anything until you can afford to buy them - it's almost as if you simply can't wait until that time, you must have it now Yeah, sure, that's not greedy at all, is it Veruca?
You also don't consider the possibility of stealing the same stuff from a real store. Pirating hurts the author directly - stealing from a store only really hurts the store since they've already paid the author(s), and they weren't going to get the sale anyway, so it makes no difference. Plus, they probably have insurance to cover it. And you end up with a better product, so your greed can be satiated for longer. Besides, they're just a big ol' evil faceless corporation anyway, I thought you pirates loved to put these people out of business?
I'm also surprised you haven't mentioned demos. The story is, after all, a discussion on game piracy, specifically a guy whose games all have demos. Funnily enough, there's a music equivalent too: radio. The demo is even usually the full, uncrippled thing, so really the only valid (but piss-poor) complaints you could have are that a) the radio quality isn't good enough for you to determine whether you like the song or not, and b) the radio version ("radio edit") is shorter or slightly different to the full version you get when buying it, and you don't want to risk getting 'burned'. This latter mentally I liken to tasting grapes in a supermarket; it's perfectly acceptable to take one or two grapes for free, in order to determine if they're ripe or whatever (a demo). But, how do you know the whole bunch isn't rotten, you just happened to, purely by chance, pick the best two? Would you eat the whole bunch in-store to be sure?
I'm not promoting the idea that "if you can't afford something, it's ok to steal it".
No, you are, you just don't like it being worded that way because it's too confrontational. Better to use weasel words, and do your best to make it seem like you're the good guy here. Only problem is, your logic doesn't apply universally. Hell, it's failing just to apply properly to the narrow-viewed context in which you need to limit it.
1) And the moral difference is WHAT exactly? Infringing copyright is stealing in that both result in innocent people being deprived of income. And you screw up the ideas of value, economy, supply & demand, and succumb to prisoner's dilemma. If your argument is that they're not the same, because a pirate wasn't necessarily going to buy the product anyway, you can easily apply that to physical theft too - the store wasn't necessarily going to sell the product anyway. So yeah, it's theft. Of course, I think you already know this, you're just deliberately being ignorant as a result of your cognitive dissonance trying to justify you being a criminal.
2) Promotion, internationalisation, start up costs, (quality) equipment costs, legal protection, insurance, steady income, obtaining rights, production, distribution. A common claim of the pirate in denial is that you can support an artist by attending a live performance. I'm wondering who's going to pay to plan, implement and promote that performance.
Pirates don't give free promotion, that's ridiculous. They succumb to greed, and take take take as much as they can. This helps nobody but the pirate. Of course, you don't see pirates shouting on the streets promoting their favourite bands. They don't pay for TV or radio spots, cover the cost of concerts, place newspaper/magazine advertisements. I doubt very much they even word-of-mouth it to their own little cliques. The only thing pirates are good for, is helping others pirate by redistribution. And, big surprise, none of those pirates are going to go out of their way to promote the bands either.
But naturally, I don't expect any of this to sink in for you. I really don't see a pirate like yourself admitting that, yes, you ARE an immoral asshole and a criminal. You probably couldn't even if you wanted to, but that's ok, I'm willing to accept that you're simply not capable of doing so. You criminals seem to waste an awful lot of time trying to convince people you're morally superior to regular, law-abiding citizens. Frankly, your state of denial and altruistic views would be laughable, if it weren't such a depressing indication of the state of today's culture.
so even IF they didn't buy the album personally, they might get a friend, or some stranger who visits their Facebook page, to buy it. Net win for the artists who got "pirated", really.
Or, more likely, they'd just share their downloads with their "friends or strangers", so they have no longer have a reason to buy it, even if they were going to in the first place.
Basically, what you're promoting is the idea that if you can't afford something, it's ok to steal it, because of the remote possibility your word of mouth will cause other people to buy it. Why would they buy it if you didn't? Do you always hold this idea of superiority to your friends?
If at least one person has decided to buy a game because it's too much trouble to pirate, you're proven wrong. You could perhaps argue that DRM's success doesn't outweigh DRM's failure, which is another matter entirely, but too late for you, that's not what you're saying. And there are already several anecdotes floating around stating exactly that - people who would have pirated it, had it not been for the copy protection or DRM. That DRM is not 100% successful (what you were arguing as a reason to avoid it) is irrelevent. Therefore, you're wrong.
Oh, and DRM seems to work quite well on consoles, thanks much.
Well, the difference here is - people who pirate games are not going to buy them anyways.
My point exactly. So, lowering the cost, removing DRM, or increasing demo length isn't going to help anything, even when this is exactly what pirates claim they want.
I don't think the results of the survey were surprising, really. There are three facts that we know about pirates:
1) As the price of the game approaches zero, the number of pirates citing price as their excuse approaches zero.
2) As the demo length approaches 100% of the full game, pirates citing this as their excuse approaches zero.
3) DRM is binary. The pirates that complain about frequent "phoning home" would complain exactly the same whether it was a one-time locally-verified registration key or a surveillence camera in every home.
There's one fact we know about humans: they're able to rationalise anything they do, no matter how illegal/immoral/irrational it is.
Of course, I think the real test will be that, now that the developer has basically given in to the demands of a bunch of criminals (which is always a bad idea in any scenario), whether it actually decreases the amount of piracy. I'd bet my life on "not significantly". Hold another survey, and see the response. For any price above zero, the same people are still going to complain. For any demo less than the full length of the game, the same thing. Get rid of DRM, and all you end up with is a bunch of people who come up with a different reason to pirate (and more people who are technically able to do so). "The payment system is too hard", "it's too much trouble to enter my credit card details", "your downloads are too slow (but I'll be happy to redistribute them free of charge)", "it's not open source", "your game is missing xyz", "it has a bug"; bitch, bitch, bitch. Eventually you end up with a free, open source, DRM-/copy protection-free game that's 100% bug free and does everything you could possibly want it to, but Developer has no money left to put food on the table, let alone finance another game. And nobody develops anymore because of it. Unless of course, your goal is to destory innovation, technological advances, and big-budget gaming altogether (aka the gaming industry). Is that your mission?
The good news is, we don't even need to go that far to actually prove anything - we can just look at the example set by Radiohead. They offered their entire album for "any amount you want-including zero". And look how that turned out: the product was potentially free (if you wanted it to be); it was the complete thing, not a demo, sample or work in progress; it was a product people apparently wanted; and there was no DRM or copy protection of any sort. What happened? It was still illegally downloaded on P2P networks! Even free wasn't good enough!
And that is exactly the point I'm getting at - if free isn't good enough, what makes you think they can get away with $9.95 (the price the product was lowered to in TFA due to pirates' demand)? The most common excuse was "but they're only 128kbps", a fine example of substituting one lame excuse with another. The other excuse was "I didn't know they were offering it for free", which is kind of the most telling of all the stupid excuses. If you didn't know it was free, you obviously didn't ev
TFA is about piracy, not about lack of sales. Unless illegally downloading a game magically makes it able to be played on Linux, the idea that selling a Linux port will prevent piracy is stupid. So stupid, in fact, that it's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect a pirate to say whilst they clamber to find some lame excuse to rationalise their criminal behaviour.
I bought almost all their albums, will buy their newest when I have some money to spare, and I brougth 5 people to their concert -- all because of piracy.
I'm sure "Mono" really appreciate that, and have piracy to thank for it. But what about the hundreds of other artists whose music you stole?
The main complaint against DRM is the fear that the game will be unplayable when the developer closes shop. One of the complaints against copy protection is that it stops people backing up their games, if they're reckless and lose/destroy the original disc.
Your solution involves packaging physical items in the game that are required to play it. Items that, if lost, will render the game unplayable. How is that solving the problem? Pirates are still going to justify their actions by some other method, even if that method involves scanning/photographing/reproducing the items the game requires. You wouldn't believe the lengths pirates will go to to avoid paying for the game. I've often wondered myself, why would you go to so much trouble, waste so much time, getting your illegal copy to work, surely it would be cheaper (in time and/or money) to just buy the damn thing. It's almost as if...as if pirates are acting entirely irrationally, and would do or say anything to justify their kleptomania.
Let's make this simple for you. Compare speeds in New York to the ones in whole Finland. Surely New York would have 10x faster speeds due to the density and customer availability.
It's a moot point. Packing a bunch more cables in NYC due to the higher density, is really only useful if your goal is to get faster speeds from one NYC resident to another NYC resident. If you want to access "the Internet", or at least someone in another city, the cable still has to go through the remote areas; which, if aren't also similarly capable, are going to create a bottleneck.
With an overall smaller country, the rural areas are also smaller, and it doesn't take as much cable to cover them so you can exit the area to some backbone or whatever (keeping in mind that cable costs the same per meter regardless of your population density). The population density of your main city can be as high as you want, but all it means is there's going to be less revenue coming from the rural areas, hence less insentive to lay a better foundation there, which due to the way networks operate, affects the internet speed of the city residents when communicating with anything outside the city.
Therefore, revenue coming from the main city has to subsidise the cost of laying cable beyond the city, to connect to the net. And this is why the overall population density of a country is the major factor. You can't just take some cross-section of one country, compare it to the whole of some other overall-higher-density country, and claim they should be getting the same service. It doesn't work like that.
I hate the "have a separate Olympics" argument. That's the first reason: if you have a separate "enhanced" Olympics, no one will watch the normals anymore, and it will die out. The second point is: what's going to stop enhanced athletes from entering the regular games, and cheating the system like they do now? It puts you right back at square one.
Except GPS relies on satellites triangulating your position. Who do you think launches those satellites? Designs and constructs the devices that have to find and talk to those satellites? Experiences an inconvenience when the satellites can't be reached (eg in a tunnel)?
I'm guessing you haven't been watching the Olympics, or indeed any international television, since the satellites that re-broadcast those signals don't exist, and the millions of technicians and engineers that deal with those technologies are either all in on the conspiracy, or are so grossly incompetent that they haven't noticed that the broadcast dish is pointing in the wrong direction.
But yeah, you totally have a point: unless you have a GPS, have to navigate on land, sea or air, watch TV, listen to the radio, build long constructions like highways or runways, have ever flown, have seen a horizon, have ever witnessed a lunar eclipse, communicated with people in a different time zone, experienced gravity, seen a photo of the Earth, seen a sunrise or sunset, deal with the concept of hours or days... then you're one of the "most people" who don't have to account for a round Earth in your daily life.
No, they said they (the fireworks) were real, it just wasn't safe or feasible to have a helicopter filming them the way they would have liked. So rather than put thousands of lives at risk, or film at an undesirable point, they chose to simulate what the fireworks would look like using CGI, had they been able to film them the way they wanted.
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The police don't do a whole lot to stop killers before they kill
Wrong. Wrong.
and DRM doesn't do much to stop you after you crack it.
Wrong again. And once more. And don't look so surprised, but oops, you did it again.
Name a released (or available via warez) game with DRM that hasn't been cracked.
The existence of a crack does not imply that 100% of people who want to copy the game are going to find a crack and use it. And quite frankly I'm disgusted that you think so highly of piracy that you would think it would be.
Name a type of weapon that hasn't been used to kill someone. Name a safe that hasn't been cracked. Oh what's that, there aren't any? Well, guess we should allow people to run around killing others, and don't bother storing your money in a bank, just stuff it under your mattress, I'm sure that's just as secure.
Or alternatively, how about this: name a DRM system for software that makes the product less secure than it would be without DRM.
What exactly is the point of police? Your lack of response means you agree it doesn't stop killers. Is assaulting innocent people really that important to you?
And just an FYI, no, saying that pirates with access to a non-existent product are able to crack the protection on said product is not an agreement that such protections are useless in 100% of cases.
I doubt very much DRM WOULD help, when criminals have infiltrated such levels as to have access to a product which doesn't even exist yet.
FYI, Jack the Ripper killed at least 5 people and was never caught. The Zodiac killer killed somewhere between 5 and 37 and was never caught. Police didn't help much.
It does if you're a realist. And DRM != rootkit either.
"A lot of people say games are addictive. Well, they're addictive in the sense that anything you like doing you repeat endlessly. But no one would say, 'Mr Kasparov, you have a chess problem,' or 'Tiger Woods, you have a golf addiction.'"
This is how most database games work. Online games like Travian or MySQLGame seem like they have good strategy and gameplay elements; but really when it comes down to it, it's just a race to see who can begin the game first. Pretty much the only rule I've ever seen setup to counter this fact is newbie protection; but of course, if you're capable of infinite expansion, and/or newbie protection doesn't allow you to become equally as powerful as any other player, the whole system is useless. "Strategy" for these games means joining some uber alliance you don't want to, or playing while you work/sleep so you don't die out while having a life.
Games like Ground Control/World in Conflict demonstrate drop-in multiplayer that can be done right - basically you set a resource pool for each player, and new players start with a full pool. Strategy here doesn't mean sacrificing equality, a life or drop-in multiplayer; NOR does it mean that every player must have exactly the same units/abilities.
I don't really think your comment applies to WoW, since as far as I know, it has a level cap, and you can choose not to go PvP until you're ready to. But what you've said definitely has merit, and is the case in many online PvP games with drop-in gameplay.
Put a cake in front of you, then eat it. Is the cake still there?
That's a false dictionary - the cake was never there in the first place, because it was a lie.
Game games are NOT usually the "full, uncrippled thing"! Have you even played any game demos yourself before??
Hence why I was talking about the music equivalent of demos, radio, and wondering why even the full, uncrippled thing was inadequate for you to determine if you liked it. Or did you perhaps think I was talking about the type of game demos that get distributed over the radio?
Hey, what's with that? I already paid for the rights to the album the first time - yet just because I wanted the same thing on a more modernized version of the media it plays from, the recording industry ripped ME off, making me pay for the same rights TWICE!
Oh yeah, I know what you're saying. I bought this TV in 1953, it was black and white, but they were all like "it's the latest technology!" and "best picture yet!". But then only like 30 years later they come out with this color TV, and they want me to buy ANOTHER TV? And I'm like "they totally ripped me off". So then I just went and took one because I deserved it. Yeah, I'm such a great, moral person, not a criminal at all.
I do maintain that piracy helps artists via free promotion.
And yet, you conveniently ignored all the ways to promote an artist for free that DON'T involve stealing their music. Even after I pointed them out to you using simple words so you could follow. Hmm...this couldn't be purely about your criminal greed now could it? Surely not?
Counterfeiting obviously creates negative consequences for all users of the money in question, by artificially de-valuing it.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! Counterfeiting devalues money, in the same way piracy devalues digital content. That you still fail to put 2 and 2 together is yet further proof that you're being deliberately ignorant, or you really are stuck so far in your criminal mindset that you're simply incapable of the basic logic.
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Completely irrelevant to our discussion at hand, really.
Ha ha ha, that's gold.
Oh, wait, you were serious? For real? You're really that stupid? Replace "money" with "music" and "government" with "artists", and it's exactly the same fucking thing! Word for fucking word! How are you even still breathing?
That's not fair! Soylent Green should get a vote too.
IMHO, it's quite a stretch to label a person a CRIMINAL for merely exchanging copies of some content, without commercial gain being a factor.
From this statement, I gather you're ok with stealing, as long as the thief pretends like the victim wasn't harmed in those actions. You also seem to be ok with the idea that making illegal duplicates of something is ok, since it results in your personal, but non-commercial gain. Alright, but I have a better idea: why don't you just counterfeit some money, then use that money to buy the goods? After all, it's not like anyone gets hurt by you printing your own money, right? You're not doing it for "commercial gain", since you still end up only buying this content you were going to steal anyway (I'm wondering what you mean by "commercial gain" though, because clearly pirating digital content allows you to gain a financial benefit). And, even better than piracy, the artist (and all those along the chain needed to get that product out) are paid for their work. It's win/win, an incredibly better situation than piracy, and you can still go around pretending like your actions promote the artists, causing other people to buy them (but, unsurprisingly, not actually doing that). But you don't even entertain the idea of counterfeit money, when clearly it's the better option. Why not?
Just because you're looking out for yourself and what happens to benefit YOU the most, doesn't mean those actions don't also have beneficial consequences for others.
But piracy doesn't have beneficial consequences for others - unless you're talking about providing the ability for others to pirate off of you.
Further back, you claimed that piracy helps artists via free promotion. Yet, strangely, I don't see you actually promoting any artists. You'd think the internet would be the perfect platform for you to promote the artists that you enjoy and want to see more of, but would rather get others to financially support them for you. You also don't take consider the possibility of promoting them without pirating their stuff. Or, worst case, pirating their stuff to determine whether you like it or not, then (if you do) spreading the word about them and deleting the content until you can afford them. Or, simply not doing anything until you can afford to buy them - it's almost as if you simply can't wait until that time, you must have it now Yeah, sure, that's not greedy at all, is it Veruca?
You also don't consider the possibility of stealing the same stuff from a real store. Pirating hurts the author directly - stealing from a store only really hurts the store since they've already paid the author(s), and they weren't going to get the sale anyway, so it makes no difference. Plus, they probably have insurance to cover it. And you end up with a better product, so your greed can be satiated for longer. Besides, they're just a big ol' evil faceless corporation anyway, I thought you pirates loved to put these people out of business?
I'm also surprised you haven't mentioned demos. The story is, after all, a discussion on game piracy, specifically a guy whose games all have demos. Funnily enough, there's a music equivalent too: radio. The demo is even usually the full, uncrippled thing, so really the only valid (but piss-poor) complaints you could have are that a) the radio quality isn't good enough for you to determine whether you like the song or not, and b) the radio version ("radio edit") is shorter or slightly different to the full version you get when buying it, and you don't want to risk getting 'burned'. This latter mentally I liken to tasting grapes in a supermarket; it's perfectly acceptable to take one or two grapes for free, in order to determine if they're ripe or whatever (a demo). But, how do you know the whole bunch isn't rotten, you just happened to, purely by chance, pick the best two? Would you eat the whole bunch in-store to be sure?
I'm not promoting the idea that "if you can't afford something, it's ok to steal it".
No, you are, you just don't like it being worded that way because it's too confrontational. Better to use weasel words, and do your best to make it seem like you're the good guy here. Only problem is, your logic doesn't apply universally. Hell, it's failing just to apply properly to the narrow-viewed context in which you need to limit it.
1) And the moral difference is WHAT exactly? Infringing copyright is stealing in that both result in innocent people being deprived of income. And you screw up the ideas of value, economy, supply & demand, and succumb to prisoner's dilemma. If your argument is that they're not the same, because a pirate wasn't necessarily going to buy the product anyway, you can easily apply that to physical theft too - the store wasn't necessarily going to sell the product anyway. So yeah, it's theft. Of course, I think you already know this, you're just deliberately being ignorant as a result of your cognitive dissonance trying to justify you being a criminal.
2) Promotion, internationalisation, start up costs, (quality) equipment costs, legal protection, insurance, steady income, obtaining rights, production, distribution. A common claim of the pirate in denial is that you can support an artist by attending a live performance. I'm wondering who's going to pay to plan, implement and promote that performance.
Pirates don't give free promotion, that's ridiculous. They succumb to greed, and take take take as much as they can. This helps nobody but the pirate. Of course, you don't see pirates shouting on the streets promoting their favourite bands. They don't pay for TV or radio spots, cover the cost of concerts, place newspaper/magazine advertisements. I doubt very much they even word-of-mouth it to their own little cliques. The only thing pirates are good for, is helping others pirate by redistribution. And, big surprise, none of those pirates are going to go out of their way to promote the bands either.
But naturally, I don't expect any of this to sink in for you. I really don't see a pirate like yourself admitting that, yes, you ARE an immoral asshole and a criminal. You probably couldn't even if you wanted to, but that's ok, I'm willing to accept that you're simply not capable of doing so. You criminals seem to waste an awful lot of time trying to convince people you're morally superior to regular, law-abiding citizens. Frankly, your state of denial and altruistic views would be laughable, if it weren't such a depressing indication of the state of today's culture.
so even IF they didn't buy the album personally, they might get a friend, or some stranger who visits their Facebook page, to buy it. Net win for the artists who got "pirated", really.
Or, more likely, they'd just share their downloads with their "friends or strangers", so they have no longer have a reason to buy it, even if they were going to in the first place.
Basically, what you're promoting is the idea that if you can't afford something, it's ok to steal it, because of the remote possibility your word of mouth will cause other people to buy it. Why would they buy it if you didn't? Do you always hold this idea of superiority to your friends?
but DRM doesn't prevent piracy
If at least one person has decided to buy a game because it's too much trouble to pirate, you're proven wrong. You could perhaps argue that DRM's success doesn't outweigh DRM's failure, which is another matter entirely, but too late for you, that's not what you're saying. And there are already several anecdotes floating around stating exactly that - people who would have pirated it, had it not been for the copy protection or DRM. That DRM is not 100% successful (what you were arguing as a reason to avoid it) is irrelevent. Therefore, you're wrong.
Oh, and DRM seems to work quite well on consoles, thanks much.
Well, the difference here is - people who pirate games are not going to buy them anyways.
My point exactly. So, lowering the cost, removing DRM, or increasing demo length isn't going to help anything, even when this is exactly what pirates claim they want.
I don't think the results of the survey were surprising, really. There are three facts that we know about pirates:
1) As the price of the game approaches zero, the number of pirates citing price as their excuse approaches zero.
2) As the demo length approaches 100% of the full game, pirates citing this as their excuse approaches zero.
3) DRM is binary. The pirates that complain about frequent "phoning home" would complain exactly the same whether it was a one-time locally-verified registration key or a surveillence camera in every home.
There's one fact we know about humans: they're able to rationalise anything they do, no matter how illegal/immoral/irrational it is.
Of course, I think the real test will be that, now that the developer has basically given in to the demands of a bunch of criminals (which is always a bad idea in any scenario), whether it actually decreases the amount of piracy. I'd bet my life on "not significantly". Hold another survey, and see the response. For any price above zero, the same people are still going to complain. For any demo less than the full length of the game, the same thing. Get rid of DRM, and all you end up with is a bunch of people who come up with a different reason to pirate (and more people who are technically able to do so). "The payment system is too hard", "it's too much trouble to enter my credit card details", "your downloads are too slow (but I'll be happy to redistribute them free of charge)", "it's not open source", "your game is missing xyz", "it has a bug"; bitch, bitch, bitch. Eventually you end up with a free, open source, DRM-/copy protection-free game that's 100% bug free and does everything you could possibly want it to, but Developer has no money left to put food on the table, let alone finance another game. And nobody develops anymore because of it. Unless of course, your goal is to destory innovation, technological advances, and big-budget gaming altogether (aka the gaming industry). Is that your mission?
The good news is, we don't even need to go that far to actually prove anything - we can just look at the example set by Radiohead. They offered their entire album for "any amount you want-including zero". And look how that turned out: the product was potentially free (if you wanted it to be); it was the complete thing, not a demo, sample or work in progress; it was a product people apparently wanted; and there was no DRM or copy protection of any sort. What happened? It was still illegally downloaded on P2P networks! Even free wasn't good enough!
And that is exactly the point I'm getting at - if free isn't good enough, what makes you think they can get away with $9.95 (the price the product was lowered to in TFA due to pirates' demand)? The most common excuse was "but they're only 128kbps", a fine example of substituting one lame excuse with another. The other excuse was "I didn't know they were offering it for free", which is kind of the most telling of all the stupid excuses. If you didn't know it was free, you obviously didn't ev
TFA is about piracy, not about lack of sales. Unless illegally downloading a game magically makes it able to be played on Linux, the idea that selling a Linux port will prevent piracy is stupid. So stupid, in fact, that it's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect a pirate to say whilst they clamber to find some lame excuse to rationalise their criminal behaviour.
Why spend time and money on police in the first place anyway? People are going be victims of crimes anyway, so why bother?
Sorry, your rationale is bullshit. Looks like you have to justify your acts with some other bullshit excuse like every other criminal.
I bought almost all their albums, will buy their newest when I have some money to spare, and I brougth 5 people to their concert -- all because of piracy.
I'm sure "Mono" really appreciate that, and have piracy to thank for it. But what about the hundreds of other artists whose music you stole?
The main complaint against DRM is the fear that the game will be unplayable when the developer closes shop. One of the complaints against copy protection is that it stops people backing up their games, if they're reckless and lose/destroy the original disc.
Your solution involves packaging physical items in the game that are required to play it. Items that, if lost, will render the game unplayable. How is that solving the problem? Pirates are still going to justify their actions by some other method, even if that method involves scanning/photographing/reproducing the items the game requires. You wouldn't believe the lengths pirates will go to to avoid paying for the game. I've often wondered myself, why would you go to so much trouble, waste so much time, getting your illegal copy to work, surely it would be cheaper (in time and/or money) to just buy the damn thing. It's almost as if...as if pirates are acting entirely irrationally, and would do or say anything to justify their kleptomania.
It's hardly a good comparison, since Cartman really does have a disability. He's big-boned.
Let's make this simple for you. Compare speeds in New York to the ones in whole Finland. Surely New York would have 10x faster speeds due to the density and customer availability.
It's a moot point. Packing a bunch more cables in NYC due to the higher density, is really only useful if your goal is to get faster speeds from one NYC resident to another NYC resident. If you want to access "the Internet", or at least someone in another city, the cable still has to go through the remote areas; which, if aren't also similarly capable, are going to create a bottleneck.
With an overall smaller country, the rural areas are also smaller, and it doesn't take as much cable to cover them so you can exit the area to some backbone or whatever (keeping in mind that cable costs the same per meter regardless of your population density). The population density of your main city can be as high as you want, but all it means is there's going to be less revenue coming from the rural areas, hence less insentive to lay a better foundation there, which due to the way networks operate, affects the internet speed of the city residents when communicating with anything outside the city.
Therefore, revenue coming from the main city has to subsidise the cost of laying cable beyond the city, to connect to the net. And this is why the overall population density of a country is the major factor. You can't just take some cross-section of one country, compare it to the whole of some other overall-higher-density country, and claim they should be getting the same service. It doesn't work like that.
In the US, the Democratic-controlled Congress decides what money should be spent where. No Bush-whacking involved.
I hate the "have a separate Olympics" argument. That's the first reason: if you have a separate "enhanced" Olympics, no one will watch the normals anymore, and it will die out. The second point is: what's going to stop enhanced athletes from entering the regular games, and cheating the system like they do now? It puts you right back at square one.
You mean like this? (it's an AutoIt script, not a Firefox plugin, but does what you want)
"There are no feminists on a sinking ship"
Except GPS relies on satellites triangulating your position. Who do you think launches those satellites? Designs and constructs the devices that have to find and talk to those satellites? Experiences an inconvenience when the satellites can't be reached (eg in a tunnel)?
I'm guessing you haven't been watching the Olympics, or indeed any international television, since the satellites that re-broadcast those signals don't exist, and the millions of technicians and engineers that deal with those technologies are either all in on the conspiracy, or are so grossly incompetent that they haven't noticed that the broadcast dish is pointing in the wrong direction.
But yeah, you totally have a point: unless you have a GPS, have to navigate on land, sea or air, watch TV, listen to the radio, build long constructions like highways or runways, have ever flown, have seen a horizon, have ever witnessed a lunar eclipse, communicated with people in a different time zone, experienced gravity, seen a photo of the Earth, seen a sunrise or sunset, deal with the concept of hours or days... then you're one of the "most people" who don't have to account for a round Earth in your daily life.
No, they said they (the fireworks) were real, it just wasn't safe or feasible to have a helicopter filming them the way they would have liked. So rather than put thousands of lives at risk, or film at an undesirable point, they chose to simulate what the fireworks would look like using CGI, had they been able to film them the way they wanted.