Good point. So why is software exempt from sales contracts?
It isn't. Software is subject to sales contracts like anything else. But no one is obligated to enter into such a contract: just because you want to sell me a copy of a game for $50 doesn't mean I have to get it from you, rather than from someone else who's offering it for free.
Once again, show me the concrete rule that says murder is immoral but breaking other laws isn't.
"It's wrong to harm people" is a general tenet of most systems of morality. After that, it comes down to the definition of harm. Murder: obviously harmful. Theft: obviously harmful. Declining to buy a product: obviously not harmful, because otherwise we'd all be "harming" every seller 24 hours a day unless we bought literally everything in existence, and no one believes that.
But how about the difference between killing someone who's a matter of minutes away from dying anyway, and a game developer who's only a few hundred dollars short of a life-saving operation for his 10 year old son? Not so clear then, huh?
No, it's still quite clear. You're never obligated to buy a product from someone just because he really, really wants your money.
No, not the concept of doing it, just the specific way they do it.
You're just rephrasing what I said. You think they own a particular arrangement of toaster parts, and I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. You can't own an arrangement any more than you can own a color, or a length, or a weight. It's an attribute of a thing, not an actual thing. It's not scarce; there's no justification for preventing me from using a certain arrangement of parts when it can't possibly interfere with anyone else's use of that same arrangement.
Right, but putting parts together into "a toaster", with or without an engineer/electrician's help, is not the same as putting them together knowingly in the exact same configuration as an existing product, which had actual people perform actual work on it (it's this crazy concept called labour).
Once again, just because someone expends labor to draw up the original plans for the toaster, that doesn't mean they "own" that arrangement of parts. Everyone else is still entitled to use that arrangement, even if they have to look at copied plans to know how to use it, because the parts they're arranging belong to them. The physical parts are the only thing in that situation that can be owned by anyone.
Show me a store who's offering legal copies of video games for sale for $0, and I'll be more than happy to agree with you.
Still having trouble seeing the difference between morality and legality, huh? That's a shame. Maybe when you're older you'll be able to grasp the distinction.
And anybody who's intelligent enough to be able to create content. Jealous much?
Ha! No, sir, I'm not jealous, because that's what I do for a living. And amazingly enough, I don't need to sell copies in order to make a living as a developer.
Right, that's the future magical candy world where criminals who previously pirated games knowing full details about them, would suddenly turn around and start paying top dollar for games they know nothing about even though you took away the legal incentive for doing so.
Yes, essentially, because they'd have no other choice. That would be the only way to get new games: paying developers to make them. And since everyone would still want new games, and still have money to spend on them, those developers would get paid.
You can download any software you want, so long as it doesn't interfere with the value of MY software.
Once again, we've already established that there's nothing wrong with "interfering with the value" of another person's property, as long as you don't interfere
I see you are unfamiliar with the concept of logical opposites then. Sales contract: you must fulfil conditions X in return for Y. Copyright: you cannot use/copy/distribute Y without fulfilling conditions X.
I see you're unfamiliar with the concept of variables. You see, the "conditions X" in a sales contract are not the same as the "conditions X" in copyright law. Copyright law doesn't specify what you need to do in order to convince someone to let you make copies, it only says that you need their permission.
But this is losing sight of the original point. The difference that matters here between a sales contract and copyright law is that a contract carries with it a moral obligation, and the law does not. You are morally obligated to do what you promise to do; you're not morally obligated to obey a piece of paper just because it was signed by the governor or the president or the king or whoever signs bills into law in this alternate universe of yours.
I'm not aware of any definitive concept which makes murder immoral but copyright infringement not immoral. Perhaps you could elaborate?
If you don't see a moral difference between killing a sentient human being and copying a file without permission, then you sound awfully dangerous to be around. You're not posting from prison, are you?
For the record, I'm not religious. You don't need a Bible to see the difference between an act that directly harms someone and an act that reduces the likelihood that they'll receive a few dollars which they might never have received anyway.
And because you don't value the toaster at $100, it also doesn't mean you can take the toaster without paying anything.
Of course not, because that would make the store poorer: they'd have one fewer toaster than they had before. That's an important difference between physical items, like toasters, and information, like games or music files.
But it's lovely to see that your answer to "this product isn't worth $100!" is "this product is worth only the cost of materials from a third party, but knowing that I'm not smart enough to design my own toaster I have to abuse the work that somebody else put into designing one".
"Abuse"? That's funny. It's as if you think they own the concept of putting a few parts together in a certain arrangement!
If I buy those parts, I'm entitled to put them together into a toaster. If I don't know how to put them together, and I find someone out there who'll tell me how to do it, there's absolutely nothing wrong with enlisting their help. I have no obligation to reinvent the wheel just because I don't want to pay $100 for a toaster.
So despite acknowledgement that video games, as digital products, have value, you don't see anything wrong with obtaining something of value without remuneration for the work that went into creating that item of value?
Yes, that's correct.
If you see two stores selling identical items, one for $100 and the other for $25, is there anything wrong with buying it from the cheaper store? Of course not. It's a consensual transaction. They have an item, they can sell it for whatever price they want. If they think $25 is a fair price, then there's nothing wrong with buying it at that price.
So if you see two entities offering identical files, one for $50 on a DVD-ROM and the other for free on a torrent site, I see nothing wrong with downloading the torrent. It's a consensual transaction. They have a copy of the file, they can distribute it for whatever price they want, including zero. If they're willing to give you some of their bandwidth for free, then there's nothing wrong with taking them up on that offer.
Or perhaps we could make the logical conclusion that as a culture we accept LEGITIMATE, LEGAL, NON-ARTIFICIAL, NON-DELIBERATE and/or UNAVOIDABLE devaluations of that product, while those that ar
A sales contract says "you get X in exchange for Y". Copyright law says "you get X in exchange for Y", where X is something along the lines of "the right to use Z".
Sorry, but that's simply not true. Nothing like that appears anywhere in the text of US copyright law, except perhaps the mechanical licenses used by radio broadcasters.
Copyright law provides a way for copyright holders to sue people who make unauthorized copies; it says nothing about how authorized copies are supposed to be distributed or exchanged. If you write a book, copyright law doesn't require anyone to pay you for it -- a sales contract does.
So it's not immoral to commit murder then?
Incorrect. Murder is immoral for reasons that have nothing to do with its legality, and even if it were legal, it would still be immoral. Morality and legality are separate issues: copyright violation may be illegal, but that doesn't make it immoral.
Or look at it this way: there are two toasters for sale. Both are the same price, same brand, model, physically identical in every way. Except one works fine, while the other is in 1000 pieces and obviously doesn't work. You're getting the same product either way, and you've just made the argument that utility doesn't imply value.
Utility is related to value in the sense that people are likely willing to pay more for a more useful product. Obviously, I'd be willing to pay more for a toaster that works than for one that doesn't.
However, if both toasters were priced at $100, I wouldn't be willing to buy either of them. I'm not paying $100 for a toaster, period. If I could download pirated plans to build the same toaster from $10 worth of parts, I might do that. That doesn't mean I think toasters have no value, it means that the value of a toaster in my mind is less than $100 but more than $10.
Your actions speak louder than your words.
No action I've committed, encouraged, or condoned implies that I believe games have no value, either, but whatever. It's amusing that you think you know my opinions better than I do.
You're making the argument that it's ok to devalue a product by committing a crime, because there are already other events which devalue that product anyway.
Not just "other events", but other events -- deliberate actions, in fact -- which we all consider perfectly acceptable. By accepting those actions, we've already established that there's nothing inherently wrong with devaluing another person's property, so you can hardly expect to use that as an argument against copying.
Try telling that to the myriad of stores that deal with second-hand video games. Then stop and think for all of 3 seconds why those stores no longer trade in second-hand PC games. Oh, you forgot one tiny problem: having lots of pirated copies around also makes it harder for retailers to sell NEW copies, and even for the developers to sell original copies also (physical or digital).
Again, so what? The existence of cars makes it harder to sell buggy whips. The existence of MP3 players makes it harder to sell Walkmans. The existence of $1.29 Suave shampoo makes it harder to sell $10 Paul Mitchell shampoo. The existence of the Gutenberg Project makes it harder to sell copies of old public domain books.
No one is entitled to have an easy time in the marketplace. If the product you're trying to sell is hard to move because there's a cheaper or better alternative, that's your cue to lower your margins or find a more attractive product to sell. And if you can't do either, that's your cue to leave this industry to the people who are doing it better than you, and find a new line of work.
You're essentially saying that it's morally ok to key someone's car and snap the aerial off, thus decreasing the car's value without physically taking anything, because the owner nev
First, copyright law is quite different from a sales contract. A contract says "if you give me $X, I'll give you product Y". Copyright law says "if you make unauthorized copies, you're in trouble". The law doesn't obligate anyone to buy copies of your work just because you spent time making it; unlike a sales contract, they can uphold the law simply by ignoring your work.
Second, you have a moral obligation to fulfill your promises, but you have no moral obligation to obey the law. Copyright infringement is illegal, of course, but that's not the subject of debate here.
If you though games had no value, why would you waste your time and bandwidth downloading them?
You're confusing economic value with utility: people download games not because they're worth money, but because they're useful (i.e. fun to play). But of course I never said games have no value, anyway.
And as soon as you drive a car out of the dealership, it's just lost a whole chunk of value. Doesn't make it right to steal cars because you believe they have NO value. And don't bother saying it's different in this case because it's a physical loss: that's not the argument you're making on this point.
For the record, the fact that driving a car off the lot causes a physical loss to the dealership is precisely why it's wrong. If you could drive a copy of that car off the lot instead, there'd be nothing wrong with that.
I'm not sure what argument you think I'm making here, but again, I never said games have no economic value. Obviously they do: people do pay for copies of games. What I said is that diminishing a used game's resale value doesn't destroy its usefulness the way counterfeiting money destroys the currency's usefulness.
Having a lot of pirated copies out there might make it harder for me to resell my own copy, but no one really cares about that. People don't buy games just so they can resell them at a loss; they buy games to play them, and making copies doesn't diminish anyone else's ability to play them. In fact, for a lot of games, having more players makes the game more enjoyable.
If you want to argue that copyright infringement is wrong because it diminishes the economic value of copies, then like I said, you must also believe that writing negative reviews is wrong for the same reason: people won't pay as much for a product that they think sucks. In fact, a single negative review in a major venue has a much bigger impact on the profitability of a copyrighted work than a single pirated copy does. Roger Ebert should be worse than a million pirates, according to that logic.
So, like I said, the money that these game makers supposedly get before selling the game: where does that come from?
I assume you're asking where it would come from in a game industry that weren't based around selling copies. It would come from anyone who has an interest in seeing that game developed. That's mostly gamers, who want the game to come out so they can play it, but it could also include companies that profit from more games being played: ATI and NVIDIA can sell more cards when there are more games to play with them, Logitech can sell more high-performance mice, etc.
Presumably you also work for a company for free, since they have no reason to pay you at the end of the month. After all, you've already performed all the work, why would they need to pay you afterwards?
Because of a little thing called a contract. You see, I didn't just waltz into an office one day, sit down, and start working in the hopes that one day my work would be appreciated and I'd get paid.
There was a negotiation before I started working and before they started paying me, laying out what they wanted me to do and what I wanted in compensation. If I didn't like the payment they were offering, I could've walked away without putting in a single hour of work.
It would've been foolish indeed for me to do all this work before anyone had even agreed to pay me for it. They could've said my work was a gift to them and they didn't owe me a dime, and they would've been right! But now, if they don't pay me, they will have committed an act of fraud, coercing me with false promises.
Now perhaps I'm starting to understand why you have to pirate your games just to stay alive, you poor thing...
And perhaps I'm starting to understand why you feel the need to force people to pay you for work you've already done: maybe you just don't have the self-confidence to ask for compensation before you start working, or maybe your work is just so shoddy that you know no one would agree to pay for it if you asked.
so your saying that, in the general case, if someone artificially limits the supply of something, but that artificial limit is broken by a bunch of criminals, it devalues all the instances of that thing, and everybody loses?
Actually, in the general case, everybody loses as soon as the supply is artificially limited in the first place. Artificial scarcity is generally a bad thing.
Currency is a special case, since its usefulness is directly related to its scarcity: the whole point of currency is to act as a medium for exchange.
And the labour that goes into cooking a meal has already been performed, so why should you pay for it afterwards right? It's not like it costs them any more if you didn't eat it. Or that loan with the bank you have, they've already paid you the money, so they're not losing anything from you not paying it back, right?
Cute, but wrong.
The key difference you're missing is that when I order a meal, or apply for a loan, I'm entering into a contract. The chef doesn't just decide to cook me a steak on speculation, nor does the bank spontaneously give me a big check in the hopes that I might Do The Right Thing and pay it back with interest. My binding promise to pay for the meal, or to pay back the loan, is the very thing that convinces the chef and the banker to put their labor and money on the line in the first place!
A game developer, on the other hand, has no contract with his potential future customers. They don't owe him anything. So if he chooses to spend his time writing a game even though no one has promised him any money for it, he's putting himself in a bad situation.
(I'll let you ponder the difference between a game developer in that situation and, say, a crafter who invests his time making clay pots even though no one has promised to pay for those either.)
Ha, please, I'd like to see how think the creators of a game are going to get paid without anyone buying it.
They can do what everyone else does, and get a customer (or a million customers) to enter into a contract before they start doing the work. You don't have to sell copies when you can sell your labor instead.
Haha, yes, and killing isn't murder, it's just assisted undesired suicide.
Again: cute, but wrong.
I pointed out an important, fundamental difference between copying and stealing: one makes people poorer, the other does not. The fact that stealing makes its victim poorer is exactly why stealing is wrong in the first place, and copying is missing that key element.
On the other hand, there's no substantive difference between "murder" and "assisted undesired suicide"; you're simply playing with words.
And copying games devalues the them, making the entire gaming industry and anyone who legitimately owns those games poorer. Or are you really that blinded to the simple fact?
You seem to think that games are some sort of currency or investment. They aren't. Many games today can't be exchanged at all, due to online activation and such, but even the rest are primarily played. If you make a bunch of copies of Team Fortress 2, that doesn't diminish my ability to enjoy my copy; I haven't lost any utility.
Dollars, on the other hand, are primarily used for monetary exchange, and their usefulness is directly related to their scarcity.
Now, it's true that if I want to sell my copy of a game, and you're out there giving away copies, I won't be able to get as much. You will have diminished the value of my copy. But the resale value of any product is affected by countless other factors anyway; unless you want to outlaw everything from writing bad reviews to creating competing products, there's not much sense in getting worked up over it.
But the labour needed to create a video game does, right?
Of course not. The labor needed to create a video game, however, has already been performed by the time anyone has a chance to pirate it. It's a fixed cost. When someone copies the game, that doesn't create any extra work for the developer: he still has all the time (and money) that he had before the copy was made -- unlike bank robbery, which does in fact make someone poorer.
But hey, consider the context, we're talking about piracy remember? Nobody really cares about the big evil corporations, they have enough money, who cares if we steal from/"infringe" upon them?
Well, I care if we steal from them, but copying isn't stealing. It makes one person richer without making anyone else poorer.
At which point I'd argue the comparison to printing counterfeit money (in that someone gains but nobody else directly loses from it), and then you'd look quite the fool.
Please, give it a shot. I can't wait to see how you handwave away the fact that counterfeiting money devalues the currency, undermining the entire economy and making everyone slightly poorer.
Also agreed, however I never contended that it was objective (in fact, I often bring people up on that exact point in copyright discussions when they start talking about fantasy worlds where all music is according to their tastes). The question is: if you didn't have the option of keeping your dollar and getting the goods, then would it be worth your $1, or $15?
Isn't that also a fantasy world? We live in a world where information can be copied. That is the fundamental nature of information in this universe. All the DRM, legal wrangling, and industry propaganda in the world isn't going to change that.
I'm not sure what the subject of the debate is anymore. We agree that a typical pirate would not pay full price for most of the things in this collection if he were forced to choose. We agree that this means those things aren't worth the full price to him. We agree that it's wrong to equate one download with one lost sale.
If your point is that people will sometimes pirate things that they'd otherwise be willing to pay for, well, we agree on that too. Sometimes a download is a lost sale. But I think we'd also agree that that's a minority of cases.
Wow, you've signed up with a bank that takes money out of your personal account every time it gets robbed? That's pretty sad.
I didn't say that.
In my country, our banks are insured (more than often than not, self-insured) so they can cover losses like that.
Yes, but that insurance money doesn't just appear out of thin air. As I wrote, "bank robbers deprive other people of money" -- for a bank that's insured, the loss is borne by the insurer instead of the account holders, but the robber's action still causes someone to become poorer.
You're 100% correct. And sadly if things continue down this road, many people will simply stop making music.
People were making music long before the record industry existed, when the exclusive right to sell copies of recorded performances wasn't even a glimmer in some greedy bastard's eye. Music isn't going away. Individual musicians might, but I doubt we'll miss the ones whose artistic services are so worthless that they can't convince anyone to pay them.
Why waste time creating songs if your fans are not going to pay you?
That's a question the artists should've started asking themselves a long time ago in a slightly different form: "If I'm in it for the money, then why am I recording this song today, at my own expense, when no one will even decide whether to buy a copy until next year?"
If you want to get paid for your work, then find a customer before you start working. That's what nearly everyone else manages to do in every other industry. You don't see house painters painting every house on a street, uninvited, and then grumbling when some of those people don't want to pay for it.
They'll choose alternate jobs like factory work or office work. Not exactly a bright future.
If there's enough demand for their talent, their fans will hire them to write music instead of shuffling papers in an office. On the other hand, if the fans don't care enough to pay for the production of art directly, then maybe they aren't really fans at all.
There's a subtle distinction here. If the music wasn't available for free, would you still rather keep your money and not have any music from your pirated collection?
Hold on, who said anything about not having any of that music?
Most people who have collections of pirated music, if they were forced to choose between paying full price and throwing it away, would likely keep a small fraction of their collections and throw the rest away. For every song that a pirate would rather throw away than pay for, you can conclude that it isn't worth the iTunes price to him.
That is exactly why it's wrong to equate each pirated copy with a lost sale: I might be willing to pay $1 for "War Pigs", but I'm sure not going to pay $1 for "Baby One More Time", even if the only alternative is to go without.
Then there's value in the sense that I was referring to, which is more intrinsically linked to the product itself, not the external factors surrounding it. There's value in an enjoyable music album, even though it's possible to get it for next to nothing. [...] The actual music is, well, enjoyable, and in terms of enjoyment per dollar, it rates reasonably well against any other ways to spend $15.
That sort of "value" is called utility, and it's subjective just like economic value is. You might think that $15 for a CD provides the same utility-per-dollar as some other form of entertainment, but of course not everyone will agree with that.
Personally, I think that spending $1 on an unhealthy, short-lived snack is, far more often than not, worse value than a music track that you'll get to listen to as much as you want, even if it's only 5 or so times over your lifetime.
It sounds like junior bacon cheeseburgers are worth less than $1 to you, then. See how easy that was?
For what it's worth, only legitimate bank users ever have to pay fees, while bank robbers don't ever have to pay a cent, yet that's hardly a great reason to support the robbing of banks. Not that, you know, simple logic would ever change your mind or anything...
Speaking of simple logic, perhaps you might consider the fact that bank robbers deprive other people of money (the value he gains is equal to the value other people lose), while someone who downloads a game isn't depriving anybody of anything (the value he gains is created by the act of copying). That alone is a good enough reason to discourage the robbing of banks.
Once again, you're just restating the same idea. If I'd rather keep my money instead of buying a song file, then that song file isn't worth the price to me.
What I choose to spend the money on instead isn't really important, but I'll play along for now. Let's say I'm choosing whether to spend $1 on an iTunes track or a junior bacon cheeseburger. That means the price of the iTunes track can also be stated as "not eating a junior bacon cheeseburger". If I decide that downloading the song from iTunes isn't worth forgoing a tasty snack, then presto, I've just concluded that the iTunes download is worth less than $1 to me.
The liberals are also idiots, especially the feminist faction.
There have been at least two cases where women have been put in prison for being raped by teenage boys. Yes, you read that correctly, they were put in prison for being the victims of actual, honest-to-god, forcible rape. Because their rapists were less than 18 years old, the victims were convicted of statutory rape of a minor. Unlike Saudi Arabia, where the public was outraged when a woman was convicted for being a rape victim, nobody cared much. And where did this happen, some conservative bastion in the backcountry? No. It happened in Madison, Wisconsin - a famously "liberal" enclave.
This idiocy is coming at us from right and left, and frankly I think the feminists on the left are worse.
I'm not wholly disagreeing with you: there are certainly plenty of ageist, prudish idiots on both sides of the aisle, and even as a liberal, most of what I see described as "feminism" pisses me off. Visit any feminist blog and you'll see that they've moved past equal rights and fair treatment, and are now more concerned with absolving women of all responsibility for any situation they might ever find themselves in.
But I must point out that your anecdote here has nothing whatsoever to do with feminists. Putting more female rape victims in jail is not part of any feminist agenda. And it has little to do with liberalism, either: the law in question was surely a state law, and Wisconsin seems pretty evenly split on the statewide level.
This judge is basically stating "even though company X created this work, and owns the rights to it, they should not be able to restrict how it is distributed".
No, that's not what he's saying at all. RTFA. He's not invalidating copyright, he's just disputing the amount of damages that the record company claims they've suffered.
Hmm, can I go to my local car dealership and tell them "hey I think i am going to take one of your cars off the lot and not pay you for it"...no I would get arrested if i did that.
Surely you see the difference between taking a car -- leaving the dealership with one less car on the lot -- and making a copy of a file.
If you don't own the rights to it then you do not have a say as to how it is distribtued/used unless the OWNER gives you that right.
Ownership is a concept invented to deal with scarcity: if an object can only be in one place at a time, then we need some way to decide who can use it and where. I can't drive a car to Seattle at the same time you're driving it to New York, so one of us has to lose. Even without a legal concept of ownership, it would still have a de-facto owner: whoever got to it first, perhaps, or whoever was strong enough to push the other guy out the door.
This concept, however, makes little sense when applied to information. A number, or an MP3 file, could be used by every single person on the planet at the same time, and nobody's use would interfere with anyone else's. There's no need to restrict how, when, or where it may be used.
You mistakenly assume that No Sale=Incorrect Pricing.
No, he didn't. In fact, he didn't say anything about "incorrect pricing", and the idea is silly to begin with: there is no "correct" price for any product, only a price that any given customer will be willing to pay.
No matter where you set the price, it's likely that someone still won't be willing to pay it. That doesn't mean you should lower your price to zero; you should set the price wherever you think you can make the most profit.
But the question is, what happens to the people who aren't willing to pay your price? Should they have to go without your product just because they'd only be willing to pay $9 instead of $10? For physical products, the answer is an easy "yes", because the alternative is to take away one of your products without compensating you for it, leaving you poorer. But for something that can be copied at no cost, without making you any poorer, it seems to me the answer is an obvious "no". A situation where one party gains and the other breaks even is better overall than a situation where both parties break even.
Sure, I have philosophical differences with the RIAA, but even absent those I'd still be a thief if I was sure I could get away with it.
I'd strip you bare in a heartbeat if I wanted your stuff and could do so with no risk.
Then you're worse than any copyright violator I've met.
I'd download an album without thinking twice about it, but I wouldn't even consider stealing that same album from a store or a private collection. There is a serious moral difference between taking money away from someone, and declining to give them some of your own money.
Incorrect. The artist made a choice to perform that work long before any pirate had the chance to download the resulting song for free. No one forced him to make that choice; he did it freely, not as a "slave".
The actions of a pirate, months or years later, halfway across the world, whom the artist will never meet and whose actions the artist will never be aware of, cannot possibly reach back in time and change the circumstances under which the artist decided to work.
Your actions may leave them as an unprofitable business with significant, almost universal demand, which makes them a prime candidate for government subsidies.
The demand is for the act of writing and recording music, not for the record industry's present business model. Music has been around for much, much longer than any of the RIAA companies. If the record industry as we know it becomes unprofitable, a more likely outcome is that music will still be written and recorded, but it'll be funded through some other means.
Real change only happens in battleground states. In the other states it's the Democratic or Republican party machine that calls all the shots.
Just like it's the oligopoly of insurance companies that call the shots in that arena. If you don't like the policies that the existing companies are offering, too bad -- starting your own insurance company is a hell of a lot harder than running for office.
Looking at the long term, we can mostly solve the issue you're griping about by adopting a better election system. The Democratic and Republican parties face no real competition because our plurality voting method lends itself to two-party domination; approval voting or ranked choice voting would change the landscape.
We can't, however, really do anything to make it easier for others to compete with State Farm, at least without giving up the few protections we get from the current regulatory environment.
I have a choice of which insurance company I deal with. If mine fucks me over I can go and find another one. I don't have this choice when it comes to DMV.
Actually, you do. The DMV, like any other government agency, is ultimately accountable to voters. You probably have a better chance at changing the DMV's policies, by lobbying your politicians or even running for office yourself, than you do at changing any insurance company's policies -- not that you have much of a chance either way, of course.
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Good point. So why is software exempt from sales contracts?
It isn't. Software is subject to sales contracts like anything else. But no one is obligated to enter into such a contract: just because you want to sell me a copy of a game for $50 doesn't mean I have to get it from you, rather than from someone else who's offering it for free.
Once again, show me the concrete rule that says murder is immoral but breaking other laws isn't.
"It's wrong to harm people" is a general tenet of most systems of morality. After that, it comes down to the definition of harm. Murder: obviously harmful. Theft: obviously harmful. Declining to buy a product: obviously not harmful, because otherwise we'd all be "harming" every seller 24 hours a day unless we bought literally everything in existence, and no one believes that.
But how about the difference between killing someone who's a matter of minutes away from dying anyway, and a game developer who's only a few hundred dollars short of a life-saving operation for his 10 year old son? Not so clear then, huh?
No, it's still quite clear. You're never obligated to buy a product from someone just because he really, really wants your money.
No, not the concept of doing it, just the specific way they do it.
You're just rephrasing what I said. You think they own a particular arrangement of toaster parts, and I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. You can't own an arrangement any more than you can own a color, or a length, or a weight. It's an attribute of a thing, not an actual thing. It's not scarce; there's no justification for preventing me from using a certain arrangement of parts when it can't possibly interfere with anyone else's use of that same arrangement.
Right, but putting parts together into "a toaster", with or without an engineer/electrician's help, is not the same as putting them together knowingly in the exact same configuration as an existing product, which had actual people perform actual work on it (it's this crazy concept called labour).
Once again, just because someone expends labor to draw up the original plans for the toaster, that doesn't mean they "own" that arrangement of parts. Everyone else is still entitled to use that arrangement, even if they have to look at copied plans to know how to use it, because the parts they're arranging belong to them. The physical parts are the only thing in that situation that can be owned by anyone.
Show me a store who's offering legal copies of video games for sale for $0, and I'll be more than happy to agree with you.
Still having trouble seeing the difference between morality and legality, huh? That's a shame. Maybe when you're older you'll be able to grasp the distinction.
And anybody who's intelligent enough to be able to create content. Jealous much?
Ha! No, sir, I'm not jealous, because that's what I do for a living. And amazingly enough, I don't need to sell copies in order to make a living as a developer.
Right, that's the future magical candy world where criminals who previously pirated games knowing full details about them, would suddenly turn around and start paying top dollar for games they know nothing about even though you took away the legal incentive for doing so.
Yes, essentially, because they'd have no other choice. That would be the only way to get new games: paying developers to make them. And since everyone would still want new games, and still have money to spend on them, those developers would get paid.
You can download any software you want, so long as it doesn't interfere with the value of MY software.
Once again, we've already established that there's nothing wrong with "interfering with the value" of another person's property, as long as you don't interfere
I see you are unfamiliar with the concept of logical opposites then. Sales contract: you must fulfil conditions X in return for Y. Copyright: you cannot use/copy/distribute Y without fulfilling conditions X.
I see you're unfamiliar with the concept of variables. You see, the "conditions X" in a sales contract are not the same as the "conditions X" in copyright law. Copyright law doesn't specify what you need to do in order to convince someone to let you make copies, it only says that you need their permission.
But this is losing sight of the original point. The difference that matters here between a sales contract and copyright law is that a contract carries with it a moral obligation, and the law does not. You are morally obligated to do what you promise to do; you're not morally obligated to obey a piece of paper just because it was signed by the governor or the president or the king or whoever signs bills into law in this alternate universe of yours.
I'm not aware of any definitive concept which makes murder immoral but copyright infringement not immoral. Perhaps you could elaborate?
If you don't see a moral difference between killing a sentient human being and copying a file without permission, then you sound awfully dangerous to be around. You're not posting from prison, are you?
For the record, I'm not religious. You don't need a Bible to see the difference between an act that directly harms someone and an act that reduces the likelihood that they'll receive a few dollars which they might never have received anyway.
And because you don't value the toaster at $100, it also doesn't mean you can take the toaster without paying anything.
Of course not, because that would make the store poorer: they'd have one fewer toaster than they had before. That's an important difference between physical items, like toasters, and information, like games or music files.
But it's lovely to see that your answer to "this product isn't worth $100!" is "this product is worth only the cost of materials from a third party, but knowing that I'm not smart enough to design my own toaster I have to abuse the work that somebody else put into designing one".
"Abuse"? That's funny. It's as if you think they own the concept of putting a few parts together in a certain arrangement!
If I buy those parts, I'm entitled to put them together into a toaster. If I don't know how to put them together, and I find someone out there who'll tell me how to do it, there's absolutely nothing wrong with enlisting their help. I have no obligation to reinvent the wheel just because I don't want to pay $100 for a toaster.
So despite acknowledgement that video games, as digital products, have value, you don't see anything wrong with obtaining something of value without remuneration for the work that went into creating that item of value?
Yes, that's correct.
If you see two stores selling identical items, one for $100 and the other for $25, is there anything wrong with buying it from the cheaper store? Of course not. It's a consensual transaction. They have an item, they can sell it for whatever price they want. If they think $25 is a fair price, then there's nothing wrong with buying it at that price.
So if you see two entities offering identical files, one for $50 on a DVD-ROM and the other for free on a torrent site, I see nothing wrong with downloading the torrent. It's a consensual transaction. They have a copy of the file, they can distribute it for whatever price they want, including zero. If they're willing to give you some of their bandwidth for free, then there's nothing wrong with taking them up on that offer.
Or perhaps we could make the logical conclusion that as a culture we accept LEGITIMATE, LEGAL, NON-ARTIFICIAL, NON-DELIBERATE and/or UNAVOIDABLE devaluations of that product, while those that ar
The only downside: Everyone with a basic analog cable subscription would need a converter box.
And everyone with a TiVo Series 2 DT would instead have an expensive paperweight. There's no dual-tuner converter box for those.
A sales contract says "you get X in exchange for Y". Copyright law says "you get X in exchange for Y", where X is something along the lines of "the right to use Z".
Sorry, but that's simply not true. Nothing like that appears anywhere in the text of US copyright law, except perhaps the mechanical licenses used by radio broadcasters.
Copyright law provides a way for copyright holders to sue people who make unauthorized copies; it says nothing about how authorized copies are supposed to be distributed or exchanged. If you write a book, copyright law doesn't require anyone to pay you for it -- a sales contract does.
So it's not immoral to commit murder then?
Incorrect. Murder is immoral for reasons that have nothing to do with its legality, and even if it were legal, it would still be immoral. Morality and legality are separate issues: copyright violation may be illegal, but that doesn't make it immoral.
Or look at it this way: there are two toasters for sale. Both are the same price, same brand, model, physically identical in every way. Except one works fine, while the other is in 1000 pieces and obviously doesn't work. You're getting the same product either way, and you've just made the argument that utility doesn't imply value.
Utility is related to value in the sense that people are likely willing to pay more for a more useful product. Obviously, I'd be willing to pay more for a toaster that works than for one that doesn't.
However, if both toasters were priced at $100, I wouldn't be willing to buy either of them. I'm not paying $100 for a toaster, period. If I could download pirated plans to build the same toaster from $10 worth of parts, I might do that. That doesn't mean I think toasters have no value, it means that the value of a toaster in my mind is less than $100 but more than $10.
Your actions speak louder than your words.
No action I've committed, encouraged, or condoned implies that I believe games have no value, either, but whatever. It's amusing that you think you know my opinions better than I do.
You're making the argument that it's ok to devalue a product by committing a crime, because there are already other events which devalue that product anyway.
Not just "other events", but other events -- deliberate actions, in fact -- which we all consider perfectly acceptable. By accepting those actions, we've already established that there's nothing inherently wrong with devaluing another person's property, so you can hardly expect to use that as an argument against copying.
Try telling that to the myriad of stores that deal with second-hand video games. Then stop and think for all of 3 seconds why those stores no longer trade in second-hand PC games. Oh, you forgot one tiny problem: having lots of pirated copies around also makes it harder for retailers to sell NEW copies, and even for the developers to sell original copies also (physical or digital).
Again, so what? The existence of cars makes it harder to sell buggy whips. The existence of MP3 players makes it harder to sell Walkmans. The existence of $1.29 Suave shampoo makes it harder to sell $10 Paul Mitchell shampoo. The existence of the Gutenberg Project makes it harder to sell copies of old public domain books.
No one is entitled to have an easy time in the marketplace. If the product you're trying to sell is hard to move because there's a cheaper or better alternative, that's your cue to lower your margins or find a more attractive product to sell. And if you can't do either, that's your cue to leave this industry to the people who are doing it better than you, and find a new line of work.
You're essentially saying that it's morally ok to key someone's car and snap the aerial off, thus decreasing the car's value without physically taking anything, because the owner nev
The law is that contract.
Incorrect.
First, copyright law is quite different from a sales contract. A contract says "if you give me $X, I'll give you product Y". Copyright law says "if you make unauthorized copies, you're in trouble". The law doesn't obligate anyone to buy copies of your work just because you spent time making it; unlike a sales contract, they can uphold the law simply by ignoring your work.
Second, you have a moral obligation to fulfill your promises, but you have no moral obligation to obey the law. Copyright infringement is illegal, of course, but that's not the subject of debate here.
If you though games had no value, why would you waste your time and bandwidth downloading them?
You're confusing economic value with utility: people download games not because they're worth money, but because they're useful (i.e. fun to play). But of course I never said games have no value, anyway.
And as soon as you drive a car out of the dealership, it's just lost a whole chunk of value. Doesn't make it right to steal cars because you believe they have NO value. And don't bother saying it's different in this case because it's a physical loss: that's not the argument you're making on this point.
For the record, the fact that driving a car off the lot causes a physical loss to the dealership is precisely why it's wrong. If you could drive a copy of that car off the lot instead, there'd be nothing wrong with that.
I'm not sure what argument you think I'm making here, but again, I never said games have no economic value. Obviously they do: people do pay for copies of games. What I said is that diminishing a used game's resale value doesn't destroy its usefulness the way counterfeiting money destroys the currency's usefulness.
Having a lot of pirated copies out there might make it harder for me to resell my own copy, but no one really cares about that. People don't buy games just so they can resell them at a loss; they buy games to play them, and making copies doesn't diminish anyone else's ability to play them. In fact, for a lot of games, having more players makes the game more enjoyable.
If you want to argue that copyright infringement is wrong because it diminishes the economic value of copies, then like I said, you must also believe that writing negative reviews is wrong for the same reason: people won't pay as much for a product that they think sucks. In fact, a single negative review in a major venue has a much bigger impact on the profitability of a copyrighted work than a single pirated copy does. Roger Ebert should be worse than a million pirates, according to that logic.
So, like I said, the money that these game makers supposedly get before selling the game: where does that come from?
I assume you're asking where it would come from in a game industry that weren't based around selling copies. It would come from anyone who has an interest in seeing that game developed. That's mostly gamers, who want the game to come out so they can play it, but it could also include companies that profit from more games being played: ATI and NVIDIA can sell more cards when there are more games to play with them, Logitech can sell more high-performance mice, etc.
Presumably you also work for a company for free, since they have no reason to pay you at the end of the month. After all, you've already performed all the work, why would they need to pay you afterwards?
Because of a little thing called a contract. You see, I didn't just waltz into an office one day, sit down, and start working in the hopes that one day my work would be appreciated and I'd get paid.
There was a negotiation before I started working and before they started paying me, laying out what they wanted me to do and what I wanted in compensation. If I didn't like the payment they were offering, I could've walked away without putting in a single hour of work.
It would've been foolish indeed for me to do all this work before anyone had even agreed to pay me for it. They could've said my work was a gift to them and they didn't owe me a dime, and they would've been right! But now, if they don't pay me, they will have committed an act of fraud, coercing me with false promises.
Now perhaps I'm starting to understand why you have to pirate your games just to stay alive, you poor thing...
And perhaps I'm starting to understand why you feel the need to force people to pay you for work you've already done: maybe you just don't have the self-confidence to ask for compensation before you start working, or maybe your work is just so shoddy that you know no one would agree to pay for it if you asked.
so your saying that, in the general case, if someone artificially limits the supply of something, but that artificial limit is broken by a bunch of criminals, it devalues all the instances of that thing, and everybody loses?
Actually, in the general case, everybody loses as soon as the supply is artificially limited in the first place. Artificial scarcity is generally a bad thing.
Currency is a special case, since its usefulness is directly related to its scarcity: the whole point of currency is to act as a medium for exchange.
And the labour that goes into cooking a meal has already been performed, so why should you pay for it afterwards right? It's not like it costs them any more if you didn't eat it.
Or that loan with the bank you have, they've already paid you the money, so they're not losing anything from you not paying it back, right?
Cute, but wrong.
The key difference you're missing is that when I order a meal, or apply for a loan, I'm entering into a contract. The chef doesn't just decide to cook me a steak on speculation, nor does the bank spontaneously give me a big check in the hopes that I might Do The Right Thing and pay it back with interest. My binding promise to pay for the meal, or to pay back the loan, is the very thing that convinces the chef and the banker to put their labor and money on the line in the first place!
A game developer, on the other hand, has no contract with his potential future customers. They don't owe him anything. So if he chooses to spend his time writing a game even though no one has promised him any money for it, he's putting himself in a bad situation.
(I'll let you ponder the difference between a game developer in that situation and, say, a crafter who invests his time making clay pots even though no one has promised to pay for those either.)
Ha, please, I'd like to see how think the creators of a game are going to get paid without anyone buying it.
They can do what everyone else does, and get a customer (or a million customers) to enter into a contract before they start doing the work. You don't have to sell copies when you can sell your labor instead.
Haha, yes, and killing isn't murder, it's just assisted undesired suicide.
Again: cute, but wrong.
I pointed out an important, fundamental difference between copying and stealing: one makes people poorer, the other does not. The fact that stealing makes its victim poorer is exactly why stealing is wrong in the first place, and copying is missing that key element.
On the other hand, there's no substantive difference between "murder" and "assisted undesired suicide"; you're simply playing with words.
And copying games devalues the them, making the entire gaming industry and anyone who legitimately owns those games poorer. Or are you really that blinded to the simple fact?
You seem to think that games are some sort of currency or investment. They aren't. Many games today can't be exchanged at all, due to online activation and such, but even the rest are primarily played. If you make a bunch of copies of Team Fortress 2, that doesn't diminish my ability to enjoy my copy; I haven't lost any utility.
Dollars, on the other hand, are primarily used for monetary exchange, and their usefulness is directly related to their scarcity.
Now, it's true that if I want to sell my copy of a game, and you're out there giving away copies, I won't be able to get as much. You will have diminished the value of my copy. But the resale value of any product is affected by countless other factors anyway; unless you want to outlaw everything from writing bad reviews to creating competing products, there's not much sense in getting worked up over it.
But the labour needed to create a video game does, right?
Of course not. The labor needed to create a video game, however, has already been performed by the time anyone has a chance to pirate it. It's a fixed cost. When someone copies the game, that doesn't create any extra work for the developer: he still has all the time (and money) that he had before the copy was made -- unlike bank robbery, which does in fact make someone poorer.
But hey, consider the context, we're talking about piracy remember? Nobody really cares about the big evil corporations, they have enough money, who cares if we steal from/"infringe" upon them?
Well, I care if we steal from them, but copying isn't stealing. It makes one person richer without making anyone else poorer.
At which point I'd argue the comparison to printing counterfeit money (in that someone gains but nobody else directly loses from it), and then you'd look quite the fool.
Please, give it a shot. I can't wait to see how you handwave away the fact that counterfeiting money devalues the currency, undermining the entire economy and making everyone slightly poorer.
Also agreed, however I never contended that it was objective (in fact, I often bring people up on that exact point in copyright discussions when they start talking about fantasy worlds where all music is according to their tastes). The question is: if you didn't have the option of keeping your dollar and getting the goods, then would it be worth your $1, or $15?
Isn't that also a fantasy world? We live in a world where information can be copied. That is the fundamental nature of information in this universe. All the DRM, legal wrangling, and industry propaganda in the world isn't going to change that.
I'm not sure what the subject of the debate is anymore. We agree that a typical pirate would not pay full price for most of the things in this collection if he were forced to choose. We agree that this means those things aren't worth the full price to him. We agree that it's wrong to equate one download with one lost sale.
If your point is that people will sometimes pirate things that they'd otherwise be willing to pay for, well, we agree on that too. Sometimes a download is a lost sale. But I think we'd also agree that that's a minority of cases.
Wow, you've signed up with a bank that takes money out of your personal account every time it gets robbed? That's pretty sad.
I didn't say that.
In my country, our banks are insured (more than often than not, self-insured) so they can cover losses like that.
Yes, but that insurance money doesn't just appear out of thin air. As I wrote, "bank robbers deprive other people of money" -- for a bank that's insured, the loss is borne by the insurer instead of the account holders, but the robber's action still causes someone to become poorer.
You're 100% correct. And sadly if things continue down this road, many people will simply stop making music.
People were making music long before the record industry existed, when the exclusive right to sell copies of recorded performances wasn't even a glimmer in some greedy bastard's eye. Music isn't going away. Individual musicians might, but I doubt we'll miss the ones whose artistic services are so worthless that they can't convince anyone to pay them.
Why waste time creating songs if your fans are not going to pay you?
That's a question the artists should've started asking themselves a long time ago in a slightly different form: "If I'm in it for the money, then why am I recording this song today, at my own expense, when no one will even decide whether to buy a copy until next year?"
If you want to get paid for your work, then find a customer before you start working. That's what nearly everyone else manages to do in every other industry. You don't see house painters painting every house on a street, uninvited, and then grumbling when some of those people don't want to pay for it.
They'll choose alternate jobs like factory work or office work. Not exactly a bright future.
If there's enough demand for their talent, their fans will hire them to write music instead of shuffling papers in an office. On the other hand, if the fans don't care enough to pay for the production of art directly, then maybe they aren't really fans at all.
There's a subtle distinction here. If the music wasn't available for free, would you still rather keep your money and not have any music from your pirated collection?
Hold on, who said anything about not having any of that music?
Most people who have collections of pirated music, if they were forced to choose between paying full price and throwing it away, would likely keep a small fraction of their collections and throw the rest away. For every song that a pirate would rather throw away than pay for, you can conclude that it isn't worth the iTunes price to him.
That is exactly why it's wrong to equate each pirated copy with a lost sale: I might be willing to pay $1 for "War Pigs", but I'm sure not going to pay $1 for "Baby One More Time", even if the only alternative is to go without.
Then there's value in the sense that I was referring to, which is more intrinsically linked to the product itself, not the external factors surrounding it. There's value in an enjoyable music album, even though it's possible to get it for next to nothing. [...] The actual music is, well, enjoyable, and in terms of enjoyment per dollar, it rates reasonably well against any other ways to spend $15.
That sort of "value" is called utility, and it's subjective just like economic value is. You might think that $15 for a CD provides the same utility-per-dollar as some other form of entertainment, but of course not everyone will agree with that.
Personally, I think that spending $1 on an unhealthy, short-lived snack is, far more often than not, worse value than a music track that you'll get to listen to as much as you want, even if it's only 5 or so times over your lifetime.
It sounds like junior bacon cheeseburgers are worth less than $1 to you, then. See how easy that was?
For what it's worth, only legitimate bank users ever have to pay fees, while bank robbers don't ever have to pay a cent, yet that's hardly a great reason to support the robbing of banks. Not that, you know, simple logic would ever change your mind or anything...
Speaking of simple logic, perhaps you might consider the fact that bank robbers deprive other people of money (the value he gains is equal to the value other people lose), while someone who downloads a game isn't depriving anybody of anything (the value he gains is created by the act of copying). That alone is a good enough reason to discourage the robbing of banks.
$80? I recall Orange Box being $50 when it came out, and it's $30 now.
Once again, you're just restating the same idea. If I'd rather keep my money instead of buying a song file, then that song file isn't worth the price to me.
What I choose to spend the money on instead isn't really important, but I'll play along for now. Let's say I'm choosing whether to spend $1 on an iTunes track or a junior bacon cheeseburger. That means the price of the iTunes track can also be stated as "not eating a junior bacon cheeseburger". If I decide that downloading the song from iTunes isn't worth forgoing a tasty snack, then presto, I've just concluded that the iTunes download is worth less than $1 to me.
The liberals are also idiots, especially the feminist faction.
There have been at least two cases where women have been put in prison for being raped by teenage boys. Yes, you read that correctly, they were put in prison for being the victims of actual, honest-to-god, forcible rape. Because their rapists were less than 18 years old, the victims were convicted of statutory rape of a minor. Unlike Saudi Arabia, where the public was outraged when a woman was convicted for being a rape victim, nobody cared much. And where did this happen, some conservative bastion in the backcountry? No. It happened in Madison, Wisconsin - a famously "liberal" enclave.
This idiocy is coming at us from right and left, and frankly I think the feminists on the left are worse.
I'm not wholly disagreeing with you: there are certainly plenty of ageist, prudish idiots on both sides of the aisle, and even as a liberal, most of what I see described as "feminism" pisses me off. Visit any feminist blog and you'll see that they've moved past equal rights and fair treatment, and are now more concerned with absolving women of all responsibility for any situation they might ever find themselves in.
But I must point out that your anecdote here has nothing whatsoever to do with feminists. Putting more female rape victims in jail is not part of any feminist agenda. And it has little to do with liberalism, either: the law in question was surely a state law, and Wisconsin seems pretty evenly split on the statewide level.
This judge is basically stating "even though company X created this work, and owns the rights to it, they should not be able to restrict how it is distributed".
No, that's not what he's saying at all. RTFA. He's not invalidating copyright, he's just disputing the amount of damages that the record company claims they've suffered.
Hmm, can I go to my local car dealership and tell them "hey I think i am going to take one of your cars off the lot and not pay you for it"...no I would get arrested if i did that.
Surely you see the difference between taking a car -- leaving the dealership with one less car on the lot -- and making a copy of a file.
If you don't own the rights to it then you do not have a say as to how it is distribtued/used unless the OWNER gives you that right.
Ownership is a concept invented to deal with scarcity: if an object can only be in one place at a time, then we need some way to decide who can use it and where. I can't drive a car to Seattle at the same time you're driving it to New York, so one of us has to lose. Even without a legal concept of ownership, it would still have a de-facto owner: whoever got to it first, perhaps, or whoever was strong enough to push the other guy out the door.
This concept, however, makes little sense when applied to information. A number, or an MP3 file, could be used by every single person on the planet at the same time, and nobody's use would interfere with anyone else's. There's no need to restrict how, when, or where it may be used.
You mistakenly assume that No Sale=Incorrect Pricing.
No, he didn't. In fact, he didn't say anything about "incorrect pricing", and the idea is silly to begin with: there is no "correct" price for any product, only a price that any given customer will be willing to pay.
No matter where you set the price, it's likely that someone still won't be willing to pay it. That doesn't mean you should lower your price to zero; you should set the price wherever you think you can make the most profit.
But the question is, what happens to the people who aren't willing to pay your price? Should they have to go without your product just because they'd only be willing to pay $9 instead of $10? For physical products, the answer is an easy "yes", because the alternative is to take away one of your products without compensating you for it, leaving you poorer. But for something that can be copied at no cost, without making you any poorer, it seems to me the answer is an obvious "no". A situation where one party gains and the other breaks even is better overall than a situation where both parties break even.
Sure, I have philosophical differences with the RIAA, but even absent those I'd still be a thief if I was sure I could get away with it.
I'd strip you bare in a heartbeat if I wanted your stuff and could do so with no risk.
Then you're worse than any copyright violator I've met.
I'd download an album without thinking twice about it, but I wouldn't even consider stealing that same album from a store or a private collection. There is a serious moral difference between taking money away from someone, and declining to give them some of your own money.
In other words, "Your crappy music is not worth its iTunes price [to me]".
Incorrect. The artist made a choice to perform that work long before any pirate had the chance to download the resulting song for free. No one forced him to make that choice; he did it freely, not as a "slave".
The actions of a pirate, months or years later, halfway across the world, whom the artist will never meet and whose actions the artist will never be aware of, cannot possibly reach back in time and change the circumstances under which the artist decided to work.
Your actions may leave them as an unprofitable business with significant, almost universal demand, which makes them a prime candidate for government subsidies.
The demand is for the act of writing and recording music, not for the record industry's present business model. Music has been around for much, much longer than any of the RIAA companies. If the record industry as we know it becomes unprofitable, a more likely outcome is that music will still be written and recorded, but it'll be funded through some other means.
Real change only happens in battleground states. In the other states it's the Democratic or Republican party machine that calls all the shots.
Just like it's the oligopoly of insurance companies that call the shots in that arena. If you don't like the policies that the existing companies are offering, too bad -- starting your own insurance company is a hell of a lot harder than running for office.
Looking at the long term, we can mostly solve the issue you're griping about by adopting a better election system. The Democratic and Republican parties face no real competition because our plurality voting method lends itself to two-party domination; approval voting or ranked choice voting would change the landscape.
We can't, however, really do anything to make it easier for others to compete with State Farm, at least without giving up the few protections we get from the current regulatory environment.
How to install a new motherboard without reinstalling Windows. It's not complicated.
I have a choice of which insurance company I deal with. If mine fucks me over I can go and find another one. I don't have this choice when it comes to DMV.
Actually, you do. The DMV, like any other government agency, is ultimately accountable to voters. You probably have a better chance at changing the DMV's policies, by lobbying your politicians or even running for office yourself, than you do at changing any insurance company's policies -- not that you have much of a chance either way, of course.