Oh, how about the 100 Microsoft asstroturfers who descend on every M$-related thread to bitch and moan because - horrors!
Some dude chimes in and says "stick to the facts", and he's an 'ass'troturfer. Actually, that'd be interesting if Microsoft paid people to use facts to back up their claims on Slashdot. I'd wanna chip in, too.
I'm unsettled because you are justifying the piracy of software by saying it's "ok" to take if the game is two years old.
I didn't justify anything or say anything is okay. This whole discussion is about lost income. That's all I'm talking about. I don't think games downloaded after two years really represent significant lost income. Please stop confusing my arguments with arguments other people have made.
This is the EXACT kind of weak-ass justifications that pirates tell themselves while they rob game developers of income. Which was the grandparent's entire point: if you're going to pirate games, don't waste our time and yours coming up with weak-ass justifications that wouldn't convince a kindergarten, and just admit you're pirating games because you're cheap.
I don't have any games I haven't paid for. I do, however, have games I've paid for but cannot play anymore through legitimate means. I am not alone. Meanwhile, 'robbed' game developers can't actually show that money would be in their account, otherwise. You're not operating with data here, merely assumptions.
If people didn't buy it, and people didn't pirate it, that would indicate that people don't want it. But that's basically the opposite scenario to the one we're talking about.
But that's what you suggested! You said if the copy restrictions are unacceptable, don't buy the game. How are they supposed to know it's because of the DRM?
It's not a given that copy protection doesn't work; you have to be pretty uber-nerd to even attempt to break copy protection on a PC game.
Every game has a crack. Anybody can apply a crack. It's not a huge learning curve. We agree about your point on console piracy.
Music store... music store... music store... this is relevant to video games, how?
Oh come on, meet me half way here. *Sigh* Okay: First off, the RIAA has been EXTREMELY vocal about piracy etc. Their minds were changed. That means the customers' message got through. Secondly, look at Slashdot right now. There's a bit about Spore and its DRM. It's on people's minds now. EA's having to look at the issue. Rewind a day or two, and there's the story about the Gamer's Bill of Rights, which includes a NOCD version of games being released a month after the initial launch. It's a topic of discussion and it's already caused closed-minds to reconsider. Relevent and important.
If they bought it, why would they download it from a filesharing site? You're making no damned sense.
Lots of reasons. (Deja vu, I was just telling somebody this yesterday.) Some cracks only work on a particular version of the binary file so it's beneficial to download the app along with it. People wanting to rid themselves of needing the CD can just download the cracked version, in full, and have that ready to reinstall. Some are people who have lost or damaged their CD and simply want to replace it. I've actually met people who download this stuff just to have it. Like it's a scavenger hunt or something. Maybe they barter with it? I don't know.
Game consoles require the CD to play, and those seem to be doing pretty well. (What's obnoxious is BOTH requiring the CD AND requiring a bunch of disk space for the install. One of the many reasons I've stopped buying PC games altogether.)
Boy do I agree with you about how much easier it is with console games. I wanted to go buy Spore until I found out how restrictive its copy restriction is. WTF. I just want to play the game, not 'register' it. To answer your question, CD-ROM drives in PCs server different duties from consoles. It's a much bigger pain to swap out discs on a PC for a game when other things are going on. It's the nature of the beast. Game consoles also have a different audience and differently natured hardware that seem to side-step the issue. I imagine part of it is simply that consoles that can store games is a recent thing. I'll tell you something I'm not sure that you're aware of. People have found a way to generate ISO images from PSPs and store them on Memory Sticks. My PSP has 8 or 9 games on it without any UMDs in it. All of them are legit, but two of them I did download instead of rip. It was just easier.
"It's ok if they take our product without paying for it, because our product has been released for 2 years." Christ, you're doing EXACTLY what the grandparent was talking about: justifying your piracy with a LAME excuse.
That isn't what I said. By the time 2 years have gone by, the game is typically no longer availble for sale. Many of the people will no longer be able to easily dig up their copy of it. Etc. There's really a number of reasons why somebody'd go download it later. Settle down.
What would you SUGGEST publishers do in response to stories like this?... Seriously, do you know anything about how humans beings behave at all?
Why do you think I'm annoyed with their stance on piracy? Why do you think I suggested making the DRM worthless instead of trying to convince ppl to throttle back the on-line downloads? I totally hear you, man. They let a train of though run away from them the legit customers were bitten.
The correct response, if there's a product you're not interested in buying (for ANY reason, including invasive DRM), the correct response is not to buy it. Pirating the product anyway just encourages more DRM in the future, it sends this message to the game's publishers: "gamers are criminals"
Not buying it sends the message to game publishers that people don't want the game. It's no more informative than that. If the game is highly pirated but sales are low, they'll start asking questions like if the price was too high. If it's a given that copy protection won't work, they won't have much other choice than to find out why.
Oh yeah? Link me. If it's been "disproven," you should have a myriad of sources and examples to back that up.
And you don't think it was at least partially because they knew releasing it on Mac would be a mistake, after the disaster that was the Halo 1 Mac release?
In this case, no. Microsoft was pushing Vista. I remember when Halo was first shown. As I recall, it was developed on the Mac and intended to be easily ported. I'm no expert on the Halo franchise, but I really really doubt there was much reason why the game engine used absolutely had to run on Vista but not XP. That was rather evil of Microsoft.
Doesn't matter; the fact is a ton of people were enjoying their game without paying for it. It doesn't matter *why* they were pirating the game.
It does matter because it isn't a fact that a ton of people were enjoying the game without paying for it. The only fact is that there were people downloading it from websites. We don't know how many of them had paid for it. This issue is muddy because games like this require the CD to play and that's really f'n abnoxious. Lots of people go download the pirated copy because of that. It's also really important to know WHEN that level of piracy hit. If it wasn't until two yeas after the release of the game, it's virtually meaningless.
Of course it did, and despite that protection it was pirated to hell and back. Thus proving that they should have use more invasive DRM in the future.
Nope. a.) It would have been cracked anyway without taking significantly longer. b.) The invasive DRM would have strengthened the demand for a cracked copy. c.) It's entirely possible, and likely, that invasive DRM would have made some people sit back and wait for the cracked copy to come along so they can avoid all that BS. There is absolutely no guarantee that they would enjoy any more sales.
Thus proving the point of the grandparent that started off this entire discussion. (To paraphrase: if you really don't like DRM, you wouldn't prove to games/music/movie companies that it's needed by pirating their products.)
That cannot be proven until it is proven that restrictive copy protection would actually increase sales. Worse, it has been disproven by recent decisions to stop using it.
"I'm not talking about Halo 3, I'm talking about Halo. The first one."
That was my fault man, I apologize. I don't know why I read 'Halo 3', but it wasn't because of anything you did. Again, sorry man. You are right in the sense that I'm not fully versed in those games in particular.
The reason there's no Halo 2 on Mac is because the original Halo was pirated to hell and back on that platform.
The game was a Vista and XBOX exclusive. That had nothing to do with piracy. MS didn't even want them playing on XP.
(Some estimates were that over 50% of the copies in circulation were pirated copies.)
Okay. So what does that actually mean? Would they have sold twice as many copies? Did 100% of the people decide they wanted the noCD version? Nobody knows. It can't be proven. Even if a high piracy rate did kill Halo 2 on the Mac, which isn't what happened but I'll run with it anyway, the game did have protection.
Piracy has killed several games in the past, notably Starsiege: Tribes, which was released with no copy protection or DRM and had many times more illegitimate users than legitimate ones.
That doesn't mean all that much. If lots of copies went around but the company never received a rightful profit, then I'd totally back you up on that. But... more pirated copies than not? Starsiege came out in 1999. It hasn't been on shelves in ages. Of COURSE it's going to have more illegit copies out there. The same's true for Starcraft and just about any other game that's heavily played in recent years. As for Halo 3, it had bigger problems than Mac people not ponying up. Yet, it still went on to sell over 8 million copies.
Of course all the games you mentioned came with copy protection/DRM. The only thing it really shows is that, hey, copy protection is effective, at least for PC games.
Not really, no. At best all it shows that a popular game will make lots of money despite piracy.
I think you have this backwards. The Dark Knight isn't popular in spite of bootlegs, it's bootlegged because it's popular. The same goes for apps. Of course the most-downloaded apps have the highest sales -- they're the ones everybody wants!
That isn't at all what I said. I said with a movie as popular as that, we should have seen damage caused by piracy.
How do I know that the people on those sites haven't bought what they're downloading? Partly because of the nature of the content (e.g. pre-release rips and other things they can't possibly have bought). Partly because of the language used (the word "warez" pops up frequently, for instance). Partly because many of the downloaders are college students on high-speed connections who don't have $50 to spend on a game (I was one a few years ago). Partly because of human nature. Plus, if you already own the content, why download an extra full-copy?
I hear what you're saying, man. But the problem is a sudden in-flux of people not paying for stuff should be quite measurable, but it's not happening. For all these college student ware-downloading penny pinchers running on human nature, we're not able to find a dent with their footprint on it. Don't get me wrong, I can see very clearly where you're coming from. I totally see how you'd arrive at that conclusion. Heck, I was that college student, too. But I can't say there is a huge number of people doing that when there is no evidence of it. I just don't know. I am not omniscient.
By the way, I do have a few of answers to your question:
1. Lots of cracks only work on very specific binaries. The version you have of software may not match the version that has the crack. Therefore, it's good to have the app that goes with the crack.
2. Most BT clients can let you pick and choose which files to bring down. Often the crack is seperate so you can easily just download that little bit. So there's really no need to host it seperately from the torrent itself. That's why it's difficult to find that one episode of M*A*S*H you're looking for as its own torrent. They just put up the whole 15 gig tracker and you pick and choose what you really want to come down.
3. CDs are a big pain in the ass. Most of us have 500+ gig drives, right? It's handy to have that installer there, too. I can tell you that from personal experience. I have cracked software that I've paid for. The software was at version 9 when I bought it, and the cracked version I have is for version 9.3. It's more convenient for me to install the 9.3 because the 9.0 has to be followed by the upgrade to 9.3.
BitTorrent is not the same sort of thing as using newsgroups or HTTP/FTP transfers or whatever. It's a different animal and as such you really cannot draw those conclusions so definitively.
I think you're also getting confused about who I'm talking about. I think the vast majority of *file-sharers* are after free stuff. The majority of the *general population*, on the other hand, doesn't have the expertise to go hunting through torrents and deal with codecs and whatnot.
I beg to differ. First off, it is very easy to download and watch movies and to pirate in general. Secondly, thanks to the MPAA's campaign to tell people not to download movies, everybody knows they can do it. Third, Napster created a huge circus before broadband penetration was even significant. It's not a small handful of people.
You are correct that there are many reasons for people to download files. However, if it were true that most people are motivated by something other than getting stuff for free, the bootleg scene itself would be vastly different than it is today. At the very least, there would be much less emphasis on full copies of new and unreleased content.
I maintan that if the picture were as bleak as you say, there'd be actual measurable damage instead of an increase in revenue. I'll grant
DRM/copy protection has "never worked" for video games, either. But virtually all video games released still have it... so it looks like your filesharing movement is falling down on the job there, huh?
Some games are going out of their way to not have that protection anymore. Customers are growing more and more dissatisfied with the restrictions these 'protections' have put in place. Music stores aren't using DRM anymore. So, sorry, no, it's not 'falling down on the job'.
Maybe right now, 5% of bittorrent traffic is legit, and maybe that 5% is growing every year (assuming you mean 'growing' as a percentage of total traffic, not as a number of downloads), but that doesn't change the fact that 95% of bittorrent traffic is copyright infringement.
There is no 'fact' about anything you said. You think it's 5%, and you used the word 'maybe'. You don't know the actual percentage anymore than I do. It's like saying the internet is 95% porn. It sure seems that way, but really, nobody knows.
The POINT is that you can't go around crying, "there's no such thing as virtual property! information wants to be free!" and also support HIPAA/medical privacy laws. If you do, you're a hypocrite.
I didn't say anything like that. That doesn't really matter, though, for the reasons I've already mentioned. You should read my other long-winded post in this thread, it clarifies my view more.
That's a pretty damned thin argument. "arguably" a significant chunk of people know how to burn DVDs that will play in an Xbox, and/or modify the hardware of their Xbox to allow it? Seriously? If I were to be extremely, extremely generous, I'd say that's 10% of console owners, but I think 10% is still a vast over-estimation. Either way, without showing exactly what that percentage is, your entire argument dissolves away.
Okay. I wasn't aware you had to mod the XBOX to play the torrent. I'll grant you that, you win that one. So... what about every PC Game ever made? Why didn't piracy kill Quake, StarCraft, Warcraft, The Sims, etc?
But I still think the file-sharing movement is about free stuff. I base this on the visible content of the popular torrent search sites, which curiously nobody else seems to be mentioning. Abstract arguments and anecdotes are not very convincing. Look at the isoHunt site. Actually go there and look at it. Do you think the people downloading zero-day cam rips of The Dark Knight are motivated by ideology? There's no DRM on a movie screen, and it's easy to wait a couple months until you can see the movie in a cheaper theater or a matinee showing.
I don't know where these people come from. You've got a point, all this content's showing up on it, whose doing it? But I have a counter question: If the number of people doing it is so high, why is Dark Knight coming close to reaching Titanic's success? Do you honestly believe that the DVD is going to flop? It's hard to say that the number of people going for strictly for free stuff. Since nobody can actually pinpoint any damage, it's not easy to answer your question. We don't know that the people downloading it never saw the movie. We don't know that the person won't purchase the DVD. Heck, we don't know if somebody dl'd it, watched it, didn't pay for it otherwise, but was first in line for the sequel. As I said, you still have to show damage. Everybody has their own reasons for downloading stuff. The question is whether or not the majority of that reason is to avoid paying for it. I don't deny that zero-day Dark Knight rips look compelling, but dude, you picked the most successful movie of the summer as your example of how people are 'stealing'.
I sympathize with your problems, but you haven't answered my main question: if you don't like the terms of a sale, why should you get the item for free instead of just not buying it?
Unfortunately I'm not somebody to ask about zero-day rips. However, there are at least two reasons I can think of. First is that there's often a delay between when a movie is released in the US and when it arrives in other countries. All that hype, and blammo, lots of people get to see it first, and you get to spend the next two months dodging sites dripping with spoilers. Are they right to do so? Nah, not really. On the other hand, we're starting to see more releases that are closer together. Hmmm. The other? They just liked it and wanted to have it. I mean, you're going to potentially spend days downloading something, right? Might as well download what ya like! Of course I'm being speculative, here, but it's an academic discussion until we get a clearer view of what's motivating people.
Nor have most of the people downloading games or apps bought them.
Honestly dude, you have no way of knowing that. You have absolutely no way on Earth to know that. Wanna know the funny thing? Take the most pirated apps out there, for example, and usually you'll find that they're also the most successful in the marketplace. Let me put it another way: If Adobe snapped its fingers and all pirated versions of Photoshop suddenly stopped working, would their revenue stream double within a year? Mm?
And as for content providers calling us thieves, the only place I hear that is Slashdot and other copyright-obsessed news sites
I just quoted you once on it, go look it up. Also go look up the levies passed in Canada on blank media, if you live there, you're being charged for the bootlegging you haven't done yet. In the US, the story is similar, only it's with blank casette tapes. Do you use Windows XP? Have you bumped into their copy restriction scheme that sniffs your hardware? That took quite a bit of work to set up. Not just the coding, but all the support staff needed to be around 24-7 to deal with unlock-related customer problems. Yep, Microsoft sure thinks highly of you, there. The broadcast flag? How about Michael Eisner having a go at Apple because of their rip-mix-and-burn ca
That reason is fairly obvious: If DRM never works, there's no point in them using it. And gee golly gosh, now we're seeing music sites dropping it. It's funny what an expression of demand can cause.
And then come the excuses. "What about people downloading Linux ISOs?". Yeah, I'm sure there are *tons* of people downloading Linux ISOs 24/7/365, because *none* of those distributions have auto-updating package managers.
I've seen quite a few legit torrents, Linux and otherwise. It's a great way to send >1 gig files. I just purchased Modo today, for example, and I recieved a BT link to over a gig of training videos for it. When Buck Bunny, the Blender-made movie came out, you could not only download the huge-ass HD video, but you could also download all their content to play with. BT has plenty of legit uses and it's growing.
"How dare they cap my bandwidth, they advertised unlimited usage!". Except that no resource is unlimited in practice, and a site full of IT people suggesting ISPs design their networks for 24/7/365 full-throttle illegal usage is laughable.
So, in other words, they should never have used the word 'unlimited', right? Incidentally, it's not like 'illegal' usage is going to bog the network down more than 'legal' usage. Thanks to streaming video, there's lots of ways to spend lots of bandwidth. Heck, ask anybody with an XBOX 360. They oversold their capacity, that's not the pirates' fault.
"File-sharing increases sales for content-producers!". Do you really think iTMS would ever have gotten off the ground if Napster had spent the last decade alive and at full strength?
How do you think iTunes ever got off the ground? Haven't you ever wondered what made the music industry stop and say "Hmm.. maybe we should give this digital music thing a try?" Well, let me put it this way: They looooooooooved selling CDs. Albums, mind you. They loved charging everybody ~$20 for ~10 crappy songs. Then, one day, millions of people are downloading, ripping, and otherwise getting music onto their computers and eventually their MP3 players. But here's the funny thing, they're not really tightwads. $400 for an iPod, fill'er up.
You're asking how long iTunes would have been around when Napster was at 'full strength'. I have a counter-question: How long would it have taken for iTunes to get off the ground if Napster had never been around to show the world that a huge market existed?
"What if a company wants to spread your medical records around? Aren't those just "imaginary property"?"
What if I download an MP3 file and it stops a full-scale alien invasion? We can invent lots of scenarios, but let's try to keep it on Earth. My medical records going around can actually do me harm. I'd rather not let my enemies know that I'm allergic to peanuts.;)
Where are the cries of "that's not stealing, nothing was physically lost"?
I think an emptying of a bank account would classify as 'physically lost'. In the case of music or movie downloads, the worst case scenario is the potential non-sale. The big question is how is that potential really turning out? GTA4 was a VERY highly anticipated game. Everybody was waiting for it. Arguably, a significant chunk of the XBOX 360 and PS3 populace would know how to download a torrent and burn it. The game was leaked a week before release. It made $500 million dollars. Fascinating. The RIAA claimed that a billion songs a month were flying around the internet without authorization, the implication being that a ridiculous amount of people were busy avoiding spending money on music. Profits are up over the years. Weird. Why is that happening?
Anyone who can tell their ass from a hole in the ground can see that this sil
Yes there is. Right there on my screen there's a little icon of two computers talking. It tells me that in the last 30 days I've sent 45 gigabytes and received 89 gigabytes.
I've got a few questions for you:
1.) Is that the 'Connection Status' screen that comes up in Windows XP when you right click on a NIC and hit 'properties'? If not, could you tell me what that is you're using?
2.) If it is that screen, can you point out how to get it to tell the difference between a network transfer vs. an internet transfer?
3.) How are you taking multiple machines and devices such as iPod Touches into account? (They can view YouTube, for example.)
4.) If somebody taps into your wireless lan, how are you measuring their bandwidth usage, too?
I'd appreciate it very much if someone could please explain to me, how is it possible that one company sells something at a loss and it's called "dumping" (which you can get in trouble for, IIUC), and another company sells something at a loss and it's called a "loss leader?" Wtf?/quote
As I recall, 'dumping' is when you sell a product considerably more cheaply in one country than in another. For example: If Sony sold the PS3 in the US for $200, but the equivalent of $700 in Japan, that'd be 'dumping'.
I'd be curious to see an expense report comparing the amount they've spent on legal fees during this whole campaign to the return on investment.
Considering they haven't actually been able to show a loss to begin with, I doubt what you're asking for is possible. So far, they seem more worried about people maybe/possibly going out of their way to avoid paying for stuff than about actual measurable drops in their revenue stream. I wouldn't mind, but it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Spamming every news and discussion board on the Net with fake hysterics over that simple cut and paste mistake was the only thing the Firefox fans could try to do to stop the flood of people dumping Firefox for Chrome?
I still can't picture Chrome actually causing a 'flood' of people instantaneously dumping any browser. It's neat, but not that exciting.
I wasnt touching this one for a while because I really have limited patience for fanboys.
I hear ya, man. Consequences suck, eh? In any event, I sympathize totally.
No facts to refute, no pithy remarks, not even a thinly veiled insult? This proves me a fanboy how? here's a dictionary link to the word fanboy. You've well and truly failed here good sir.
I know you're just super eager to declare victory here, but it just ain't doing much to bother me. Sorry. You know how you came across. You also know how it looks when you continue doing it with every reply. It's entertaining, to say the least, especially when you try to claim the high ground in order to avoid my point.
At least you managed the pithy remark here, I'll give you half a credit for that.
It wouldn't have much impact if it didn't have a little truth to it.
You might also learn the difference between spelling and grammar.
Your spelling of 'know' was really really bad. I didn't bother researching the grammatical ramifications of it. I wouldn't have had time, that wasn't your only typo, Mr. Kettle.
In fact I'm going to stop here, this is a waste of my time and valuable cynic skills answering a fanboy who's best answers were "He. Un huh" and "Hehe" and which both set off my moron alarm and spell checker and of course completely attempts to avoid answering questions which could prove you wrong, but if you did this you might see some logic which would completely shatter your fanboy world.
That's convenient. You wouldn't want to address my most deatailed point, would you? Very classy.
This whole thing started because you could not take a joke...
By your own admission, your joke failed.
(chief among them the SIM lock and lack of a 3G modem functionality, both points that you have conveniently and repeatedly ignored)
Actually I did acknowledge the SIM card problem. It was in the huge chunk of text you skipped for frivilous reasons in a vain attempt to sound superior. Amusingly, it's completely inconsequential. I am not, nor was I ever trying to sell you on the iPhone. For somebody claiming he doesn't act like a fanboy, you're sure doing a lot of not-listening.
your much vaunted JesusPhone 3G...
Yep, I'm the fanboy here. Mmmm hmm. No signs of that coming from you, no siree.
...oh I wont bother reading any replies as I don't really want to give you any more material to troll over as I consider it an insult to decent material...
Who do you think you're bullshitting? We both know the real reason.
Slashdot Mirror
What if someone stole my iPhone 3G and committed a crime? Will I be tracked and punished?
Well, if you're sitting in an interrogation room, and AT&T says your phone is in Disneyland, probably not.
Oh, how about the 100 Microsoft asstroturfers who descend on every M$-related thread to bitch and moan because - horrors!
Some dude chimes in and says "stick to the facts", and he's an 'ass'troturfer. Actually, that'd be interesting if Microsoft paid people to use facts to back up their claims on Slashdot. I'd wanna chip in, too.
uh.. Someone did notice. He got caught remember?
Yeah, they caught him immediately after he dialed a line that charged $45,000 a minute.
"The 70's called...." I can't bring myself to say the rest....
BURN!!!
Pussy Nazi Sez
No pussy for YOU!
Ha, right, because it's sooooo easy to picture you anonymously trolling on Slashdot during orgy breaks.
Or is SkyNet just fucking with us now?
Terminator was not a cautionary tale.
Almost as sad as the first one...
(If this doesn't get modded Insightful, I'm going to question the sanity of those who enjoy Shia LaBeouf's acting.)
Great. Let's use mod-points to fuel a popularity contest based on who likes what movie. Super cool.
I'm unsettled because you are justifying the piracy of software by saying it's "ok" to take if the game is two years old.
I didn't justify anything or say anything is okay. This whole discussion is about lost income. That's all I'm talking about. I don't think games downloaded after two years really represent significant lost income. Please stop confusing my arguments with arguments other people have made.
This is the EXACT kind of weak-ass justifications that pirates tell themselves while they rob game developers of income. Which was the grandparent's entire point: if you're going to pirate games, don't waste our time and yours coming up with weak-ass justifications that wouldn't convince a kindergarten, and just admit you're pirating games because you're cheap.
I don't have any games I haven't paid for. I do, however, have games I've paid for but cannot play anymore through legitimate means. I am not alone. Meanwhile, 'robbed' game developers can't actually show that money would be in their account, otherwise. You're not operating with data here, merely assumptions.
If people didn't buy it, and people didn't pirate it, that would indicate that people don't want it. But that's basically the opposite scenario to the one we're talking about.
But that's what you suggested! You said if the copy restrictions are unacceptable, don't buy the game. How are they supposed to know it's because of the DRM?
It's not a given that copy protection doesn't work; you have to be pretty uber-nerd to even attempt to break copy protection on a PC game.
Every game has a crack. Anybody can apply a crack. It's not a huge learning curve. We agree about your point on console piracy.
Music store... music store... music store... this is relevant to video games, how?
Oh come on, meet me half way here. *Sigh* Okay: First off, the RIAA has been EXTREMELY vocal about piracy etc. Their minds were changed. That means the customers' message got through. Secondly, look at Slashdot right now. There's a bit about Spore and its DRM. It's on people's minds now. EA's having to look at the issue. Rewind a day or two, and there's the story about the Gamer's Bill of Rights, which includes a NOCD version of games being released a month after the initial launch. It's a topic of discussion and it's already caused closed-minds to reconsider. Relevent and important.
If they bought it, why would they download it from a filesharing site? You're making no damned sense.
Lots of reasons. (Deja vu, I was just telling somebody this yesterday.) Some cracks only work on a particular version of the binary file so it's beneficial to download the app along with it. People wanting to rid themselves of needing the CD can just download the cracked version, in full, and have that ready to reinstall. Some are people who have lost or damaged their CD and simply want to replace it. I've actually met people who download this stuff just to have it. Like it's a scavenger hunt or something. Maybe they barter with it? I don't know.
Game consoles require the CD to play, and those seem to be doing pretty well. (What's obnoxious is BOTH requiring the CD AND requiring a bunch of disk space for the install. One of the many reasons I've stopped buying PC games altogether.)
Boy do I agree with you about how much easier it is with console games. I wanted to go buy Spore until I found out how restrictive its copy restriction is. WTF. I just want to play the game, not 'register' it. To answer your question, CD-ROM drives in PCs server different duties from consoles. It's a much bigger pain to swap out discs on a PC for a game when other things are going on. It's the nature of the beast. Game consoles also have a different audience and differently natured hardware that seem to side-step the issue. I imagine part of it is simply that consoles that can store games is a recent thing. I'll tell you something I'm not sure that you're aware of. People have found a way to generate ISO images from PSPs and store them on Memory Sticks. My PSP has 8 or 9 games on it without any UMDs in it. All of them are legit, but two of them I did download instead of rip. It was just easier.
"It's ok if they take our product without paying for it, because our product has been released for 2 years." Christ, you're doing EXACTLY what the grandparent was talking about: justifying your piracy with a LAME excuse.
That isn't what I said. By the time 2 years have gone by, the game is typically no longer availble for sale. Many of the people will no longer be able to easily dig up their copy of it. Etc. There's really a number of reasons why somebody'd go download it later. Settle down.
What would you SUGGEST publishers do in response to stories like this? ... Seriously, do you know anything about how humans beings behave at all?
Why do you think I'm annoyed with their stance on piracy? Why do you think I suggested making the DRM worthless instead of trying to convince ppl to throttle back the on-line downloads? I totally hear you, man. They let a train of though run away from them the legit customers were bitten.
The correct response, if there's a product you're not interested in buying (for ANY reason, including invasive DRM), the correct response is not to buy it. Pirating the product anyway just encourages more DRM in the future, it sends this message to the game's publishers: "gamers are criminals"
Not buying it sends the message to game publishers that people don't want the game. It's no more informative than that. If the game is highly pirated but sales are low, they'll start asking questions like if the price was too high. If it's a given that copy protection won't work, they won't have much other choice than to find out why.
Oh yeah? Link me. If it's been "disproven," you should have a myriad of sources and examples to back that up.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/09/yahoo-music-to-recor.html
And you don't think it was at least partially because they knew releasing it on Mac would be a mistake, after the disaster that was the Halo 1 Mac release?
In this case, no. Microsoft was pushing Vista. I remember when Halo was first shown. As I recall, it was developed on the Mac and intended to be easily ported. I'm no expert on the Halo franchise, but I really really doubt there was much reason why the game engine used absolutely had to run on Vista but not XP. That was rather evil of Microsoft.
Doesn't matter; the fact is a ton of people were enjoying their game without paying for it. It doesn't matter *why* they were pirating the game.
It does matter because it isn't a fact that a ton of people were enjoying the game without paying for it. The only fact is that there were people downloading it from websites. We don't know how many of them had paid for it. This issue is muddy because games like this require the CD to play and that's really f'n abnoxious. Lots of people go download the pirated copy because of that. It's also really important to know WHEN that level of piracy hit. If it wasn't until two yeas after the release of the game, it's virtually meaningless.
Of course it did, and despite that protection it was pirated to hell and back. Thus proving that they should have use more invasive DRM in the future.
Nope. a.) It would have been cracked anyway without taking significantly longer. b.) The invasive DRM would have strengthened the demand for a cracked copy. c.) It's entirely possible, and likely, that invasive DRM would have made some people sit back and wait for the cracked copy to come along so they can avoid all that BS. There is absolutely no guarantee that they would enjoy any more sales.
Thus proving the point of the grandparent that started off this entire discussion. (To paraphrase: if you really don't like DRM, you wouldn't prove to games/music/movie companies that it's needed by pirating their products.)
That cannot be proven until it is proven that restrictive copy protection would actually increase sales. Worse, it has been disproven by recent decisions to stop using it.
"I'm not talking about Halo 3, I'm talking about Halo. The first one."
That was my fault man, I apologize. I don't know why I read 'Halo 3', but it wasn't because of anything you did. Again, sorry man. You are right in the sense that I'm not fully versed in those games in particular.
The reason there's no Halo 2 on Mac is because the original Halo was pirated to hell and back on that platform.
The game was a Vista and XBOX exclusive. That had nothing to do with piracy. MS didn't even want them playing on XP.
(Some estimates were that over 50% of the copies in circulation were pirated copies.)
Okay. So what does that actually mean? Would they have sold twice as many copies? Did 100% of the people decide they wanted the noCD version? Nobody knows. It can't be proven. Even if a high piracy rate did kill Halo 2 on the Mac, which isn't what happened but I'll run with it anyway, the game did have protection.
Piracy has killed several games in the past, notably Starsiege: Tribes, which was released with no copy protection or DRM and had many times more illegitimate users than legitimate ones.
That doesn't mean all that much. If lots of copies went around but the company never received a rightful profit, then I'd totally back you up on that. But... more pirated copies than not? Starsiege came out in 1999. It hasn't been on shelves in ages. Of COURSE it's going to have more illegit copies out there. The same's true for Starcraft and just about any other game that's heavily played in recent years. As for Halo 3, it had bigger problems than Mac people not ponying up. Yet, it still went on to sell over 8 million copies.
Of course all the games you mentioned came with copy protection/DRM. The only thing it really shows is that, hey, copy protection is effective, at least for PC games.
Not really, no. At best all it shows that a popular game will make lots of money despite piracy.
I think you have this backwards. The Dark Knight isn't popular in spite of bootlegs, it's bootlegged because it's popular. The same goes for apps. Of course the most-downloaded apps have the highest sales -- they're the ones everybody wants!
That isn't at all what I said. I said with a movie as popular as that, we should have seen damage caused by piracy.
How do I know that the people on those sites haven't bought what they're downloading? Partly because of the nature of the content (e.g. pre-release rips and other things they can't possibly have bought). Partly because of the language used (the word "warez" pops up frequently, for instance). Partly because many of the downloaders are college students on high-speed connections who don't have $50 to spend on a game (I was one a few years ago). Partly because of human nature. Plus, if you already own the content, why download an extra full-copy?
I hear what you're saying, man. But the problem is a sudden in-flux of people not paying for stuff should be quite measurable, but it's not happening. For all these college student ware-downloading penny pinchers running on human nature, we're not able to find a dent with their footprint on it. Don't get me wrong, I can see very clearly where you're coming from. I totally see how you'd arrive at that conclusion. Heck, I was that college student, too. But I can't say there is a huge number of people doing that when there is no evidence of it. I just don't know. I am not omniscient.
By the way, I do have a few of answers to your question:
1. Lots of cracks only work on very specific binaries. The version you have of software may not match the version that has the crack. Therefore, it's good to have the app that goes with the crack.
2. Most BT clients can let you pick and choose which files to bring down. Often the crack is seperate so you can easily just download that little bit. So there's really no need to host it seperately from the torrent itself. That's why it's difficult to find that one episode of M*A*S*H you're looking for as its own torrent. They just put up the whole 15 gig tracker and you pick and choose what you really want to come down.
3. CDs are a big pain in the ass. Most of us have 500+ gig drives, right? It's handy to have that installer there, too. I can tell you that from personal experience. I have cracked software that I've paid for. The software was at version 9 when I bought it, and the cracked version I have is for version 9.3. It's more convenient for me to install the 9.3 because the 9.0 has to be followed by the upgrade to 9.3.
BitTorrent is not the same sort of thing as using newsgroups or HTTP/FTP transfers or whatever. It's a different animal and as such you really cannot draw those conclusions so definitively.
I think you're also getting confused about who I'm talking about. I think the vast majority of *file-sharers* are after free stuff. The majority of the *general population*, on the other hand, doesn't have the expertise to go hunting through torrents and deal with codecs and whatnot.
I beg to differ. First off, it is very easy to download and watch movies and to pirate in general. Secondly, thanks to the MPAA's campaign to tell people not to download movies, everybody knows they can do it. Third, Napster created a huge circus before broadband penetration was even significant. It's not a small handful of people.
You are correct that there are many reasons for people to download files. However, if it were true that most people are motivated by something other than getting stuff for free, the bootleg scene itself would be vastly different than it is today. At the very least, there would be much less emphasis on full copies of new and unreleased content.
I maintan that if the picture were as bleak as you say, there'd be actual measurable damage instead of an increase in revenue. I'll grant
DRM/copy protection has "never worked" for video games, either. But virtually all video games released still have it... so it looks like your filesharing movement is falling down on the job there, huh?
Some games are going out of their way to not have that protection anymore. Customers are growing more and more dissatisfied with the restrictions these 'protections' have put in place. Music stores aren't using DRM anymore. So, sorry, no, it's not 'falling down on the job'.
Maybe right now, 5% of bittorrent traffic is legit, and maybe that 5% is growing every year (assuming you mean 'growing' as a percentage of total traffic, not as a number of downloads), but that doesn't change the fact that 95% of bittorrent traffic is copyright infringement.
There is no 'fact' about anything you said. You think it's 5%, and you used the word 'maybe'. You don't know the actual percentage anymore than I do. It's like saying the internet is 95% porn. It sure seems that way, but really, nobody knows.
The POINT is that you can't go around crying, "there's no such thing as virtual property! information wants to be free!" and also support HIPAA/medical privacy laws. If you do, you're a hypocrite.
I didn't say anything like that. That doesn't really matter, though, for the reasons I've already mentioned. You should read my other long-winded post in this thread, it clarifies my view more.
That's a pretty damned thin argument. "arguably" a significant chunk of people know how to burn DVDs that will play in an Xbox, and/or modify the hardware of their Xbox to allow it? Seriously? If I were to be extremely, extremely generous, I'd say that's 10% of console owners, but I think 10% is still a vast over-estimation. Either way, without showing exactly what that percentage is, your entire argument dissolves away.
Okay. I wasn't aware you had to mod the XBOX to play the torrent. I'll grant you that, you win that one. So... what about every PC Game ever made? Why didn't piracy kill Quake, StarCraft, Warcraft, The Sims, etc?
But I still think the file-sharing movement is about free stuff. I base this on the visible content of the popular torrent search sites, which curiously nobody else seems to be mentioning. Abstract arguments and anecdotes are not very convincing. Look at the isoHunt site. Actually go there and look at it. Do you think the people downloading zero-day cam rips of The Dark Knight are motivated by ideology? There's no DRM on a movie screen, and it's easy to wait a couple months until you can see the movie in a cheaper theater or a matinee showing.
I don't know where these people come from. You've got a point, all this content's showing up on it, whose doing it? But I have a counter question: If the number of people doing it is so high, why is Dark Knight coming close to reaching Titanic's success? Do you honestly believe that the DVD is going to flop? It's hard to say that the number of people going for strictly for free stuff. Since nobody can actually pinpoint any damage, it's not easy to answer your question. We don't know that the people downloading it never saw the movie. We don't know that the person won't purchase the DVD. Heck, we don't know if somebody dl'd it, watched it, didn't pay for it otherwise, but was first in line for the sequel. As I said, you still have to show damage. Everybody has their own reasons for downloading stuff. The question is whether or not the majority of that reason is to avoid paying for it. I don't deny that zero-day Dark Knight rips look compelling, but dude, you picked the most successful movie of the summer as your example of how people are 'stealing'.
I sympathize with your problems, but you haven't answered my main question: if you don't like the terms of a sale, why should you get the item for free instead of just not buying it?
Unfortunately I'm not somebody to ask about zero-day rips. However, there are at least two reasons I can think of. First is that there's often a delay between when a movie is released in the US and when it arrives in other countries. All that hype, and blammo, lots of people get to see it first, and you get to spend the next two months dodging sites dripping with spoilers. Are they right to do so? Nah, not really. On the other hand, we're starting to see more releases that are closer together. Hmmm. The other? They just liked it and wanted to have it. I mean, you're going to potentially spend days downloading something, right? Might as well download what ya like! Of course I'm being speculative, here, but it's an academic discussion until we get a clearer view of what's motivating people.
Nor have most of the people downloading games or apps bought them.
Honestly dude, you have no way of knowing that. You have absolutely no way on Earth to know that. Wanna know the funny thing? Take the most pirated apps out there, for example, and usually you'll find that they're also the most successful in the marketplace. Let me put it another way: If Adobe snapped its fingers and all pirated versions of Photoshop suddenly stopped working, would their revenue stream double within a year? Mm?
And as for content providers calling us thieves, the only place I hear that is Slashdot and other copyright-obsessed news sites
I just quoted you once on it, go look it up. Also go look up the levies passed in Canada on blank media, if you live there, you're being charged for the bootlegging you haven't done yet. In the US, the story is similar, only it's with blank casette tapes. Do you use Windows XP? Have you bumped into their copy restriction scheme that sniffs your hardware? That took quite a bit of work to set up. Not just the coding, but all the support staff needed to be around 24-7 to deal with unlock-related customer problems. Yep, Microsoft sure thinks highly of you, there. The broadcast flag? How about Michael Eisner having a go at Apple because of their rip-mix-and-burn ca
on't like DRM? Why help push it into existence?
That reason is fairly obvious: If DRM never works, there's no point in them using it. And gee golly gosh, now we're seeing music sites dropping it. It's funny what an expression of demand can cause.
And then come the excuses. "What about people downloading Linux ISOs?". Yeah, I'm sure there are *tons* of people downloading Linux ISOs 24/7/365, because *none* of those distributions have auto-updating package managers.
I've seen quite a few legit torrents, Linux and otherwise. It's a great way to send >1 gig files. I just purchased Modo today, for example, and I recieved a BT link to over a gig of training videos for it. When Buck Bunny, the Blender-made movie came out, you could not only download the huge-ass HD video, but you could also download all their content to play with. BT has plenty of legit uses and it's growing.
"How dare they cap my bandwidth, they advertised unlimited usage!". Except that no resource is unlimited in practice, and a site full of IT people suggesting ISPs design their networks for 24/7/365 full-throttle illegal usage is laughable.
So, in other words, they should never have used the word 'unlimited', right? Incidentally, it's not like 'illegal' usage is going to bog the network down more than 'legal' usage. Thanks to streaming video, there's lots of ways to spend lots of bandwidth. Heck, ask anybody with an XBOX 360. They oversold their capacity, that's not the pirates' fault.
"File-sharing increases sales for content-producers!". Do you really think iTMS would ever have gotten off the ground if Napster had spent the last decade alive and at full strength?
How do you think iTunes ever got off the ground? Haven't you ever wondered what made the music industry stop and say "Hmm.. maybe we should give this digital music thing a try?" Well, let me put it this way: They looooooooooved selling CDs. Albums, mind you. They loved charging everybody ~$20 for ~10 crappy songs. Then, one day, millions of people are downloading, ripping, and otherwise getting music onto their computers and eventually their MP3 players. But here's the funny thing, they're not really tightwads. $400 for an iPod, fill'er up.
You're asking how long iTunes would have been around when Napster was at 'full strength'. I have a counter-question: How long would it have taken for iTunes to get off the ground if Napster had never been around to show the world that a huge market existed?
"What if a company wants to spread your medical records around? Aren't those just "imaginary property"?"
What if I download an MP3 file and it stops a full-scale alien invasion? We can invent lots of scenarios, but let's try to keep it on Earth. My medical records going around can actually do me harm. I'd rather not let my enemies know that I'm allergic to peanuts. ;)
Where are the cries of "that's not stealing, nothing was physically lost"?
I think an emptying of a bank account would classify as 'physically lost'. In the case of music or movie downloads, the worst case scenario is the potential non-sale. The big question is how is that potential really turning out? GTA4 was a VERY highly anticipated game. Everybody was waiting for it. Arguably, a significant chunk of the XBOX 360 and PS3 populace would know how to download a torrent and burn it. The game was leaked a week before release. It made $500 million dollars. Fascinating. The RIAA claimed that a billion songs a month were flying around the internet without authorization, the implication being that a ridiculous amount of people were busy avoiding spending money on music. Profits are up over the years. Weird. Why is that happening?
Anyone who can tell their ass from a hole in the ground can see that this sil
But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
Do you often get $20,000 bills?
Yes there is. Right there on my screen there's a little icon of two computers talking. It tells me that in the last 30 days I've sent 45 gigabytes and received 89 gigabytes.
I've got a few questions for you:
1.) Is that the 'Connection Status' screen that comes up in Windows XP when you right click on a NIC and hit 'properties'? If not, could you tell me what that is you're using?
2.) If it is that screen, can you point out how to get it to tell the difference between a network transfer vs. an internet transfer?
3.) How are you taking multiple machines and devices such as iPod Touches into account? (They can view YouTube, for example.)
4.) If somebody taps into your wireless lan, how are you measuring their bandwidth usage, too?
"Uh that is just two examples. How about the SNES, NES, Genesis, GBA, DS, PS2, PS1, etc?"
Small nitpick: The PS2 was sold at a loss, too. The only person arguing with that is 'Gord' and his 'evidence' is highly questionable.
I'd appreciate it very much if someone could please explain to me, how is it possible that one company sells something at a loss and it's called "dumping" (which you can get in trouble for, IIUC), and another company sells something at a loss and it's called a "loss leader?" Wtf?/quote
As I recall, 'dumping' is when you sell a product considerably more cheaply in one country than in another. For example: If Sony sold the PS3 in the US for $200, but the equivalent of $700 in Japan, that'd be 'dumping'.
Hopefully for both of us, my memory is correct. ;)
how bad search really was before Google.
Speak for yourself! Well, I did mostly search for porn back then...
I'd be curious to see an expense report comparing the amount they've spent on legal fees during this whole campaign to the return on investment.
Considering they haven't actually been able to show a loss to begin with, I doubt what you're asking for is possible. So far, they seem more worried about people maybe/possibly going out of their way to avoid paying for stuff than about actual measurable drops in their revenue stream. I wouldn't mind, but it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Spamming every news and discussion board on the Net with fake hysterics over that simple cut and paste mistake was the only thing the Firefox fans could try to do to stop the flood of people dumping Firefox for Chrome?
I still can't picture Chrome actually causing a 'flood' of people instantaneously dumping any browser. It's neat, but not that exciting.
I wasnt touching this one for a while because I really have limited patience for fanboys.
I hear ya, man. Consequences suck, eh? In any event, I sympathize totally.
No facts to refute, no pithy remarks, not even a thinly veiled insult?
This proves me a fanboy how? here's a dictionary link to the word fanboy. You've well and truly failed here good sir.
I know you're just super eager to declare victory here, but it just ain't doing much to bother me. Sorry. You know how you came across. You also know how it looks when you continue doing it with every reply. It's entertaining, to say the least, especially when you try to claim the high ground in order to avoid my point.
At least you managed the pithy remark here, I'll give you half a credit for that.
It wouldn't have much impact if it didn't have a little truth to it.
You might also learn the difference between spelling and grammar.
Your spelling of 'know' was really really bad. I didn't bother researching the grammatical ramifications of it. I wouldn't have had time, that wasn't your only typo, Mr. Kettle.
In fact I'm going to stop here, this is a waste of my time and valuable cynic skills answering a fanboy who's best answers were "He. Un huh" and "Hehe" and which both set off my moron alarm and spell checker and of course completely attempts to avoid answering questions which could prove you wrong, but if you did this you might see some logic which would completely shatter your fanboy world.
That's convenient. You wouldn't want to address my most deatailed point, would you? Very classy.
This whole thing started because you could not take a joke...
By your own admission, your joke failed.
(chief among them the SIM lock and lack of a 3G modem functionality, both points that you have conveniently and repeatedly ignored)
Actually I did acknowledge the SIM card problem. It was in the huge chunk of text you skipped for frivilous reasons in a vain attempt to sound superior. Amusingly, it's completely inconsequential. I am not, nor was I ever trying to sell you on the iPhone. For somebody claiming he doesn't act like a fanboy, you're sure doing a lot of not-listening.
your much vaunted JesusPhone 3G...
Yep, I'm the fanboy here. Mmmm hmm. No signs of that coming from you, no siree.
...oh I wont bother reading any replies as I don't really want to give you any more material to troll over as I consider it an insult to decent material...
Who do you think you're bullshitting? We both know the real reason.
Yeah like nobody knows who you are, Mr. Coward. Heh