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Author Topic: Online Piracy  (Read 27246 times)

Neonivek

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #135 on: February 04, 2012, 06:56:25 pm »

Wow I actually forgot about it, but I pirated Terraria, too.  I already had my mind made up that I was going to buy the game, but I caught a leak about a week before the release date.  Why not?  I was excited.  It was like getting a little sneak preview.  I still bought it the day it was released.  I even had extra appreciation for the work of the developers, as I got to witness a lot of the cleaning up they did in that last week.  I also got them 8 more sales through recommendations to friends and family.

EVIL! I will charge you $50,000 dollars. EXACTLY what you deserve!
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Deadmeat1471

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #136 on: February 04, 2012, 06:57:33 pm »

Wow I actually forgot about it, but I pirated Terraria, too.  I already had my mind made up that I was going to buy the game, but I caught a leak about a week before the release date.  Why not?  I was excited.  It was like getting a little sneak preview.  I still bought it the day it was released.  I even had extra appreciation for the work of the developers, as I got to witness a lot of the cleaning up they did in that last week.  I also got them 8 more sales through recommendations to friends and family.

EVIL! I will charge you $50,000 dollars. EXACTLY what you deserve!

LOCK HIM UP WITH RAPISTS AND MURDERERS AND DRUG DEALERSSSSSS FOR HE ART OF THE CRIMINAL ELK
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Frumple

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #137 on: February 04, 2012, 07:01:48 pm »

BECAUSE DRUG DEALERS ARE ALL AS BAD AS RAPISTS AND MURDERERS AND JAYWALKERS! And pirates. And counterfeiters and everything else that involves prison time.

Wait, what does this have to do with piracy again?* Maybe this thread?

*Back on topic discussion slaves! *whip crack* Rational debate for the logic throne!
« Last Edit: February 04, 2012, 07:06:25 pm by Frumple »
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Deadmeat1471

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #138 on: February 04, 2012, 07:04:09 pm »

BECAUSE DRUG DEALERS ARE ALL AS BAD AS RAPISTS AND MURDERERS AND JAYWALKERS! And pirates. And counterfeiters and everything else that involves prison time.

Wait, what does this have to do with piracy again? Maybe this thread?

Dakk - 'Indeed, but apparently the judge forgot to look at the goddamn US constitution. '

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darklord92

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #139 on: February 04, 2012, 08:43:17 pm »

We live in a corporate apocalypse where an I-phone has more value than a human life :/
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Loud Whispers

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #140 on: February 04, 2012, 08:52:00 pm »

We live in a corporate apocalypse where an I-phone has more value than a human life :/
The box is more valuable than the product.

Muz

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #141 on: February 05, 2012, 05:36:29 am »

Most people are law abiding not because they have thought about and decided on a morally rightious philosophy to live by, but because they fear the repurcussions if they are caught.
The reason this is important to the piracy issue is because it is very unlikely people will be caught, and if they are there are few legal legs to stand on in regards to prosecution.

The reason this is the case is because internet piracy isn't simple theft, it's taking a product and replicating it, while this is in itself isn't a crime - there are no lorries with people in ski masks jumping around to arrest. However if you share this with someone else, youre in dodgy ground.

But then, If i bring a film for me and my friends to watch, that is the same simialar to piracy, but no one in even the worst court would ever try and sue me for this.

Or what if I need to make a backup CD for something? My Master of Orion 3 main disc for example
has been scratched beyond repair for many years. The second I lend it to a friend, is this piracy?
On top of this the game doesn't detect the disk, so I have to use a PIRATE crack to play a game I have bought many years ago.

My conclusion:

There is no way to regulate internet piracy in a free society.

Full stop.

Well, there's not really such a thing as a 'pirate crack' any more than there are 'burglar crowbars' or 'serial killer knives'. Cracks are tools. There is, however, cracks that pirates use to bypass security, and it's much more often used illegally.

I think the free market just fails with software. Free market argues that the market will settle at a price just low enough to be above costs. With software, it costs less than a few cents to produce, and free market just fails utterly here. You're right; software piracy is not exactly analogous to theft - with theft, people get hurt, imprisoned, someone loses their stuff, etc. Piracy doesn't seem to hurt anyone except the devs.

I think today, selling software is more about
1. Convenience. I mean, I could sit at home and make a sandwich, but sometimes it's more convenient to go out and buy a sandwich, instead of making one. Unfortunately, piracy is just so much more convenient than the legal thing, which requires you to register, deal with DRM, credit card numbers, etc. Pretty much the main reason I paid for Unreal World instead of pirating it was that they had so many fake pirated versions that didn't work, and it was just easier to pay $3 for it.

2. Sympathy, they pay to support the game. The price tag is a suggested donation.
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Deadmeat1471

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #142 on: February 05, 2012, 06:55:37 am »

One thing, I can download a game for free faster from Pirate bay than I can from steam.

This should change. This means I can pirate something easier than I can use a product i've actually bought. There have been times I've actually done this rather than wait 12 hours or whatever for something to download on steams crappy servers.

*Also on the moo3 thing, it's not the disk I remember now. If you want to play a mod for some reason you have to crack the exe, or it doesn't work.
« Last Edit: February 05, 2012, 07:00:00 am by Deadmeat1471 »
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darklord92

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #143 on: February 05, 2012, 03:03:46 pm »

It's not that steams servers are crappy it's how torrents work deadmeat.

on a normal server you have one "band" that downloads to and from yoru computer. hence "bandwidth" on how much you can download at a time.

a torrent relies on multiple bands to downland one file. each band being seeded by another user. Hence why everyone wants you to seed when you torrent a file. becasue if there was only one band it would go just as slow as a regular download if not slower due to the fact your conencting through the other users ISP which could be anywhere from dialup to fiberoptic. with steams severs they have a corporate connection which almost guarantees more speed than an average user. The reason it's slow is becasue they give you a certain bandwidth so other people can download too.
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ein

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #144 on: February 05, 2012, 03:57:20 pm »

Regardless, Steam could incorporate an opt-in 'seeding' service, where you can let others download games from you, the official servers, and other people with the game, similar to torrenting~

Leatra

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #145 on: February 05, 2012, 04:35:42 pm »

The Poor/region locked/out in the middle of nowhere Pirate: Not everyone is right next door to wallmart, and it's something a lot of us take for granted. And even worse look at countries like Australia it can cost as much as $100-120 for a single game, let alone the console. Develoupers even force you to buy the game in your country even for those extreme prices by "locking" the game to that region, there are excuses to region locks(try playing the pal version of metroid prime 1 on a NTSC gamecube ) but sometimes it's simply to keep prices in each region set. A lot of people would say if your poor than you probably don't need luxury such as a game system, it's something I can agree with but things like computers are are becoming much less of a luxury and more and more of a necessity, and with common operating systems like mac and windows becoming more and more expensive it becomes difficult not to pirate.

A very close friend of mine falls into this category. He says he would buy 'most' of the games he pirated. But he can't because the average price of a PC game is like 1/7 of the average salary in his country and most of the games are not even sold there.

wink wink

I don't support piracy but some people don't have a choice. Telling them to "Just STFU and don't play videogames until your country develops" will only encourage them more.

SOPA, PIPA, whatever. Can you define what piracy is? Downloading a PC game that you will never pay for is, for example, piracy. However, is showing your favorite song to your friend piracy? Corporates can and will 'manipulate' definitions. I didn't investigate much about SOPA but it seems a little vague. Do you know what Coporates will be capable of if a bill like this passes? We can't know this because people will always push it to the limit if there is money in the end.

These corporate dudes of the video game industry seemed like they cared about gamers. Look at them now, do they speak out against SOPA or PIPA? Majority of the game industry is silent. We are all just money bags for them. Hell, last time I checked, Entertainment Software Association was supporting SOPA. Google the members of ESA if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Pirates will always find a way and only destruction of the Internet can stop them. It will always be the real customers who will suffer. Just like how it's like with DRM.
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Gantolandon

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #146 on: February 05, 2012, 05:47:30 pm »

Regardless of what you think about ethics of piracy, it is there because the model of selling creative work is not only unreasonable - it's fucking insane.

Let's see how this goes with physical goods. The manufacturer buys raw material and pays his workers to produce a batch of items for him. Then he sells it for more money. The price of one item includes mostly the price of the material and the worker's payment. It's also a bit inflated, because the company needs to make money, after all. This surplus also covers for the marketing and distribution costs, which are pretty significant. Last but not least, it also should cover the cost of the creative work done before the manufacturing process - design, for example.

When this surplus is pretty small, all goes well. The potential buyer can try to make the same product at home, but it's unlikely it would be profitable for him. After all, mass production is more cost-effective, that's why most of our goods are produced in factories, instead in artisans' workshops. He can steal the product, but it can be dangerous to him - being caught, even if not so likely, would cost him much more than the stolen goods. He can do this if he's desperate enough - for example, he is starving and needs some food - but, in most cases, he will just buy the product.

The problem appears when this surplus is not small. For example, designing a medicine is quite difficult, but manufacturing it is usually a simple process which doesn't require expensive ingredients. Patents are supposed to level that difference - the researching company can artificially inflate their price for some time to cover the cost of development. It's far from being a great solution, but at least it can work, as distribution of counterfeit goods is quite risky and expensive in itself.

Then we have digital goods, where manufacturing and distribution carries almost no cost at all. It's a process so simple that potential buyers can do it by themselves. To make a profit, the designer only needs to cover a single expenditure (designing the digital good) and the cost of selling individual copies. And, of course, hype. Even copyright isn't enough here - laws add some risk to otherwise profitable activity and copying copyrighted material isn't very risky. Yet.

There is also a thing that copyright holders often do not mention: they only need to produce (or buy) a digital good once and they get to sell it as many times as he can. He can also profit from any work that is in some way derivative from the one he holds his right to. Mind it, their employees are still paid like ordinary workers, though - they get their salary (or one-time payment) and usually don't see even a penny from those profits. Anytime you think about the losses piracy bring, think about those profits. It's something that most ordinary manufacturers can see only in their wildest dreams.

So, of course, all these restrictive laws like SOPA or PIPA do have a point. They are the only chance this flawed business model has. They need to be even more draconian, as piracy becomes easier and cheaper each day. Of course, it means that we would pay money (in form of taxes) to the government to better prevent us from getting creative works cheaper. I see no reason for the ordinary citizen to support it.

The one thing we can hope for is that the current situation is somewhere near the equilibrium - the piracy won't be stamped out, but enough user will still buy digital goods to support this business model. It seemed possible, after all, several years ago. But the science marched on, new ways of piracy slowly become possible (see 3D printers and "physibles" - not miuch right now, but you can see where it leads), and our governments has turned out to be much less controllable by an ordinary voter than we thought. It's now quite obvious they won't support the balance between the consumers and copyright holders. So we may expect even more stupid and restrictive laws and acts, until the whole model becomes so obsolete and ineffective it collapses under its own weight. It won't kill the entertainment industry - the people will still need it, after all. But it will certainly be painful, especially for the biggest players (and their employees, too!). The best thing that could be done is finding alternative ways to pay the author.

The one thing that I don't think should be done is defending the current way of selling digital goods. Even if you don't support SOPA or similar laws, you are using the same arguments that are used to push them. Moreover, it isn't even advantageous to you. If you do some kind of creative work, you most probably do it for someone who pays you a small fraction of the money he gets. He will profit from your work long after you get laid off or decide to work somewhere else. You still will be a consumer of creative works, why defend his rights instead of yours?
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Neonivek

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #147 on: February 05, 2012, 07:14:52 pm »

Well the amount of control the industry ACTUALLY wants over your purchases is surprisingly vast.

For example remember when you were young and you let your friend borrow your videogame? Most EULAs actually outright say that your not allowed to do that (Some very old computer games even go further as to say you can't even have the game installed on a second computer)
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Johnfalcon99977

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #148 on: February 05, 2012, 07:35:37 pm »

I don't know where everyone is going with the conversation art the moment, but I want to share my opinion of the matter.

I think the best way to stop piracy is not to fight it directly but just provide a better service. Look at I-Tunes. So many people were just downloading music before. I-Tune comes in with its policy of "One dollar per song, no matter what". How many people do you know who pirate music anymore?comes in with its policy of "One dollar per song, no matter what". How many people do you know who pirate music anymore?

We should stop spending money on fighting it and spend money on actually providing good, reliable services is what I am getting at here.
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Reudh

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Re: Online Piracy
« Reply #149 on: February 05, 2012, 07:55:51 pm »

It ain't $1 per song where I come from.

The cheapest I EVER saw a song for on iTunes was $1.69.
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