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[MonkeyHead]

Don't be silly, Bucket.

You missed the "some" criteria. If I have something you want, how is it logical to assume you have a right to it without some form of trade? Espcially if my own time and money have been invested in making it - thats what the exchange is about - not the actual "thing" that has been created, but as an exchange for my time and effort - isnt this why professions charge by the hour for services?

[Bauglir]

In what way would Frumple's alternatives allow a DF-like project to be constructed?

Have... have you already forgotten Goblin Camp? S'mostly dead at this point, from what I recall, but there's nothing inherent to... any software, really... that somehow magically makes it impossible to be created via group effort, or somehow renders it incapable of being passed from developer to developer. There's nothing about DF that copyright made possible. That's all on Toady's dedication, insofar as I'm aware, and while copyright may or may not make that more likely, it's pretty far from necessary for it.

There's more than one decade+ literary project roaming around the net, collaborative efforts that have survived a great number of folks passing in and out of it. There's gaming projects like that as well (Dungeon Crawl, Angband, as examples).

Copyright made DF possible by allowing Toady to earn a living from the donations he earns by producing it, is the point I was making. I was less talking about "low-graphics civ-building and management games with huge amounts of detail and freedom" and more "huge, life-consuming project made by one or two people with a vision for it". Sorry that wasn't clear.

[Leafsnail]

Crowd funding and the like matches that model better than copyright, since you're basically paying the developers to use their time and knowledge to make a game.

Copyright made DF possible by allowing Toady to earn a living from the donations he earns by producing it, is the point I was making. I was less talking about "low-graphics civ-building and management games with huge amounts of detail and freedom" and more "huge, life-consuming project made by one or two people with a vision for it". Sorry that wasn't clear.

Did it?  I don't really see how copyright is essential to Toady's business model, even if he does use it.

[kaijyuu]

Has Toady actually exercised his copyright? You can keep something closed source without copyright (it just helps if someone tries to reverse engineer it).

[Darkmere]

That's exactly the point. You don't have to part with your games or music when I copy them.

The effort to make games or music has already been invested; it is time spent on creation that could have been used on something else, like growing food or making cars. You talk like creation is a free, zero effort endeavor but it simply isn't. You mentioned stage work, so let's go with that. Say you work really hard and put on a completely awesome production of Our Town (or whatever, insert random something here), and someone in the audience on opening night records the whole thing, then gives out recordings to everyone else in town for free. Now, no one needs to go see the show, so you no longer get paid. You still have the original performance, no one can take that away from you, but all the future ticket and concession money are now lost, as are your time expenses spent making sets and doing rehearsals.

Alternatively, another troupe comes in and uses all your sets and equipment to perform the same show and profits off all the work you did, while you get zero royalties. This is desirable, then?

[Bauglir]

I was... reasonably sure there was an incident a few years ago where somebody tried to create a DF clone, and was advertising it on the boards here. I seemed to recall it not ending well for them, but I can't actually recall the details other than bans being involved (which are hardly related to copyright enforcement). That said, I feel like if somebody tried to sell copies of DF or distribute it without credit (which would have to include modified versions of the software, since it includes credits within it, admittedly), there would be some unfriendly words from the Toad when he caught wind of it. His business model doesn't depend on people exchanging money for copies of the game, but it very much depends on recognition for the game, and that's something that copyright enforces in cases where the license isn't meant to support the traditional business model (for instance, Creative Commons Licenses still require copyright to work, by my admittedly sparse understanding). I haven't got more time to go further in depth here, unfortunately.

[Bdthemag]

Regardless of your moral standpoint on pirating, the industries who deal with this problem aren't loosing a lot of money off of it. Are game publishers going under due to piracy? No, it's at most a small dent in their potential profits from someone who probably wouldn't of bought the game in the first place. Even if you look at the music industry, the only thing pirated music is "affecting" is the record companies who distribute the music. Artists make a small percentage of their sales off of CD's and Albums (Most of it goes to the record companies), and make a majority of their revenue off of live performances. Piracy isn't hurting artists, the same way piracy isn't hurting developers. It's just simply the publishers wanting more revenue, and they're trying to find new ways to make cash to fund their increasingly bigger and bigger budgets that have been inflating ever since video games became popular with the average person.

[LordBucket]

another troupe comes in and uses all your sets and equipment to perform the same
show and profits off all the work you did, while you get zero royalties.

There's some ambiguity in how you're phrasing this.

If you're saying that we do a show at a third party theatre, we build sets and do the show, then the next troupe to come through uses the sets we left behind without reimbursing us? Yes, that would be completely proper. For that matter...let's make it even "worse" and say that the second troupe to come in only even chose to do to same show for the specific reason that there were pre-constructed sets already available for it made by us. That would still be ok.

On the other hand, if two troupes are sharing the same theatre concurrently, say...troupe A performs on Thursdays and Saturdays, and troupe B on Fridays and Sundays. Troupe A builds the set, and Troupe B uses them too. There's the potential for trouble there because Troupe B might accidentally damage the sets during their performance nights, causing us to be unable to use them on ours. That wouldn't fly. But the metaphor there is not a copyright issue, it's a property destruction issue.

On the other hand, if they see our set design, and copy it...again, I don't see a problem with that. It would be highly unusual for two different troupes to both be performing the same show concurrently in the first place, and I imagine that would ruffle some feathers, but ultimately that would be up to the the theatre owner, not the performer's companies. If a theatre books two different troupes for the same show at the same theatre...there's likely to be friction over that regardless of set procurement arrangements.

You could probably come up with a better example. This doesn't work well because you're talking about physical objects. But if they use our sets that we built and left behind without reimbursing us...yeah, nobody would have a problem with that. But if they're using finite, limited resources like sets and equipment, that we're still using, and thereby incurring a risk of loss by accidental damage...yeah, that's a problem, but it's a problem that isn't really representative of the point I think you're probably trying to make.

Would you care to clarify?

[Zyxl]

Not to interrupt the current discussion, but something funny:

A study suggests that games having a demo makes them lose out on about 50% of sales otherwise
(Schell Games CEO's D.I.C.E. presentation or just google, trailer+nodemo sells twice as well as trailer+demo).

However, I pirate games because they have no demo.
(I'm not shelling out $50+ USD when I'm not even sure how well it will run, or the state of bugs, issues with a piece of my hardware in particular, currently unresolved driver issues, etc).

[FearfulJesuit]

I'm a bit late to this, so I'll just chip in my thoughts. While it's true that people should pay for their data, I also think the current model is outdated. Firstly, that money should mostly go to artists (the Internet having effectively made overhead and publishing costs obsolete, and pure profit). Secondly, I think people pirate stuff when the cost (in time or effort) of pirating it is significantly less than the cost of buying it. We don't see all that much piracy of movies or video games compared to music, because a) music is much cheaper and easier to store in bulk, because it's smaller, and b) the video game and movie industries have come up with easy, fairly priced distribution systems (Steam and Netflix). Together, that means that it doesn't make sense to pirate movies or video games unless you're sticking it to the man- you just wait for a Steam sale, or get a Netflix subscription. Meanwhile, the record industry stubbornly insists that an album which costs less than a penny to store on a server for however many downloads people want to buy, and maybe a couple cents to get to you via bandwith, should cost $20 because that's how the model worked when music was on vinyl. In addition to that, the amount of culturally relevant music- the amount of music that people want to listen to and are expected to know- is massive. Think of all the important bands of the 20th century- how much would it cost to get all those on CD? Currently, probably a thousand dollars. People pirate music because the dominant prices for music aren't the right price- they're priced that way by cartel, and they're heavily inflated.

[Loud Whispers]

In my young years my family was quite poor and we could never afford to go to movies, only pictures. And that was as rare as eclipses. As a result I would often have to wait for 2 years or so for a film to come out on VHS, and by then all the hype would be gone and I'd usually forget about the film. It would also explain why I stopped involving myself in the hype of films, as they were too often what the success of films braced their backs on.
Nowadays the only thing that has changed is that there is nothing worth watching in cinemas anymore, and that whenever I try to give my money to the publishers of shows I like I often find myself having to jump through several hurdles and still wait years for an official release.
How publishing companies distribute their media in the digital world is mind-boggingly painful that it's just easier to forgo them altogether and watch independently created media made by random people on the internet. There are seriously too few shows that are even worth the effort of pirating, and the only show I've ever pirated I own the box set for [well, one third of it anyways because I have to wait years for the rest to be released] and the only other media I've pirated were games that are non-extant. And if anything's true, it's that copyright already crossed the line of insanity - when you are dead, you do not need decades more 'compensation.'

[Darkmere]

Would you care to clarify?

I meant that someone profits from or costs you profits from time and energy you invested in the creative process, which was the main point of the entire rest of my post that you ignored. Copyright (which isn't always gracefully enforced) protects a creator's return on their initial time investment of creating an intellectual commodity. Some people make stuff for free, which is great. Others make stuff for profit, and if consumers are willing to pay, that should be feasible as well.

[Sergarr]

Not to interrupt the current discussion, but something funny:

A study suggests that games having a demo makes them lose out on about 50% of sales otherwise

Does that mean that current games are 50% shit?

[Bdthemag]

Not to interrupt the current discussion, but something funny:

A study suggests that games having a demo makes them lose out on about 50% of sales otherwise

Does that mean that current games are 50% shit?

I think that you're being too generous with just 50%.

[Leafsnail]

Do you have a link to the methodology for that data?  It seems a bit dodgy, considering there are multiple possible biasing factors (eg the games that sell the most know that they have a big fanbase and don't need a demo - for example, everybody already knows what Call of Duty is like, so they don't need to bother).