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Yes, and it should be punished under theft.

Yes, and it should be punished under copyright law.

Yes, but it shouldn't be punished.

Certain cases are crimes.

I feel ambivalent towards piracy being a crime.

No, but it should be punished.

No, it is a natural part of a consumer's routine.

No, not at all.

Other

Don't Care / View Poll

[Pathos]

It's time to discuss piracy, ladies and gents.

The question of piracy (as a whole) is not a simple one to address, as different moral viewpoints (or even similar moral viewpoints) can end up at completely different conclusions to how to solve the problem of piracy and whether or not it IS a problem.

Let's address piracy as a crime:-

• It doesn't count as theft, as there is no theft of a physical product. You are merely copying a product over.
• It is a breach of copyright law.
• Numerous bodies are attempting to place highly invasive anti-piracy laws into our day to day lives. Including, but not limited to, internet services being cut off without any advance warning or warrant required and hacking and constant monitoring of suspected PCs involved in piracy. Even for downloading a single illegal file. I think you could do that by accident.

Let's address what economists / consumers usually think of piracy:-

• It's a natural part of consumer behaviour. It's a way to test the waters of a product. Attempting to shut it down doesn't do anything useful.
• The vast majority of people who have access to the internet have done an act of piracy on the internet (something like 90% of teens had over 700 illegally downloaded songs on their portable music players). Making piracy an arrestable crime under law would mean a lot of people would be criminalised for it. See American prohibition, which created organised crime.
• More anti-piracy stuff = Fewer sales and more piracy. See Spore as an example of serious DRM getting the game into a piracy whirlwind.
• Wares are generally of a better quality than the product itself.
• Consumers don't really consider it a crime, simply because it's not causing anyone any real harm.

Let's address what games publishers / most governments think of piracy:-

• It is a crime, unquestionably. Equal to theft, and should be tried as such.
• Piracy must be stamped out at all costs. Ignoring statistical evidence and claiming it funds child abuse and terrorism is for some reason necessary.
• All negative backlash against anti-piracy methods must be ignored, despite the fact they often lose sales because of it.
• A person's privacy doesn't matter as long as long as they aren't using pirated software. The irony is, of course, that people using pirated software won't have their privacy invaded.

( Feel free to add to any of this, it isn't comprehensive, and it's probably pretty strawmen, but I think it sets the basis for the argument. )

Here is where my opinion comes in. My reasons for disliking this anti-piracy trend is two-fold:-

• Piracy is a natural way for a consumer to weed out the terrible products from the good ones. This scares the executives and publishers, as it means they can't make terrible products and make money from them.
• Piracy is being used as an excuse to invade our privacy. It's not about anti-pirate versus pirate (that battle is unwinnable for the anti-pirates and they know it since all current anti-piracy methods are useless against pirated software), it's about privacy versus surveillance. If pretty much any of the anti-piracy acts go through, people in that part of the world will be royally fucked. Both the companies and the governments are attacking our liberty under the pretence of defending us.

I suspect these are the ONLY two reasons (or, at least, the root reasons) why there's such an anti-piracy trend going on in the corporate and political world. Anything about it being a crime is an excuse for these two things. I can only assume this from the utterly retarded anti-piracy methods that've been made lately. And I can only assume those anti-piracy methods were made to force more people to start doing piracy in an attempt to inflate the problem to get these two goals done. I can think of no other reasons other than this and the DRM designers being utter morons.

So, think about it like this. Piracy is a natural consumer method (equal to getting a taster of a product at a shop, except the product can be made through Star Trek-esque production machines) to testing out a product. Companies and governments want to (for whatever reason, probably making more money and being authoritarian) be able to control and monitor your every move, as well as stopping you from being able to test a product before you buy it.

People can claim that piracy is a crime, but I know which one of these I think is the bigger crime.

How about all of you?

[MrWiggles]

Theft is just taking items without the owner consent. Whether they still have access to it, doesn't matter for it counting as theft. It justs counts toward how serve of a theft it is.

Thats a very skewed one sided definition of theft that would seem to show bias in the OP, which to me would just fight the start of an honest debate.

[eerr]

clearly, all those people who pirate downloaded games would have BOUGHT them instead!

each piracy act is a loss of 60 dollars!

(company>)We must destroy all pirates.

[MrWiggles]

Each act of piracy is a potential loss of sale. It doesn't matter if none of the supposed pirates would have bought it, the loss of sales is still real.

[ein]

Just wanted to say, this is a horrible topic, likely to lead to a flame war.
Then again, it's not in Other Games, so maybe not.

Anyway, my opinion is that piracy is a natural part of the process that can be kept to a minimum by finding an equilibrium between good games and reasonable copyright protection.
While it is natural, it is a crime, but one that should not be punishable.
It's like teens drinking booze.
They're probably going to do it and there's nothing you can do to stop them without becoming a complete hard-ass.
Even then, they'll probably still find some, and be MORE likely to drink it.
Of course, if they're being stupid about it, they'll get caught, slap on the wrist, parents pick them up, everything goes back to normal.

And about loss of sales, usually, the big company doesn't miss out on anything.
It's the retailer (GameStop or whatever) that loses the sales.

[Grakelin]

Each act of piracy is a potential loss of sale. It doesn't matter if none of the supposed pirates would have bought it, the loss of sales is still real.

You'll have to explain that one to me.

I don't really see piracy as being particularly immoral. I pirate all kinds of stuff, but I also end up going out and buying it anyway. I've purchased Warcraft III 3 (!!!) times, and I have multiple copies of Civ IV (I had to uninstall my pirated expansions to get my purchased Complete Edition to work, though). I even purchased Fallout 3. Wish I'd tried before I buyed that one.

Some games I feel comfortable giving money to.

While it is natural, it is a crime, but one that should not be punishable.
It's like teens drinking booze.
They're probably going to do it and there's nothing you can do to stop them without becoming a complete hard-ass.
Even then, they'll probably still find some, and be MORE likely to drink it.
Of course, if they're being stupid about it, they'll get caught, slap on the wrist, parents pick them up, everything goes back to normal.

Probably not relevant, but being caught underage drinking by the police can ruin your life by preventing you from getting into university and/or a job. This shit happens to people, it's harsh.

[ein]

My understanding is that that comes more from the criminal record aspect of it than the underage drinking aspect.

[Strife26]

It's really a question of the free rider problem.


Making software is expensive and time consuming. Actually making the physical copies is quite cheap. For most people, their spot on the demand curve falls under the current price, especially when discretionary pricing is easily available with piracy.

[HideousBeing]

Piracy is bad and you know it. People will do it. Very few sales are lost, so no reason to mess with it anyway.

They probably spend more money on buying/making complicated DRM then they make in extra sales.

Although if I've lost a disc or need a crack it's nice to know that there are some options out there.

[Neruz]

[Soadreqm]

Oh, yeah, this is a horrible topic. Not gonna stop me from posting though.

"Piracy being used as an excuse for surveillance" implies that there is some hidden motive to surveillance. Would you care to expand on this? Why does the sinister council of vagueness want to look over your shoulder, other than keep tabs on whether you are illegally copying their products (which is the excuse) or national security (which they are already allowed to do)?

I think arguing that pirates wouldn't have bought their software anyway is somewhat fallacious. Is it okay to sneak into a movie theater because you wouldn't have paid for the film anyway, and the screen isn't worn by you watching it? How about breaking into someone's house if you don't steal or damage anything? Besides, if they aren't going to buy the object in question, why are they pirating it in the first place? They must WANT it, right?

Also,
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/9/29/

[Jookia]

Why are you so scared about it? Don't pirate things and if they do touch your connection, sue them. Easy.

[Neruz]

I think arguing that pirates wouldn't have bought their software anyway is somewhat fallacious. Is it okay to sneak into a movie theater because you wouldn't have paid for the film anyway, and the screen isn't worn by you watching it? How about breaking into someone's house if you don't steal or damage anything? Besides, if they aren't going to buy the object in question, why are they pirating it in the first place? They must WANT it, right?

The point is brought up due to the fact that the primary argument made in favor of DRM is that every pirate is a lost sale; ergo piracy is actually costing the developers money.

This has recently been proven to be absolute bullshit, which is why people tend to get uppity when someone starts screaming "BUT PIRACY IS COSTING THE INDUSTRY REAL DOLLARS", because, as it turns out, piracy isn't costing the industry anything at all.
Ironically, some more recent numbers released by various publishers and developers heavily suggest that restrictive DRM, unlike piracy, does in fact cost sales.


Does the fact that piracy is a null-transaction change the fact that it is copyright infringement and thus a crime? Nope. Technically it's stil a crime. And technically so is jaywalking.

[Soadreqm]

This has recently been proven to be absolute bullshit, which is why people tend to get uppity when someone starts screaming "BUT PIRACY IS COSTING THE INDUSTRY REAL DOLLARS", because, as it turns out, piracy isn't costing the industry anything at all.
Ironically, some more recent numbers released by various publishers and developers heavily suggest that restrictive DRM, unlike piracy, does in fact cost sales.

I don't have any counterproof on this, but my uneducated guess is that a statistically significant number of people who would otherwise spend money on the products is pirating them instead. It makes sense. Pirating things is easy, and the target demographic for software is big enough to contain some morally but not economically bankrupt characters who could afford to buy their stuff, but won't as long as they can get it for free. And if piracy was costing the industry nothing, why would they spend time and money on developing DRM? Spending money on being mean for no reason sounds like a bad business practice.

[Shades]

I don't have any counterproof on this, but my uneducated guess is that a statistically significant number of people who would otherwise spend money on the products is pirating them instead. It makes sense. Pirating things is easy, and the target demographic for software is big enough to contain some morally but not economically bankrupt characters who could afford to buy their stuff, but won't as long as they can get it for free. And if piracy was costing the industry nothing, why would they spend time and money on developing DRM? Spending money on being mean for no reason sounds like a bad business practice.

So far every study I've seen that actually did some research into the, very limited set of, numbers avalible has estimated at most 1% of potential sales have been lost due to piracy.

Some studies have gone as far as claiming piracy helps sales. Personally I'm not sure, I know cases where that has been individually true but I doubt it's the case overall.

However it can't be denied that profit from the music industry (arguably the largest pirate market) has been generally growing year on year (with a few drops, one of which collerates to the collapse of napster amusingly enough).

The most amusing claim is that piracy funds illicit activity, including "people trafficking, money laundering, violence, drug smuggling and terrorism" now if you can't make money off trafficking people, laundering money and smuggling drugs you have problems.