I think we all have very different views here of what copyright is, but let me point out that copyright was originally intended to keep companies from stealing material from each other. This means that 2K wouldn't be able to use material licensed by EA in their games and so on. Copyright has recently become an issue for customers because companies feel like blaming waning sales for crappy games on piracy.
Here's a fact: Console piracy far outstrips PC piracy. Sounds crazy, but more people have consoles than PCs. Also, do you know how
easy it is to mod a console? I've had customers come in and ask us if we mod consoles or loudly brag how their 360 is modded and they use an external HDD with all the games on it they want. If it wasn't breaking forum rules, I could probably pop on Google and find several sites that offer modding assistance or tutorials that show you how to do it yourself. Nintendo has tons of piracy going on, yet they regularly post in the black every fiscal year. This means that, overall, they are making money.
Now, the comment made that most pirates are the biggest consumers of media? Possibly. This isn't too farfetched and, honestly, the people that would pirate most are people who don't have the money in the first place. I could argue here that piracy may actually help artists and developers in the long run because it expands their market to everyone with some know-how. Instead of paying customers finding that new CD you just put out and liking it, anyone with a computer and torrent software can find it. If they like it, they buy it. These people then come to your concerts and make you more money. This, however, doesn't exactly transfer over to developers for obvious reasons. It can help them, however, because people can actually try the game before they buy it. More often than not, purchasing the game to get support and patches and other cool stuff is just
what you do. It's the reason you're buying the game. You're not buying code at that point, you're paying to get support and patches made and other cool little tidbits.
I think an easy way to abate piracy enough to ensure it doesn't
truly harm sales is to require registering on the forums and a simple CD-Key/Machine-Key verification. This makes sure that pirates are less likely to be able to download patches and obtain technical support. If you want technical support, buy the product. That simple.
As far as open-source being hurt by piracy... Pirates tend to be the #1 supporters and spreaders of open-source software. IRC warez channels, torrent websites, and download sites all tend to host any open-source software they can get. It's one of the many reasons why large companies that were considering the blackbox approach to hardware (blacklisting any non-licensed software) simply did not care about open-source OSes and software. Of course, the blackbox approach got squished because, frankly,
consumers hate any DRM.
When you buy something, you don't want to be asked several times "DID YOU
REALLY BUY THIS?! ARE YOU
SURE YOU AREN'T A PIRATE?!"
Moral arguments, by the way, are just a silly thing. This is not an argument of morals. This is an argument of the bottom line effects of piracy. I highly doubt that piracy significantly effects the bottom line for a simple reason I've stated before: There is
no guarantee that pirates are "lost sales" You cannot lose something you never had and, most likely, pirates would have never bought the product in question anyway.
It's all a question of demographic. If pirates aren't the purchasing demographic and represent a portion of people that
never were, then why would DRM change that? All it does is make paying customers angry and upset at being treated like criminals in an attempt to recoup sales that were never lost in the first place. In fact, I would wager that companies like Ubisoft have
lost more money and sales due to invasive and batshit insane DRM than they would have gained by their foolish attempt to force people who wouldn't have bought the software in the first place to buy the software.
Let's review one simple fact: People who aren't going to buy are just not going to buy. Businesses are ignoring the main tenet of retail and that is to entice the consumer to buy their product. You don't punish consumers for what shoplifters do. You don't raise prices because your store gets robbed. You simply offer incentives to buy, which do not extend to people who steal. In the retail business, a receipt is proof of a sale and gets you customer support. In software this is equivalent to your CD/License key. This is your proof that you are a paying customer and deserve support. We identify forged receipts in similar ways we identify fake CD/License keys.
I think you are correct that making a polished game takes a lot of time and effort. Money, however, is a tricky thing to quote. How much money has Toady spent on DF? If you don't count his living expenses (which would constitute pay) and food, I think you may get a very surprisingly low number. When you talk about "how much a game costs" you need to remember that a lot of that budget is pay for the people working on it. The rest is licensing and marketing, I would wager. I don't know a lot about development budgets, but I believe this is the case for most projects. I can spend absolutely no money and code a game in my spare time. Several people have and continue to do so. Saying that games cost money to make is silly as you could conceivably have a computer for other reasons and functions than to make a game and may have simply decided to learn Java online in your spare time via free tutorials you found on Google to make a simple menu-driven adventure game. What does that cost to make? Nothing. When you get to "professional" software, however, you need to pay for licenses that are often too damn expensive and often large development teams have computers made for specific tasks like graphics design, program testing, program writing, and compiling. "Cost" is all relative to your method and it is fully possible to create a very polished "no-budget" game using open-source software.
Also, I respectfully disagree with your stance that open-source software is inferior to licensed software. It is simply a different thing. GIMP can perform, mostly, the same functions as Photoshop. It is made by an open-source team, however, so it tends to be a bit harder to understand and possibly to gain support for, but there are new features and developments being added all the time. I know several commercial programmers that exclusively do their programming work on Linux because they like the platform more for coding purposes. I think GIMP is a similar animal where it really depends on what you do, what you know, and what you are aiming for. If you don't need Photoshop and GIMP does what you want just fine, why get Photoshop? I do, however, concede that commercial programs do offer more integration (although open-source teams are working on that) and polish. I am, however, a proud OpenOffice user and, aside from cross-program formatting problems, I have very few problems with OpenOffice.
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Topic: These are the many profitable industries with no copyright protection (Read 10802 times)