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[Bauglir]

Well, sure, and a single person downloading a game isn't going to meaningfully affect a company's bottom line, either. But if you hand out the game for free, you rely on the good will of your audience to survive; that can work, as our Most Glorious Toad demonstrates. But when you look at Toady's output, it's pretty much ridiculous for a single person. If DF were produced by a team of people, all of whom had to live off donations, it would... not be free. It's just not a feasible thing, because you need an economy of scale to support modern game design, which there's clearly a demand for (you might not play modern games, but that isn't the issue; they are massively pirated).

The principles are precisely the same. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that money can be counterfeited to the same degree of effectiveness as a pirated game. You endanger the corporation, and eventually devalue the product, depriving the employees of the money the had, and indirectly depriving others who DID pay for the game of the value of their purchase (because they pointlessly spent money).

My point is that if you say intellectual property is a meaningless term because you deprive nobody, you must discard the value of all abstract concepts.

[Phmcw]

The principles are precisely the same. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that money can be counterfeited to the same degree of effectiveness as a pirated game. You endanger the corporation, and eventually devalue the product, depriving the employees of the money the had, and indirectly depriving others who DID pay for the game of the value of their purchase (because they pointlessly spent money).

My point is that if you say intellectual property is a meaningless term because you deprive nobody, you must discard the value of all abstract concepts.

But that, however is fair game. Devaluing one product is incredibly common : Aluminum, books, cotton, ... all these product saw their price divided by thousands because of technology change. If printing money was that easy, money WOULD have no value. The value of money reside precisely in the fact that you cannot copy it, and the delicate equilibrium of trust that ensue (money is not backed by anything anymore).
Copying has devalued cd? Good, cheap music. It destroyed superstars? deal with it! (Well, not really CD sales is not the only source of money in music. Probably not even the main.) If tomorrow you'd discover a cheap way to do something, say a screen at the cost of paper, would you destroy your invention to avoid hurting Sony Panasonic and co?
File sharing is a game changer on data transmission. Just like extraction of Aluminum from Bauxite was. Distribution of music is now free. Roll with it.

Edit : however I'm not against giving some right to the inventors of concepts. But not the same that poeple have over maerial goods.

[Nikov]

I see little harm in "fulldemo". It is basically the old shareware license scheme of the 80's and 90's. If you like it, buy it. If you don't, don't. Software producers are encouraged to make replayable single-player games or balanced, clean playing multiplayer games, because lacking these, players won't buy. The legality of this practice on a normal pay-to-play license is zero to none, but I'd like to see more game companies, particularly indies or companies confident in their product, try a "three free days" policy with direct-to-drive publishing. Likewise I think the music industry needs to embrace that these aren't the vinyl days anymore when you couldn't cut a copy of a record without a garage corner full of AV gear. Their business model is not keeping up with the current way people listen to music, and if they would focus all this legal money trying to enforce nigh-unenforcable laws into something productive like coming up with a new revenue system that piracy and sharing only enhanced, they would be a lot better off.

[G-Flex]

I see little harm in "fulldemo". It is basically the old shareware license scheme of the 80's and 90's. If you like it, buy it. If you don't, don't.

In practice, a lot of people will like it and not buy it. And not only was not every game back then the same kind of "full-demo" shareware, but piracy was also less of an issue back then.

I'd like to see more game companies, particularly indies or companies confident in their product, try a "three free days" policy with direct-to-drive publishing. Likewise I think the music industry needs to embrace that these aren't the vinyl days anymore when you couldn't cut a copy of a record without a garage corner full of AV gear. Their business model is not keeping up with the current way people listen to music, and if they would focus all this legal money trying to enforce nigh-unenforcable laws into something productive like coming up with a new revenue system that piracy and sharing only enhanced, they would be a lot better off.

I agree with this, though. I don't agree with piracy on the whole, but business models have to change to accommodate the way information is produced and replicated these days.

[Bauglir]

I do agree that anti-piracy measures are doomed to fail, and companies are wiser to invest in other areas than ever-more oppressive DRM schemes (or what have you in other markets than gaming) and advertisements that insist that it's theft. I hate referencing a webcomic author on something like this, but I feel like everything I could say on the practical side of this issue has already been said more eloquently.

Most importantly,

Nobody wins.

Well, except pirates. Pirates always win, on a long enough timeline. Honestly, the timeline doesn't even need to be that long.

[Phmcw]

Bauglir : I come back on a thing but it's because I find it important : capitalism have one nasty side effect. It's that one of it's prerequisite is that, once the rules are sets, fuck morality, the weak dies.
It's pretty much the reason why it isn't sufficient in itself. But here we're in a case were capitalism will topically find the best answers. We just have to set up the framework of laws. And the laws that don't include the right to file sharing are unsustainable. You know it, I know it, they know it. They are just trying to get as much money out of it, and they do it by lobbying our politician to set up incredibly freedom threatening laws that will be enforced at great cost with our money. Right now they are trying to steal from us, and in the first sense of the term.

[Bauglir]

Some of them probably are, but I don't think it's reasonable to gesture to a vague "they" and insist they're an evil conspiracy out to drain the citizenry of their wealth. Yeah, I'm sure some people actually do think that way, and I'm sure that the people that drafted this particular law weren't thinking primarily of defending themselves.

But the motives of some of the people supporting the cause don't prove that the cause, itself, is inherently wrong. Only that it's possible to be an ass who supports something reasonable, and it's also possible to use something reasonable as an excuse to do something mind-boggling greedy. Which is something history has demonstrated to be true repeatedly, so I'm not sure why we need to have this argument.

-----------------------

I remain unconvinced that abstract concepts have no value; if you believe that a single one of them does, including money, you must admit that there is a reason that theft can be wrong other than that you deprive a person of a possession. Once you admit that, "I'm only taking a copy!" is no defense against anything but the accusation that you are depriving somebody of something, which nobody here is making. Again, copyright infringement is not theft, I'm claiming only that there are other reasons theft can be wrong that DO apply to this topic.

[freeformschooler]

Nobody wins.

Well, except pirates. Pirates always win, on a long enough timeline. Honestly, the timeline doesn't even need to be that long.

Few quotes I have agreed with more.

Let's put this in perspective in a slight derail away from the current point of conversation. You can ignore me if you want but I think I'd rather people hear me out:

The current business model for distribution of music, PC games or whatever else have you, is outdated. Maybe it's outdated in the sense that the newer business models are "better. Maybe it's outdated in that people would rather pay for a product acquired through the new business model. But none of that matters. What matters is that it's outdated in the sense that the people who would rather stick to it are more likely to attempt to fight pirates who are effectively using thier own implementation of the newer business model to illegally acquire copies of something that perhaps the former party would rather they pay for with the old business model. But the most important thing is that so long as this discrepancy, and the fight for the life of the old business model exist -- and even after that, perhaps, but that's a different story -- the fight for the old business model is rigged in favor of piracy. End of story. Pirates are always going to win, and they're always going to "acquire" the product they want. We can beat the For or Against argument with as many funny shaped sticks as we want, but hidden under said argument is the implied knowledge that so long as the old business model's staunch supporters are willing to fight, they're going to lose said fight.

[Aqizzar]

Whoops, wrong thread.

Uh... Anyway.  Say, how would you release music or movies as shareware anyway?  I like the idea of shareware coming back into existence, mainly because I got tons of free entertainment by playing the first block of levels of many an FPS, but with content that can't really be broken up in parts I don't see how it would work.  Maybe just a really elaborate website structure, so that you could listen to a song or whatever for free on the site, but it couldn't be downloaded and transported (without an elaborate enough recording scheme to make it not worth the effort).

[olemars]

  Maybe just a really elaborate website structure, so that you could listen to a song or whatever for free on the site, but it couldn't be downloaded and transported (without an elaborate enough recording scheme to make it not worth the effort).

Meh, that's what Spotify or Wimp is for. If you live in a country deemed worthy of course.

Spotify makes pirating music pointless for me. GoG, Steam etc has made pirating games pointless for me. Only thing I lack in my part of the world is a way to get episodes of TV series, since actually watching them when they air on TV never works out for me, and I don't feel like buying whole seasons on DVD.

edit: Oh, and a decent eBook setup. The publishers in this country are so scared of eBooks that they're trying their hardest to keep us at 15th century technology. And they seem to be winning.

[freeformschooler]

Only thing I lack in my part of the world is a way to get episodes of TV series, since actually watching them when they air on TV never works out for me, and I don't feel like buying whole seasons on DVD.

I'd like to introduce you to my friend Netflix. It gets better every quarter, really, and it has full series of TV shows that are just a little older than "just came out on DVD". In fact, it has most of the ones I've searched for, and you can watch them right from your computer! Or with almost any newer Blu-ray player, or on your smartphone, or... anyway, almost literally ALL of the things you can't watch through streaming (tens of thousands of shows and movies) you can get through the mail in a DVD.

I hate to be an advertiser but Netflix has reduced the actual amount of TV I actually watch, other than news and I guess the Super Bowl, to almost nothing. It is seriously worth whatever they charge.

[olemars]

Emphasis on "my part of the world"  I want Netflix. Ideally I'd like to have access to episodes at the same time they're available for TV though. Something like being able to subscribe to a series for an affordable sum instead of a whole channel (or channel pack) full of junk. That's something torrents offer uniquely right now, and which the producers don't bother with. It can easily take a year for a US-produced series to permeate to channels on my cable.

[G-Flex]

This may or may not be a viable solution for anyone in particular, but we've got DVRs these days as well, making watching TV shows at a particular time somewhat unnecessary.

[DrKillPatient]

COICA, the successor to this bill, got killed early along the line by Ron Wyden. He states here that he's very much against this one too. I predict that this won't get too far either. In addition, Google is against it. Far as I know, they're pretty damned powerful, and I bet they've got lobbyist influence.

Regardless, this is the internet we're talking about. The more technologically competent people win. If piracy can't continue one way, it'll eventually find another. The only way to reduce it, I think, is to stop fighting it. Personally, if I pirate stuff, it's because their creators commit atrocities like this, or use intrusive, unnecessary DRM-- Not because I'm just being cheap. I'm entirely happy to support anyone who accepts piracy as a fact and gets on with their lives, of course.
Although in my experience, free/open-source stuff is of a better quality, because it's released when it's done, not when profits are down. 'Tis why I try to stick to Linux and free software.

[Vigilant]

So basically this whole argument hinges on "Because there's only a chance of causing harm, there isn't a problem in doing it."

Most fights only cause superficial damage, beyond some bruised pride. You could even argue that in some cases it causes benefit, via all those old stories of how bully was stopped when the tables got turned and the other guy got beaten up. But in most contexts, randomly assaulting someone is illegal just because there's the chance of doing significant harm.

Across a group of people, something with even a chance of doing harm invariably does do harm, since you have enough people doing it to trigger the probability. The problem with basing everything around subjective triggers like "it's ok to do this if i never would have bought it, or whatever condition of your choice about trying things out, making a statement about the morality of the company", is it's a closed system where the judge is also the beneficiary. Suddenly everyone's the special exception and knows completely for sure that they weren't one of the ones that would have bought it anyways.

But that's about to be expected. Left unrestrained, a human will almost always maximize self-benefit. It's the government's job to maximize group benefit. Which is usually their intention even if it gets screwed up along the way.