Here is a bit of reading:
The Role of Physical Piracy in the Market Economy
The Model of Post-Copyright Incentive
The Market Function of Piracy
Don’t Think of It As Piracy, Think of It As Marketing
WHY PIRACY IS GOOD

Edit: Some of the points that are brought:
- Piracy is free advertising. (Like Facebook; advertisements from friends) Even if you don't get the money from that pirate, you get it from people that heard about it.
- Piracy does NOT hurt the videogames industry. because after more than 25 years, the videogames industry would have been long dead by now, rather being bigger and wealthier now than it's ever been at any time.
- Piracy is the consumers looking for other ways to fulfill their demands which should mostly be considered as a public outcry for change, rather than the majority of the consumers turning into evil downloaders that have no consideration for the copyrights of others.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 22 2011, 2:31 am by Apos. Reason: Added an edited part :massimo:

I would be very interested in what the drive is for the people who crack programs to distribute them (as i'm sure only a limited number of them get monentary return) - perhaps they have more of a free-information justification, the type we see in "ideal communism" and open-source communities, but that is just speculation that would lead into mostly irrelevant discussion.

But to throw acctual weight in - I believe that given a choice between a pirated and paid product that often times the customer will choose paid because it is required for optimal use (multiplayer, (windows) updates, less errors) to an extent it's up the the company to ensure that the customers continue to depend on having an authentic version - since given varying economic standings it is often a better choice fiscally for an individual to pirate a product.

What about credit card security? Given the recent PSN hacking and the hundreds of game download sites that haven't uttered the term update in years should a customer trust putting his credit card number out there?

I don't believe in pirating due to it's primary motivation being greed (something for nothing) _{for most pirates}, but can see viable arguments if indeed someone tried to justify it.

interesting reads btw apos

There were some good articles there, but a couple of them are ridiculously biased.

This is a good argument that I agree with. I've discovered many small games from browsing on torrent sites that I would have otherwise never heard of. I can see how this advertising can help the company. However, it can also have no influence, considering the mindset of "Oh, their last game was on the torrent sites, so I bet someone's cracked their new game already." Only the honest pirates that buy the game if they like it would contribute (assuming this mindset, of course).
This is a logical fallacy (there seems to be a lot of these as of late). The video game industry has been trying to tap into new demographics (i.e. Wii being more family-oriented), and those statistics are more likely reflecting that. Unless you're in a large game developing company, the work-to-pay ratio isn't phenomenal by any means (side note: the average work week for game developers is 60 hours, and even more during crunch time). That was more relating to the individual worker than the company.
"I demand that this game shouldn't cost me a penny!" Piracy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Companies have been restricting features and causing playability/installation issues because they are working on anti-piracy code. Pirates crack the game to remove DRM and make the game easy and free to install/play. If piracy didn't exist in the first place, these crippling security measures would not be taking place.

This is definitely not a "free information" justification, but I understand what you mean to say.

Not all games are multi-player, though, and single-player games suffer dearly from piracy. It is an advantage to have easy updates with an authentic copy (but really, you shouldn't be sending major patches to a single-player game). I agree that multi-player games have a strong advantage against piracy for the reasons you listed.

Okay, the PSN hacking is another story altogether. Seriously, who stores passwords without even hashing? Rage, rage, rage, etc. I don't think this event promoted piracy by any means, though.

I pirate sometimes, but I refuse to acknowledge baseless justifications for it. Saying "It has no impact" when it does, saying "It's not stealing" when it technically is, etc. When it comes down to morality, the cons outweigh the pros. That's why, if you're going to support pirating, you can't focus on morality.

The question is, is pirating actually stealing? Take this example. There's a football game in a local stadium, and you go peer over the fence. Maybe even build a mini grandstand outside the field. Are you stealing from the event's hosts? You aren't taking anything physical from them, you wouldn't go pay to see the game anyway so they don't lose potential profit (as it were), so is it stealing? Pirating is the same.

Ok. When Adobe makes their Photoshop program it costs time and money from the company. This is when they are in 'debt' technically. When they release the product, they expect everyone buying it will pay back all that money that was invested in the first place. The more people who are pirating (aka, not paying for the product), the less money they are getting. Now, the way you are trying to avoid this is to say that lots of pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway. To this I pretty much can only resort to a moral argument. Is it moral to use a product that you should have paid for?

And, if you are the sandwich-maker, are you OK with all of your customers doing this? Or even a significant % of your customers doing it? You're not, are you? Just apply the silver rule, and it is definitely immoral.

You can give them out without negative effect. But the seller of goods doesn't want to give them out. They want money in return for the time and effort they put in developing their software. If we are applying Kant's Categorical Imperative, Adobe should simply release Photoshop for free, because everyone is going to pirate it anyway. But Adobe can't release Photoshop for free because making the program costs money, money Adobe needs reinvested by consumers. So Adobe closes down, and all the other video game industries, etc. This is why applying Kant's Categorical Imperative leads me to the conclusion that piracy should not be practiced, and it should lead you to that conclusion as well. Your only defence for this seems to be going on that whole 'well some pirates wouldn't have paid for it anyway' deal.

If every single person who buys a game pirates it instead, what would happen?

You've responded to it in a very tiny way. Just your own situation. I want facts here, statistics. Out of all the pirates in the world, how many can't afford it. Out of that subset, how many could afford it, but at the cost of something else? Your entire premise seems to hinge on this wet-paper supposition that a lot of pirates would collapse financially if they stopped pirating and started paying for their products. I'm not buying it. And I'm still applying a moral argument to that premise, arguing that one should not use something for free that was intended to be paid for.

You've said I'm arguing against some specific 'subset' of piracy. But if anything, the piracy you describe is the subset. It beggars belief that the majority of pirates can't afford games they pirate to such an extent that they would be risking serious financial collapse if they stopped pirating.



Yes I concede to you both it is a bad analogy. I am more trying to show why the sandwich maker/consumer maker would be not happy with a person taking his sandwich/program for free when he expected money for it.

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Jun 22 2011, 5:04 am by Oh_Man.

As stated: I'm confident that my gain is greater than their loss.
As stated much earlier: I concede that, in regards to that, it is improper. To a degree that I consider trivial.
If the sandwich-maker-with-an-infinite-supply is me, then actually I'd wish there were some way to give everyone I couldn't profit from a sandwich.
Note that this answer is not serious, and I refer now to my above response.
"everyone is going to pirate it anyway"? Where does this statement come from? I'm rather confused by this line of thought.
Again: The conclusion is based upon a flawed assumption. Not all pirates are "honest"; by the same token, not all pirates are "dishonest", either.
If every single item which has ever been pirated were to be immediately bought by said pirate, what would happen?
Thousands, tens or hundreds of thousands, of people would be in debt, some quite massively, causing significant economic upset.
I do not see how your proposal has anything more to do with actuality than this one does.
Out of curiosity, where are your facts and statistics? I'd like to see an entirely-honestly-answered survey of a sufficient percentage of pirates to demonstrate that it is impossible for a "significant number" of "honest pirates" to exist.
My "entire premise" is that myself and most of the people I know well, are counterexamples to the claim that "when one pirates, it costs a developer money, therefore one should not pirate".

Kant's Categorical Imperative states "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." So if we make piracy a universal law everyone is doing it...

This seems entirely unrelated to the imperative. Where did you pull this from? Do you know how the imperative works?

Answer a question with a question, great. An a question that doesn't even make that much sense. Who exactly is going into debt? All the piraters who are paying back the companies they stole from? That's like saying we should stop fining people for speeding because then thousands of people would all lose money. I seriously have no idea what your argument is at this stage, it appears to make very little sense.

Well once again, why are you refusing to answer and instead putting it back on me to answer it for you? I haven't looked at any statistics yet, for all I know, you could be right. But you are the one that has your entire argument resting on this fact that apparently a large subset, perhaps even the majority, of pirates are on financially tenuous grounds to such an extent that paying for products would send them all bankrupt... The burden of proof rests, squarely, with you.

Now, let us assume for a moment that you are in fact right, and most of the pirates in the world are low-class bottom-feeders struggling to get food on the table. Why is it not immoral for them to freely take products that were made by people who want money in return? Should they not simply refrain from using the product until they have the money? Again, applying the imperative. If it was moral to take things for free because you can't afford them anyway, every single person would no longer care about wealth. They could throw all their wealth away, and then use that as a justification to get a bunch of stuff for free because 'they couldn't afford it anyway'. I don't see how your argument can convince anyone, and I suspect it is simply your attempt at eliminating your cognitive dissonance.

Yes, you are generalising the population from a tiny sample. Which is useless. Because my sample shows that pirates can in fact afford games and just don't want to buy them anyway, because hey, why pay for something I can steal for free? I was in this category myself. So, now we have two samples, giving two opposing generalisations of a population. Which one do you trust? The answer, neither, because neither are statistically significant samples.

So, if you accept the above, you need to go find a survey that backs your claim.




Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 22 2011, 6:35 am by Oh_Man.

Sorry Angel, your post was at the bottom of the page and I must have missed it.

Actually, our thoughts are along the same lines here. I'm saying that if there was no choice of piracy, people that wanted it would buy it. If there was a choice, those same people may choose to take the free option instead.

Yeah, CD-Keys have been fairly successful in the past, but once someone figures out the algorithm to generate those keys SC1, people can start obtaining several "legitimate" copies of the game, and have access to all the features. The move towards personal accounts was a good one against piracy, I'd say, and it doesn't limit the experience for someone who bought the game.

Yes, I agree completely, but now the whole analogy is ruined! This might even be getting more complicated than just talking directly about piracy, because now we have to correlate things.

If a company truly felt that piracy was helping them, they wouldn't be opposed to it (some actually do take that stance, in fact, as was pointed out earlier). However, most feel that it is impeding their profits in one way or another, and you know what they say: the customer company is always right.

Yeah, that pretty much sums up my main point. I personally don't feel that the advertising piracy provides to already-big-name games makes up for the loss of sales.

On the subject of the sandwich analogy...

Supposed that you were to build a machine that generated an "infinite" ammount of sandwiches. You would have invested millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work into designing and building this machine. Then, you put a price on those sandwiches so that you might be able to turn a profit on all the money and hard work you invested into the machine. Keep in mind, it will also cost you money to run and maintain the machine, and you also have to pay the emplyees that helped you build the machine.

Then, after all of your hard work, suppose someone hacks into your sandwich machine, and gives away free sandwiches to everyone on the planet that wants one. You, after all of your hard work, would be in millions of dollars in debt with nothing but an infinite number of sandwiches (which are now worthless by the way)

Correct me if I'm wrong Oh_Man, but basically what Kant's Categorical Imperative means is "If you ar going to do something, do it only if it wouldn't matter if everyone did it."
Since the game companies would go out of business if everyone pirated. You probaly shouldn't do it at all.
The same basic principal applies to littering. Yeah, one person littering doesn't matter that much, but imagine how nasty this world would be if everyone just dumped their garbage in the streets.

That was beautifully well put.

But how many of those people would actually buy a sandwich if it cost money? That can also be said for gamers. I doubt a lot of people would buy the game if a crack wasn't available, so the companies wouldn't actually lose any money. They just wouldn't get anything from it.

So how do you then turn that into a justification for universal pirating?

I don't; I'm just pointing out the invalidity of that "the company loses money when we pirate games instead of buying them" argument.

The problem is that this is a naive interpretation of the philosophy.
As I've seen pointed out on another forum: To treat it naively, we come to the conclusion that, if everyone dedicated their lives to doctoring, we would have no blacksmiths, carpenters or farmers: Therefore, we should not become doctors.
Using it properly, we come to the conclusion: One should not become a doctor under specific circumstances.

Many philosophies appear, at a glance, to yield different conclusions regarding appropriate behaviour (Rule Consequentialism, Categorical Imperative, The Golden Rule). If we look at these more closely, they all result in obviously false conclusions and behaviours (Rule consequentialism: don't lie, even if it saves a life. Categorical imperative: no one should become a career doctor, because everyone being a doctor is bad. Golden rule: force another man into a cast, because your leg is broken and you want a cast). For all of these, the faulty conclusions can be mended by adding "if"s and other qualifier statements. Ultimately, for a given set of values (pain is bad, lying is bad, giving is good, whatever), these "different" philosophies, to be perfectly accurate and self-consistent, become different frameworks with which to express the exact same set of behaviours.
And again, this assumes that all pirating is harmful.
"Pirate under such circumstances that you can be confident you otherwise would not have purchased a product", acted upon by everyone, does not yield the "companies lose profit" issue. Your conclusion is false.
The point was the result: Large swathes of people suddenly going into debt is not good for most other people.
And...
...the point of the point made is to illustrate through example how irrelevant your argument seems to me.
As stated: "I do not see how your argument has anything more to do with actuality than this one does."
But you are the one that has your entire argument resting on this fact that apparently the subset of pirates that I and many of my friends belong to doesn't exist. Deriving from "I think, therefore I am", I conclude that I do, indeed, exist. The burden of proof, squarely, rests with you.
It would be useless if I were trying to make any claim as to what ratio of pirates are "honest" to "dishonest".
However, that is not the case. I am arguing that "a significant number" are belong to my subset.
I and most of my close friends is most certainly, to me, significant.
For my position to be correct, at least "minimum threshold for significant" honest pirates must exist. "Minimum threshold for significant", even if I were not talking about I and most of my close friends, is well under 50%.
If you're going to try to speak from a purely statistical perspective... Without evidence either way, we have no business assuming what the ratio of "honest" to "dishonest" pirates is - any outcome, without evidence, is equally likely as any other outcome. Given that "minimum threshold for significant" is below 50%, in over 50% of cases, my argument holds true. From that, your claim is the more specific.
Except that "throw[ing] all their wealth away, and then us[ing] that as a justification to get a bunch of stuff for free" yields bad things. Therefore, a proper application of "the imperative": Do not do the thing you just described as bad - not, do not do something a limited and specific subset of which results in the thing you just described as bad.

Post has been edited 12 time(s), last time on Jun 22 2011, 6:11 pm by EzDay281.

People need to eat, don't they? Sandwich lovers will gladly pay money for a sandwich. The point is that if someone was giving the sandwiches away for free, several of those same people would then take the free sandwiches instead of paying you for them.

There's nothing invalid about it. You're looking at it from a black-and-white perspective, where there's people who will buy is, and there's people who won't. Where you're going wrong is that you assume only the people unwilling to buy it will pirate it. The point of interest is the people that are willing to buy it, but they decide to get it for free instead because they can.

I can't remember if I said that already, but here is how I think:

• Let's say I want to have Photoshop, I want to start learning how to use it and have fun with it. I will only keep it for myself and maybe show my work to a few friends, nothing serious. I would go for the pirating option.
  
  
• Let's say I started a designer company. I will get a lot of clients and they will pay me lot of money. In that case, I would buy the program since it becomes a tool for my work.
  

Also (Even thought that's not the way I used it here.), I usually see the pirate as the person that distributes the software in the first place, not the person that downloaded it. The person that download should not be the one to blame. Though in P2P, I'm not sure if a seeder should be considered a pirate or not.

(Found this topic today; got bored around page 4 ... I don't know if I'll be reiterating old points that have been battered and beaten)

My reasoning goes like...
If I can't afford the game, and I don't pirate it ... I don't end up with the game. The company doesn't get my money, the company is short nothing.
If I can't afford the game, but I pirate it anyway ... I end up with the game. The company doesn't get my money, the company is short nothing as if I didn't get it at all.
If I can afford the game, and I don't pirate it ... I get the game. The company gets my money. If I hate the game, I'm screwed and I am short my money.
If I can afford the game, and I pirate it anyway ... I get the game. The company doesn't get my money, the company is short nothing as if I didn't get it at all. If I like the game and feel I should want to continue to play the game, I will buy it.

"game" works with music, software, movies (should-be joke; I don't watch movies on my own), etc. too (I've been slowly buying the music I've downloaded as I get money). You can also replace "pirate" with "playing at a friend's house" or "borrowing"/"renting" (is renting still a thing?).

I don't play a lot of games on my own anyway (I go to friend's houses and such), so anything I'd pirate would be games I would otherwise have access to, and would otherwise not buy. All the games I regularly play I do in fact own. I have a small amount of software that I have pirated and use regularly, but all the developmental software and such I have I've acquired through legal means.

The problem is that music, games, movies are expendable goods. Once you have watched the movie, you will probably not want to watch it again. (Unless it's a classic of course... But even there...) So if you pirate it, it's like if you eat it, after that, you won't use it again ( Don't even think about it!).

At this current time, you may not have to money to buy a movie, but in a few years, things may change and that's when you will be able to buy it. Don't consummate the movie for free because after that, it won't be worth anything.

Surprised you made it that far. A lot of the pages are just reiterating the same general ideas.

Well, that's where not all pirates align. There are people that pirate, like the game, can afford it, but they don't buy it because hell, they already have it. In this respect, the company is short of something. If all pirates did what you do, this wouldn't be such an issue, but unfortunately, that's not the case.

That's actually a pretty good point. We can always go back to the "pirates can't access things like multi-player" argument, but I still think this is significantly accurate regardless.

I've only skimmed the thread, but I found this interesting. It's a nice theory, but it actually doesn't work in reality.

One example of this that I heard about on the radio, was a study that found in LA that if approx 10% of the drivers bent the road rules or drove aggressively, rather than following the rules to the letter, traffic throughput actually increased. It seems that if 100% of a population follows the rules to the letter, the system ends up being less efficient than if a few people broke the rules to edge out a small advantage for themselves.

That's just an example of where this came up. I'm sure there are many other examples you can think of where a few people breaking the rules actually improves the situation, but if everyone broke the rules it'd fall down in a house of cards.

Apos posted some links earlier about how piracy is good and is sometimes used for marketing. I haven't actually read any of the articles he linked to, but I have read other articles showing that Adobe pretty much has a policy of allowing piracy. They could easily spend a hell of a lot more money to stamp out piracy than they are, but they don't see it as worthwhile. This is because the college kids that pirate their professional software become familiar and proficient with it. When they leave university and become an employee, they lobby for their company to buy Adobe products because that's what they're familiar with, thus driving sales. It's called vendor lock-in, and Microsoft similarly do it with their Visual Studio development software and to a lesser extent with Office. That's also why they have Student and Teacher editions, basically it performs the same task that piracy does (get 'em while they're young), but gives them extra revenue at the same time.