incal11:

perfectimo:
There should be no exceptions to the law.

... and the law is always right.
<taking a break to laugh at you>

Hmm... don't see anywhere in my 8 words where I said anything remotely like that. If you live in a society you have to live by it's rule otherwise leave.

You sir are a sad unimaginative sheep;
I am very happy not to be like you.

incal11:
You sir are a sad unimaginative sheep;
I am very happy not to be like you.

You sir are an idiot. How was that a measure of my imagination? How was I being a sheep?

I could have sworn I made a post about keeping this discussion civil...

nilcypher:
If we are going to have this debate, can we keep it civil please? Otherwise, we won't be having this debate.

Oh look, there it is!

Last chance guys. If you can't discuss this without name-calling, then I'm going to have to shut this down.

nilcypher:
I could have sworn I made a post about keeping this discussion civil...

nilcypher:
If we are going to have this debate, can we keep it civil please? Otherwise, we won't be having this debate.

Oh look, there it is!

Last chance guys. If you can't discuss this without name-calling, then I'm going to have to shut this down.

I'll try but in my defence I was pointing out the hypocrisy in incal11's post.

Here's an interesting point. You can call it whatever you want and try to justify it however many ways you want but until it is legal to take somebody else's property without their permission then you are breaking the law.

perfectimo:

I'll try but in my defence I was pointing out the hypocrisy in incal11's post.

To quote a great philosopher:

"Do or do not, there is no try."

nilcypher:

perfectimo:

I'll try but in my defence I was pointing out the hypocrisy in incal11's post.

To quote a great philosopher:

"Do or do not, there is no try."

To quote another actor: "You're tearing me apart!"

I'm pretty sure this thread is effectively dead or it will be up again after this post but here's to the next piracy thread. *raises glass*

TsunamiWombat:
No. It's theft. Deal with it.

Best post in the whole thread in my opinion.

Zeldadudes:

TsunamiWombat:
No. It's theft. Deal with it.

Best post in the whole thread in my opinion.

It's certainly to the point, but I'm not sure that pinning down exactly what type of crime internet piracy is is a good use of our time. The bottom line is that it is illegal, and that isn't going to change any time soon.

Regardless of what you might think about piracy, it is indisputable that piracy is making developers and publishers behave in strange ways, whether it means not bringing games to PC, like Gears of War 2, or using it as an excuse to dump draconian DRM on us, like SecureROM.

The thing is, their concerns are not entirely without basis. The recently released puzzle title World of Goo has seen massive piracy rates, around 90% and Crytek and id have both turned their back on PC exclusivity thanks to piracy. In essence, by continuing to pirate games, we're cutting our noses off to spite our faces. The more we do it, the more the EA's of the world will foist their crap on us and the more games will go into that multi-platform hodgepodge that the PC fares so poorly in.

incal11:

perfectimo:

incal11:
I rarely download , most of what I have I either look for buying it , or I had it already (bought and lost when I was younger).
In fact I think I may download way less that some of the anti-download radicals here.

Merryjest:

incal11:

WARNING This is an hypotethical situation!
You probably won't get if you lack imagination (a sad thing for a gamer ), or just disagree Because :

-I'm in a isolated and ignored country ;
-there's a civil war and I might die tommorow, there's a game I want to play before that happens;
-the internet is heavily filtered (so no steam, but I can access some torrents using routers)
-anyway, if I somehow order it , chances it reach me are extremely slim or nonexistant.

Am I to die in misery because I can't get it legally?

What makes you so special that you deserve to break the rules merely because of your position? You are applying sentimentalism, and I'm sorry, it doesn't work. People die every day- fact of life- and most of them don't get what they want. I would actually call you an idiot, in this hypothetical situation, because you are wasting time playing on your computer instead of spending every waking hour of the day and night trying to devise an escape plan.

I'm adding
-I can't escape
-I have no loved ones to spend some time with (thei're dead)

because some people die without what they want everyday , I don't have the right to ease my own pain if I have the chance ?

You're a sad sad person...

There should be no exceptions to the law.

... and the law is always right.
<taking a break to laugh at you>

I love the way i can actually pick out the posts written by people under 22 these days.

I have my moral compass, it's pretty much on what most people agree with. There is some things i do not agree with, copyright laws and digital rights, and a few traffic laws. Digital Rights Management is a pain, should be curb stomped now to stop its vile presence, it treats consumers like pirates, and the pirates get the 'consumer' version basically. Retarded. I don't see why a company has the right to tell me what i can use my freshly bought song on.

I actually believe everything should be released as Creative Commons No Commercial- No Derivative. Or Copyright Laws altered to become similar. Which keeps commercial Copyright Infringement illegal but allows sharing, as i do think information should be free.

And you are talking to someone who has a big media collection. I buy what i like.

I would like to download a free copy of a woman, that is already bought by someone else, and use her as I like. That guy would still has the original and act around like he's better than me just because he has money, but I'd have that woman too and my version wouldn't try to check me every time to see if have the right to own her.

In fact, If it was possible to download physical copies of things on the internet, I'd be downloading everything - gummies, watermelons, BMWs and the Great Pyramid.

nilcypher:

Regardless of what you might think about piracy, it is indisputable that piracy is making developers and publishers behave in strange ways, whether it means not bringing games to PC, like Gears of War 2, or using it as an excuse to dump draconian DRM on us, like SecureROM.

The thing is, their concerns are not entirely without basis...

My view on this though is that even if there wasn't piracy, devs would still be jumping ship off of the PC. There are too many (poor) reasons to not develop for the PC and to just stick to consoles. Piracy is just the strongest excuse devs can come up with so that they don't look lazy.

I remember reading an article about a year ago where one dev was blaming Intel on the fall of PC games. It sounded far-fetched, but it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of PCs out there, and only a few of them will run the games being put on them. Devs don't want to spend the time to make their game ugly but runnable on everyone's laptops. Making PC games is almost like making PS3 games in 2007: Foolishly pointless as no one owned a PS3.

Anyway, I get really pissed when I hear anyone cry "piracy." It's not a big deal. It's always been around and always will be. The things that deserve to get purchased still do, and the companies that sell shit go out of business.

IF companies are so concerned about the damage piracy is doing, then they need to stop spending all this money on advertising that you are a criminal for "stealing." It certainly makes me feel awesome (no sarcasm here) when I see those MPAA ads at the beginning of movies. I don't know how much money goes into those ads, but it's 110% waste. The campaign needs to be "If you like it, buy it!" Sure, it sounds a little less dramatic, but it would be a ton more effective, and it would inform people that devs, artists, studios, etc all need their money too for the things YOU love.

Hell, they don't even need to spend a lot of money on the campaign. All the time CEOs get interviews and they always are complaining about piracy. Instead of the usual piracy rant just say "I know people are going to do what people are going to do, but just remember to buy it if you like it."

So apparently you're pretty fed up with analogies that you feel dont suit downloading. Well as I read that I came up with an analogy of my own.

An airline sells seats on a plane. They still fly the plane from point to point even if it is not completely full. If you could somehow reproduce a fake ticket and board the plane the airline would not be losing money because they still have to pay the same to run the plane itself, and there happened to be a free spot on the plane. Does this make it legal? Umm... no...

Is this a better analogy than stealing a car? Yes. What would this form of crime be called? Umm... I dont know... stowing away on a plane is not something I have a lot of experience with, but I still feel like that analogy works better.

But I happen to agree with everyone who said downloading still theft, of intellectual property. You've pigeonholed theft as being only when someone removes something from someone elses possession, but ideas can be stolen too. If I steal your idea, you still have it. See how that works? No? Ok.

No;
an idea can really be stolen if the one who taken it then claims unfairly it's his own idea.
The idea which lead to the creation of a game has already been used ,
who would claim to be the maker of Halo after pirating it ?
Also a plane needs more fuel if it carries more weight , however small , and fuel is tangible.

perfectimo:

I'll try but in my defence I was pointing out the hypocrisy in incal11's post.

Here's an interesting point. You can call it whatever you want and try to justify it however many ways you want but until it is legal to take somebody else's property without their permission then you are breaking the law.

The real hypocrites are the one who started insulting me at every turn ; and I could have used a lot more verbal violence .

You see the word in black and white if you think the law is forever almighty , and your blind acceptance makes you a sheep .
That's not name calling , it's a constatation; at least I'm not insulting your intelligence , but your ability of making use of it.

I feel like talking to a wall; I'm not trying to change the way the world works...
but it will change , it will HAVE to change along with our current conception of property and some laws , like it changed before you were born.

Maybe this thread is just a few years too early.

Phantom2595:
I declare that this new word/term SHALL BE.

ILLEGAL REPRODUCTION! (of copyrighted material)

are you ganna copyright your word and be the first person to copyright a word thereby limiting said word to your use only? on topic i see your point but still as Richard said nobody wins or loses but at the same time the company of said game is losing. They are losing because if you had bought the game from a retailer they would have gotten your money. So they dont get your money when you illegaly download the game. I still think that the odds of me being caught if i downloaded something illegaly are pretty much 1:120 EDIT:Yea dont comment on how im trailing off topic or dont know what im talking about

What baffles me is how some people try and moralise piracy. You're not fighting against an oppressive regime or toppling a dictator when you download Crysis from a torrent, you're committing a crime and depriving people of income, however small a sum it might actually be.

You don't get to pick and chose which laws you obey and if you think a law is unjust, the correct response is not to break it, but to try and get it changed.

nilcypher:
Regardless of what you might think about piracy, it is indisputable that piracy is making developers and publishers behave in strange ways, whether it means not bringing games to PC, like Gears of War 2, or using it as an excuse to dump draconian DRM on us, like SecureROM.

The thing is, their concerns are not entirely without basis. The recently released puzzle title World of Goo has seen massive piracy rates, around 90% and Crytek and id have both turned their back on PC exclusivity thanks to piracy. In essence, by continuing to pirate games, we're cutting our noses off to spite our faces. The more we do it, the more the EA's of the world will foist their crap on us and the more games will go into that multi-platform hodgepodge that the PC fares so poorly in.

Look at the market for books. You can read books for free thanks to libraries. You can buy books cheaply thanks to second-hand bookstores. A huge portion (something like 75% if Charles Stross' article is to be believed) of most books' audience get them through these channels.

For console video games, there are rough analogues. You can play games temporarily thanks to rentals. You can buy used games cheaply. I think these services are inferior to libraries and second-hand bookstores, but they're still similar. And, yes, they're more expensive, but a video game costs ten times as much as a paperback, too. I think we can all agree, just anecdotally speaking, that the volume of rentals and second-hand sales is huge.

For PC games, these services don't exist.

It's not that much harder to illegally copy and run console games than it is to illegally copy and run PC games. A small group of people has been doing it for many years now. But, for most gamers, there's just not enough incentive. Because they've got these nice legal alternate channels.

Of course, most video-game publishers hate second-hand sales and rentals. Recently they've started waging war on them with special "only-if-you-bought-this-retail" downloadable content. Some of them even go so far as to write stupid editorials about how the next president should regulate second-hand sales with special video-game blue books and funnel half the money from any such sale to the game's publishers. They dream of the day when they can crush used games and rentals, when every customer will be walking home with a shiny $60 box right on release day. (Some of them have tasted the MPAA's ways and have an even bigger dream -- to turn all gaming into a rent-directly-from-the-publisher experience, where you as the end user own nothing.)

But those second-hand sales and rentals are the only thing keeping illegal distribution of console games down. If they ever succeed, console "piracy" will skyrocket. There is no way to make everyone who plays video games right now pay $60 for them.

-- Alex

nilcypher:
What baffles me is how some people try and moralise piracy. You're not fighting against an oppressive regime or toppling a dictator when you download Crysis from a torrent, you're committing a crime and depriving people of income, however small a sum it might actually be.

You don't get to pick and chose which laws you obey and if you think a law is unjust, the correct response is not to break it, but to try and get it changed.

SOMEONE is Lawful good.

Seriously though While I don't ALWAYS agree with that sentament (I am all for going outside the law when unjust) The point has been made. You should not steal and that is stealing plain and simple. Yes corporations are greedy and money grubbing, Yes they lower standards to make money, but if you want something you should compensate those who work for it.Life has alot of things to fight back against and even more ways to do so but at this point the relative consistency of game prices, especially considering how much piracy should drive it up, is just one of those facts of life.

Yes its still going to happen, Yes we need to find some way for file sharing to become a way to gain compensation for work, yes the Paradigm needs to shift. But call an apple an apple for crying out loud.

nilcypher:
You don't get to pick and chose which laws you obey and if you think a law is unjust, the correct response is not to break it, but to try and get it changed.

I agree with this statement as far as copyright infringement is concerned, but not in general.

There are circumstances when the law is very poorly thought-out and not likely to change soon.

Sometimes, it's trivial laws covering trivial shit. I know the DMCA makes pretty much any form of DRM circumvention illegal. Fuck that! I'm not waiting ten years for the legislature to get off it's ass just so I can back up a bit of media or make some DRM-infected game work with my CD drive.

Sometimes, it's trivial laws covering non-trivial shit. If I lived in a state with sodomy laws that covered something I like to do, I would certainly break them.

-- Alex

bob has a batman fetia`

nilcypher:
What baffles me is how some people try and moralise piracy. You're not fighting against an oppressive regime or toppling a dictator when you download Crysis from a torrent, you're committing a crime and depriving people of income, however small a sum it might actually be.

You don't get to pick and chose which laws you obey and if you think a law is unjust, the correct response is not to break it, but to try and get it changed.

Some companies I need not to name are actually acting like opressive regimes, and i'm moralising piracy only under some conditions (to simplify to the extreme you think in terms of yes OR no, I think in terms of yes AND no)
If there's anything I can actually do to change the law where I live I will do it , but 'till then I refuse to be completely manipulated , especially by laws that does not concern the proper working of my state , they'll have my money if they deserve it .

TerraMGP:
But call an apple an apple for crying out loud.

I never said it's not theft , just that it can be justifiable in some conditions.
And I believe the very concept of theft will have to change.

If you want to change things, start by boycotting their product. Picket, hand out fliers, stand outside of their building. Do the kind of thing that people should be doing to Yahoo. Illegally downloading to cull the market does not work because they can simply point to the figures and say 'see? those people would have purchased our games" and iwth people still putting money into the games by purchasing them the company gets its reward.

theft is theft is theft, whats the difference between stealing a game online or snatching a dudes wallet. Everyone loses (even the thief eventually)

I'm already boycotting , as for the protest , things aren't looking too good with sarkozy , but it will blow up if he keep it up.

jockslap:
theft is theft is theft, whats the difference between stealing a game online or snatching a dudes wallet. Everyone loses (even the thief eventually)

Personally I don't think I'm stealing anyone's wallet with 10+ years old games , or games I bought but left home.

incal11:
Personally I don't think I'm stealing anyone's wallet with 10+ years old games , or games I bought but left home.

In that case your not, especially with orphaned works or works that will never see a rebirth. But there is a difference between getting a copy of a game that you paid for at one time or getting an orphaned work you cannot otherwise get and taking something that a person depends on for income.

Just saying

TerraMGP:

incal11:
Personally I don't think I'm stealing anyone's wallet with 10+ years old games , or games I bought but left home.

In that case your not, especially with orphaned works or works that will never see a rebirth. But there is a difference between getting a copy of a game that you paid for at one time or getting an orphaned work you cannot otherwise get and taking something that a person depends on for income.

Just saying

i agree, if it's old and i can't find it in a store, then downloading it is great, you can keep the classics alive. Otherwise it is stealing. Perhaps internet downloading should be legal for games over a certain age?

Still it's stealing in regard of the law ...
and yes hopefully the law will have to accept reality regarding this.

incal11:
Still it's stealing in regard of the law ...
and yes hopefully the law will have to accept reality regarding this.

Nope, it's a different thing. For a long time, copyright infringement was only a civil offense, for example (whereas theft is covered under criminal statutes as well).

-- Alex

my mistake , so many equated copyright infringement with theft here...

I wish people would stop saying illegal=wrong. The law isn't infallible.

Richard Groovy Pants:
A pirate that will use said pirated game for personal use will not win any money out of it. And the company being infringed of their copy rights won't lose any because they didn't had it from the beginning!. No one loses, no one wins. It balances itself out and to all the haters saying that pirates are thieves well, go eat cacti, maybe then you'll think before posting.

Technically they do win money out of it, to be precise, the money they would have paid for the game had they not pirated it.

Zephirius , you ough to read the first AND last pages of a thread ; or your just making everyone go round and round .

Start with this page from the top :)

Merryjest:

Northover32:
"You wouldn't steal a BMW would you?"

Damn right i would! if it took about 4 seconds, and i could steal like 20 at a time without being caught! No one can denie that if they wern't gonna get caught they would definately steal a brand new car!

Actually, yes they would deny it. The answer to that question is what separates quality from trash.

but if you read what i said correctly, i didnt say you wouldnt denie stealing the car once caught, as i put it, you wouldnt denie that if you had the oppertunity to take a car without being caught that you wouldnt do it.

good try though, and "The answer to that question is what separates quality from trash."? so since you answered it wrong without even understanding the question makes you trash then? just using your words.

If the celebrities that are ultimately losing money from downloading music (for example) can bend the law as to, for example, escape jail time? why can we not bend the law, for example, to get free music?

The moment you brought the law into this, you've just invalidated all of your arguments. The law is an arbitary line in the ground, on one side is "pass Go", on the other side it "Go to jail". Ever heard of SS officer Klaus Barbi? He was sentenced to life for "Crimes against humanity"; but let's remember when he commited his "crimes", he was not breaking any laws at all, he had french legality on his side. How do you define a criminal? If the media and those with a lot of money and power says: you are a crimal, then you are a criminal; if they say: you are not a ciminal, then you are not a criminal.

What's the difference between filesharing and stealing?

Love music, Love filesharing, Hate piracy.

Here's my summary:

There are 2 different kinds of value:
1) Money. This is what you get for you labor, which you use to exchange for similar goods and services
2) Inspirational value. This is what you get when you see a good painting, or sit and listen to good music. This can not be expressed in monetary terms.

Musicians produce music because they love music, not because they want to make money from music. [read: they should not expect to get money in exchange for their music] However good musicians can easily make a comfortable living from concerts, advertising, interviews, merchandise, etc, without ever selling a single recording.

The difference between filsharing and piracy is:
Filesharing is downloading the music to listen to the music, it generates a lot of inspirational value, but never any monetary value.
Piracy is downloading music to make money from it, it generates no inspirational value, and a lot of monetary value.

Notice how money is a zero sum game, but inspirational value is not. Therefore stealing is only useful in describing something of monetary value, it is meaningless in the context of inspirational value, because you can never steal a particular feeling I just had 24 hours ago. How much money is my .jpg file of the Mona Lisa worth?