Taken from another forum user [clowning, GS user, SR2 forum]

"The problem with piracy and theft is not just a matter of money, but it is also a violation of trade.

Basically, the pirate/thief is coercing a trade agreement that one party does not want. This breaks down the trade system that exists in the world, whereby people VOLUNTARILY on BOTH sides of an arrangement agree to a price for a goods exchange.

This voluntary system is essential to all trade. It is a form of contract. By stealing something, whether an object like a car, or a license to use someone else's product (which is what a game purchase is, BTW, hence the licensing agreements), you are destroying the required trust between parties in all transactions.

This creates an environment hostile to trade and encourages cost increases as owners attempt to protect their product from coerced trade (theft of some sort).

Pirates can try to justify their illegal and immoral behavior all they want, but that does not change it. Taking anything not yours without the owners permission, whether an object or a license, is coercion, theft, and deprives owners of their rights of ownership. These things are not justifiable."

I'm not sure what's worse: Having people who probably wouldn't buy the game anyway, pirate it, or having people who would have bought the game, not do so because it has a rediculous level of DRM in it.

I'm in the latter group. I haven't bought a PC game in nearly two years now because I wont rent software (and I don't pirate it either). I simply do not see why publishers cant release patches to remove DRM after the game has ceased to be economically viable. In fact, what's needed is a central repository where each game that is released, has a patch deposited to remove the DRM, so that if the company controlling the activation servers, or the publisher, goes out of the business, gamers aren't left holding a worthless disc.

You may be annoyed at pirates, but all you're really doing is annoying your customers, more so when they're left with a game they cannot play.

1)  Bullshit.   Take any two companies, compare their US EULA's, then come back and tell me that crap.  There is no standard, and a lot of them are pages long.  It's neither rational nor reasonable to expect anyone to remember all the bullshit in the last one they read, and it likely only vaguely resembles the one they're buying.  One license will give the user the right to modify, another will restrict the making of backup copies.  One license will give the licenser a unilateral right to terminate yours without cause, another will only have unilateral termination on your part.  You can't even go by companies, they change them regularly in an attempt to close methods of reverse engineering by banning more and more normal actions or preventing things they just don't like, such as used sales.


1b)  When a company will refund me not only the purchase, but the effort involved in aquiring and returning the game, then I'll give them the time of day.  For sake of simplicity, I'll accept full refund on any shipping costs both ways and minimum wage and gas reciepts when I go to a physical store.   Till then they can go fuck themselves, I'm not returning shit.  I will simply ignore them in perpetuity when they inconvenience me.  If the EULA were actually enforced, such as EA turning off Spore servers, a company can actually steal from their customers in a perfectly legal manner.  Niether here nor there or more applicable than the argument against pirates?


2)  Very nice, I consider this an acceptable method of sale.  After sale is a violation of the already agreed upon sale of a good for a price with no such EULA stated.

What is it about idiocy that it always propogates to saturation without being labeled as such?  Objection is irrelevant, just as objection to the idea of leprechauns and pots of gold at the end of a rainbow are irrelevant to the reality that there are no leprechauns or pots of golds.  The rainbow itself is not a physical object either.  I do not have to object to the idea of finding a pot of gold to state that there isn't one.

Cultures around the world have needed to be convinced of something so normal as owning property to start with.  At least that preposterous concept based on fiction has a physical object attached to it, even if arbitrary to the point of being physically unrelated to the legal definition.  Do you own all the ground underneath your ground?  If so, how deep?  What about the dirt that gets moved about by walking?  When you actually think and analyze the concepts behind property laws, they're fiction.  It's not a convention based on reality, it's a mutually beneficial method of doing things that is adopted for the sake of simplicity.  You own a parcel of a specific size and shape on a roughly two dimensional plane at a specific point, where the dirt on it ends up is irrelevant.  It exists to serve a purpose, not because it reflects reality.

IP doesn't even have that, there is no physical item, a thing, to start with.  It's literally all in your head.  It doesn't exist.  The book isn't intellectual property, even the original manuscript is simply a copy of it.  Intellectual property is the pure fiction in your head as you write it down.  It has not, does not, and likely never will exist in a physical state short of a breakthrough in technology of divine proportions.  You can't steal something that doesn't exist.

People came up with copyright because of this.  Not intellectual property, copyright.  They aren't the same thing despite the wishful thinking of many.  By creating a work, you are entitled to exclusive copyrights under copyright law.  You're not even arguing your actual points, talking about ideas and intellectual property instead of works and copyright, which are what legally apply.  Copyright is almost rational.  That specific work is an object, an existing thing.  It may be digital or some other method of storing it such as phonographs, but it exists.  However, copyright law itself is still just a construct.  There is no object taken when you copy someone elses work.  They have lost nothing because the copy doesn't exist.  It's created when you copy it.  Copyright exists purely for the purpose of rewarding the creation of works in order to fuel that creation.  The author benefits from the originally short term copyright, the public benefits from the addition of the work.  There is no intrinsic value to the idea beforehand.

Potential versus reality.  You're married, your wife is a sex addicted slut, your daughter is a sex addicted slut.  Potentially, you have two gold mines.  In reality, you have two sluts.  Yes, you could farm them out for money, but you actually have to farm them out and make a lot of money off them before they become something other than the sluts they are.  You can't lose something that you potentially have, why you potentially have it is irrelevant, you never actually have it until you do.  This is why it's idiocy to equate copyright infringment with theft.

Before anyone argues over intellectual property, coming up with an idea is irrelevant.  I come up with ideas on a regular basis, almost none of them are copyrighted.  I'm too lazy to note it, but I'll rescind all rights to any posts I've made which are some of the few thoughts I have that make it to the status of a work.  You also come up with ideas, for instance, when you need to take a shit, as soon as you get the idea to do it, you've just created intellectual property.  There is no way to and no one would want to actually try and protect this, thus it's not.  Making it illegal to think about taking a shit would do absolutely nothing to progress society.  If it were actually enforced, one would have to shit themselves wherever they happened to be without even noticing.  If one applied such a standard to everything, we'd all need lobotomized in the womb to avoid infringement.

Now, as to your assumption.  Thanks to "The Odd Couple" we have an excellent example.  "When you ASSUME, you make an ASS of U and ME."  One of the greats.

I'm already an ass regardless, but it holds up.  You assume I have a problem with people being reimbursed for their work simply because I don't buy the idiocy that copyright infringment is theft, and consider arguing it as such to be a sign of mental defect.  The idiot above calls it theft, equates downloading a torrent with stealing a boxed set of DVD's out of Walmart.  They are physically unrelated to each other, conceptually unrelated to each other, and legally unrelated to each other.  In no fucked up country on earth do they amount to anything even vaguely similar in any way.  One steals from someone a physical item that took money to create, one is the lack of a potential sale of that physical item.

People regularly assume I am a pirate simply because I don't blame pirates for pirating games published by dispicable companies that regularly shaft their customers.  I consider it a prudent, logical action.  Pirate it first, then buy it if it's safe to.  When EA releases a game, doesn't support it, turns off the servers a few months later, and leaves you hanging, EA deserves to be pirated.  It's poetic justice, karmic retribution.  It may not be legal, but I'll cheer them on before I consider someone a criminal for violating the copyrights of a company that's decided to make a living shafting them.  I might feel sorry for the developers that work for them, but when you deal with the devil you're going to get burned, and that's essentially what a few of the major publishers have decided to be.  Mutual benefit requires that one actually benefits from their purchase, which is all to frequently not the case.

What I actually do, as opposed to the swashbuckling menace to society that I am regularly assumed to be to my continued amusement, is spend most of my discretionary funding on movies and games that I have a particular interest in, and usually only after researching them to make sure they're safe.  I prefer the sale to be mutually beneficial, as copyright is designed to do, instead of getting nothing for something by purchasing a broken game that doesn't live up to the sales pitch in any way.  I support those that deserve my support, ignore those that don't, and attempt to convince idiots to argue the actual issue, instead of picking this absurd theft crap up and just spending pages arguing over whether it's theft to start with.  Morons the lot of them.

Edit: WTF on the quotes?  I have a block of text between two quoted sections that I can't unquote?

I agree , pirating software is bad ... but I don't really see anyone trying to

slow it down ... What I mean is  .. by adding DRMs to the CD .. isn't working.

This year, alot of good games that could have been made for the PC didn't

to the rise in PC pirating ... I hate to say this but console software is pirated

too.

Here is what I would like to see happen: the game CD only has the data of the

game and a install app to connect to a main server. Also, you will need to

have a internet access to install the game. I would say at least 70% have

DSL or better internet access now. So, basically you buy the CD at your

favorite store.

Now its time to install the new game. You insert the game in your CD or DVD

drive and run the install app. First thing it does is make sure the key is good.

Then it would get some information from you like your name and email address

to be link your name to the key. After that is done ... the data on the disk is

installed on the PC. Once that is done ... the install app requests for the main

EXE files from the main server.  The main EXE files are installed and the install

is complete.

Basically even if the CD was stolen during the manufacturing process the main

exe are missing. You would get the main exe file from the main server during

the install phase. Also, the main exe files you get from the main server would

only work on that computer too. ( custom DRM  )

So , thats what I would do to try and slow down pirating software ...

That is the worst argument I have ever seen.(Sorry Jonnan, you've been replaced)

You are either grossly ignorant or simply don't think before responding.  The dvd is a dime a dozen, the boxed set sitting on a retail shelf is not.

The producer that prints and ships the box has their cut, the shipper that moves the box has their cut, the warehouser that stores the box and distributes it to retail outlets has their cut, the shippers that ship them out to those retail outlets have their cuts.

The store is not out less than a cent when someone steals it even if the entire package were to cost so little.  The store is out the money they paid for it, with the potential loss being the retail price it might have sold for.  On the reverse, when someone pirates it, some point along that chain is potentially out of their cut, and no one takes a loss by losing a physical item they already paid for.

Theft and copyright are entirely unrelated, get over it.  I'm just going to ignore the rest of it since you obviously lack reading comprehension and have no idea what I said as your arguments are entirely irrelevant.

Almost everyone that I know started file sharing due to being repeatedly abused by the content owners. Some people just don't want to pay for anythings, but most of the file sharing is done as a form of "well if they try to screw me, I am gonna screw back".

Value is irrelevant, it has no bearing on the difference between theft and copyright infringment.

Oh well, enlighten you, probably not, but try I shall.

Your first argument, I shredded in detail already.  Do you not grasp the difference between real loss and potential gain?  Even better, a downloaded copy IS NOT A LOST SALE!  It never has been and it never will be.

The factual accuracy of this is irrefutable, the vast majority of them either result in a sale themselves, or would never have been one to start with because the downloaders either don't have the money to start with or don't care enough to spend it.  If you are at all honest, I'm sure you can ask yourself this question.  Ignoring the moral and long term implications of downloading all your games, would you take more than you currently buy?  I'd download hundreds a year if I were so inclined.  I don't have twenty thousand dollars to spend on games every year, and if I did, most of them are complete shit so why would I bother?  The statistics that have been taken show it to be closer to one for a thousand downloads, and in many cases far less.

Now that we've established this, lets ignore it.  Pretend a downloaded copy is a lost sale.  Walmart sells a game for $50, and you "steal" it instead of buying it.  Walmart payed 30 to get it, Walmart is out 20 bucks in profit.  Why?  Because Walmart is still selling the games they have, they simply aren't going to be able to sell that one more, it will never be made because mass production, while mass, is done as needed, not all at once in expectation of record sales for the lifetime of the product.  If, on the other hand, you actually steal that game from Walmart, they are out $50, $20 in profit and $30 that they already paid for it.  Walmart is fucked, they've actually lost money.  When you download it, they simply make less because you would have bought it instead and given them their $20 profit.  This isn't magic, it's simple math.  When you steal something you take away a physical object that has direct costs incurred in obtaining it.  When you download a copy, there is no physical object with direct costs.  How much the DVD costs to make in the first place is irrelevant.  How much the game costs to develop is irrelevant.  Value, which is purely a function of supply and demand, and inconsequential to the cost of obtaining an item, is irrelevant.

Theft takes an actual item and causes a direct loss to the person that obtained it, copyright infringment at best negates a potential sale of that item.  The person with the item still has the fucking item.  I'm sure it's possible, but it's beyond my abilities to make this any more clear.

Your second response.  You claim consumers are informed on the contents of EULA's because they know they are there?  What the fuck?

The chain of "reasoning" is as follows.  The statement that copyright infringment is a coerced trade is refuted by stating the obvious, that there is no trade, nothing is actually taken from the copyright holder.  This is fact.  I then retort that EULA's hiding restrictions until after sale are however coerced trades themselves.  This is also fact.  You then say that it's irrelevant because everyone already knows what's in the EULA's because they've seen them before.  This is not fact, you even give an exception, one of a multitude, while claiming it.  I then provide more, make a claim that even among single publishers, the EULA's have relevant variations, listing some of them in the process.  You then say it doesn't matter, presumably because your asshole is already stretched out enough that it doesn't hurt anymore?

If you can't follow and grasp the problem with your argument, you need to read your own posts very very carefully and only respond after you've discovered the paradox of your argument.  Your potential way out that you simply ignore all objectionable restrictions because they aren't enforcible and thus don't exist is naivety and no different from the pirates from a legal perspective.  As soon as you break the license, you're committing copyright infringment according to the publisher.

The final section of your post.  Wrong.  This is basic economics.  In any medium, you have costs, both fixed and variable.  The cost of software is relevant to the discussion.  For sake of round numbers, pretend Sins cost one million dollars to develop.  The development cost of Sins for 300k copies, per copy, would then be a whopping $3.33 a box.  Naturally they have other costs, advertising, production, post release support, various distribution costs.  The actual cost of the software itself though?  Negligible per copy.  The more copies, the more negligible it is.  If you sell enough, the box itself becomes a greater cost.  The process behind distribution is almost always a greater cost.

Price is the other side, a function of supply and demand, and only when you meet the correct price, will you sell that copy.  If you have too many copies, as is the case with internet piracy, the price becomes a problem.  As a black market, illegal in nature, this is not a problem for the majority of your customer base and you can largely ignore it, charging a price based on legal supply and demand, ignoring the illegal supply and demand.

The value of the software has nothing to do with an individual box, it is increasing with every sale.  Value is how much something is actually worth.  Not the wishful thinking of the company producing it, the actual results.  The value of Sins is however many millions of dollars they've made off it, the value of a pirated copy is nothing.  You can't subtract nothing from millions and make it a smaller number.  A pirated copy has no value because it's not paid for.  It doesn't matter what you call it, a copy of software has no value unless it's sold.    That price is often zero, they wont buy it unless it's free, regardless of their access to the illegal market.  Piracy is just another one of the factors in value.  Based on demand, you can milk a certain amount of money out of a certain product, at a certain price, for a certain cost.  Free copies on the black market factor into that demand.

You refute yourself.

"It" is the ratio of illegal copies disabled to legitimate purchases.  Various enterprising publishers have done studies on their own markets, the brilliance of them, to see just how fucked over they really are.  The 90% piracy rates for instance, utter crap, but they list it as a statistic fairly often.  Occasionally one will do real time tracking of sales versus anti-piracy measures.  An online aspect game where people are illegitimately accessing a server is an outstanding opportunity for such research.  As they block pirated copies, forcing those people to either find other means, purchase the game, or stop playing it, they can track changes in the overall dynamics.  Bumps to sales numbers directly following the disabling of the pirated copies tells you roughly how much you're getting out of it.  The answer has been squat, 1/1000 and worse are the numbers I've seen given.

Which is exactly why your attempt at moral equivalencies is pointless.  You can pretend they are the same, but there is no lost sale for an overwhelming majority of pirated copies.  They are not lost sales, they are potential lost sales.

You accept that people pirate before buying.  I assume you also accept that most people who pirate would never buy the game to start with correct?  Or are you assuming certain prolific teenagers spend twenty thousand dollars a year on video games when they have their broadband taken away from them?  If this is so, you already disagree with your own view that a downloaded copy is robbing someone of a sale, you simply aren't thinking about it.  For all you know, the copies sold because of piracy through the try before buying crowd outnumber those lost to context amoral individuals that don't care about infringing on copyrights.

I tell you what, go buy Spore.  When they turn your server off, let me know what course you took.  Your options are to either join in a class action lawsuit, or become a copyright infringer just to play your game.  Assuming you still have the ability to play it legally at that point, they might have already refused to give you new activations.

If you want to assume the good nature of corporations that have already proven otherwise, and depend on a legal system to protect you that has also already proven otherwise depending on district, go for it.  I prefer to live in reality, EULA's are a serious problem in the US.

Niether was I.  You seem to have a disconnect between the world as a whole and a retail outlet.  If something can't be sold, it has a value of zero, irrespective of price.  If pirated copies wouldn't have been sold, they have a value of zero.  If the lack of piracy would not have increased sales, the effect of piracy on the value of software is zero.

You're utterly hopeless, or you took debate class, one or the other.  Probably both.  It's terrible what schools do to people.

Wrong again.  The shoplifter takes a physical object with a direct cost attributed to it.  You have your point, perhaps, but it's irrelevant because you can't argue a single aspect in a vacuum.  Never mind that the morality of violating copyright law is ambiguous at best.

Since it's tomorrow.  Millions of children will take candy they didn't pay for, often without asking.  Would you say trick or treat is more like theft than internet piracy, or less?  I can get more absurd too, if you have sex, and the woman gets pregnant without your permission, would that be more like theft than internet piracy?  I bet you can find plenty of people that think the second is.

Moral equivalencies are not perfect equivalencies to start with, so I fail to see why you quote the exact words and then change them to start with, but if you must...

Congratulations, you made a terrorist threat, let me know when you get out of jail?

Ok, so you've simply missed the news.  One of the recent posts here was on the very subject.  There is now precedent for enforcing EULA's on end users, for anything short of "unconscionable" requirements.  Now either you're a sucker, or this should worry you.  We've the potential to get a hardcore marxist in office, and it's the loony left judges that keep hosing us with the copyright bullshit.  They're protecting their loony left buddies in the movie and music industries mostly.  Something to do with creativity and brains being a rare combination, most of them are nutty.  How sure are you that the next eight years wont put a bunch of fucking nutjobs on your district too?  As soon as just one of them upholds it at the federal level, we're utterly boned.  The Supreme court has made quite clear that at this time it's not going to bother hearing them, and it's doubtful whether they give a damn about consumer rights at this point after their imminent domain ruling.

Not to mention one of the provisions in EA's EULA's are that California law presides.  God I love that one.

Ok, one more time.

IP != Copyright.  Intellectual property is a broad encompassing idea that covers, yes, ideas themselves.  Yes, there are people actually lobbying to have IP in general covered under a broad IP law with vastly extended scope.  Yes, society will be utterly fucked in such an event.  No, this isn't an irrational fear, it's already in the works.  Idiots are arguing about it on here all the time.  Like the shit for brains idiot saying "Star Wars" infringed on "The Hidden Fortress" as if the idea of telling a story from the viewpoint of minor characters is sacred to the earlier movie to start with.

Copyright = IP.  As an intellectual work(I realize calling most copyrighted material intellectual takes suspension of disbelief, but I didn't define the terms) of various categorizations as defined under copyright law, they are classified as IP.

Fiction thus ends, reality is as follows.  IP doesn't exist.  It's like every other arbitrary rule society creates to grease the wheels.  If one lived in a true communist utopia, there wouldn't even be theft of physical objects.  Theft itself only exists because ownership exists.  Ownership exists as a means to generate further materials for use through trade in markets to create personal wealth and advance ones self.  It's an incentive.  It's also one grounded in a physical reality.  If you have a car, two people cannot drive it at once.  It makes sense for someone to own the car, otherwise one driver would need to bludgeon the other into a coma to get where he was going.  Possession is the root of ownership, and it's a necessarily exclusive problem, if not necessarily to individuals.

Copies don't suffer that problem, thus the lack of grounding in a physical reality.  The duration is arbitrary, the limits are arbitrary, the entire structure is arbitrary.  The concept exists solely to benefit society by creating incentive to create intellectual works, nothing more.  The law exists in it's present form because copyright holders aren't even the people that create them, they're trusts and shareholders.  Without the law, there is no copyright, no ownership of a story.  It's not bound by the physical fact that only one person can read one book at a time, you simply copy the book.  Patents serve the exact same purpose for physical objects.

You assign morality based on a legal structure that creates something where nothing exists previously.  To most of the world, copyright infringment is no different than shitting in the woods.  No one owns them, you're not taking anything from anyone, and only if everyone took a dump out there, would there be any noticable effect.

One could also look at it the following way...

The unending extension of copyright ownership by way of vested interest, hurts society which is by all definitions immoral.

On a more important side note, morality is high subjective and very relative to say the least.

Two points here (also, I'm writing this post while writing/not writing a paper, so I deeply apologize for this coming out in essay-speak)

First, whether or not you consider piracy "theft", it is illegal, as most nations have a law addressing it. The two acts may fall under different aspects of the legal code, but both are forbidden. And if you are a member of that society, you implicitly agree to live under its rules.

You may disagree with the law, but if you do, you have plenty of legal options to protest it. In a democracy, a law is put in place when the majority of people decide that a certain action is detrimental to the society as a whole, and seeks to prevent it. Not necessarily detrimental to an individual, since on an individual level, not spending money obviously trumps spending it if you get the same result. However, taken out to a macro scale, such an act is harmful to both consumers and suppliers. Therefore, the society's majority, represented in the US by elected officials, pass a law forbidding it.

If you disagree with the stated majority's opinion, you have the right to try and change their mind (i.e. write your congressman, hold a protest rally, gather a petition, seek elected office, state your own views on an internet forum, etc...). What you do not have the right to do is break that law. As a member of a society, you benefit from all the other communal benefits it provides, like police/armed forces protection, public education, utilities, public transportation, and all the other innumerable benefits of civilization. You can't pick and choose what aspects you want to benefit from and which you don't.

If you are unable to change the majority's mind and find their view to be so contrary to your own that you can't live under it legally, you still have the right to move from one society to another, which is closer to your own beliefs. You still don't have the right to break the law.

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Secondly, I just wanted to mention the whole doctor and plumber thing.

The doctor gets more money for two reasons. While I don't know for sure, I'll agree that it takes an equal amount of effort to be a really excellent plumber and a really excellent doctor. However, because of the educational requirements, it is considerably easier to enter the field of plumbing then medicine. This means there is a much larger supply of ok plumbers then ok doctors, which drives prices down. Furthermore, people place different values on the services they offer. People are less likely to fork over money for excellent compared to ok house plumbing then they are for their body's plumbing. I know I’m happy as long as my pipes work, but I want the best person I can get for anything involving cutting me open or poking me with needles. That means there is a greater demand for high quality doctors then plumbers, which allows all doctors to charge higher prices.

What do you know, my economics teacher was right when he said all you need to be an economist is to answer every question with supply and demand.

@Regont - The majority of people have not made laws in the USA for a very long time. Special interest has had that honor for decades now as far as I can tell. Hellsince it is an election year just look at the electoral college and how it is run. Moreover 10% of Americans are in prison (no other country has ever come close to that number) and another estimated 10% are legally prohibited from voting. That factored in with the 20+ of the population under 18 years of age and things start to look pretty bad to be honest. There is much, much more but simply put dont believe the hype...

BTW: I agree with you breaking the law is not a right it is an obligation when the law no longer provides for the majority of the citizens it supposedly serves and protects.