I don't think it's a matter of "harm". The issue is whether people deserve to make money on their intellectual property if they wish. Are media careers obsolete now? Will people who create content no longer be paid for their creations? Do they deserve to be paid?
You're missing the point here. The point is that if the people doing the vast majority of the pirating are in these morally acceptable situations, then the creators would make nearly the same amount of money now as they would if piracy didn't exist. Given that, what reason is there for the pirates in these acceptable situations to not pirate?
You're missing the point here. The point is that if the people doing the vast majority of the pirating are in these morally acceptable situations, then the creators would make nearly the same amount of money now as they would if piracy didn't exist.
Who decides what is a morally acceptable solution and what is not? What is the boundary of said decision? Every situation you can think of is so ambiguous and dependent on the situation that it would be impossible to create any system to determine whether it should be allowed or not.
As for as morals go, pirating it < pirating, waiting for price to drop and purchasing then< no pirating, waiting for price drop, then buying it< buying it now.
Addition added.
I was going to include this, but hesitated and eventually took it out because I think, morally, waiting for the price to drop is no different than buying it now. Is it more immoral to wait for a movie to come out on DVD/Blu-Ray rather than going to see it in the theater now? The price is different, yes, but morally, I see no difference. Now, if we were discussing what is best for the creators of the game, then I would agree with you, but that is not necessarily the same thing.
Who decides what is a morally acceptable solution and what is not? What is the boundary of said decision? Every situation you can think of is so ambiguous and dependent on the situation that it would be impossible to create any system to determine whether it should be allowed or not.
The situation is pretty broad, we're just giving specific examples. You have a person. That person for whatever reason pirates something, and does not pay for it. If piracy were impossible, that person would still not have paid for it. Do you think that is acceptable for that person to pirate whatever it was they pirated? Do you think that person caused harm in some way? Explain why.
I was going to include this, but hesitated and eventually took it out because I think, morally, waiting for the price to drop is no different than buying it now. Is it more immoral to wait for a movie to come out on DVD/Blu-Ray rather than going to see it in the theater now? The price is different, yes, but morally, I see no difference. Now, if we were discussing what is best for the creators of the game, then I would agree with you, but that is not necessarily the same thing.
Morally there is no difference, I just feel like it should've been added because you used the word "now". Has you just said "no pirating, just buying it (whenever)" it would've been complete. I don't know why I did not change it to this latter idea though, perhaps because you were talking about price dropping this had not yet come up in my mind yet.
You have a person. That person for whatever reason pirates something, and does not pay for it. If piracy were impossible, that person would still not have paid for it. Do you think that is acceptable for that person to pirate whatever it was they pirated? Do you think that person caused harm in some way? Explain why.
Yes. The creator spent his time and effort into creating this media. They decided to take an idea and execute it for others to experience it. However, he only wants to share it if other people pay him some money for it. If he didn't get money for it, he wouldn't have created it in the first place. The people who steal from him ruin it for the other people who wish to experience the creators media. The creator didn't make enough money from his media to make it worthwhile for another piece. Now the pirates have no only deprived the creator of the media his compensation for creating it, but other consumers as well.
You keep saying your time is money, however whenever someone takes the time to create a piece of media you seem to think they don't deserve money for it if they want.
Yes. The creator spent his time and effort into creating this media. They decided to take an idea and execute it for others to experience it. However, he only wants to share it if other people pay him some money for it. If he didn't get money for it, he wouldn't have created it in the first place. The people who steal from him ruin it for the other people who wish to experience the creators media. The creator didn't make enough money from his media to make it worthwhile for another piece. Now the pirates have no only deprived the creator of the media his compensation for creating it, but other consumers as well.
But we're assuming that he would have made the same amount of money in a world without piracy because the only people who pirated it are people who would not have bought it in the first place. In the piracy world he can blame the failure on piracy. In the non-piracy world, the creator would have nobody to blame except themselves for making a product that failed in the marketplace. From this perspective, you could actually say that the pirates are doing the creators a favor. If a game is heavily pirated, the creator can actually believe, and get others to believe, that their game was a success despite failing economically. In the world without piracy the creator would be out of a job for making such a poorly selling product.
So, since i live in Costa Rica and no one here buys licenses for distribution, and companies don't market to my country, you'd then approve of me pirating spore? and imports are not reasonable (up to 80% import tax on consumer electronics and entertainment (50% to 60% with video games) plush shipping costs?))
****Re-Checked, it's now down to 30% - 50% on consumer electronics and entertainment
Can't you purchase it digitally via the EA downloader?
Can't really tell, I'd need an international credit card first (I usually use a friends card) and I don't know if they'll have a problem with having the billing address being outside the US, as its been in several occasions when trying to buy/download stuff online.
But we're assuming that he would have made the same amount of money in a world without piracy because the only people who pirated it are people who would not have bought it in the first place. In the piracy world he can blame the failure on piracy. In the non-piracy world, the creator would have nobody to blame except themselves for making a product that failed in the marketplace.
How many people who pirated the game in the piracy world would have otherwise purchased the game in the non-piracy world? If the answer is anything but zero, your argument is moot. If you answer is zero, I would argue that it has no application in the real world as there are many people who have the financial means to purchase a game but otherwise pirate it.
You can make as many hypothetical solutions as you want, but they have almost no application in the real world.
Can't really tell, I'd need an international credit card first (I usually use a friends card) and I don't know if they'll have a problem with having the billing address being outside the US, as its been in several occasions when trying to buy/download stuff online.
I was not aware that there was such a thing as a non-international credit card. I have used my credit card to purchase things from other countries on several occasions, and they just handle the exchange rate for me. The billing address might be an issue, though.
Can't really tell, I'd need an international credit card first (I usually use a friends card) and I don't know if they'll have a problem with having the billing address being outside the US, as its been in several occasions when trying to buy/download stuff online.
I was not aware that there was such a thing as a non-international credit card. I have used my credit card to purchase things from other countries on several occasions, and they just handle the exchange rate for me. The billing address might be an issue, though.
We have "Only valid in CR" credit cards here, because we have local Visa/Mastercard/etc processors (interest rate is lower, as well as prerequisites) and the international ones. I guess its not your case since all of those are US companies thus directly connected to the international processors (this is just a guess)
We have "Only valid in CR" credit cards here, because we have local Visa/Mastercard/etc processors (interest rate is lower, as well as prerequisites) and the international ones.
People bitch about PC gaming dying. Well it's because people pirate games like Spore that causes them to go to closed platforms like the Xbox and Playstation. It's insanely hard to pirate games for those platforms and they make a lot more money because of it. You people need to learn, the only way to get DRM gone is to stop pirating their shit, no matter what they do.
I call "bullshit" on the idea that console piracy is difficult. Hacking an old-school Xbox was trivial by the end of its life-cycle; anyone with a copy of Splinter Cell and the right software on their PC could do a softmod. Hacking a PS2 wasn't that hard either. Hacking a 360 requires a bit more effort (mainly in getting the case open), but still amounts to little more than a firmware flash on the DVD drive in the console and having the right kind of drive in your PC to be able to read the original disks so you can make a copy of them. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge and access to Google can find out how to pirate console games.
The draconian DRM schemes used by PC game publishers use these days amount to little more than a minor annoyance to the crackers who dive into the games and remove the copy protection. Meanwhile, the legitimate PC game consumer gets shafted and shat upon. Once they are informed of the extra crap that they are going to have to deal with on their PC due to the DRM in a game they basically have three options, two of which are viable if they still want to play the game on their PC:
Bend over and take it in the ass while saying, "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"
Use a pirated copy of the game (regardless of whether or not they actually purchased it)
Don't buy the game at all in PC form
The trouble with options 2 and 3 is the publisher can point to them and say, "Look! Look! Piracy cost us X amount of sales on the PC!" when in reality it was their own stupidity and over-zealousness in attempting to protect their precious cash-cow that cost them the sale or forced the piracy. If anything, publishers using DRM schemes on the PC versions of their games is driving me towards playing games on a console. I don't have to worry about how many times I have installed Bioshock or Mass Effect on my 360 because neither of those games has that limit on the console. I can just drop the disc in and play without worrying about some authentication server being up and running or whether or not it will recognize my install key as legit.
Having to hack something or buy DVDs to burn games on is enough of a deterrent that most people will not go to those lengths. It's very different from simply downloading a game an playing it. Pirating on a console takes effort.
Agreed. I hated it whenever I bought a game and that it would not install because I have 2 physical optical drives. Or when it whines that I have to put the CD in the first of those drives, when it's already in there. I am not going to let some game company decide for me whether or not I can have multiple optical drives or not.
Does a thing that has an infinite supply have any commercial value? Not really. Unfortunately, this is not the answer that those who produce content for profit wish to hear.
If anyone were ever able to create a genuine Replicator (as opposed to one that can only reproduce media, as we have now) the fallout (especially in the commercial sector) would be immense.
I am of the opinion that pirating a game that you can buy in a store or off of a console is wrong but emulating games that are not currently available without buying them off of people on eBay or Amazon is perfectly okay.
Does a thing that has an infinite supply have any commercial value?
There isn't an infinite amount of games. There are games that can potentially have an infinite amount of copies, but games are still scarce in the economic sense of the word and that's all that really matters when you're talking about value.
I used to pirate a lot of games and software, in my punk kid days, when I didn't have any money but did have access to a fat Internet connection. The novelty wore off, though, and honestly, it's more of a pain to pirate most things these days than it is to just plunk down some money. Steam has basically made it way too easy for me to legally acquire games, so I've gone ahead and done it. As for other software, buying it is usually a better option than pirating something that has a nonzero chance to be laden with viruses and trojans.
I still pirate music, but I support the bands by attending concerts and buying T-shirts and the like. If more bands did the Radiohead thing, though, and offered their albums for sale for whatever you felt like paying, I'd probably toss like 5 bucks at most albums. It's worth it just to have high-quality correctly tagged files.
The underlying problem here is that we have an economy based on scarcity. It's designed around the idea of supply and demand, and assumes supply is finite. With infinite supply, price becomes zero. Some people, like my buddy Dough Rushkoff, have suggested that we switch to a different economy that is based on abundance instead of based on scarcity. That's a nice idea and all, but so far nobody has explained to me exactly how that works. If someone can design an economy that functions on a principle of abundance rather than scarcity, I think the world will be saved.
The underlying problem here is that we have an economy based on scarcity. It's designed around the idea of supply and demand, and assumes supply is finite. With infinite supply, price becomes zero. Some people, like my buddy Dough Rushkoff, have suggested that we switch to a different economy that is based on abundance instead of based on scarcity. That's a nice idea and all, but so far nobody has explained to me exactly how that works. If someone can design an economy that functions on a principle of abundance rather than scarcity, I think the world will be saved.
I think your issue is that you view digital media as a good whereas you should view it as a service. People took the time to create it, you pay them for their time (who's end product is the piece of digital media).
The underlying problem here is that we have an economy based on scarcity. It's designed around the idea of supply and demand, and assumes supply is finite. With infinite supply, price becomes zero. Some people, like my buddy Dough Rushkoff, have suggested that we switch to a different economy that is based on abundance instead of based on scarcity. That's a nice idea and all, but so far nobody has explained to me exactly how that works. If someone can design an economy that functions on a principle of abundance rather than scarcity, I think the world will be saved.
Hrm. That's a tricky one. The concept of competition of limited resources is a pretty universal idea, and the fundamental driving force of evolution. If we could somehow break away from that...well, things would be interesting.
I'm not sure how that could work in any system that uses any sort of currency, though. The idea is that you're given access to a finite amount of resources, in order to acquire a finite amount of goods to allow for existence. If you gave people access to infinite resources, your economy would break unless the supply is literally infinite. We don't have an infinite supply of all goods, though, and we probably can't really make that happen, either. I mean, how would you make sure that everyone has enough food? Or space? And then, if you do supply everyone with all the food or space they need, how do you deal with the subsequent rapid population growth?
I'm incredulous as the notion of being able to do such a thing, but I'd like to read somebody's ideas as to how it might work.
Think about this. Right now we use our currency for everything. The currency is based on an idea of limited resources. Even the richest of rich people don't have infinite money. The currency is limited, so your access to physical resources is equally limited.
Now we have a nearly unlimited fountain of digital media and information. People are expecting others to give them a share of their very limited resource, money, for some unlimited resource, bits. Isn't that an inherently stupid exchange? If someone gives you rare money to make a copy of existing bits, that's pretty sad. That's like if someone came and gave you money for a loaf of bread from your infinite bread machine. Really dumb when you think about it.
As Andrew is trying to point out the money should be for the service of labor involved in arranging the bits, not for the copying of the bits themselves. That's well and good as that service still is a relatively limited resource. The problem is that right now the business model doesn't match that idea. The business model treats copies of the bits as goods. The publisher pays the developers as if they are providing a service, but we buy copies of the goods from the publisher as if they are goods.
You can say that people who use their limited labor to perform a valuable service deserve some sort of compensation. But to make the jump from that all the way over to a kid with no money copying a video game for free is not easy. There is a huge gap in between that must be traversed, and along the way the logic does not match up.
In the case of a truly infinite resource, the only feasible option that I see, in a system that uses anything like currency (exchange of limited resources for presumably limited goods), is to reassign purpose to the infinite item in question. Ergo, digital music is more like advertising, and the actual products that a band sells would be apparel (and other such things) and live performances. Live performances are generally the singular experience that you cannot duplicate, so that's actually worth something. You're right; the concept of music as a "good" is pretty much gone.
Comments
You keep saying your time is money, however whenever someone takes the time to create a piece of media you seem to think they don't deserve money for it if they want.
You can make as many hypothetical solutions as you want, but they have almost no application in the real world.
The draconian DRM schemes used by PC game publishers use these days amount to little more than a minor annoyance to the crackers who dive into the games and remove the copy protection. Meanwhile, the legitimate PC game consumer gets shafted and shat upon. Once they are informed of the extra crap that they are going to have to deal with on their PC due to the DRM in a game they basically have three options, two of which are viable if they still want to play the game on their PC:
- Bend over and take it in the ass while saying, "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"
- Use a pirated copy of the game (regardless of whether or not they actually purchased it)
- Don't buy the game at all in PC form
The trouble with options 2 and 3 is the publisher can point to them and say, "Look! Look! Piracy cost us X amount of sales on the PC!" when in reality it was their own stupidity and over-zealousness in attempting to protect their precious cash-cow that cost them the sale or forced the piracy. If anything, publishers using DRM schemes on the PC versions of their games is driving me towards playing games on a console. I don't have to worry about how many times I have installed Bioshock or Mass Effect on my 360 because neither of those games has that limit on the console. I can just drop the disc in and play without worrying about some authentication server being up and running or whether or not it will recognize my install key as legit.I do pirate games occasionally, and then I either lose interest in the downloaded game, or I go and buy a full copy.
I think my decision to buy Spore as soon as possible is due to all of the hype and anticipation that it has generated, at least for me anyway.
If anyone were ever able to create a genuine Replicator (as opposed to one that can only reproduce media, as we have now) the fallout (especially in the commercial sector) would be immense.
I still pirate music, but I support the bands by attending concerts and buying T-shirts and the like. If more bands did the Radiohead thing, though, and offered their albums for sale for whatever you felt like paying, I'd probably toss like 5 bucks at most albums. It's worth it just to have high-quality correctly tagged files.
I'm not sure how that could work in any system that uses any sort of currency, though. The idea is that you're given access to a finite amount of resources, in order to acquire a finite amount of goods to allow for existence. If you gave people access to infinite resources, your economy would break unless the supply is literally infinite. We don't have an infinite supply of all goods, though, and we probably can't really make that happen, either. I mean, how would you make sure that everyone has enough food? Or space? And then, if you do supply everyone with all the food or space they need, how do you deal with the subsequent rapid population growth?
I'm incredulous as the notion of being able to do such a thing, but I'd like to read somebody's ideas as to how it might work.
Now we have a nearly unlimited fountain of digital media and information. People are expecting others to give them a share of their very limited resource, money, for some unlimited resource, bits. Isn't that an inherently stupid exchange? If someone gives you rare money to make a copy of existing bits, that's pretty sad. That's like if someone came and gave you money for a loaf of bread from your infinite bread machine. Really dumb when you think about it.
As Andrew is trying to point out the money should be for the service of labor involved in arranging the bits, not for the copying of the bits themselves. That's well and good as that service still is a relatively limited resource. The problem is that right now the business model doesn't match that idea. The business model treats copies of the bits as goods. The publisher pays the developers as if they are providing a service, but we buy copies of the goods from the publisher as if they are goods.
You can say that people who use their limited labor to perform a valuable service deserve some sort of compensation. But to make the jump from that all the way over to a kid with no money copying a video game for free is not easy. There is a huge gap in between that must be traversed, and along the way the logic does not match up.