Computer piracy debates

[Nyoibo]

I mostly pirate movies and tv series, given how much movie studios screw writers and that tv series are there free to air I don't see the problem, as for games, I have been tempted to pirate some a few times, usually when simply by virtue of where I live I'm expected to pay up to $50 more for a game regardless of the fact it's a digital copy so theres no shipping involved and the australian dollar is stronger that the US.

[Andara Bledin]

I'm actually suspicious about that statistic that says that pirates buy more games; I've never seen the methodology they used, so it could easily be just asking, in which case the pirates might well be lying.

That's not quite what I'm saying.

What I'm actually stating is that given a "try before you buy" business model, more sales are made as compared to a cold purchase model.

People who aren't going to pay for the content are already not paying for the content and the ease of acquisition doesn't really make nearly as much difference as people want to think. Sure, thousands of people are getting to enjoy something without paying for it, but they wouldn't have paid for it regardless.

The casual infringers are where the most revenue is lost. However, that and more is made up by those who will only pay for content they know they enjoy and those who would never be aware of the content in the first place.

Thus, the availability of content for download leads to a higher volume of sales, despite the much greater availability to just take the content without payment.

^-.-^

[siead_lietrathua]

im on the fence about pirating. mostly because i do have some pirated stuff, mostly books, but i also own the purchased copy for most of those. (dnd books and whatnot). it's just easier to lug my e-reader or laptop from place to place than to carry a large volume of books about.
i prefer to buy when i can, but i also don't want to buy the exact same thing twice.

to the try-before-buy method, i do that with movies/ tv shows alot. watch some cheezy flick online until i can find and afford a hard copy.

[Ginger Tea]

TV shows, I've found the prices of some seasons rather dubious, cosidering that sides from the TV Licence in the UK we have a lot of free to air channels and even when we had just the 4 we had been taping movies and shows since the advent of home video recorders.

I have no idea how many tapes we junked last year had movies on them or not, but most movies we had later purchaced on VHS and I made a list of the tapes we had that were also earmarked for the skip to see what I could find on DVD, failing that I would just get a torrent going as I had paid for said movie once and in some cases twice (Starwars pan and scan/widescreen/remastered and executor box set tin all on VHS and atleast 2 versions on DVD).
TV shows however, some didn't get a home video release or are no longer in print, Hell I have a betamax tape of "Watch" a bbc history program filmed in the early 80's and the behind the scenes episode, only cos I was there in the crowd scenes when it was filmed at my school, if that was on VHS, I would have had that in a vault to make sure it never got taped over, or ended up in the skip with the rest.

I don't mind paying £50 for the complete soprano's as I didn't see many episodes to begin with and moved missing the rest (and the west wing too which I really liked), but when the Xfiles first came out on DVD it was £30 or more and I already owned the VHS box sets of all 9 seasons, which iir were a wallet denting £90 each when they first came out, £90 vs the cost of a few 4 hour tapes when BBC showed it, yes I did buy them as I liked the show and didn't want to have to keep looking for random tapes as some were xfiles followed by something else, not a tape dedicated to the show, but really £90 when I saw it for free on TV? (no ads too)

TV torrenting can hurt exports of shows, my brother used to be a season ahead of various shows as he would torrent a tivo episode from America whilst we got last season, message boards would be riffe with current episodes so we would have to be wary of reading threads for spoilers, lot's of spoilers.
The way I see it possibly hurting shows getting renewed abraod is that, if a large enough viewer base has already seen season 2, how many would tune in to watch season 2 loclally?
if the numbers are too low then those that did not torrent season 2 get shafted when they fail to renew season 3.
It may not impact on the production of future seasons, but if distributers are leery of spending money on importing it, then it just forces those that didn't torrent to now do so or wait how ever long for a domestic release of the current box set.

Back in the day's of bootleg VHS movies, I could see the appeal.
We got movies 6-12 months after the American release (holiday movies were always a year out instead of releasing christmas movies internationally) and normally by the time we got them on the big screen, you could rent and or buy for the little screen.
All it takes is someone with an NTSC-PAL set up and someone to post original tapes to you.
In the last decade movies have come out within a similar time frame and 6 months later (hell I'm sure some were 3) you can pay £15-£20 for the movie on dvd or bluray, as stated before, If I saw the movie and wanted a DVD, I would not be an early adopter and if I had not seen the movie I would not pay £15 for a turkey, so I would wait for the sales.

You can still buy phyical pirate DVD's mostly shitty cams rather than a DVD R5, but aside from pay as you go mobile broad band, most ISP's don't charge per GB of data, so why anyone would still buy a fake DVD when you can get the same cam torrent for free.

[fireheart17]

That's actually worse. There are some processing fees with credit cards and the like where paying a dollar means it's actually costing them to put it out. You're better off pirating it then because at least the processing fees aren't happening. That said, you're still better off paying more for the legal copy.

As far as the Humble Bundle is concerned, the first time I bought it, both my boyfriend and I ended up paying more than the average (which unlocked some games for us ANYWAY ) just because we knew they deserved it. We also dictated that the money would go straight to the developers.

On that note, my boyfriend will buy games legally from Steam, but has been known to pirate games for me in the past. Ditto for movies and TV shows. We do still go out to the movies a lot and I do buy anime boxsets where I can (partially due to the fact that the pirated shows are either English without subtitles or Japanese with subtitles and often the former are also censored). As for TV shows or movies, those tend to be pirated for the following reasons:

-They're somewhat obscure (i.e. there are some TV-movies of Jodi picoult novels that I want to see but I can't find anywhere)
-They aren't available on DVD or iTunes either in Australia or in general. (for instance, America's Next Top Model )
-The film is part of the "Disney Vault" or is put on moratorium for other reasons. (I'm going to start stocking up on the "Disney Vault" films as a treat for my students when I start teaching. Also, displaying pirated films would be somewhat bad )

[mikoyan29]

If you go by the RIAA definition of piracy, the bulk of the songs on my iPod are "pirated" as I ripped my CD collection some time ago. But I believe that falls under the "Fair Use" provision that the Supreme Court has upheld ever since Lucas tried to sue Sony. I think what I hate is the blurring of the lines that some of the Studio and Music executives use. There are some CDs in my collection that I'm now on the third or fourth copy of (cassette, album, CD, SACD...didn't bother buying the mp3).

These folks want to blame piracy but I think their model is rapidly becoming outdated.

[Mytical]

Normally I don't tend to pirate anything. I will try demos, etc..and if I like the demo I will buy the product. Just recently however, I found an old game that is no longer supported that I love. Unless you go to great lengths to get it to play (normally) on new machines, you won't get it to work. I have the physical disk, but again..it just won't play on a new machine without going through a LOT of hassle. I found somewhere that had it 'cracked' already so it will play on my windows 8 computer, and downloaded it. The game is notorious for being picky about which emulator will work on it, etc. This one works without any emulator, dos box, or any other thing needed. It took me like 3 clicks to get this game. One to download it, one to instal it, and one to put it as a short cut on my desktop.

Generally I am against pirating things..but since I have .. won't hear me saying anything against it :P

P.S. The game is Shadalar for magic the Gathering. I am addicted to that game. *laughs* It is a card game and a rpg all rolled into one.

[Gravekeeper]

As far as the Humble Bundle is concerned, the first time I bought it, both my boyfriend and I ended up paying more than the average (which unlocked some games for us ANYWAY ) just because we knew they deserved it. We also dictated that the money would go straight to the developers.

I've been buying a *lot* of indie and small dev stuff during the current Steam sale, even if they're games that are really my thing. Simply to support the devs. Especially adventure games. Even if they aren't the top of my list these days, its a type of game I'm quite enjoying seeing re-emerge in the industry.

As an upcoming indie dev myself though, piracy is a large and very valid concern. Hence this thread and its weak justifications irk me to no end. I've had to design a lot of aspects of our current project to make the game less desirable for being tossed up on the pirate bay. As some indies have seen their sales drop 50% or more after pirated copies hit the torrent sites.

P.S. The game is Shadalar for magic the Gathering. I am addicted to that game. *laughs* It is a card game and a rpg all rolled into one.

That's abandonware though, so you're not actually pirating. Abandonware is fine.

[Nekojin]

That's abandonware though, so you're not actually pirating. Abandonware is fine.

Actually, in the US, there is no legal distinction regarding abandonware. Copyright durations are extremely long; if Atari decided that they wanted to sue you over a bootleg copy of Pong (an actual bootleg, not a clone), they could do so. It's just as much of a copyright infringement as copying a current game/movie/album is. The only difference is that publishers typically only care about their current portfolio, and are highly unlikely to get litigious over something that they're not making any money on anyway.

This, again, falls into the distinction between civil and criminal law. You can infringe on copyright all day long, and nothing will come of it if the copyright holder doesn't actually care. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons that I do think that copyright durations need to be made much, much shorter than they currently are, but there's no political push (IE, lobbyists) for shorter copyright duration.

[Ginger Tea]

Re abandonware and ROMS and stuff.

Arcade manufacturers get all antsy about ROM downloads of 80's arcade games and to legally have a rom rip one must also have a PCB of the game or a full on cabinate and when people say "this is an old game and no arcade has it to play" as most got stripped down to house newer PCB's and alot of arcades closed in the 80's bust or when home consoles took off sometime between the NES and the Megadrive/SNES era.

So people cannot get the games, but they are not Abandonware as the IP is still active on current gen systems.
But people want to play the original, not a reboot HD effort and IP owners think that selling the roms legaly will devalue the current title, to those that don't care for the new version they may never have gotten a sale, but a fair priced ROM for MAME or some hardware that you can run from an SD and have a more authentic experience using actual hardware of the time (made in todays factories not 30 year old chips) would sell to the right market.

Then you have the hard core collectors of PCB's who might think that legal roms will somehow devalue their copy of NES game with a print run of 10 for a competition.
No it won't there will still be only 10 copies in exsistance, but more people will get to play the game instead of the few that store it and never let it see a semi working NES again.
Having one Mona Lisa and a billion 1:1 posters for a fiver is not going to make the original worthless or worth less, those that buy the poster would never have the money to pay for a fleck of paint scraped from an edge.

You do see the odd Mega Drive Xbox/PS2/3 compilation, but most are rewrites of the game not the 68000 code and an emulator, so any quirks and bugs are removed (and new ones no doubt added), there was a hand held one for sale a few years ago, again it could have been a full megadrive in a system on a chip, but afaik it was rewritten to ARM type hardware.

[lordlundar]

If you go by the RIAA definition of piracy,

The RIAA definition of piracy as of late is "We own everything you have and if you don't like it you can jump off a cliff."

Bitter? Maybe. Still haven't found contrary evidence on it though.

[Duelist925]

The RIAA definition of piracy as of late is "We own everything you have and if you don't like it you can jump off a cliff."

Bitter? Maybe. Still haven't found contrary evidence on it though.

The RIAA would patent AIR if they could. If they could patent the thought processes that result in content of any form, they would.

[Crazedclerkthe2nd]

I generally only pirate on two conditions:

1) The item I want cannot be purchased. I appeared on a reality show in in 2004 and although I did tape my appearance, I lost the tape. I was willing to buy another one and even reached out to the network that produces the show to get my hands on one, only to receive a blunt "we don't do that" reply. So that left me no choice but to pirate.

2) If I already own a physical copy of the game/movie/etc. and simply want a back up or want to use it on another format. I believe that copying of this nature should be acceptable so long as it's not for monetary gain.

There was one recent instance where I pirated a computer program to help a friend in college because for some reason the professor designed the lessons to only work in ONE SPECIFIC program that cost several hundreds of dollars.

Did I feel guilty about it? A bit, but I don't lose any sleep over it.

I actually find myself concerned with the current transition to digital media and cloud services whereby physical copies do not exist anymore and you have to trust your media collection to a corporation who can remove it from you at will any time they want to.

Also, add me to the list of people who can't stand DRM.

[jedimaster91]

I actually find myself concerned with the current transition to digital media and cloud services whereby physical copies do not exist anymore and you have to trust your media collection to a corporation who can remove it from you at will any time they want to.

This worries me as well. It's part of the reason I'm not interested in the Kindle or Nook and I will still buy physical copies of movies. The storage aspect of going all digital is tempting, but all it takes is someone at DRM getting a stick up their rear end and all your movies/books are gone. I think there was an article posted here on Fratching about a lady who had her entire Amazon account suspended and couldn't get her content (too lazy to look up the thread). I can't remember what the circumstances were, but it's too easy for something like that to happen and that scares me.

[Gravekeeper]

This worries me as well. It's part of the reason I'm not interested in the Kindle or Nook and I will still buy physical copies of movies.

Yeah, thats true. Steam is about the only digital service I trust in the long term. I certainly don't trust EA with Origin or worst yet, Ubisoft. Who, while they make good games, are fucking idjits when it comes to handling DRM.