Ham Doctor wrote:

Not just that, it is disgusting to see other countries permit this sort of attitude simply because it isn't 'their law' or because they were/are a IT country.

Should I should stop drinking alcohol because it's not legal to do that unless you're 21 in some other country?

Stealing is stealing. Plain a simple. These same people wouldn't allow someone to steal a car or children, so why allow them to steal digital content as well? It's outrageous.

It's outrageous you're comparing downloading something to kidnapping or theft of a physical property. A download isn't always a loss, real theft is.

A country should respect any other country's laws and regulations. When a country suddenly has several companies attempting to sue people from your own country for whatever reason, it should be a big red flag, huh, maybe we shouldn't let people do that.

No. Just no. If you can't see why it's a stupid idea then I hope you never reach a position of power.

It's outrageous you're comparing downloading something to kidnapping or theft of a physical property. A download isn't always a loss, real theft is.

Yeah but I'm sure you'd be pissed if you bought a game and the CDs in the case were blank. The physical medium may be part of the cost but it certainly isn't what you're spending most your money on. You are getting benefit out of something that isn't yours which the owner clearly wants compensation for and has the right to it.

This kind of argument is complete BS and the loss of sales is very real even if they do probably exaggerate the extent of it.

Theodis wrote:

Yeah but I'm sure you'd be pissed if you bought a game and the CDs in the case were blank. The physical medium may be part of the cost but it certainly isn't what you're spending most your money on. You are getting benefit out of something that isn't yours which the owner clearly wants compensation for and has the right to it.

This kind of argument is complete BS and the loss of sales is very real even if they do probably exaggerate the extent of it.

Some people download entire libraries of things just for the sake of having a full collection. The majority of these people don't play a large portion of games they have and know nothing more than what the game is called.

Others download games and play them for a little bit just because they can, or to see what everyone is talking about. If they couldn't do it for free then they wouldn't bother playing them in the first place.

Then you've got people who download things instead of buying them because they're confident the chances of getting in trouble are slim to none, or don't even know what they're doing is against the law.

The first two types of pirates weren't ever going to bother buying the game in the first place and probably wouldn't know it existed without piracy. How are they lost revenue and who really cares?

Smoko wrote:

I'm sure it was all because of piracy that they didn't sell as much as they wanted. There's no way it could have been because the game was hardly advertised...

The key takeaway from the article isn't that they sold poorly, but that they sold poorly and "BitTorrent downloads are depressingly sky high."

a port of a PS3 game and costs more.

Granted, it is an enhanced port with more content. Edit: To expand on this, you get all of the content from the original PS3 game, the content from the expansion pack, and new content on top of that. It makes sense to cost more?

As far as I am concerned, 1 download = 1 sales loss. If you never intend to pay for it, you have no right to download it.

Then you've got people who download things instead of buying them because they're confident the chances of getting in trouble are slim to none,

Exactly. This is probably the only reason you and many other people think that it's not really that bad and not much of a crime simply because it's so rampant and hard to legally enforce. Software and games are not all that cheap to buy new and very expensive to make. Even if nothing physical is lost in the theft of it it is still valuewise quite a loss if a person would have otherwise bought it if they couldn't steal it.

or don't even know what they're doing is against the law.

Well those people better hope it never becomes reasonable to catch them because it is pretty obviously wrong to get expensive stuff for free and ignorance is never a good defense.

The first two types of pirates weren't ever going to bother buying the game in the first place and probably wouldn't know it existed without piracy.

They still don't have the right to it regardless of what they do or don't do with it unless they pay for it. And if companies really wanted to advertise that way to get something known it's up to them to decide not you and they tend to in the form of a demo.

How are they lost revenue and who really cares?

It doesn't matter if they lose money or not. The companies are whining and responding with DRM and other crap so obviously they do care and they're the ones that matter because they made the stuff or own the rights to it so it's their decision.

Theodis wrote:

Exactly. This is probably the only reason you and many other people think that it's not really that bad and not much of a crime simply because it's so rampant and hard to legally enforce. Software and games are not all that cheap to buy new and very expensive to make. Even if nothing physical is lost in the theft of it it is still valuewise quite a loss if a person would have otherwise bought it if they couldn't steal it.

I think it shouldn't be a crime because there's so many cases where nothing wrong is really done. So what if someone downloads a game, plays it for an hour and then decides they don't like it and deletes it. So what if someone downloads a game, throws it in a folder and forgets about it.

If piracy is such a problem, why are sales records still being broken as it becomes more common?

Well those people better hope it never becomes reasonable to catch them because it is pretty obviously wrong to get expensive stuff for free and ignorance is never a good defense.

I never said it was a defense, just making a point that not everyone is a cheap bastard. They should be educated instead of punished.

They still don't have the right to it regardless of what they do or don't do with it unless they pay for it. And if companies really wanted to advertise that way to get something known it's up to them to decide not you and they tend to in the form of a demo.

Demos are rarely a good indicator of a final product. They can be good while the game is bad and bad while the game is good.

It doesn't matter if they lose money or not. The companies are whining and responding with DRM and other crap so obviously they do care and they're the ones that matter because they made the stuff or own the rights to it so it's their decision.

Secondhand sales are just as much a reason for publishes adding DRM. They're just being foolish about it anyway, it's always broken and quite often it happens before the retail release.

Demigod also had its street date broken by a number of days. I don't imagine it would have been so heavily pirated had that not occurred. Still, the people pirating Demigod were bastards - the game has no copy protection. It's not like pirating Spore or whatever, where it's actually a better product that way and you get the joy and satisfaction of screwing a company that's trying to screw you, it's just generally mean.

Intellectual property applied to digital files is an interesting beast, when you start thinking about it. I think the page on the program Monolith has an interesting discussion about some of the reasons why.

Copyright infringement is not, and has never been, theft. If I download some random game of a torrent, nobody loses the ability to sell that game. They still have the game. All I've done is duplicated the data. The only reason it's a problem in the modern day and age is the killer combination of the ease of duplication of digital data and the ease of distribution of digital data - it's all about copying, not stealing.

You could argue that by downloading a copy of Starcraft or whatever I'm stealing from the company by denying them profit. But now you've drifted from an actual, calculatable loss in theft (Say, if I ran off from a store with a physical copy of Starcraft) to a potential, uncalculatable loss predicated on the idea that I might have bought the game had I not downloaded it and that I won't buy it once I have downloaded it. If you accept that that's the same as theft, then you should also accept that just not buying the game is theft (I'm denying the company profit), and not having unprotected sex with every women you run into is murder (I'm denying a human the potential for life). That's clearly nonsensical.

It's not really piracy, either, because I'm not making counterfeit copies for money. I'm downloading - or maybe distributing - real copies for free. Different crime.

The cost of duplicating digital content is basically infinitesimal. While that is the case, there will always be copyright infringement, because it's too damn easy. And I hope to Eris that that's never not the case, because that would imply a scary level of control over my personal computer and the data on it. Hell, one could even make an economic argument that current IP economies are built on unsustainable premises. Specifically, because the cost of duplication of digital content is so low, the cost of production is entirely sunk cost - very little of it is a per-unit cost (Especially with digital distribution). Classical economics suggests that in that situation, in a free market, the unit cost will tend to 0. The only reason there's any digital economy at all is because of IP laws that make digital data sort of maybe behave like real objects that have a cost to create. There are other models - for example, the patronage model of digital economies - but they have their own issues.

Jp wrote:

(...)you've drifted from an actual, calculatable loss in theft (...) to a potential, uncalculatable loss predicated on the idea that I might have bought the game (...). If you accept that that's the same as theft, then you should also accept that just not buying the game is theft (I'm denying the company profit), and not having unprotected sex with every women you run into is murder (I'm denying a human the potential for life). That's clearly nonsensical.

This is kind of a weak argument.
If I go and steal plans for weapons/strategic locations in the USA and try to leave the country, I have the strange feeling I'd face a trial for potentially endangering national security.
Yet, by your argumentation, I never committed any sort of crime!


Jp wrote:

The cost of duplicating digital content is basically infinitesimal

While the cost for digital copies is infinitesimal, the cost for creating the digital content is not.
Which is the business problem here, given that in a capitalist environment, investment must pay off, or it is bound to be ceased.