The content industry's definition of "piracy" is any time you make a copy of something, even if it's for legal fair use or backup reasons.

They are little more than a criminal cartel. This is not being done for the benefit of software companies, it's being done for the benefit of the media industry.

Anyone who's smart doesn't use BitTorrent or P2P. At least publicly. Those that actually know what they are doing use something like a 256-bit SSL-encrypted NNTP connection with a good Usenet provider (like one that doesn't keep download logs). Unless the European Union plans to buy massive amounts of supercomputers to break the SSL encryption on every single connection, they won't be able to enforce anything.

You will NEVER eliminate "piracy". No amount of draconian copy protection, no amount of Orwellian legislation and no amount of huffing and puffing will change that. Every attempt by the MAFIAA to squash "piracy" has only caused it to rise in popularity. First they went after Napster and shut it down. Then things like Kazaa and Gnutella rose to take it's place. Then they went after those. And then BitTorrent rose to take it's place.

File sharing and "pirating" was once an obscure activity that only the computer elite participated in or even knew about. The MAFIAA played a large role in popularizing music and film "piracy" by drawing the public's attention to the fact that you can download music online.

The more you attempt to do battle with "pirates", the more legitimate customers get caught in the crossfire and get harmed. By trying to smite "pirates", you also end up smiting your paying customers.

To answer a few other points :

1.Reducing software "piracy" will not reduce software prices, it will increase profit margins for the large software companies. Do you really think that large publishers like EA are going to lower their prices if it could be demonstrated these measures had a significant effect on software "piracy"?

2.Software "piracy" is not the same thing as stealing from the store. Not even close. Please can the holier than thou deontological ethics.

If I steal a car from someone, they will then no longer has possession of that car. Because I stole the car, they no longer have it and therefore can no longer user it. There is a tangible and quantifiable loss.

If I steal boxed software from a store, then that store no longer has possession of that boxed copy and therefore can no longer sell it. Again, quantifiable loss.

If I "pirate" a piece of software, it's simply making a copy. Downloading "pirated" software doesn't take it out of someone else's possession. You could argue that in some or even a lot of cases, people will "pirate" instead of purchasing and therefore deprive them of income and that may be true in some cases. And yes, artists deserve to be compensated for their work and those who have the money to buy something but pirate it anyways are scum.

However, there really isn't a quantifiable loss in the sense that it's impossible to know how many people had the money to purchase the product to begin with and how many people would have even purchased the product given an inability to pirate it. You simply can't know that information about each and every person downloading a given piece of software therefore you can't use "piracy" figures to say how many money you lost. It's like a company counting every person in the world that didn't buy their product as a lost sale.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

just another pirate. thanks for the lesson in thievery. i hope that one day pirates like you will end up in televised executions. you can thank the statue of liberty that i'm not in charge.

liberals. damn you liberals!

Phew - my faith in humanity is restored   

He got me flat footed that time .....

Regards
Zy

Then they are in for a shock, there's more to life than packet encryption.

Regards
Zy

You all should start a church. Seriously. The amount of vitriolic hatred that people in the "piracy is the end of the world crowd" is amazing. It's like you've all declared a jihad. (Public executions? Get a grip)

For the record, I legally bought Sins. I legally bought Gal Civ II and it's two expansions. I have dozens of games that I've legally bought on Steam. I have shelves full of game boxes that I've legally bought.

Saying that Usenet exists isn't helping people pirate. That's like saying that I'm helping pirates by saying that pirated material is available on web.

Capitalism is an abstract concept - it cannot "go" anywhere, and is in no danger of going away. In fact, it is largely working as intended.

Well you have to admit. Public executions would solve the problem.



The reason The Great State of America gets 1 million canadian immigrants each year, while they only get about 10,000 amercians is because we tax, at most, about 40% of a worker's income. And you can blame liberals for that.

Pretend that there was a portable scanning/storage device that would allow you to walk into any store and swipe at any digital product on the shelf to 'copy' its contents in a short period of time. Now lets assume that the internet does not exist, however anyone with a personal computer could easily obtain such a device at virtually no cost. If the use of this device was not considered illegal, why on earth would any immoral person purchase any digital product?

I've actually seen pretzels that are less convoluted than this thread.

They wouldn't get a box, manual and the ability to play online.

Really? That must explain why Alaska, as the largest state, gets more immigrants than any other state.

No - wait, that right. They don't.

Because it's frick'n' *COLD*.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the U.S. had high immigration rates even when the marginal tax rate was at 80%-90%, and the absolute rate was almost as high (in the wealthy brackets)

Thy theory, it doth not stand up well, for you chose not to feed it with facts.

Jonnan

I believe in justice, and at this point justice is Mass Effect being stolen instead of bought. EA reserves the right to steal from it's customers, so why shouldn't I reserve the right to steal from EA? They have it in writing after all. The pirates only steal copies, the industry is stealing the actual products from it's users. DRM authorization servers being shut down, rootkits installed with CD's to prevent you from playing them on your computer, encrypted movies that only function on "authorized" hardware. As bad as the pirates are, the industry is worse, present company excluded.

Since everyone else is using the car analogy.

If I could get any car for free, I'd have one like the man does,(excellent taste getting a Porsche) rather fond of the 67 911's in particular. I wouldn't steal his car, and if he were trying to sell me one he wouldn't be out a sale. No one would lose anything because there's no way in hell I'd pay the $70-80 grand to buy one on my income. I don't have that kind of money, I'm not stupid enough to buy a car that I'd take 15 years to pay off and spend the rest of my life working to maintain. If I were making half a million a year it would essentially be free as I'd have nothing better to do with the money, and I'd have one in a heartbeat. There are plenty of things I'd get if they were, but never will short of having enough money that they might as well be.

Even better. Unlike cars, which have never been free and likely never will, software was once free, legally speaking. For some odd reason, the software industry still existed at the time. People on the inside are seriously skewed in their own perspective, just as the pirates are skewed by theirs. Neither side is behaving very rationally in general, one of the high points at Stardock is a significantly larger dose of it. It wasn't illegal to distribute copyrighted software for free until 1997, never mind the point in time at which the software wasn't entitled to copyright protection to start with.

Magically, games and other software were made and sold well under the supposed scenario where copying them was legal. Myst sold six million copies, despite being legally free. There were plenty of very good sellers before it became illegal to copy and share software, no magical increase followed the law change.

Thinking is very useful, learning also helps. Educate yourself on the practices and history of both sides of the equation, and you see a steady rise in the dominance of the pc gaming industry despite the rise in piracy, and people that made millions before it even became piracy to do so. You'll also see the reasons I can't despise the pirates despite a significant philosophical differing, somehow still unaltered despite the treatment I'm receiving in return for my money.

Edit: You fail at economics. You fail at Alaska too, I'm one of em.
Alaska doesn't get a lot of immigration because there isn't much to do. Work draws a populace, and when the tax rates where that high in this country, they were nill for everyone but the rich and the rest of the world was even further in the toilet. People came here for the same reason they do now, you can make peanuts in your country, or you can make more here. The level of industry in Alaska is zip compared to the rest of the country.

Yes, good point. Canada is cold. It's women are ugly. And they even tax the polar bears. It is God's curse on humankind.

I know America is superior in more ways than just tax. But the tax is a factor.

^^^

*cough*    

Two mistakes:

-Saying EA is stealing. Are they really? If they are, you can go to court over it if you want.

-The whole "two wrongs make a right" philosophy. Sorry, but just because wrong to you does not give you the right to commit another wrong against them.



At the time, most software developers were making their money elsewhere. Most of them were also in the hardware business, and many of them just did it as a hobby.

These days, software development is like any other job: It puts food on the table and pays the bills. That money has to come from somewhere. It's not magic, it doesn't make itself.