Actually, that exact argument has been going on in the publishing industry for some time - a lot of publishers have been arguing in favor of DRM for awhile now.

For counterexamples, there is the Baen Free Library/E-books or for the technically inclined there is the O'Reilly Safari, both of whom have come down fairly solidly in the "No DRM" corner and seen to have had good luck with it.

The Baen Free Library has been brought up as an example before. Perhaps not in this thread, but in similar ones. The point is that a particular publisher voluntarily giving up some rights to a works for promotional/advertising purposes does NOT give the general public the right to force that same decision on other publishers. No matter how well the scheme works.

In reality, the BFL is on par with the public library in terms of advertising effectiveness. The form of the promotional material makes the customer much more likely to purchase their own copy - who wants to read a book on a computer screen, and who wants to depend on the library having a copy available when you get the urge to reread?

Whose forcing anything? The argument was whether or not DRM was required in order to make money on intellectual property, and it's a valid theory to state that it does.

Lie any other valid theory, what makes it a valid theory is that it makes predictions that can be verified or falsified, and I think the Baen Free Library, Safari, and indeed Galactic Civilizations II do a very good job of falsifying that prediction.

That doesn't 'force' anyone to abandon the theory in their business model. All sorts of people use bad theories to predict what they need to do to make money - they waste money doing so, it may or may not be enough money to kill the business, and hey, it's their money to waste.

But, if they waste their money in ways that happen to annoy me, I'm not going to buy their products, and will probably point at them and laugh about it too. All sorts of people laugh at *me* when I'm stupid - I see no reason not to return the favor - {G}.

Jonnan

is not good to have full progrmas for free, but is too expencive.

to hell piracy is good

I'm quoting this just because I found it utterly hilarious.

I thought it more 'incomprehensible' than 'hilarious'...

Well I will allways belive that banning pirates from the internet is justified.

I do not belive there ever will be a true "silver bullet" solution to the problem.
As long as there is a demand for it, pirated software will allways be available no matter what. Handling it case by case would be best.

One thing I think would have a large impact is what Time Warner is now doing in my area.
Not only are you just paying for internet service now, the service plans are becoming "flexible". Your paying for it like pay for a utility.
More bandwith you eat up = more you pay for the service.

So the download junkie down the street is now going to have to pay a lot more for all that massive downloading.
So you get a 2 pronged effect,
1. After getting the rather new and much larger bill for using up the bandwith, he's going to think twice since its going to cost him money now.
2. My connection speed goes up =D.

Piracy has existed as long as writen media has existed.
It's just untill recently it has not been a (big) problem for the industries.
It really hits the bottom line now.
Studio "A" may have turned over $100,000,000 in "profit" but a large ammount of that money is reinvested as wages, material, ect.
Companies and industries are not cash sponges soaking up revenue, money is a constant flow through them.
"If" there is a raw, true bottom line profit, its probably only 3-5 cents on the dollar. And thats only if things are running right without unexpected losses.

Piracy was time consuming and somewhat expensive back in the day, and that was the best deterrant as a result. Only really determined individuals were prosecuted. Even large operations didn't affect the bottom line of a industry much.

P2P sharing was hard to, usualy it involved buying a blank (insert whatever), copying it yourself and then giving it to the other person, in person.
DvD burn drives didn't exist and VCR/casset copies sucked.
The industries cared, but not enough to spend money chasing down everyone with a VCR and a tape deck and then prosecute them.
It was way to many people that made copies that were not as good as the originals and only gave them to the people closest to them. They would have ended up spending more money chasing everyone down then what they would have earned if everyone bought legal.

Well computers came along.
First data storage was limited, computers were very expensive, dial up modems were slow.
So the industries didn't care so much about computers in the home either, untill CDs came along.
The movie and music industries tried to block the DvD hard drives in home computers, as well as hard drives that could burn thier own CDs. Thier fear was justified but fell short since you still would have to buy blank CDs, copy them yourself and then give them to someone personaly.
Then MP3 came along with faster internet connections, harddrives doubling in size every few months and a global internet with servers overseas.
Napster treated the music industry with all the gentleness of a prison anal rape.
The was also an unawareness of what everyone was doing was wrong or not. Copyright infringement was not a hot button issue since it was not actively prosecuted or covered by the media.
Personaly, my first memory about the issue was reading a story about a young boy who downloaded about 12,000 songs not knowing it was illegal. I thought in disbelief, there are not 12,000 GOOD songs.
Well everyone found out it was wrong to do what they were doing, but didn't care. They were getting something free from the magic world of the internet. And alot of people in thier own form of logic still think what thier doing is not wrong.
And the best part? It costs people praticly nothing to do it. All you have to do is get a half decent computer with half decent internet connection and your set.

So yeah its eats into the bottom line of a industry when they have such a large ammount of sales lost and have to spend extra revenue on security on thier product.

Well I don't care that its "copyright infringement" or any legal meaning its still theft in my eyes.
Go apeshit, or whatever, I don't care.
If I were to beat the hell out of you in an alley and take your stuff,
Is it a mugging? Or will you call it "agressive negotiation"?

Using arguments like "it was a shitty game" is not good enough.
Read a review, thousands are online right now for praticly any game you can think of. Game makers buying off the game informer website? Well read some player submited reviews.

"Not avaible in my country" Sorry, nothing anyone can do about that. Then again downloading pirated software mare not be a crime where you are so feel free.

"I am a student and/or I can't afford the new games with my current job" Sorry to say this but, You should probably shift your priorty from gaming to finding a better job for yourself or finishing school. Or, you could just be patient a little while and watch the price of the game drop after a couple of months on the shelf. It won't kill you.

I like Stardock's SINS game and how they treat thier customers. If Stardock makes another game soon I'll probably buy it.
I haven't bought an EA game in I don't know how long. (probably have if it was from a company owned by EA and I didn't know) Why? Well It kinda goes back on principal of how they treated thier football game franchise, they are dicks.
Blizzard? WOW was both the best and worst game, played it a while. It was fun but recycled alot of the same elements over and over.
Blizzard makes abother game soon? I probably won't buy it since they lost alot of thier creative team recently. Unless it gets good reviews I probably won't even look at it. I came close to buying Hellgate since it had much of the same team that made the games I liked working on it. But I waited and found out that it was nothing like what everyone wanted it to be.
So yeah I use shopping skills for buying games. I look for what I am interested in, read reviews, look at player reviews, and be patient. Guess what? I very rarely get burned. It still happens but o well.

Not so much--TWC is tying the transfer quotas to the speed tiers. So you can get fast and (comparably, but still low by any sane standard) high cap, or slow and low cap. It rather annoys me since if they take it national, it means my prices are liable to go up. Hopefully the backlash is enough in Texas that they don't.

I expect, as do many, that file sharing is just a scapegoat in that particular case. They're likely just doing it to try and make a bit of extra cash while not having to bother building up their network any. Plus there's the added benefit of strangling online streaming video (it was recently found that Youtube and similar are using more bandwidth than P2P overall) so people have to keep using cable TV.

So unless you happen to be unlucky enough to live in a monopolized area, they are going to lose a ton of customers to a provider offering standard flat-rate and "change their minds". If my ISP started throwing excrement like that, I'd switch faster than you can say something that takes a really short time to say.

And that is what industry-wide agreements are for. (aka "trust" or "cartel", which is supposed to be illegal, but big companies are getting away with it more and more) If everybody does it, you have nowhere to go. And all the companies get to make more cash for less investment. Everybody (who matters) is happy!

And here we come to the crux of the problem - companies abusing the rights of the customers, while at the same time a lot of noise is being made about certain individuals abusing the rights of companies.

And as usual in such things, those who are the least to blame take the punches, on both sides.

I agree, kryo. This sounds like a case of a media giant not wanting to spend money to upgrade existing infrastructure to handle a greater bandwidth load. Is it just my imagination or is it the case that the more money people have the stingier they become?

Well, otherwise they wouldn't have that much money in the first place.

Yeah alot of people localy are not exactly happy with TWC's "plan".

Myself included was not exactly happy with it since I used to do alot of online gaming.

It has had the effect of slowing down people's usage of the service tho.
I was just pointing out that now mass downloading is no longer widely avaible for the same low price of a casual user. And not many people like spending more money for a chance to get something "free".

That doesn't make sense - it is still cheaper to download a pirated game than to buy a legitimate copy, no?
And besides that, flat-rate is still the norm in the "free" world as far as I know.

So I should think this is just one of them "business strategies" at work.