Piracy - will it ever be clear?

I know that gaming is not the only medium that involves piracy and illegal copies but it forms a fair share of the total.

One quite popular argument in favor of piracy is based on the popular pre-movie ad "You wouldn't steal a car". The argument goes like "If I steal your car, it's not in front of your house the next morning. If I pirate/copy it though, your car stays there but I will have a car that is exactly the same." One huge mistake in this is comparing something physical (car, house, ring) to something more abstract (code). To replicate, or better yet copy a code, all you need is a functional computer. If you want to copy a car though, apart from  the machine that puts it all together, you need components. We have yet to find a way to make something out of nothing, so in order to copy a car, you'd need to invest into a reasonable amount of materials for the copy to be assembled. 

Another thing is proof. Stuff comes on CDs/DVDs/BRs but we're slowly moving towards digital only. How do you, or the opposite side for that matter, prove that the game on your HDD is a legitimate purchase of a DRM-free game, that the ironman3.mp4 is a legit RIP from a BR you have purchased and that the 50 gigs of music have all been purchased and not pirated? Do you need to keep the receipts until you delete the stuff? Even if all digital goods get a unique serial number as a verified purchase, there will still be a way to duplicate this number to a pirated version.

All in all, I think that it will take years, if ever, to make piracy as black and white as stealing a physical item.

What's your opinion, do you justify piracy as something wrong or right to do and do you think it will ever be a solved issue? 

IMO, the only way to slow down piracy is to educate people as to why they should be paying for their games (i.e. supporting developers). Just saying "it's illegal" is pointless and convinces noone. 

It won't be going anywhere.

No, piracy will never disappear.

I know that gaming is not the only medium that involves piracy and illegal copies but it forms a fair share of the total.

One quite popular argument in favor of piracy is based on the popular pre-movie ad "You wouldn't steal a car". The argument goes like "If I steal your car, it's not in front of your house the next morning. If I pirate/copy it though, your car stays there but I will have a car that is exactly the same." One huge mistake in this is comparing something physical (car, house, ring) to something more abstract (code). To replicate, or better yet copy a code, all you need is a functional computer. If you want to copy a car though, apart from  the machine that puts it all together, you need components. We have yet to find a way to make something out of nothing, so in order to copy a car, you'd need to invest into a reasonable amount of materials for the copy to be assembled. 

Another thing is proof. Stuff comes on CDs/DVDs/BRs but we're slowly moving towards digital only. How do you, or the opposite side for that matter, prove that the game on your HDD is a legitimate purchase of a DRM-free game, that the ironman3.mp4 is a legit RIP from a BR you have purchased and that the 50 gigs of music have all been purchased and not pirated? Do you need to keep the receipts until you delete the stuff? Even if all digital goods get a unique serial number as a verified purchase, there will still be a way to duplicate this number to a pirated version.

All in all, I think that it will take years, if ever, to make piracy as black and white as stealing a physical item.

What's your opinion, do you justify piracy as something wrong or right to do and do you think it will ever be a solved issue? 

zaxrider

I know that gaming is not the only medium that involves piracy and illegal copies but it forms a fair share of the total.

One quite popular argument in favor of piracy is based on the popular pre-movie ad "You wouldn't steal a car". The argument goes like "If I steal your car, it's not in front of your house the next morning. If I pirate/copy it though, your car stays there but I will have a car that is exactly the same." One huge mistake in this is comparing something physical (car, house, ring) to something more abstract (code). To replicate, or better yet copy a code, all you need is a functional computer. If you want to copy a car though, apart from  the machine that puts it all together, you need components. We have yet to find a way to make something out of nothing, so in order to copy a car, you'd need to invest into a reasonable amount of materials for the copy to be assembled. 

Another thing is proof. Stuff comes on CDs/DVDs/BRs but we're slowly moving towards digital only. How do you, or the opposite side for that matter, prove that the game on your HDD is a legitimate purchase of a DRM-free game, that the ironman3.mp4 is a legit RIP from a BR you have purchased and that the 50 gigs of music have all been purchased and not pirated? Do you need to keep the receipts until you delete the stuff? Even if all digital goods get a unique serial number as a verified purchase, there will still be a way to duplicate this number to a pirated version.

All in all, I think that it will take years, if ever, to make piracy as black and white as stealing a physical item.

What's your opinion, do you justify piracy as something wrong or right to do and do you think it will ever be a solved issue? 

zaxrider

I don't believe in intellectual property. I don't pirate things mostly out of interest in not being arrested. As far as I'm concerned, though, IP is contrary to property rights. In saying you can use force to stop me from downloading a game you made, what you're essentially telling me is that you have the right to dictate to me the physical configuration of my own property. Because that's really what's going on: little bits of data are moving around on a hard drive I own.

Stephan Kinsella's great work "Against Intellectual Property" is the definitive text on the issue for me. Kinsella is actually an intellectual property lawyer as well as a natural rights theorist and economist. I understand that from an economic standpoint, if nobody buys games or music less of it will be produced. Therefore I buy games, movies, books, or music not because I believe the creator deserves payment for their nonexistent intellectual property, but because I want to provide monetary incentive for more books, games, etc of the type that I like to be created.famicommander

I find it particularly funny that the essay that you linked to is a $5 ebook. A little more consistency would be required for me to care about it. For now, I can't take seriously someone who charges $5 for an ebook about why authors shouldn't expect to get paid for their work.

As for the rest of your rant, you exactly sound like the guy who doesn't tip in Reservoir Dogs. Can't you just appreciate the fact that someone made a game you like, and give him monetary compensation for the fact that he provided you with 10+ hours of entertainment? 

I don't believe in intellectual property. I don't pirate things mostly out of interest in not being arrested. As far as I'm concerned, though, IP is contrary to property rights. In saying you can use force to stop me from downloading a game you made, what you're essentially telling me is that you have the right to dictate to me the physical configuration of my own property. Because that's really what's going on: little bits of data are moving around on a hard drive I own.

Stephan Kinsella's great work "Against Intellectual Property" is the definitive text on the issue for me. Kinsella is actually an intellectual property lawyer as well as a natural rights theorist and economist. I understand that from an economic standpoint, if nobody buys games or music less of it will be produced. Therefore I buy games, movies, books, or music not because I believe the creator deserves payment for their nonexistent intellectual property, but because I want to provide monetary incentive for more books, games, etc of the type that I like to be created.famicommander

The idea that intellectual property doesn't exist or that if a physical good isn't exchanged then it's not theft is beyond idiotic. Money is exchanged for goods and services. The exchange of money for physical merchandise is simply the most common form of purchase we commonly make, but it's by no means the only kind.

If software is overpriced, then people won't buy it and that will drive prices down. That's how a free market works. It does not entitle anyone to obtain a free copy of the software because they -feel- it's too expensive. The same stupid argument could be made for physical goods. If intellectual property doesn't exist, then shouldn't everything physical good we buy cost only the amount of the raw materials required to manufacture it? Of course not, because the item we are buying is the culmination of countless hours of design, engineering, and testing and if the creator weren't planning on selling it for more than the cost of the raw materials then there wouldn't be any point in trying to sell it at all.

As for Stephan Kinsella, that's an even bigger joke. While he makes that little 60 page novella available for free download to make a point, I can't help but notice that his dense law tomes are still up FOR SALE at as much as $200 per hardcover.

-Byshop

[QUOTE="famicommander"]I don't believe in intellectual property. I don't pirate things mostly out of interest in not being arrested. As far as I'm concerned, though, IP is contrary to property rights. In saying you can use force to stop me from downloading a game you made, what you're essentially telling me is that you have the right to dictate to me the physical configuration of my own property. Because that's really what's going on: little bits of data are moving around on a hard drive I own.

Stephan Kinsella's great work "Against Intellectual Property" is the definitive text on the issue for me. Kinsella is actually an intellectual property lawyer as well as a natural rights theorist and economist. I understand that from an economic standpoint, if nobody buys games or music less of it will be produced. Therefore I buy games, movies, books, or music not because I believe the creator deserves payment for their nonexistent intellectual property, but because I want to provide monetary incentive for more books, games, etc of the type that I like to be created.Byshop

The idea that intellectual property doesn't exist or that if a physical good isn't exchanged then it's not theft is beyond idiotic. Money is exchanged for goods and services. The exchange of money for physical merchandise is simply the most common form of purchase we commonly make, but it's by no means the only kind.

If software is overpriced, then people won't buy it and that will drive prices down. That's how a free market works. It does not entitle anyone to obtain a free copy of the software because they -feel- it's too expensive. The same stupid argument could be made for physical goods. If intellectual property doesn't exist, then shouldn't everything physical good we buy cost only the amount of the raw materials required to manufacture it? Of course not, because the item we are buying is the culmination of countless hours of design, engineering, and testing and if the creator weren't planning on selling it for more than the cost of the raw materials then there wouldn't be any point in trying to sell it at all.

As for Stephan Kinsella, that's an even bigger joke. While he makes that little 60 page novella available for free download to make a point, I can't help but notice that his dense law tomes are still up FOR SALE at as much as $200 per hardcover.

-Byshop

[QUOTE="famicommander"]I don't believe in intellectual property. I don't pirate things mostly out of interest in not being arrested. As far as I'm concerned, though, IP is contrary to property rights. In saying you can use force to stop me from downloading a game you made, what you're essentially telling me is that you have the right to dictate to me the physical configuration of my own property. Because that's really what's going on: little bits of data are moving around on a hard drive I own.

Stephan Kinsella's great work "Against Intellectual Property" is the definitive text on the issue for me. Kinsella is actually an intellectual property lawyer as well as a natural rights theorist and economist. I understand that from an economic standpoint, if nobody buys games or music less of it will be produced. Therefore I buy games, movies, books, or music not because I believe the creator deserves payment for their nonexistent intellectual property, but because I want to provide monetary incentive for more books, games, etc of the type that I like to be created.ReddestSkies

I find it particularly funny that the essay that you linked to is a $5 ebook. A little more consistency would be required for me to care about it. For now, I can't take seriously someone who charges $5 for an ebook about why authors shouldn't expect to get paid for their work.

As for the rest of your rant, you exactly sound like the guy who doesn't tip in Reservoir Dogs. Can't you just appreciate the fact that someone made a game you like, and give him monetary compensation for the fact that he provided you with 10+ hours of entertainment? 

The basis of property rights lies in scarcity. We have property rights to determine who should get to control scare resources, because one person having control over them necessarily excludes other people having control of them. It is wrong for me to steal your car or TV because my doing so deprives you of the use of that item. But intellectual property doesn't work that way; there is no scarcity. My downloading your song or game does not require to to relinquish it. You have a poor conception of how a market works. The pricing system has very little to do with this argument. The incentive to produce comes from a subjective theory of value, not a labor theory of value. The producer does so because he expects that consumers will subjectively value the item he produces more than the money the producer intends to charge for it. The increase above in price above those of the factors of production has nothing to do with compensation for intellectual property. Further, there is nothing contradictory about Kinsella trying to sell his works. There is nothing at all wrong with him asking money for it; the point is that he will not use force in order to stop you from acquiring it by other means. famicommander

Somehow I suspect that if everyone were to torrent a scanned PDF of each of his published works he would probably take exception.

And piracy or copying of intellectual property -does- deprive the company who floated the salaries of an entire development team for X number of years. The justification for all piracy boils down to one major logical fallacy. The idea that "I" the pirate can take what I want because there will be enough people who aren't giant, stealing pieces of sh!t who will actually buy the product to support the industry. The fact of the matter is, though, that if piracy were easy enough then nobody would pay for anything and every digital industry would collapse. The laws are in place to keep this from happening, and to ensure that if someone devotes years of their life to a creative work then they have a fair shot at being compensated for it, and not just by "good samaritans" who are "pitching in" by actually paying for their copy of a piece of software.

There is no moral justification you can give me for an indy mobile app developer who spends weeks or months developing a game, puts it on the iTunes store for $2 per copy, sees thousands of unique users log in via Game Center, but then he gets a $100 check for his effort because almost 98% of the people who installed the game did so through a cracked IPA file. Other games, like Battle Dungeon, were absolutely ruined by piracy because they were online multiplayer games who's servers got inundated by load from pirate copies, but without the expected revenue stream to support them they had to shut the whole thing down.

If you think something is overpriced then you are entitled to not buy it, but you are in no way entitled to obtain a copy through theft regardless of whether or not you are depriving the original owner of a physical commodity. You are depriving them of the revenue they would be making for their work.

The BS argument every pirate makes is "well, I wouldn't have paid for it anyway so who cares?" or "I want it enough to pirate it but not enough to buy it". Both are a load of crap. If you are unwilling to pay for it, then you don't deserve to have it.

-Byshop

[QUOTE="ReddestSkies"]

[QUOTE="famicommander"]I don't believe in intellectual property. I don't pirate things mostly out of interest in not being arrested. As far as I'm concerned, though, IP is contrary to property rights. In saying you can use force to stop me from downloading a game you made, what you're essentially telling me is that you have the right to dictate to me the physical configuration of my own property. Because that's really what's going on: little bits of data are moving around on a hard drive I own.

Stephan Kinsella's great work "Against Intellectual Property" is the definitive text on the issue for me. Kinsella is actually an intellectual property lawyer as well as a natural rights theorist and economist. I understand that from an economic standpoint, if nobody buys games or music less of it will be produced. Therefore I buy games, movies, books, or music not because I believe the creator deserves payment for their nonexistent intellectual property, but because I want to provide monetary incentive for more books, games, etc of the type that I like to be created.famicommander

I find it particularly funny that the essay that you linked to is a $5 ebook. A little more consistency would be required for me to care about it. For now, I can't take seriously someone who charges $5 for an ebook about why authors shouldn't expect to get paid for their work.

As for the rest of your rant, you exactly sound like the guy who doesn't tip in Reservoir Dogs. Can't you just appreciate the fact that someone made a game you like, and give him monetary compensation for the fact that he provided you with 10+ hours of entertainment? 

Yawn. So to make a long story short, video games are public goods, is that what you're saying? So, logically, government should take over game development, or else nobody will do it (once people realize that it's a public good and stop paying for them).

The point is that I do not agree with the notion that I can be coerced by force to pay for something when taking it without paying does not deprive anyone else of their property right. Information and ideas cannot be owned.famicommander

This is the ludicrous sense of entitlement that I'm talking about. You aren't being coerced to pay for ANYTHING. We are not talking about basic human necessities that you need to live, we're talking about a piece of entertainment that you decided you WANT. The idea that you talk about force and coercion at the idea of having to pay for a new toy to keep you entertained just goes to show how incredibly self-centered some people can be.

The fact that you want something does not entitle you to it, no matter how poor your parents were at teaching you this basic life lesson. The person who put their time and effort into creating something gets to set the price, and YOU have to weigh how much you want it against that price. If the price is too high, you have to right to not buy it but you sure as hell don't have the right to decide you are going to screw the person who created it out of the money they deserve for their effort.

So my question is, regardless of whether you think digital copies qualify as stealing, why exactly do you think you are entitled to free sh!t (besides the obvious of being born into what is presumably the middle class of a first world country and not knowing any better)?

-Byshop

"Somehow I suspect that if everyone were to torrent a scanned PDF of each of his published works he would probably take exception." You may suspect that, but you'd be completely wrong. If you had actually read any of his work on IP law you would know exactly where he stands. Instead of confronting his ideas you dismiss them with appeals to emotion and appeals to authority. There's nothing productive about this discussion because you are not open to the possibility that you are incorrect. You determined your conclusion and then went out in search of arguments to support it. You don't have to agree with Kinsella's work, but don't pretend you've actually given due time and consideration to his ideas. You have not. Your statement in the first line of this post proves that beyond any doubt what so ever.famicommander

Yeah, I figured you'd probably ignore all the actual arguments I made. Why not post a meme pic, while you're at it. That's what people do when they don't have a leg to stand on.

-Byshop

I know that gaming is not the only medium that involves piracy and illegal copies but it forms a fair share of the total.

One quite popular argument in favor of piracy is based on the popular pre-movie ad "You wouldn't steal a car". The argument goes like "If I steal your car, it's not in front of your house the next morning. If I pirate/copy it though, your car stays there but I will have a car that is exactly the same." One huge mistake in this is comparing something physical (car, house, ring) to something more abstract (code). To replicate, or better yet copy a code, all you need is a functional computer. If you want to copy a car though, apart from  the machine that puts it all together, you need components. We have yet to find a way to make something out of nothing, so in order to copy a car, you'd need to invest into a reasonable amount of materials for the copy to be assembled. 

Another thing is proof. Stuff comes on CDs/DVDs/BRs but we're slowly moving towards digital only. How do you, or the opposite side for that matter, prove that the game on your HDD is a legitimate purchase of a DRM-free game, that the ironman3.mp4 is a legit RIP from a BR you have purchased and that the 50 gigs of music have all been purchased and not pirated? Do you need to keep the receipts until you delete the stuff? Even if all digital goods get a unique serial number as a verified purchase, there will still be a way to duplicate this number to a pirated version.

All in all, I think that it will take years, if ever, to make piracy as black and white as stealing a physical item.

What's your opinion, do you justify piracy as something wrong or right to do and do you think it will ever be a solved issue? 

zaxrider

IMO, the only way to slow down piracy is to educate people as to why they should be paying for their games (i.e. supporting developers). Just saying "it's illegal" is pointless and convinces noone. 

ReddestSkies

[QUOTE="famicommander"] So either you've not read it on you've not understood it. He very clearly constructs and then deconstructs that argument.Jacanuk

He criticizes us for coming up with a conclusion first and googling to support our argument, but it's painfully obvious that he just likes to pirate and tried to find whatever rationalization he could to justify his stealing.

-Byshop