[QUOTE="Baranga"]
Used sales are socially acceptable everywhere. It was a thriving business where I live during the good old Soviet days, and we sure as hell weren't capitalists back then. You can't stop people from selling and buying used stuff, either directly from the seller or from some random reseller.
Nobody needs to find a way to make a profit from piracy. People need to change their business model so that pirates don't provide better service. I believe the problems are the result of the generation gap between the people in charge of various industries and their consumers. It's natural and I am not really bothered by the future - even if SOPA becomes law. Time will solve this problem.
Jabby250
But what kind of service? People keep saying that offering a better service is the way to go but they implicitly refer to the current market/laws that are in place. Whether trying to offer 'a better service' always leads to success is debatable imo (see: CDProjekt), as is the viability to achieve that goal for some companies. Arguing that offering a better service is the solution is useless when no one can agree on what that is.
Taking down torrent sites is a more precise goal -- and why wouldn't corporations fight for that -- instead of trying to compete with piracy? You could argue it's egoistical but companies like Google are only against the law because it's intrusive upon their own business practices.
A great start would be to stop worrying about theoretical dollars.
The problem is not "how do I stop pirates from pirating?" but "how do I make more people pay me?".
Netflix, Steam, OnLive and its peers, the humble bundles, Roku, Trent f*cking Reznor - all employ great business practices that benefit the user more than piracy does. They're run by people that understand that the digital age needs different business models. It blows my mind that we're in the year 2012, in the middle of the digital age and with quantum computers already in use, and we still make baby steps on issues like digital rentals, non-fixed pricing, p2p distribution and so on.
There is no single "better service solution". The entities I listed above all have radically different models, and they all have success. At this point it's clear that the business models of RIAA, major game publishers and every SOPA supporter are not good enough anymore. In an age where the consumer has as much power as the producer, the producer can't act like a monolithic entity anymore. It has to think outside the box. Of course some fail, miserbly even (Microsoft lol). But that is not a good reason to stop trying. The current generation simply won't accept these stagnating business models when they see examples of people doing something better for them in the same field.
As for CD Projekt, they made a lot of money from TW2. It was pirated - and it also sells much faster and without dropping the base price as much as the first game. IIRC right around the time their German piracy misadventures backfired, someone from GOG mentioned converted pirates bring more business than people that come from search engines.
You can't bring down torrent sites as long as there are no laws made specifically for that. You can't "interpret" current laws to bring them down because that sets up a dangerous precedent. And you can't make a torrent-killing law because torrents and torrent sites are not an "evil" technology - that's like banning cars because there are car accidents.
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