f13.net

Which means rather than buying them i will pirate them completely guilt free.  Here (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52547) is the link, don't know if this has been posted yet.

EA backpedalled and changed it to validate only on additional content downloads. With Mass Effect, it'll be DLC, with Spore, who the fuck knows, since it'll be getting all its stuff from the web, anyway.

Is that Erin Esurance in your avatar?

Sorry Stormwaltz, I'll be pirating (or totally skipping) ME (and Spore) due to this. And I've bought all my software as originals for years. My copy of KOTOR has been installed at least 4 times, counting my upgrades and Windows-wipes. I still probably need to download Bioshock from the net sometime.

If I do the right thing and buy an original, I get saddled with bullshit copy protection. If I do the wrong thing and steal it, I don't have to worry about that bullshit.

If I get treated like a criminal, I'll behave like one. Or not buy the product.
Either way, it's a real sale lost, as opposed to the pretend sales losses from pirates who would never have bought your product.

And yes, I know it's not Stormwaltz' personal fault or anything.

I hate this kind of shit but isn't it just like Steam.  Even lighter since it's only a punctual verification instead of a perpetual verification.

Well, no. My steam account works on any computer I have. If I change computers, upgrade my machine, do a complete wipe, whatever, I can just download it again and play. I can also select the "go offline" mode. I mean, I have 3 desktops here right now, all with my Steam account basics loaded onto them.

for ME and Spore, 4 installs EVAR and after that contact EA "customer service" to be able to install a game I bought and paid for can go fuck itself.

So, edumacate me on why everyone's panties are in a bunch over this?  Is it just a concern over drive wipes/reinstalls?

Also, isn't Spore supposed to be an online game anyway?  Or no?  I'm a Sporen00b, don't know anything about it other than you get to play God in a 'round about way.

Its a concern over being able to play the games I buy now in 5 years or so again if the fancy strikes me, just as I play games from five years ago right now again.

I have enough Microprose originals in my games collection that I know I would be screwed now if they behaved that way back then. Darklands and Master of Magic to name just the two installed at the moment.

You wanna guess how many new installs I had the last five years? Let alone the last 16?

If you enjoy the game that much, the least you can do is buy a fresh new copy of it once in a while.

Note: I'm quoting Threash, but this is a general rant, not aimed at him as an individual (although the rant certainly applies), but the entire generations that seem to think they can steal what they want, when they want.

[rant]


What gives you the right to steal a product simply because you don't like the way they decide to protect it?

Some analogies to drive it into your morally corrupt, thieving brain:

--I don't like the way McDonald's packages their happy meals, so I'm going to break in and steal them.
--I think automobiles shouldn't have finance charges, therefore I'm going to carjack whatever one tickles my fancy.

Stealing a software product because you don't agree with how the company does business isn't "speaking with your wallet", it isn't being a rebel, it's breaking the law.

If you don't agree, don't buy it--but this sense of entitlement that gives the gaming world the impetus to steal what they don't want to pay for because it's software is fucking things up for everyone--developers and gamers.

Do you think we (developers) LIKE having to protect our software? Do you think we all drive ferraris and dine on caviar off the breasts of $1000 whores every night? It's how we make our freaking living...and you are stealing our product.

Stop it. You don't have the right--you aren't entitled no matter what you seem to think.

[/rant]

Uhhh, that's not how it works. It's not about entitlement or 'the "right" to steal.' In this particular case, the people saying they'll pirate it would rather piss the company off with a crime they'll really NEVER get in trouble for. Not buying something is voting with your wallet. Stealing it is making a point.

I agree with Zepp actually. If I don't like they way you decide to protect your game you can shove it up your behind. Its your right to eat that particular copy to get yourself fed and it is not my right to steal it.

I just dispute that there is a relevent group of people that wants to steal a game, but if they can't will just buy it instead. Copy protections for offline games will get cracked because thats a fun activity for some people, and everybody who has a habit of stealing them just waits the extra few days. The paying customers are the only ones really getting screwed.

You can't make a political statement that way anyway because marketing spin will be that their copy protection was too ineffective and therefore nobody did buy it. They are remarkably oblivious to the truth.

I know it's how you make your living, and for years now I have bought original software, even to the extent of buying originals of older stuff I played in the past and may never actually install or play again. Call it what you like, but it makes me happy so fuck it.


See, that's the thing here. This kind of protection means I'm not really buying the product. It's long-term rental at best.


Please read the following quoted three lines for my perspective. See if any of them makes sense from a business standpoint, especially since I would like to legitimately purchase these products.




It's not an entitlement-whore mentality, either. It's an ownership one. If I buy something, I own it and have the right to do whateverthefuckIwant with it from that point onwards. This kind of protection says I don't really own the copy of the product I buy. So why buy it?



As an addendum. I stillhaven't bought or pirated Bioshock, I've been waiting for them to remove the stupid level of protection, hopefully a year or so after release when it's no longer a hot new release. If I do decide I must play Bioshock though, and it's not yet unfucked, I will aquire a copy that's not riddled with ridiculous copy protecton.

Is your moral compass so corrupted that you think that actually makes sense?

You just claimed that it's ok for muggers to steal from little old ladies at the ATM to make a point. All they have to do is to wear a mask, and feel as if they are being held down by the establishment (what, I have to WORK for a living? Why--I'll just make a point by stealing--I'll never get caught).

Or, let's turn it around:

--I don't like the way you run f13. In fact, I hate it so much, I'm going to hack the servers and destroy how you make money.

By your argument, it's not a problem at all, since I'm just making a point

I don't feel as strongly about what you said, even though you did slightly imply you'd be willing to pirate it. But again, renting is a business practice to make money--if you don't like the fact that you can't keep videos from NetFlix for good, then you simply don't rent them--you don't freaking steal them.

I'm sure however that some people do rent once and make copies for future use, but doing it doesn't make it right, it just makes you morally corrupt.

Taking the same money for renting out things that others do for selling them doesn't smell like roses, either. If that fact isn't visible on the actual box you buy in the shop (sorry rent), its morally corrupt as well.

You are confusing a bunch of disparate groups:

1. People who can't afford to pay. (For high-end things like say Maya, Photoshop, etc)
2. People who pirate as a demo or pirate something they don't particularly care for and would never pay for anyway.
3. People who refuse to pay for rental crippleware.
4. People who pirate whatever because they are cheap bastards.

Group 1 and 2 don't result in any lost revenue. Group 4 results in major lost revenue. Group 3 results in lost revenue but that's totally within your control as a developer.

Edit: And as Tebonas points out, some of these EULA's are so totally absurd they are immoral if not criminal. According to most EULA's the software doesn't have to do a damn thing and can destroy your computer if it wants. If companies are going to fuck over consumers it's hard to feel too terrible when consumers fuck them right back.

What gives you the "right" to put out a 10-page all-caps legalese piece of shit saying your software doesn't have to do anything?

They aren't putting guns to people's heads and making them buy the software.

The thing is, it's not being presented for (or charged as) a rental. It's being sold (on all levels) as a purchase when in fact it is not.

Let's be blunt though, I didn't slightly imply I'd be willing too pirate it. I pretty blatantly said I'm willing to pirate it if it's still crippleware and it gets to the point where I really want to play it. Bioshock, as pretty as it is, is yet another FPS. Spore and ME both are more compelling. I'm happy to wait a year or two and see if they come to their sense and remove the crippleware aspect once it's no longer a hot property, plenty of other stuff to play in the meantime, but when (if) I do decide I want to play it..

Yes, I said it's the same as mugging old ladies at the ATM and hacking my server.

Yea, that's the exact same thing.

Please, don't be a putz.


This is interesting though. Mostly because renting it and copying it is also theft. And it's a lot more efficient than downloading from newsgroups.

Also, remember, you're on a board where the vast majority of people BUY most, if not all titles, that they have even the tiniest amount of interest in. I, personally, take pride in supporting developers. But when they try to fuck me, I'm not about to blame anyone for them getting fucked back.

This isn't like Crysis where the guy bitched and moaned like a sissy with a skinned knee over the lack of sales claiming pirates fucked him. This is about a company fucking legitimate consumers and letting the pirates off with nothing but a cakewalk of a cracking scheme. And it's not about rationalization or "making things right." It's much more an 'eye for an eye' case. Your average PC user is probably a tiny bit more tech savvy than your average douchecock console junkie. And they readily identify when a company is pulling a dick move. It's another huge case of EAs standard one step forward, two steps back policy.

And they sure are challenging everything this time. With Spore, I don't even know why the copy protection was announced as it streams to the web and could validate every/any time. For Mass Effect though? Fucking inexcusable. INEXCUSABLE. The minor head honchos left there should've thrown a fucking hissy fit. They know better. EA should know better. And there's a lot of situations where I find MORAL problems trying to say pirates are in the wrong for what they're doing.

Also, your stance is completely invalidated by the fact you work for a publisher and developer. This isn't a reflection of you as a person, but a reflection of what you do. Of course you have to say it's amoral. Sure, it's entirely possibly that you're being honest. But since your name is red, saying "piracy is bad" is a laughable situation as you can't say it's "valid in SOME situations because it would end a career.

I am also waiting (or rather hoping) that soon these companies are going to drop the copyright protection. I've been wanting to (buy) and play Bioshock for a long time :(.

The one thing that I think is most insidious is how it doesn't need to be stated what copy-right protection is used on a game box. Things would be different if consumers knew that the latest copyright protection runs the risk of buggering their computer

Two things:

--it's not the revenue loss I'm ranting about. I'm not even ranting because I'm a game developer.

I'm ranting because you are breaking the law. You are stealing.

What does this say about the rest of your (again, generally speaking here) morality? Why is it ok to break the law because you are making a point? Why is it ok to steal because you want to, or don't like how someone else is doing something with their property?


--If you are willing to steal video games because you feel it's ok (victimless crime, lossless transfer of value, whatever your rationale is), what else are you willing to rationalize? Where's the line?

--Can we steal gas from gas stations because we don't like the oil companies making so much money?
--Can we steal books from the library because we can't be bothered to buy them ourselves?

I added a lot more response above (Hit post instead of preview the first time, sigh). To add, comparing it to tangible real things is stupid and naive. Downloading something off bittorrent, that someone else cracked and packaged, costs the developer absolutely nothing. Unless:

1. You would've bought it if it wasn't available via torrent.
2. You're a total dickhead who tries to get tech support when running a cracked .exe.

And both points are completely unprovable.

But sure, go steal something tangible like gas or a book. And then say to the cops, "What's happening here? I used videogame piracy logic to do this. Its totally legit and on the up and up.

I'm not confusing anything--but you are completely fucked in the head if you think any of what you wrote matters at all.

1) So that means that homeless people can go ahead and steal food, clothing, and camp in your living room because they can't afford to pay?
2) Ahh--the "it's not important enough to me to respect the law" argument. I see what you did there.
3) And here we have the "it's not good enough to pay for, but it's good enough to steal" argument.
4) Anarchy ftw?

What scares me more than anything else in the rationalizations you and others are giving is the mentality that "oh, that doesn't apply to me entitlement implied in the rationalizations. Once you've crossed that line, there is no stopping you. Once you, as a population group have that concept embedded in your rationalization process, anything goes, given enough time.

You are so ass backwards in your rationale here it's petrifying--especially since you probably represent a large portion of your generation when it comes to these moral and ethical questions.

Here is the logical breakdown of what you are saying:

It's not a crime if I'm not caught.
Information has no value, since it can be duplicated/replicated with little effort. In other words, Intellectual Property does not exist.

I'm still at a loss to understand how consumers are getting bent over by this.

And I don't see the correlation that antipiracy software means you don't own something.  It's just making sure that some identifier in the game hasn't been registered before, and if it has, to whom.  Internet, and broadband, is widespread.  Any gamer is going to have it.

I figure the law is a bit murky on the subject of data (CmdrSlack?  Chime in?), or even under what category it falls into (intellectual property?).  Nevertheless, theft is theft.  Making some sort of consumer statement doesn't make it any less so.  It doesn't matter if they wouldn't have bought it in the first place - that's just revenue loss argument.

I don't make one freaking cent from any games, or software, that my company sells, personally. I don't get royalties, I don't get profit sharing (not yet at least, no one in our company does directly).

As I mentioned, my stance on this has nothing to do with actually being a game developer--what causes me to see red when I see people blithely stating they will steal what they don't want to pay for is what it logically means for our culture in 30 years, when those same people (as a class) are going to be lawmakers, senators, presidents, and cops.

Q(and colored)FT.

I think this is one point in particular that you are completely wrong about. There are definitely people who pirate because they don't want to pay and everyone here agrees that is completely immoral.

The piracy that people are discussing is not because people want to steal, its because they are recieving a superior product. A pirated game without all that copyright protection shit is far superior to the legit goods that companies like EA want to dump on consumers.

We are talking about people who want to do the right thing being punished for doing so.

I'm curious, Schild...

Let's take one of the Sigil interviews here back after they crashed and burned.  What if someone came in, copied/pasted your entire interview with McQuaid on their MMO / gaming website and claimed it as their own.  There doesn't even have to be money involved (say, membership fees).

It's not necessarily about taking credit, in as much as they couldn't be arsed to conduct their own interview with him.

Wouldn't you be a mighty bit pissed?



How is anyone buying software with antipiracy measures being punished?  10-30 seconds taken out of their day to make sure their copy is legit?

Zepp, the point is that this bullshit is e-pissing on our shoes and telling us it's raining.  If they're going to rent the games to us, then fucking say you're renting them, but if I shell out $50 to purchase a game, only to discover that I don't really own as it as I have all of these bullshit hoops to jump through, I'm going to be upset.

When my options are either
a) Don't play the game or
b) Pirate the game and completely bypass all of their bullshit

I'm going to choose b, every fucking time.

Equating it to robbing a little old lady at the ATM, or homeless people stealing food and shelter is fucking retarded, because they took somthing tangible, they deprived the owner of being able to sell that product to someone who was willing and able to pay for it.

The key here is deprivation and a willing and able customer, if I'm not depriving you of anything, and was not a willing and able customer, what have you lost? Nothing.

However, had the company not put in bullshit "you don't own this" code into their game, I *would* have been both willing and able to buy it, so they have deprived themselves of that revenue.

It should be a clear choice for developers, most of the people who are going to pirate the game if there is no DRM are those that are not willing or able to purchase it, they're not losing anything when someone pirates it.

However, when they add in DRM that is comically easy to crack, yet a pain in the ass for a legit customer, they have lost the legit customer that is no longer willing and able to put up with aforementioned pains in the ass.

Edit:  Snakechamer, in your scenario, the pirate would be depriving Schild of traffic, so they aren't /just/ stealing his IP, they're stealing possible traffic.

So, let me see here....

If I hack into your bank, and (digitally) transfer all your money to my account, it's not stealing since I didn't take the actual physical dollars from it?

Gotcha.


How is traffic considered tangible?
Edit:  Also, pirating the game (IP?), isn't theft?  What makes the theft of Schilds story/traffic/IP any more THEFT!!! than piracy?

A lot of copyright software will mess around with things you have on your computer. Just wiki securom or starforce and you'll get a quick intro to the kind of shite they do to your computer.

Copyright protection has generally always been designed to somehow inconvenience the legit user, from having to read something obtuse in a manual, having a disc in your drive and now to having a near-permanent internet connection.

I grew up in South East Asia and am probably more exposed to piracy than nearly everyone on this board. Piracy has always been very convenient and the response of the gaming industry has been to make legit games more inconvenient.

One of the key differences now is that by having the mandatory checks you stop 'owning' the game and are only 'renting' it. The legailty of this is something I know nothing about, but it very clearly screws the users over. This kind of problem will always be exacerbated in places where there is no renting culture of games. If people can't properly buy games they are going to be definitely feel tentative about renting it for the full price of a game.

Having a hard-coded number of lifetime installs.

After that, contact EA directly and be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. You deal with fuckwits and beaurocracy. How well do you think EA will handle that?

I'm not super-keen on the online validation-a-go-go aspect, but I can live with that in it's muted form.




I do want to pay for it though. I really do. I just don't want to have software I pay for crippled by crippleware that appears to be set up to ensure that I won't be able to play the software I legitimately purchase several years down the track.
Several years ago, I knew a guy (brother in law of a high school friend) who sold pirated PS1 software. His regular customers included a couple of cops. Oh, also, corrupt politicians, cops, lawmakers, presidents have been around longer than any of us here have been alive, so there's no worries there for our cultures in 30 years at least.  :awesome_for_real:


Oh yeah, I for one bought Crysis. Haven't installed it yet, may not even get around to playing it for months or longer. But I bought it. If it had fucked-up protection, I wouldn't have. Oh, and Titan Quest. I've got 3 copies of here, in fact.


The thing that comes to my mind personally on this whole thing, is that I feel that EA might have concocted the whole "phone home" protection scheme knowing that there'd be a huge outcry, so then they could "tone it down" to the 4 installs EVAR version and come off (to the mass of morons) like they're being reasonable and throwing us a bone.  

:tinfoil:? Maybe, but that's how a ton of negotiation is done in the real world...

Don't be stupid Snakecharmer, if you hack into my bank account and take money out, that means I no longer have access to that money, of course it's stealing, you have deprived me of somtihng.

And really, traffic isn't tangible? That's a fucking retarded comment, you should know better.

You're being deliberately obtuse and you know it.

On the comedy channel here, there's an Aussie comedian with a bit that they keep using as a promo. It goes like this. (sorry, couldnt' find a video link).

Breaking a law which you think is unjust is a valid means of protest, it may get you fined/arrested but it is a valid form of protest.  How valid it is will generally be determined by how others interpret and approve of your actions.  Trying to start a movement in favour of Grandmother assault would probably only get you a load of trouble and derision.  It is testimony to the validity of filesharing arguments that so many people around the world are in support it.

Not buying the product is one form of protest, telling the relevant people why supports it.  Actively altering the product to address your concerns, and going even further to actively distribute that altered product IS another form of protest as it shows conclusively that you support the product as something of worth, just not in its current iteration.

And on another note, any gaming company that doesn't consider each 'illegal' download as a protest against pricing, distribution restrictions, copy protection measures or rights restrictive EULA bullshit is missing valuable insight in how to better design, distribute and market their products to gain an advantage.  The larger corporations can spend lots of money to enforce what they think are their rights and control distribution channels, the smaller companies have to find other more creative ways to engage the market and its expectations.

Pretty much the same thing as depriving the developer a sale via piracy?

Sure thing.


There's no ads here.  No tshirts for sale (anymore?).  He's not lost anything. 


Yeah, I am.   Either way, it's stealing.  But all this 'tangible' bullshit is exactly that.  Bullshit. 

It doesn't matter the method in which it's obtained - via a datastream off some torrent search engine (software piracy) or breaking into the vault and taking the dollars directly from it, it's theft.

Making some consumer statement about antipiracy software by pirating software isn't going to stick it to The Man.  The Man is going to stick it right back to you (generally speaking) in terms of higher game purchase cost and more antipiracy measures.   So yeah, feel free to pirate away in some protest whilst fucking over the people that purchase it legitimately.  The wheels on the bus will continue to go 'round and 'round. 

Theft in protest is still theft.

It can depending on the way the DRM system works. Here's a concrete example. Songs purchased through MSN Music are DRM-encumbered. You have to "validate" your songs if for some reason it thinks the music is no longer being played on an "authorized" device. For example, if you upgrade your computer, it may no longer think the computer is authorized (similar to the way Windows XP validation works). The validation process is handled by special validation servers. Microsoft is shutting down those servers, just because. This means that customers who bought music from MSN Music that for whatever reason need to have songs revalidated/reauthorized are screwed. Microsoft's suggested workaround? Burn them to a CD and then copy them back. Unfortunately circumventing DRM is illegal under the DMCA which is what that workaround is doing. That means MS is advocating their customers break the law to get around the fact that MS is shutting down their servers. What if you forget to (or didn't know you were supposed to) burn them to a CD before upgrading/changing systems? Sorry you are screwed -- no refunds.

Game developers didn't start putting in copy protection until people started stealing their products en mass. MosesandStick mentioned growing up in SEA--I didn't grow up there, but I spent quite a bit of time, and have seen the "stores" where you can walk in and by any game you wanted, including photocopied manuals, for a buck or two, back before they were routinely protected.

I've watched the evolution of copy protection, from having to hunt for passwords based on page number and line/word number, through "spin wheels" (couldn't be as easily photocopied), to boot sector/track offsets to break being able to raw copy floppies, all the way to what we have to deal with today--I've played games for 28 years now, and been involved in making them for 3.

Consumers have been fucking over game developers from the beginning--and started the whole damn thing. Trying to use the "but we're just counter-fucking the damned greedy game developers!" is circular logic--they wouldn't be "screwing you" if you wouldn't fucking steal from them.

And before you even start to say, "but, I'm not a pirate, I didn't steal first!", think about it: if you pirate software, you're a thief, and breaking the law. It doesn't matter who did it first, you are taking something that you didn't pay for, and is not yours.

I learned that was wrong at about age 4 or 5 myself, but it appears it's a lesson that isn't taught anymore?

If homeless people could pirate food, clothing and shelter like people can pirate computer games then no one would ever go hungry. How would that in any sense be a bad thing?

There are multiple shades of gray but newer copright protection measures are changing the landscape completely.

As multiple people have mentioned previously, you are not buying games anymore, you are merely renting them. Companies are taking away the right of consumers to own their goods and then charging them a full price for it. I think the right thing to do is to simply not buy games but as Wasted said, if the law is going to fuck you over then you respond appropriately. History is full of examples of people breaking the law for the right reason. I hope one of the lawyers on the board can elucidate about how the law works in these areas but I'm pretty sure current laws are not up to scratch for protecting consumers' right in the digital age.

Overpopulation.

I learned when I was young that it is good to share as well.

I'm looking at the legally purchased 'The Witcher' DVD on my desk that has 'Do not lend or make illegal copies of this disc' printed quite plainly on it.  Its this do not lend bullshit that is driving the movement, even if its not the motivation behind a lot of the downloading only participates.

Making and distributing digital copies of media not for profit but to share is only defined as stealing because publishers spent lots of money to convince people that it is. This is far removed from the sort of property rights and concept of stealing most 4-5 year olds get taught.

An interesting point related to Mosesandstick's post is that Companies in recent years seemingly want things both ways.

What I mean is the mindset that we're "buying a licence" to use the software/game/movie/music applies on one hand. Not a copy of the media, but the right to watch/use/access it.
But on the other hand if you lose or have stolen the physical media it's stored on, well, tough shit. Buy it again.

This is one aspect where the much and oft-maligned Steam is in fact totally unfucked.



Oh, Snakecharmer. Did you read my reply last page on how legitimate users are being bent over/inconvenienced by this particular copy protection? You didn't reply to that at all. And I'm asking in a non-confrontational sense.



I have to disagree with this bit - most game piracy isn't a protest of any sort, it's just people who don't want to pay for something or can't afford something they want so use other methods to aquire.

Totally valid point--but it still doesn't make stealing the license morally/ethically "ok".

The "not for profit" part has nothing to do with whether or not it's stealing. By your logic if you take a copy of say, the latest Harry Potter book, photocopy a bazillion copies of it and give them away for free, that's not stealing cause you didn't make any profit on them (in fact it probably cost you a bazillion dollars to make those copies).

Going back to your "Do not lend" comment, Borland way back when had the best software EULA which basically said to treat the software as you would a physical book. A physical book can only be in one place at one time (running on one computer at a time) but you can move it around from place to place (move it from computer to computer as long as multiple copies of it aren't running at the same time), lend it out to other people (again as long as only a single copy is running), and so on.

Steam doesn't fuck me in the ass if I upgrade my computer, or want to install a game on every computer in the house.

Snakecharmer, I think perhaps you need some binoculars to read what everyone has been saying from up there on your high horse.

A vast number of us will /not/ purchase a game with cockstab DRM

If I I'm not willing to pay for your product, you havn't lost anything.  For you to lose a sale, I would have to be willing and able to purchase the product, but didn't because a pirated version was available.

So no, it's not like taking money out of my bank account, because you deprived me of money.
If I refuse to purchase your game, you're not getting any money out of me.
If I continue to not purchase your game, or pirate it, you're /still/ not getting any money.

If the reason I'm pirating is your stupid fucking DRM, you just lost yourself a sale, because of your DRM.

And developers screaming "We're not making money because of pirates!1!1!!ONE1!" was just their excuse for shit sales numbers for shit games.  If you didn't make shit games, or priced them at the level of which a shit game should be priced at, people wouldn't pirate them.

Important part is bolded.  If the person pirating is unable or unwilling to purchase your game, you're not losing anything when they pirate it.  They aren't going to buy it anyways.

here's a question for you.

If I were to buy a copy of, say, Bioshock (since it's available) and decided that I wanted to play an unDRM'ed version of it, and so downloaded the cracked ISO and played that while my legitimately-bought copy sat in my shelf, unopened. What would you think of that?


And it's been brought up in the past - but why on earth a Steam-bought copy of Bioshock still has the 4-install limit applied to it is just a total head-scratcher.

But go steal a videogame and say to the cops, "What's happening here? I used videogame piracy logic to do this. Its totally legit and on the up and up."

The only thing in your favour is that it's harder to catch you stealing the videogame if you do so via illegal download. If the cops fail to catch you stealing a videogame, it's exactly the same as if they fail to catch you stealing gas or book.

Stephen Zepp is correct.

Triple tap and I'm off to sleep.

If game companies are losing so much money to piracy, maybe they need to first look inwards and ask the question "Why aren't people buying our shit?"

If your game sold 40,000 copies, and 400,000 copies were illegaly pirated, then you did something very, very wong.  Maybe your game just isn't worth $50, if it's a $20 game, then very few are going to be willing to pay $50 for it.

If publishers would look inwards to figure out the root of piracy, they would end up profiting from it, not pissing off their customer base and losing even more money.  If there is a such a large demand for the games (as proven by aparently the millions upon millions of illegally pirated copies out there, which is the reason your game isn't selling), but it isn't selling, then you know that it's popular, and you're not off on the taste determinant of demand.

Tale:  If I steal a videogame from Gamestop or EB, I have deprived them of the ability to sell that game to someone else, so yes, it would be a clear-cut case of theft. 
However, if I'm not going to buy it anyways, and I'm depriving you of the ability to sell it to someone else, you havn't lost anything as a publisher/developer.

I don't have a problem with it. To me if somebody is fucking with my legal rights (e.g. "fair use" and/or "first sale doctrine") I have no qualms about restoring them back.

The problem here isn't copy protection unto itself. It's that so far the copy protection systems have either sucked outright or only screwed those trying to use the system legit.

We don't have nearly this problem on consoles in the west because nobody tells MS and Sony what they're allowed to installed DRM-wise. Meanwhile, try any of that in Windows and there'll be rioting and Fox News special reports.

It's stealing. No amount of justification changes that. You're just not getting rundown. And you're not because the companies either don't want to take the time to bother, or have largely shifted over to the hardware where it doesn't happen to nearly the same degree. The rest are making online games with subscriptions or xtrans, for that call-home goodness in a different form.

I do agree with Nerf when he said on page one about calling it a rental rather than a purchase. DRM call-home isn't renting per se, but if you call the game a service then that opens up what you can do somewhat. Of course, the only people reading the EULAs are the lawyers that wrote their underlying boilerplates*, so you need some way to clearly tell consumers what's going on.

And you better damned well have some permanent DRM unlock in place for when your company goes bust or gets sold or gets bored with supporting that title.

* the rest are arguing with the Gamespot clerk because they're trying to return an opened MMO for which they didn't like the EULA they could only read after launching the game :awesome_for_real:

People pirate. Deal with it or go out of business. Here you have people telling you exactly why they might pirate something. Try listening.

F13 is not composed of the people who pirate everything just because they are cheap bastards, it's composed of people who want to give you money. If you can't find a way to extract money out of them you're fucked.

You don't have the right to stay in business and nobody is compelled to buy what you produce. It seems that at some point the PC game industry simply forgot that the way to make money is to create products that people want to buy, instead of creating products that turn people off then berating them for not buying them enough.

Morality is a two-way street. If you sell me something and tell me I "own" it then I find out that it self-destructs after a while you've essentially stolen from me. I don't see any developers complaining about that. How exactly is it "moral" that I buy a product and I go back and play it two years later, the authentication server is down permanently and it no longer works? (Even though it has no online component) How is it "moral" that according to your EULA the software doesn't have to do anything at all, and can erase my whole computer with liability?

If your EULA says the software doesn't do anything why should I pay for it exactly? Can you imagine someone selling books with the disclaimer "may not contain words" or a TV set "not guaranteed to display video"?

Most EULAs are a total joke. If you want to talk about morals lets talk about those too.

Consumers are getting bent because of the privacy implications and the history of these tools putting hard to remove junk on PCs which screws up other functions (pretty much the same reason consumers get irritated by other forms of software virus).


As regards the stuff about why not everyone sees piracy as theft, that's because theft is the taking of someone else's property with the intent to permanently deprive them of the property, wheras software piracy is just fare dodging. Piracy is analogous to sneaking into the cinema because you don't like the fact that the bouncer punches everyone in the face as they queue to pay for a ticket. It is not analogous to stealing a physical object.

Doesn't stop it being illegal, doesn't make it ok, but this difference is why shrill protestations about pirates "stealing" EA's product don't have much impact on most people.


All that said, it's usually possible to find "third party" patches to turn off the DRM nonsense, so if the mechanism bothers you enough, there are morally legitimate ways to avoid the punch in the face, but still play the game.

I'd rather just not see the locks at all.  Even if you make available a digital unlock after the fact, there's no guarantee you'll be able to find it 5, or 15 years later.     I'm not obsessive enough to regularly create "patch disks" for all my games, and keep those disks along with the game disks.  Fuck, there's also no guarantee I'd be able to install off that media later. My latest computer doesn't have a floppy drive, so I had to get a 'pirate' version of Mater of Magic, despite having the disks for it.

As to the 'pirate' issue. You all are wasting breath trying to convince people who have long-since rationalized their criminal behavior.   Remember: "It's a crime if it happens to me, but not to a faceless bastard company!"   That's the mindset, so no examples or illustration is going to turn these guy's heads. 

I think EAs true intention here is to kill off (or at least seriously cripple) the second hand games channel. Whatever the exact limitations in their code might be, that wont stop a completely cracked image from appearing on the usual sites within hours.

However, with the limited installs, the resale value of the box drops dramatically as soon as it is opened. Especially since the buyer has no way of telling how many installs are left for the serial number. The only way to find out if it still works would be to install it, and that burns another install. At least with MMOs or Steam games you can sell the account info...

DRM companies need to make money too.

I'm pretty sure at this point they have advocates that storm into the big game companies HQ's brandishing glossy full color pictures of aborted babies screaming "THIS IS YOUR GAME WITHOUT COPY PROTECTION! WHY DO YOU HATE BABIES?"

One of the features of software is that it is easily portable, easily copyable, and easily installed on multiple machines. Easily uninstalled and reinstalled. The publishers don't want us to have access to that feature because it makes piracy easy.

BUT

NO COPY PROTECTION TO DATE HAS PREVENTED PIRACY. None. Nada. Zilch. Zero. If you make video games, your game is going to get pirated.

The question put to you is this: Are you going to make your product unattractive to legitimate users in order to fail to prevent it being pirated?

Stardock's answer to that question is interesting.

Instead of asking how they can annoy and inconvenience legitimate users, maybe they should start asking how they can actually reduce piracy? (Hint: DRM is not the answer)

You guys COULD buy the game, and Then crack it.

Stardock's answer is not interesting because they are selling a niche product to a niche audience. A more interesting example is what Epic does with their games. Those games are sold with copy protection but sometime after release they release a patch which removes it. Basically their strategy is to try and slow down piracy during the first few critical weeks of a game's release and then after that they don't worry about it anymore.

Edit: I should say it's not interesting in this discussion since the games we're talking about here have much larger markets than the Stardock titles do.

No your analogy doesn't work. To use your movie example software piracy would be the same as somebody stealing a copy of the film, making copies of that and then you getting one of those copies and watching it whenever and wherever you feel like. If you wanted to you could make copies of your copy of the film as well and give/sell it to people.

I actually had to do this with a Sims 2 expansion. The copy protection (arrr harrr harrr) made it so the game would no longer run on my computer. I had to use a crack to bypass the copy protection in order to play my legitimatley purchased copy of the game.

I THINK THAT'S IRONIC OR SOMETHING!  :drill:

Is 12 million a niche?

We're talking about video games here. Also 12 million downloads does not mean that 12 million people purchased a copy.

QFT



Fair enough, but that still wouldn't be theft, merely non-payment of royalties, which in most cases is a civil issue rather than a criminal one.

But anyway, the resale issue would only really be significant if the DRM scheme impacted commercial scale pirates, which it doesn't.

It only really impacts resale of originals or friends sharing games.


Again, I'm not saying it makes piracy ok, I'm just saying it explains why people don't get excited about it.

How is that functionally different to any other item you might purchase? If you buy a car you have a reasonable expectation that it will last you for a certain amount of use and after that it is likely to be unusable as parts wear out and are irreplaceable. Are manufacturers who build in obsolescence also stealing from you?

People are acting like the software industry are pioneering the field of selling you a limited licence but that isn't true. If you buy a car you are permitted to do what you like with the physical media of the car but you aren't given any licence to any of the IP or reproduction rights. Same with games, you buy a game and can dispose of the physical media as you like but your use of the IP is limited by the rights the publisher gives you. I agree that these should be explained up front pre-purchase so that consumers can make an informed choice about what they are getting for their money but in essence you've always only been buying a limited licence regardless of any DRM measures implemented.

Breaking the law because you disagree with the right of a company to determine how it licences its IP to a customer is not going to get the law changed.

I'm struggling to think of anyplace in the car industry or another manufacturing industry where active steps are taken build in obsolescence and people don't get reamed for it.


Most talk of built in obsolesce is tin foil hattery outside of IT industries.

Certainly car and other industries plan on the basis of releasing steady improvements over time, and thereby making old products obsolete. But actively putting a clock on number of uses a product has - or actively preventing it's resale? Well, not so much.


None of this legitimises piracy, but it does tell you why nobody is interested in listening to software firms cry about it.

Except it is lawful to make a private copy for yourself to ward against media failure.

The game industry seems to drink from the same cool aid the music industry passes around. You don't have all the rights and the customer none of them. At least not until you at least pony up the cash to buy you the relevant law changes.

"Wear and tear" is different than controlling access to something you purchased. The car equivalent analogy would be if you were required, say, every year to have a dealer "validate" your engine management chip to keep your car running and then suddenly one year they decide to stop validating that particular car.

Except you often can't do with the game the same things can do with a car. E.g. I have an extra copy of Half-Life 2 I got through the Orange Box. I can't legally sell that copy to anybody even though I physically have the disc for that game (I bought the boxed version). The best I can do is give it away to somebody. Valve has effectively taken away my rights under the First Sale doctrine.

Another example. Most games are copy protected. That takes away my rights under software copyright laws to make a backup of that game. Sure I could circumvent the copy protection and make a copy that way but that's illegal under the DMCA.

Its more like mcdonalds decided to spit in MY burger and piss in MY drink because some jerk stole from them.  Its not about entitlement or having the right to steal, its about the stolen product actually being BETTER than the one you have to pay for.  If the only way to get a spit free burger is stealing it then thats what im going to fucking do.  I am perfectly ok with breaking some laws and if you think that makes me morally inferior then fuck you, you can't sit there and tell me you never smoked weed, drank before you were 21 or even broke a fucking speed limit.  I could understand developers using anti piracy measures if any of them actually you know... worked, but none of them ever fucking has.  You are not going to stop pirates, you are just pissing off customers.

Ok so basically I am NOT going to buy and play Bioshock or Mass Effect, despite wanting to.  I hate copy protection.

Oh well, too bad.

I predict that this thread is one more post about "it's your moral obligation to obey any and every law no matter how unjust you think it is" from being Godwinned.  Possibly by me.

The car analogy died 1 page back. I'm on the side of it being a silly method of protection.

Samwise, you need to message me when you do it so I can further the cause with motivational poster images.

I think we need to equate piracy to more situations where someone directly takes something tangible from someone else.

UNFORTUNATELY, Piracy IS a victimless crime. This isn't a discussion of whether or not it is a crime - because, of course it is a crime. This is, when is it OK to pirate.

If you want to compare it to something tangible.

Someone breaks into your house with a weapon. You have the right to defend yourself. You have the right to KILL that man.

Meanwhile, murder is a crime.

That's the comparison you guys are wanting to make, but you're so high up your fucking mountain that the oxygen is getting thin and you look like loonies.

You have an alternative to breaking the law however which is not to buy the game and not to break the law. People are acting as though their only options are to steal the game or to buy it. There is a third way and that is to not have anything to do with the game. If you can't bring yourself to buy it due to your deeply held digital freedom convictions then taking the game for free doesn't magically become morally right as a result.

Shunning the game and being clear about your reasons for doing so is more likely to cause a change in attitudes by media companies than simply pirating the game. One way puts your motivations in question, the other doesn't.

Of course that's an option. But as a reasonable option, it goes out the fucking window when the developer acts like paranoid douches. They are practically saying "Pirate our game, we're gonna spend a shitload of money on pointless DRM, OBVIOUSLY we don't get it, and we want to punish the legit customers.

There's a reason GOOD customers hate DRM. It's because really, it only affects them. If EA didn't want people pirating their game, they should've used Starforce and triplefucked everyone.



You can pirate something and still act like a white knight on the internet and in person. See, the thing about piracy is when you do it right, pretty much NOBODY ever has to know. That's why the previous examples of stealing an article, robbing an old lady, and shit were just absolutely moronic in their effort to be used for comparison.

I want to throw a hypothetical at you.  Actually, not much of a hypothetical, because this is an incredibly frequent occurrence.  Suppose I have bought the game, and the copy protection prevents me from playing it.  Is it all right for me to download a pirated copy of it at that point?

Keep in mind that even though I have paid for the game, in the eyes of TEH LAW by downloading a pirated copy I am "stealing" the game, I am violating the EULA, and I am violating the DMCA.  The fact that I have paid money for it and theoretically "own" it is immaterial from a legal standpoint.

Which is it, goose-steppers -- hypocrites or douchebags?

Which is why I said that licence restrictions should be more visible prior to purchase so that consumers can make informed decisions. In the particular case you mention then you basically have a broken game. it doesn't matter if it's broken due to the DRM or because the devs can't code an installer properly. The devs should make it right and failing that you should get a refund same as for any product that's broken.

Let me make my position clear here, I'm not pro-DRM. As a gamer and a consumer I hate the fact that my experience becomes more complex and more restrictive. I am however very much anti-piracy, the reason for this restrictive DRM is entirely down to people who think that stealing is cool, as a result we're all paying a price for that. As such validating piracy - even for 'legitimate' reasons like Samwise's example above - sends a very bad message and just perpetuates the problem.

If i dislike something about a game i will not buy it.  If a game company is actively trying to fuck their customers i will actively try to fuck them back.  I buy LOTS of games, pissing people like me off is a really fucking BAD (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v390/Tremmie/?action=view&current=noname.jpg) idea.  That picture doesn't include all the games whos boxes i didnt save nor all the tons of stuff ive bought online from steam and individual developers like mount and blade.  

I'm guessing from your last sentence you're falling on the side of "douchebags" but I'll make one more attempt to get a more definite answer out of you:


You and I both know that there is no guarantee of developers spending effort on "making a product right", especially after you've already paid for it, and especially if "making it right" means removing their shitty copy protection that they've already invested a fair amount of money into.  And there are all sorts of reasons I might not be able to get a refund -- maybe the game sat on my shelf for a while and I'm past the 30 day mark now (I've had games sit unopened for literally YEARS before firing them up).

In a shiny happy perfect world we wouldn't have any broken-ass copy protection in the first place, so stop adding your own hypotheticals and answer mine.  Is it all right for me to play the game I paid for or not?

Just to go on the record, I'm anti-DRM as well--in fact, within my division at GarageGames I'm one of the strong supporters of removing what little content locks we have already. As hugely beneficial as it would be from a marketing/product tailoring perspective, every time someone brings up the phrase "phone home" for one of our products, I cringe, then put the debate gloves on.

Now, let's drive the "off to politics" nail in deep:

How many people here read the thread 3rd Grade Murder Plot--WTF is the world coming to? (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=12895.0)?

First, don't even bother trying to imply I'm equating murder (or conspiracy to murder) with piracy. I'm not. I'm trying to get all of you that "thinks it's ok to do what they want if they can rationalize it" to think about the moral implications of that attitude, taken to it's logical conclusion.

Now, read some of the comments, especially the first page. I'll quote Morat here (the irony of that blows me away!), who is responding to Arrrgh that says:
(Note: the original quote is semi-out of context, it could easily have been meant as sarcasm, but it's not really apropos to what I want to quote in any case)


All of you are adults, yet you are still sitting firmly in either #2, or #3, and/or have slammed right into a new #4: "It doesn't apply to me if I want to make a point/want revenge on the other person".

One more question: Do any of you have kids? How do you explain to them that it's ok to pirate software if you don't like what the company is doing, but it's not ok to steal candy, even if you don't like what the store manager is doing?

You're putting forward one argument then asking a different question.

Yes it is 'alright for you to play the game you've paid for'. Without a doubt. If you buy a game you should be able to play that game. Nobody is ever going to argue against that.

I don't agree (as you noted) that you have the right to redress that via piracy for the reasons I've already explained.

I shouldn't freaking have to tell you Sam--I know you're old enough to drink beer, and I should think you're mature enough to figure out a simple ethics question on your own, but a lot of y'all are proving me wrong.

No, it's not ok to use a pirated version because yours doesn't work. You have no innate "right" to use the software that validates the illegal/immoral/unethical action of participating in a crime (receipt of stolen goods if you want, or conspiracy to commit fraud, or whatever other crime you want to name that's appropriate).

Your rights are limited to redress from the publisher, or returning the product--and yes, I fully agree that is fucked up in the industry, and that part needs to be fixed. It's not going to be fixed by stealing games.

This actually kept me up last night--not because I am worried about the ::moneyhat::, but because I'm worried that the most recent 3 generations or so are all growing up thinking they set the line of when something is unethical, illegal, or immoral in their own minds, not authority/society.

The behavior and rationalizations I'm seeing here are all described under the ICD-10 Criteria for Dissocial Personality Disorder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissocial_personality_disorder)

So, Stephen - if 6 million people pirate Mass Effect, is it from henceforth known as the Digital Holocaust?

Where do we put all the shoes??!?!??!?!?!

Dude, that's totally uncalled for. Fuck off.

Stephen, just to, ugh, throw a little wrench into your blitzkrieg of moral indignation;

what is it that this vicious DRM hopes to achieve? How does allowing a legitimate user only four installs actually help fight piracy? Do you honestly think that once someone like EA comes out with a system such as this, that the actual pirates are going to turn off their bittorrent and head down to the shops to purchase legit copies?

I realise that you've stated as you yourself being against DRM. This however is neither here nor there, since all faulty analogies aside, all we have heard (or seem to hear) is hysterical screaming about how some of us may be amoral cp-loving philistines, who deserve no worse then death. You say that there are "thing terribly wrong in the industry".

And? Stating this doesn't exactly make it any easier for the legitimate customer who brings in the money. So all we have, are companies making things harder for the very people who keep them in business, all the while screaming at the top of their lungs that this is somehow the fault of some other third party.

I think that this 'holier than thou' is exactly what most people are really complaning about.

If you don't agree with a company's business practises you don't buy their product. These products are not vital to your existence, so you cannot claim any moral justification for a theft where you are basically motivated by greed.

Saying "fuck you I'm going to pirate your shit" is just childish.

Actually, buried beneath a lot of crap, most of us here are operating at the post-law and order stage of morality.

In short, we obey the law when it coincides with our moral beliefs, and disobey it when it conflicts. (In short, we hold personal morality superior to societal morality). The moral calculus is more complex than that -- I might find a given law immoral, but feel that the results of flagrantly disobeying it are worse for society at large, and thus choose the 'lesser' of two evils. I might find a law immoral, and break it, but takes steps to minimize the impact of doing so -- like, say, only lighting up a joint in private and not doing it in front of cops.

Or I might find a law so morally repugnant that I would flagrantly violate it, accepting punishment in the hopes of having the law changed.

Digital rights -- and sort of intellectually property concepts -- are really a complex stew of moral choices, and where the individual balance is is hard to say. (Me? I go by the lifetime of the creator -- not the corporation. If it was the work of multiple hands, I say it should be public domain when the last royalty-earning creator dies or formally opens it up to the public domain. Mickey Mouse shit is bullshit, although given the way Mickey's changed over the years I suspect Disney could re-copyright as a seperate, but derivative work. The original Steamboat Willie-era shit would be public).

Now, I find issues like this pretty simple: I'll happily pirate a copy -- if I have, at some point, bought the software and haven't loaned it out. I'm not going to pirate a copy just because I lent my physical one to a friend. I will if I broke the CD, can't find my original key, etc. I feel the same way about music, and lord knows the RIAA is even less sympathetic than EA. :)

I DON'T find things like, say, making backup copies of software to be morally wrong -- even if the EULA attached to that software says it is.

And I happen to agree that overly vicious DRM is only going to slow sales and fuck the companies using it. Steam seems a good compromise -- allowing only the number of licensed copies you own to run at any one time, but allowing access to those copies anywhere. Steam may be a bitch at times, but I suspect their model is the future of DRM.

Let them pirate. They need a unique key for activation, a key that can only be associated with one user ID.

Thinking piracy needs to be justified or some kind of moral obligation is the first turn to Not Getting It. You don't need moral justification to pirate. And saying it is such a thing is just a shitty straw man that collapses under it's own weight.

You can't justify a criminal position on the basis that the person you are commiting the crime against is doing something wrong. There is no justification for piracy; it is solely motivated by greed. If you want to make a point, don't buy the product. I'm not saying what the developers are doing is right, but taking the stance that their slight towards you justifies a crime is grade-A shortbus logic. You can take morality out of the argument if you want, since as crimes go piracy seems the most victimless; but that doesn't mean that what you are doing is right.

But please, I'd love to hear an argument why you have the right to steal someone elses creative property.

Why do I feel the need to bring up that it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement? People keep forgetting.

I'd love to hear where I said I have the right to.

It's theft of services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services), pure and simple. I concede that the software isn't previously contracted services, but then again neither is turnstile jumping, yet it's still theft.

Schild: and I don't claim I have a right to hack into the f13 servers and destroy all your data--but it's still a crime, and still morally wrong to do so.

You keep comparing it to single crimes against people.

That's such a terrible, TERRIBLE argument. It's making you look insane.

If you don't need any justification (moral or otherwise) to pirate stuff, what do you need? If you will say that you have no right either then you should never pirate anything.


If you have no right or justification to pirate something, how can it ever be "OK". It's a crime, no matter which way you try to chop it, and thus there really is no situation where it's acceptable. Voting with your wallet is making a point, piracy is a purely selfish act.

Also saying that piracy is a victimless crime is blindingly naive, just because the victims don't always have faces doesn't mean that there's no consequences.

edit:


Is it somehow "less bad" to steal from a corporation than from an individual?

You keep saying you can't be bothered by society's laws, the rights of others, and paying for what you recieve, which makes you both a criminal and a sociopath.

Bullshit, EVERYONE breaks laws.

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=3441;type=avatar)

QFT. The spoilt children are going to steal the lollipops because the lollipops come in sticky wrapping.

Schlid, the mere act of doing it (or really, deciding to do it) is a moral judgement. Even if the moral judgement is "there's no moral issue here".

Everything you do in life is a moral judgement.

In this case, given it's copyright infringment and against the law, there's really no way to AVOID a moral judgement. Even if, in your case, the judgement appears to be "I don't care what the law is". You're doing the moral calculus instinctively, as everyone does, but you're STILL making a series of moral judgements.

You're deciding the law in this case is stupid, and not worth following. You're deciding you'd rather take for free what others are trying to sell, because you have cheap (money/effort) means to do so.

I'm not even sure, really, what your moral justifications are for taking the fruits of other's labors without payment. I'm sure you have some, or choose not to think about, but I haven't the foggiest idea what they are. Frankly, it seems like it boils down to "They're pissing me off to much to pay for their product, and I want it, so I'll take it for free" -- you're justifing piracy as punishment because others didn't create the product exactly how you wanted it to be.

Why isn't it enough to say "Fuck them, they can keep their crap" if you don't want to put up with their particular copy protection scheme?

Hell, there are enough other games you can buy instead.

I don't think he did.

What he and most people have been saying is that the reason that much of the reason copyright infrigement remains socially acceptible is that the industry, and various people in this thread keep making invalid comparisons that make you sound as loopy as the RIAA. Comparing copyright infringement to stealing property makes the industry sound shrill, and is part of why they lose the argument.

And even if I don't condone copyright infringement, I have no particular sympathy for the victims of it who have encouraged piracy through their misguided attempts to snuff out sharing or resale of legitimately purchased products.

Incidentally, this argument would be a lot easier to have if more countries took the lead of places like Germany, where consumer protection statutes prevent companies taking action to strangle the secondary market. Which as various people have pointed out, is usually what DRM is about in the games market.


I'd also have more sympathy for the industry if those formats where piracy is more rare (ie. consoles) didn't typically have higher prices. If the shrill warnings from the industry regarding the cost of piracy were accurate, then the fact that console games have historically been more expensive than PC games suggests an anti-trust investigation is long since due.

I agree with the sentiment that pirating is illegal, immoral, etc...

The only problem I have is you keep arguing in absolutes.  Everyone breaks the law in one form or another.  Take driving for instance, everyone has done a rolling stop on small interceptions, everyone has knowingly gone over the speed limit, everyone has gone closer to the car in front of them then the legal limit (it has been shown that if all cars would follow speeding and distance laws then our highways would be backed up and gridlocked so bad it would make traveling even worse).  Even if you don't drive, there's always jaywalking.

There is not one person in the world who has not broken any laws.  The question (and this is a serious one) is where do you draw the line between which laws are ok to casually break and which ones aren't?  Again, I'm not condoning pirating nor those who pirate, but let's be real about human nature for a second.

This is a fascinating thread. Mostly because the indignation on both sides proves why a) companies seek to DRM the hell out of everything; and, b) why some publishers won't sell to entire countries due to their decades-long rampant piracy tendencies. Now, on that second point, I think that's shotgunning the person to cure their nasal itch, but whatevs. It is what it is.

DRM-free and-yet-successful Sins of Solar Empire does not prove DRM isn't needed any more than Club Penguin proves the whole PC industry must become constant-connected Flash gaming in order to thrive (I know CP and DRM are different, but they share the call-home thing). The same people bitching about DRM are logged into Steam every day while those not bitching are buying music on iTunes, and were before they started transitioning away from DRM. This debate is approaching dogma.

We are at an entirely different parallel discussion, though. The "you have x installs" retardedness.

Hey, I agree --  that's fucking stupid.  And I might not buy the game because of it.

I feel my only moral choices are to either put up with the shit that comes with the game and buy it and play it, or...decide the shit that comes with it is too much, and not buy it and not play it.

Backup copies, personal use copies, things like that -- totally different set of moral arguments.

Personally, I think both piracy and anti-piracy measures are retarded.  The problem is that as a legitimate user, I see pirates getting better versions of the same software I'm using for free.  I've tried voting with my wallet, all it means is that I don't get to play the games that all the pirates are playing.  I'm tired of taking a moral stand, or whatever, in the name of getting my point across to the game companies.  I tried that, and it didn't work.  At this point, I'd be happy to just play a damn game once in a while.

I'm more than willing to buy a game, more than willing to (hypothetically) even pay more for a version with some special features I want.  But the version with the features I want is the pirated version, the one I'll be able to run three, four years down the road.  So what the hell am I supposed to do?  I can continue to refrain from buying these things, in which case the companies will almost certainly continue to ignore me and I won't get to play the game.  Or, I can pirate it, in which case the companies will still ignore me, but I'll at least be playing the game.

Right now, I'm really on the fence.  I want to get Spore, one way or another.  I don't want to break the law to do it, but I also don't want to end up holding a $50 DVD that won't fucking run because some idiot decided that fucking over legitimate customers makes great business sense.

Yes. It is morally wrong that unaccountable immortal corporations have equal or more rights than individuals. At this point everyone should have their own corporation to protect themselves.

Speaking just for myself -- I find it totally ethical to legimately purchase the game, but play a cracked copy. You BOUGHT the game you played. You paid the creators.

My only real problems with that scenario is I find it rare to find a good cracked copy that doesn't run into issues upgraded, reinstalling, or patching sooner or later.

As I said -- I suspect Steam, or some other form of central licensing system -- is the DRM future for games. If you tie the license to a unique ID/password, then you can ONLY lose access if someone manages to break into your account. If the system does game archiving (and even better, builds in emulation for older games to run better in newer OSs) so that I could, for instance, pay 5 bucks and get a copy of Master of Magic (with royalties flowing to whomever still owns the title) or pay Steam/Steam-equivilant a dollar for all some old SSI Gold Box games, that would be the best of both worlds.

Your games are always "there" (via Steam), you can download them and play them wherever you go, so long as you're only playing ONE copy of it at a time. Does it really matter if you have 5 copies of Spore installed over five seperate PC's if only one is authorized at a time?

About the only hassle would be the need for internet connectivity to utilize -- Steam's authorize/deauthorize process could use some work, but does handle it even if your internet provider is down.

Corporations are owned by groups of individuals.

They only have rights to save the rigmarole of the owners suing you individually.

I have a bad habit of arguing "meta-issues", i.e. one level removed from the core argument itself--in this case, I'm arguing ethics, not breaking the law.

I don't give a shit if people pirate software, in and of itself. I don't care that people willfully break laws, if the know they are doing wrong.

What I'm arguing so heatedly about is the appearance that those that pirate software as a "lesson to the developers" are justifying their actions by claiming (outright, or just through their actions) that society's laws (from a moral/ethical perspective, I'm not talking legislation at all)  don't apply to them--in effect, Schild and others are arguing that it's not wrong to steal (software in this case), if you don't like how the property is provided.

I'm of the belief that morality and ethics isn't a spectrum--an act is either moral, or immoral, and a rationale/moral compass that indicates to individuals they can pick and choose their ethical guidelines based on personal preference is a very scary thing indeed.

In this particular case, those justifying pirating software because they don't like how the provider enforces software protection can use that same argument to apply to any particular ethical dilemma, and be justified in their own eyes. From a morality perspective, that is logically equivalent to justifying any act, for any (selfish) reason.

That scares the shit out of me from a purely societal perspective--individuals that are raised with this sort of ethical rationalization process move on to doing crazy, stupid, destructive things to the society as a whole.

A lot of my concern here is reinforced by an episode of CSI I watched the other day, called Fannysmackin' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannysmackin').

At the end, the characters hold a brief discussion on society and morality, and here's the key quote that puts it in perspective for me:

I agree, but I was responding to the overarching "you're not allowed to steal"/"I don't care as long as I don't get caught" debate.

DRMs are not designed to screw people. Their purpose is to ensure folks get their money back. They are needed in the PC world because the general belief* is that an unprotected CD/DVD-ROM is a copied CD/DVD-ROM. That means the publisher doesn't get their money back. That means their staff doesn't get paid. That means their partners don't get their cut. And that means their licensors (engines, IP, etc.) don't get theirs either. It's the same for music and videos.

Yes, to Margalis' point, these companies can just find a new business to get into. Welp, by and large they already have. Most of the dollars in the industry outside of MMOs go to companies that design for PC as an after thought, or if their development pipeline allows for PC porting and their distribution channels make it just as easy to sell (be it retail or digital). And I separate MMOs because whether it's Flash-based xtrans or download/purchased subscription, this models works extremely well on PCs and is still largely exclusive to them (for reasons not directly related to this discussion).

In the meantime, we'll see more bad practices, and the rise of embedded or bracketed advertising, and along the way, the continual decline of PC titles at retail as the migration to digital continues.

Ultimately though, nobody is really to blame. All of media is going through this sort of self-questioning, which is why companies like Sony and Microsoft are evolving from controlling the hardware to controlling the end-to-end experience of media distribution. The information has always been the most important thing. It's the channels that are evolving.

* statistically arguable, but it's an easy sell to publishers

All of those same people run corporations too and none of us are as dumb as all of us.

To bring your own quote back to you, It's not wrong to buy a law (copyright and patents in this case), if you don't like how the law is worded. Media corporations are hypocrites and I can't stand hypocrites.

Yes, there are laws and there are laws. Some legislation is simply bought by lobbies. You must obey them as a citizen, but you don't have a moral obligation to follow them. You moral compass doesn't break just because some corrupt politicians took money to make something unlawful!

Excellent post, and it pretty well sums up my own stance in regard to laws and morality.

Since everyone else here is happily taking examples that have nothing to do with the specific argument, I'll do the same with the above statement on laws vs personal morality. If you were to go to an fundamentalist islamic country, would it then become "morally right" to stone someone to death for infidelity, execute someone for being homosexual, cut off their hands for stealing, etc? What if those are the laws of the land? Do they supercede your own personal morals on what is "right" versus "wrong"?

It's at least as relevent as the "copying IP = stealing a car" argument.

In this case, that depends on whether you see the secondary market for original software as something the publisher has any rights over.

Because the form of DRM we are talking about does jack shit to prevent warez.

See here you're conflating agreeing with the law with agreeing with the punishment which isn't the same thing. I would believe it is wrong to steal whether I lived in a fundamentalist Islamic state or not. However I wouldn't agree that cutting someone's hands off was a justifiable punishment, in the same way that I believe murdering people is wrong but I am opposed to capital punishment. And no, to forestall the inevitable 'Aha!' I don't agree that a law forbidding homosexuality is morally right but that again is not relevant. Having limited rights in the purchase of a video game is not even remotely in the same league as being oppressed for your sexual alignment.

All I'm seeing in this thread from a lot of people is bullshit justifications for why they should be allowed to steal someone's work. Media companies are all 'evil hypocrites', they 'buy laws', they have more rights than individuals and so on.

Bollocks frankly. They have exactly the same rights as any other content creator. If you create an original work as an individual you have the same rights over the use and exploitation of that work as Disney do over their IP. You can choose to give it away for free or you can choose to try and make a living from licencing it but that's your choice as a creator and not up to a random consumer to decide if he wants to use your work but reject your terms for doing so.

Copyright laws need to be changed to reflect the world of convenient transfer of large amounts of data. Current law is mostly a band aid slapped onto obsolete legislation passed before large scale peer to peer copying of very large files became possible. I have no doubt that it will change as the current rules are bad for creators and consumers alike, in the meantime breaking it doesn't make you a hero.

To me this is such a non-issue.  If you want the game, buy it.  If you dislike the copy protection, crack it after having bought it.  If this is too much effort for you or if you don't want to support the companies for putting copy protection in their games, don't buy it and don't pirate it.

One of us missed something in his meaning--hopefully he will clarify.

I took what he said as it being a bad thing that we took our own morality over the societies' morality, not a good thing--but you seem to think he's agreeing wth you, implying it's fine and dandy to do so.

Morat?

Why do you keep mixing morality and law as if they were interchangeable?

How do content creators not have a moral as well as a legal right to protect their creations?
How do you have a moral right to take their work without their permission?

Legally there's no argument, or there shouldn't be. Morally it seems pretty clear to me as well tbh, but then I don't subscribe to the 'stealing = sticking it to the man' meme that a lot of people here apparently do.

I disagree. Since you addressed some of my main points I'll respond. Corporations colluding with the state to legislate a business model is fascism. It's as simple as that. The moral idea behind copyright and patents which was to enhance society has been subverted for greed. I'm not justifying anything. Fraud and piracy are a cost of doing business. They should deal with it and include it in their operating costs or find a new business; that's what the rest of us do. They shouldn't be allowed to rape the culture of a society because they are afraid of change and "it's always been that way".

I actually don't have a problem with DRM. DRM is snake oil which tricks greedy executives to fuck their own customers. It's stupid but the market will weed it out eventually; as long as it isn't legislated. Simple things that keep honest people honest like serial numbers and checking that the CD is in the drive are fine. It's when a company adds DRM that blatantly says "you are a criminal" or that assumes the company will continue to exist 3 years down the line that I have a problem with it. If you couch the DRM as providing additional features (by providing an account that you have to log in to which is tied to your game purchase) then I have no problem with it and neither does anyone else. The customer has to opt to allow the transaction. Automatically phoning home is very very bad even if effectively they are the same thing.

It may seem like individuals have the same rights as multinational corporations in regards to the law in the United States but that is not the case. Normal people can not afford in most cases to protect their interests legislatively or via the court system.

The up side is that people are going to continue to do whatever they want with regards to imaginary property and media corporations will adapt eventually or die. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Depending on your view on morality, you could have have such a moral right when performing such an action would have a net positive outcome, I.E. the positive effects outweigh the negative effects.

The positive outcomes of pirating a game you're not going to buy are obvious: the person gets to play the game that they otherwise wouldn't.  Fun, whoo.

The negative outcomes are more nebulous, though.  If you're not buying the game anyway, then the negative financial impact on the dev is zero.  Other negative effects would be difficult to identify, given that the consumer's impact on a game designer's life is pretty minimal.  The average pirate doesn't know Will Wright or anyone on his design team, and aside from giving them money or not, I can't see them making the devs any happier or sadder.  There's the tiny possibility of something bad happening to the pirate (E.G. prison) but generally that isn't the main reason people argue against software piracy.

So, if you're a utilitarian, you're stuck with a situation in which you have a small positive outcome and almost no negative outcome (or a very nebulous one).  Or so it seems to me.

Notice how none of the red names has said shit about EULAs other than to rationalize away the immorality of selling products that do nothing?

This is about money, nothing more. It's not about morality or the law, it's about people looking to get theirs.

Stephen Zepp lecturing about morality? This is a man who thinks invading another country and killing hundreds of thousands of people is ok. Sorry if I don't take his lectures too seriously. I don't have blood on my hands for downloading Ultimate X-Men.

Read a software EULA sometime. It essentially says that the software doesn't have to do anything at all, and can fuck up your system as much as it wants. They could sell you an empty box and according to the EULA it would be ok. You could buy MS Word and instead of being a Word Processor it could be Minesweeper and they'd be in the clear. Or it could be a utility that erases your drives and that would still be ok.

If your EULA says you can literally sell me an empy box then why should I pay you?

And no, cars are not the same. Cars don't come with an agreement that says they aren't required to move or have wheels or can explode at any time without liability. Here is the WOW EULA as an example:


What a fucking joke. "FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE" translates into "this game doesn't actually have to be a game."

I'll ask again: if your game doesn't have to actually do anything at all, doesn't have to work, can erase my computer or literally be an empty box why should I pay for it? Not a trick question.

Edit:


Bingo. Welcome to the 21st century. The funy thing is, most F13 members want to give these people money. As long as they don't insist on selling crippleware.

I'd suggest that it doesn't actually matter what Morat's intent in his post was. I agree with what he said and it applies to me. I consider myself a moral enough person, and my personal morality is something I value more than society's morals, laws and rules.

There are plenty of things done in law and by governments that I disagree with, that I think are immoral. There are other things that I don't see as neccessarily immoral yet are illegal or go against licencing statements. For an example of illegal, we'll take jaywalking. Morally wrong? Yeah, it's technically a public safety law, but even the cops don't take notice unless they're on jaywalking revenue duty.

For an example of the second one, how about showing a DVD to a class in a school setting? I don't know about the US, but most videos/dvds here have a screen of bullshit about how they're not to be used for "public exhibition", which they define as including on oil rigs and in schools. I do that one regularly without having any moral qualms.

And I for one don't think stealing - sticking it to da man. When I violate copyright it's because:
1) I'm downloading tv shows that aren't available locally. Which I may or may not buy later when it becomes available on DVD. (and I do) I don't bother with downloading movies, since they always come out to rent before too long.
2) I want to listen to an album, which I may or may not buy later. (and I do)
3) Showing a DVD to a class. Technically a violation?
4) When I make a video/animation with the kids and use copyrighted music to soundtrack it (non-commercial work, but still, it's technically a violation).
5) I don't pirate game software anymore, haven't for a few years now. I do apply cracked .exes now and then though so I can keep my discs safe. That's neither here nor there though.

This thread is tedious so I'm skipping to the end.  I only read half of the first page.

Has anyone made the point about how the game is basically setting its own life to end at the exact moment that the verification servers go down?  Are the DRM companies going to provide verification indefinitely?  Or are they going to charge you another $20 for a new copy when you want to play the game in ten years?

For example, I purchased the strategy guide for Final Fantasy IX.  Go ahead and laugh.  But the guide only contained about 1/4 of the information and for the rest it advised me to go to playonline.com.  If you go there now, it's only information on Final Fantasy XI.  Oops, the book I paid $20 for is now virtually useless.  Fortunately, I know how to find this information elsewhere on the internet, but the fact is that by tying the product to an outside service instead of making it fully functional on its own, it guarantees that it will one day become useless.  Potentially MUCH sooner than if the company had just left off the overzealous DRM.

Apologies if this point has already been made, it was the first one that really jumped out as needing to be said.

Also, happy to step into the morality ring if I can get a recap so I can own you with my superior morals without retreading ground?  Go!

Margalis, learn to fucking read, please. I already said that I don't get one freaking cent from product sales. It has nothing to do with money, but nice try.

Then, learn to think. Given your, and others willingness to decide yourself the morality of stealing, it's simply following your logic to it's final conclusion that Bush can invade whatever country he wants, morally. It's amazingly hypocritical to think that you can decide something is moral against society's norms, yet he can't.

There are no symmetry breaks in morality--you can't say "at this level, this applies, but at this level, that applies".

Either individuals can decide if an act is moral or not, or they can't. Period. I say they cannot. You obviously think they can, unless it's Bush.

You do realise that you can just as easily be proven wrong in your stance on morality, as you think yourself proven right. Morality is a very flexible idea.

However, this still doesn't answer how EA's proposed DRM is going to increase revenue, provide a good service to paying customers and stop pirates.

Software companies have become steadily more abusive as the years have gone by.  Copy-protection has gone from laid-back to draconian, intrusive in-game advertisements have become more commonplace, EULAs are more one-sided and restrictive, and our friends at Blizzard are currently trying to use EULAs to destroy whole swaths of consumer rights.  As the saying goes, I vote with my dollars.  I don't buy anything that has in-game ads, or uses copy-protection that I consider excessive (StarForce, I'm looking at you here).  I'm not compelled to steal such things; I simply go without.

However, I am diametrically opposed to more than one publisher now as a result, and eventually that's going to turn into a clash.  I'm going to be configuring IPSec to block the ad servers that are trying to plaster Fanta ads all over Bioshock 2, for example, and the EA executives are going to try to claim that such behavior is against the law.  It will say in the EULA that I'm forbidden from blocking the ads, and EULAs are binding law, of course, and an EA exec will state in interviews that unscrupulous people like myself are stealing their money by not seeing their ads on my computer in the game that I bought.  They'll push for some legislation to brand me a criminal, and they'll buy enough senators to pass it, and then I'll be a criminal.

I'm still waiting for an explanation of how charging money for a product that doesn't do anything and can wreck your machine is moral.

Zepp wants this to a philosophy 101 argument because the details are embarrassing. GarageGames Torque EULA is nearly a direct copy/paste of the WOW one:


His company charges $150 for a game engine that may not actually be a game engine and may not be fit for the purpose of creating games. If you load it onto your computer and it's a 200 byte program that erases your drive that's fair game. Clearly he has the moral high ground here.

The "morality" here is that it's ok to rip off consumers.

Interestingly, there are laws in place here in Australia that resulted in EA having to pull the dynamic ads out of BF2142 in the local version here.

Four things:

1) There is no morality issue whatsoever here--you have the choice of purchasing or not purchasing. No one is holding a gun to your head, or in any way forcing this on you--but in the reverse case, you steal.

2) All EULAs for all products contain boilerplate legalese--and quite frankly, they aren't enforceable in most states in the US at least. Most states have laws that explicitly disallow waiving Fitness for a Particular Purpose or Warranty of Merchantability.

3) The discussion has nothing to do with contract negotiations or attempted enforcement.

4) Two wrongs still don't make a right. Even if it was immoral for those EULAs to somehow be forced on you, it's a separate ethical situation, and totally unrelated to stealing software.

Nice strawman attempt though.

Here's a direct question for you--as far as I remember, you are a software developer. Following your line of logic, it's perfectly all right for anyone that contracts for your services (either as a full time employer, or a contractor directly) to refuse to pay you--and with your logic, that's perfectly ethical.

Are you seriously supporting that position, or are you just spouting off to be an ass?

EULAs are 'forced' upon you, the only reprieve is that legally (if I remember correctly) you are allowed to return goods because of the EULA. I've never done so but I imagine people have encountered problems if they tried to do so.

Copyright protection is also generally 'forced' upon consumers; 99.9% of consumers probably have no idea what the DRM is going to do their computers. I've never had the bravery/stupidity to read a EULA but I'm guessing they don't specify what the copy-right protection will actually do but its more of a blanket "no matter what happens, not our fault, tee-hee!"

I'm not defending piracy with this statement, but defending EULAs and copyright mechanisms is just retarded.

Oh. Both sides of the argument are skipping most of the posts where the other side makes a perfectly good point and just replying to the silly shit and tangents because they're easier to "score" off. Why did I get a reply to the easy part I wrote about local laws in islamic countries and yet a lot of the harder stuff to argue against that I write gets skipped over?

Here's a point I've been trying to make - About 70% of my PC games (yes, those shelves are doble-stacked), and most of my console stuff that's still in action (most PS2, PS1, 3DO, SNES, N64 stuff is packed away):


(http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg143/azazel_f13/DSC02690-2.jpg) (http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg143/azazel_f13/DSC02688-2.jpg)
(http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg143/azazel_f13/DSC02687-2.jpg) (http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg143/azazel_f13/DSC02686-2.jpg)


If you're making people like me (which I would suggest are the majority of f13 posters) refuse to buy your game, (or even decide to pirate it as an alternative) due to the DRM then you're fucking doing it wrong.

Dude, you're doing it wrong. Look at your bookshelf!

In what sense? PC shit gets shoved in the bookshelf. "in action" console games get piled in the lounge room, they used to all fit in that blue box.

Pay attention man--refuting the validity of an argument does not equate to supporting the position the argument was aimed against. Nowhere did I defend EULAS or copyright mechanisms--I said they weren't part of the discussion at hand (hence being a strawman).

It's not forced on you in any way, shape, or form. You can willingly choose to not enter the contract. Developers/publishers however cannot "choose" to have you not steal their property.

I thought we were talking about copy protection...  :grin:

One of the best peices of advice I ever got was "If what you're doing isn't working, try something different."

It seems to me that copy protection is not working, and something different should be tried.

I honestly do not believe I've heard a convincing argument that makes pirating software ethical. If I've missed one, I apologize.

I think this happens on the internet in general because

1) it's difficult to track all points, and people respond to the "squeaky wheel" (things they disagree with)
2) People feel conceding a point is a weakness. I try to concede when I've been convinced, but nobody's perfect ;) I honestly haven't been convinced one inch off of my position in this argument however. If someone can come up with a consistent moral stream of thought that makes it ok to pirate software, I'd be very interested in hearing it. (no, pirating something that you already own isn't in theory at least ethical in my opinion. Pragmatically of course, it's less "evil")


I hate DRM as much as the next guy, and while I'm :nda: regarding specifics, I will certainly say that in regards to the products my company sells, I'm firmly, 100% in the camp of making the engine products as freely available as is humanly possible.

I'd also like to point out that InstantAction was designed from the beginning to provide the best combination of user freedom (games are tied to your account, you can play them literally anwhere you wish--your home, your laptop, the library, your buddy's computer), and revenue protection (they are tied to an account).

This strategy was developed because we're a company made up of game players--hell, our CEO is the best Soul Caliber player in our entire company (well, he used to be, probably out of practice now). We hate DRM as game players, and we recognize it's a pain in the ass for consumers, and we planned around what we felt was the most mutually acceptable strategy.

Software is not services. And when we engage in services contracts we don't say "our services come as-is and may not do anything", we agree to meet specific criteria and the customer pays us based on us meeting those. We don't make our customers pay in advance for a contract that says we don't actually have to deliver anything at all. We don't consider providing actual value optional.

The software I make is not crippleware loaded with abusive DRM that stops working after a few years. We include contractual guarantees that our software works (more or less) and that we'll respond to critical customer issues within hours. (Unlike in your industry, where you respond to customer issues - never) We schedule regular free maintenance releases specifically for addressing non-critical customer issues. For the most part we rely on our customers to be honest, we have a very minimal licensing scheme that is quite easy to abuse. It does not phone home, it does not restrict the number of installs, it's quite possible for someone to create a single fake license key then replicate our software as much as they want.

We also provide fully-featured no-cost evaluation versions that could easily be hacked into full versions. For all I know all of China already has pirated copies. It wouldn't surprise me.

I've personally fought attempts to make our software more "secure" precisely because it makes it more of a pain in the ass for legit users. And even on our website we've moved away from requiring logins and accounts for the same reason, barriers to entry are something we want to avoid, not erect. If some teenager who can't afford our software downloads a cracked copy I couldn't care less. That's not lost revenue, that's exposure.
---

People pirate. Deal with it. In your attempts to stop the people who pirate everything as a rule you are creating an environment where the pirated version is superior to the paid version - brilliant.

Again, F13 is not like most communities. If you can't find a way to get people from F13 to pay for your product you're fucked, because F13 is composed of people who will gladly give you money as long as you aren't ass-fucking them for their trouble. Your paying customers, the ones who want to support you, are telling you that your product sucks. (You being EA here, not Zepp)

Edit:


Whether it's ethical isn't particularly interesting. It happens, and it's going to keep happening. That's why it's important to differentiate between the people who pirate because they always pirate from the people who pirate only what they can't afford to buy from the people who pirate only when the terms of use are too draconian.

I don't have any respect for someone who pirates everything. But I find it hard to get worked up when people pirate the odd game here and there because the DRM is ass-fucking. And whether or not that's ethical the world in increasingly filled with people like me.

I wasn't focussing it on an argument for or against piracy in any form or way; I was responding to your statement that people willingly accept EULAs. Think about it this way:

1. You purchase good
2. You sign contract when you click accept on EULA

I'm no legal expert but when you purchase something that doesn't state the contract and are then required to sign a ridiculously one sided contract to get any benefit out of your goods something seems a bit unfair. The only reason why EULAs aren't a big issue is because (I think and hope) they are generally recognised as legal bullshit.

Good job outlining the differences--seriously (and I agree with you).

However, the differences don't negate the meta-question of the morality of those you contract with to refuse to pay because they choose to. If you accept that it's ok morally/ethically to pirate software product, then the same logic applies to pirating/stealing software services.

On your thoughts regarding DRM/EULAs, I personally agree with you. And I also personally hate the fact that EULAS contain such bullshit, unenforceable limitations...but having done the research myself and knowing that they are unenforceable in the first place, plus having done what I can at my company to establish a position of giving refunds to anyone who has a reasonable case (we do get people that buy the software, download and install, then immediately turn around and ask for a refund with the full intent of continuing to use the product), I don't let them bother me.

We're also arguing two different things--I'm arguing that individuals do not have a moral right to steal software because they don't like how it's packaged (because it has DRM in other words), and that continued to it's logical conclusion, the breakdown in morality decision making has devastating circumstances to society.

Many of you that currently think pirating is ok, for whatever reason, are probably going to have kids--and you'll probably demonstrate to them your belief in this situation. How are they going to be able to differentiate what's ok and what isn't if the moral logic is broken? See the "3rd grade murder plans", the "Fannysmackin'" episode, and dozens of other breakdowns in basic morality we see in our society today.



Stipulated. My personal concern is not that people willingly break a law knowing it is wrong, but that they don't think it's wrong.



Thanks for the clarification--because we (GG) do as much as we can to not be like EA--what they are doing is exactly why GG was founded in the first place.

Margalis, the EULA discussion is a sidetrack but regardless. You know why those limitations of warranty are there (or you should), you should also know that if a company did sell minesweeper but advertised it as a word processor their EULA wouldn't save them from the inevitable legal backlash. Yes, by taking the EULA to it's logical extreme, a company can sell you an blank disc and say 'well you agreed that you didn't expect it to work' but frankly only a company that was actively looking to go into receivership is likely to pull a stunt like that.

All that being said however, the EULA could contain incitement to violence and advocate genocide but that still doesn't mean that it's right to pirate the game, again it's simply more bullshit justification for why your moral code can be stretched around something that shouldn't even be an argument.

That's because the various arguments are all over the shop. Snakecharmer kept asking how people are being reamed by this DRM and when I explained to him why I never saw a reply.

I for example find software piracy to be "small w" wrong while beating that granny to death at the ATM is "large W" wrong. Your personal morality may be black and white, for others, we see things in shades of grey. Regradless, I don't pirate software anymore. The only way I would again would be in cases like Bioshock/Spore/Mass Effect in repsonse to the DRM being fucked up and really wanting to play the game.

However, we were discussing all kinds of copyright laws and infringment, such as limited rights and the moral rights of the IP creator (or owner) to declare how their product is used (this was I think from IainC in response to the 3 or 4 installs is a rental - not a purchase). I talked about showing a DVD in a school. Technically a breach of the "EULA" copyright declaration at the start of Videos and DVDs. Immoral?

We (generally) live in liberal, free market socities. If a consumer wants something and he can afford it, he gets it. We have consumer rights that protect our ability to purchase goods and services. When you're selling a good in a free market environment people expect that they can get it.

We are talking about the sale of games here, not the renting of games and not the licensing of games. We as consumers are saddled with expectations that are derived from our experiences and the laws that govern our societies.

It is this expectation that has led this generation to 'fix' the issues with whatever goods and services it purchases. If I'm going to buy food and I'm allergic to pickles, I ask for them not to be used. My iPod comes with this half broken piece of software called 'iTunes' (let's say hypothetically), I can find programs on the internet that will allow me to circumvent the requirement to use iTunes.

Thusly, when it comes to games we expect to get games that aren't saddled with extraneous, morally and legally dubious protection. People will practice what they see as their right (legally not sure whether this is a right) to obtain a good that doesn't have those limitations. Naturally this leads to piracy.

Piracy is a natural part of any market; piracy provides the goods and services the market refuses to provide. The pirated market is supposed to represent the desires of consumers and the folly of suppliers. It may sound wierd to say that people have the right to pirate but there are forms of piracy that simply represent the failure of the market. There is nothing 'immoral' about consumers excercising their rights.

The moral issues over the piracy of computer games are greatly confounded by the ideas of copyright infringement, theft of IP, etc. For most of us this is obviously immoral, but when it comes to 'our' (I use the term loosely) piracy we are not doing it to steal, we are merely trying to excercise our 'rights' as consumers and individuals in an imperfect market.

I could be wrong about a lot of this, I am know very little about economics and law. But as far as I know the forms of piracy that we are discussing here are based on the idea of suppliers failing and the consumers excercising their right to recieve a product the market should be supplying. Obviously there are external factors in such a decision,  and many of them have been discussed already.

I think the bottom line for many people is that the black market is the way in which consumers naturally express their desire to purchase a subsitute good without all the extra crap. No one wants to do it with the burdern of possibly being a thief and potentially harming those they want to reward (i.e. developers), but it is up to the market to adapt, not for the market to force its limitations on consumers.

Service is kinda the anti-software, as far as business deals go.  I provide service up-front, with no guarantee that my customer is going to give me a penny, because I guarantee satisfaction with the promise that they don't pay if they're unhappy with the work.  If I tried to offer them the same terms as an EULA offers consumers, I'd be out of business in a week; only an idiot would agree to those terms.

Besides that, I could not sit down in front of a customer and offer, with a straight face, to take their money and then maybe or maybe not destroy their network, with no particular obligation on my part to do even a vaguely competent job, and no fault assigned to me if I screw up and set everything on fire.

Best argument I've seen so far (only logical one from my perspective at least). I'm almost persuaded.

I realize it just sounds like self-promotion, and that the games currently available don't interest this particular market segment very much, but I honestly feel the strategy IA is implementing (in the long term picture, consider it Steam++ I guess, if you need a comparison) is going to work out.

Downside being of course it requires a constant internet connection for play, which of course is a show stopper for some (many?).

I don't believe they have a "moral right" either, I just don't particularly care.

I recently downloaded Ultimate X-Men (the comic, all of them). I don't feel guilty. If it didn't suck ass I'd pay for it, just as I've paid for plenty of comics over the years. Nobody lost any revenue over what I did. Is what I did morally right? If it isn't it's no great shakes. There was no harm done to anyone, and any morality at play is very abstract.

I find it a little silly to construct a slippery-slope argument that ends with the downfall of civilization. In many cases people disobeying the law and/or listening to your own morality is a good thing. Was the Underground Railroad immoral? I'm going to go out on a limb and say no. And though I did download X-Men I'm not about to go out and murder a cop...that isn't the "logical conclusion" of piracy, any more than stopping in a crosswalk logically concludes in bank robbery.

People don't have the "moral right" to stop in a crosswalk or pirate something but I don't get worked up over either.

My personal rule is I never download/copy/pirate anything in a way that leads to lost revenue. Works for me and it's pretty hard to argue with on any practical level.

I went to a website the other day and watched part of a movie that I don't own on DVD.  I was never going to buy said movie in the first place, because it looked terrible and such was in fact the case.  The legal owner of that movie has experienced absolutely zero impact by way of my actions.

When some industry type pompously asks me if I'd rob an old lady, or equates the above bit of movie-watching with reneging on a contract to pay for services rendered, all I hear is "I cannot admit that any form of piracy is harmless or else my face will melt to reveal the circuitry beneath, so I'm just gonna hope you're a fucking idiot who can't distinguish between things that hurt people and things that do not!  PLEASE TAKE NOTHING I SAY SERIOUSLY, I AM A FUCKING ROBOT!"

And speaking to Mr. Zepp as pertains to DRM:

Sony rootkits.
StarForce driver failures.
Dropped authentication servers.

If a company can release DRM that is not dangerous or inconvenient to a consumer, the consumer has no real reason to reject it.  However, as the above examples show, the actual DRM available on the market is far from such an ideal.  It's intrusive, poorly-coded, inconvenient, and a security threat.  There are older games that can't run on modern operating systems because their old DRM methods are incompatible.  And, years down the road, all of the software that relied on authentication servers will become unplayable.  It may be five, ten years from now, but why should I be unable to play the game I purchased because someone pulled the plug on the DRM servers?

I refuse to use any Steam-based games because I don't want the junkware sitting in my OS and gobbling my bandwidth.  Valve can go suck a goat, doubly so after they decided that they had every right to turn Counterstrike into an adware bonanza.  It's that attitude, that 'hey, we can change the rules whenever we like and you can't do a damn thing about it' that really sets my teeth on edge.  I would never dream of treating another person like that, and I'm not going to tolerate anyone who thinks they can do that to me.

I find the problem with this argument is that it becomes fairly easy to say you're not going to buy something when pirating it is so easy. With something with anal DRM it can be a pretty easy decision but how do you decide whether something fits into "Good enough to purchase", "good enough to enjoy", "good enough to enjoy if I'm not paying anything for it", "not good at all" or whatever categories exist in peoples' heads. Get deluded enough and people will just pirate everything and justify it as if they were not going to pay for it anyway. This is not supposed to be a critique of you, but merely something that (might) work for you doesn't necessarily apply to everyone else; the mechanisms used generally in our societies to determine whether something has worth is by voting with your wallet.

A relevent question in your case would be why download (and read?) something if you don't feel it is worth paying for. Or maybe you don't feel it's worth the full dollar amount?

I used to do that when I was younger and had little disposable income.

As you can see, as my disposable income has increased, so have my purchases, including both new releases but also many of the titles I once was never going to pay for. How do I decide which ones to buy? The ones that were worth playing any length of time in, of course!

To answer a specific question above, I downloaded X-Men because I knew the first few issues sucked, heard the rest sucked and was curious. And yes, they all sucked. I only read them for the sake of completeness and the hope they would get better, but I wasn't enjoying a second of it.

I do agree there are people who can justify pirating anything and everything. In college I knew a guy who had hundreds of gigs of pirated music that he regularly listened to. I would never do something like that, if I enjoy it at all I'll pay for it and even trying before I buy is the exception, not the rule. I'll generally only do that if I'm pretty sure I'm not going to like it.

I'd say that parts of this are a fallacy, just because the amount you take seems insiginificant does not mean that no harm is done. I'd agree that comparing piracy to mugging an old lady is a poor analogy; it's more akin to what would happen if say one million, or ten million people each stole one cent from your bank account. At the level of the individual, what they have take is trivial, however the net effect is significantly larger.

In a more general sense (not directed at you Margalis) I feel that the "I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so I pirated it" argument is a very poor one; it suggests a very selfish attitude.

In network security there is such a thing as making a system so secure that it either becomes worthless and unused, or more insecure than "inferior" methods because people start leaving little scraps of paper everywhere.  People start looking for methods to get what they want without the burden.

DRM is no different.  People either won't buy it, or they'll bypass it if it is annoying enough.  For some that will be cracking a legitimate copy, for others that will be pirating it.

Morality doesn't matter because a large enough swath of people aren't going to stop for what your opinion of right and wrong is.  They will, however, do what's necessary to play a fun game, and if a company makes the barrier to entry too high, that means piracy instead of sales.

How come no one's posted this yet?

(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080509.jpg)

I don't feel like companies are entitled to fuck me.  Like if I pirate something and enjoy it, sure, I'll buy it.  I like having a movie in a box on the shelf that I can take out and stick into any old DVD player.  But if I pirate something and it blows?  That money I didn't pay for the privilege of learning that it blows?  Yeah, fuck you, movie studio.  I beat you and your shitty product.

No, I missed it (530 am ftl).

Anyway, so people are freaking out about having to verify it after 4 (or however many) installs?  My response to it is just kinda a 'meh, /shrug.  Big deal.'

How about this...

Can we agree that it is in fact theft no matter what?
Can we also agree that if there was a better way to do it - less starforce type DRM, for example, something truly non-invasive - you'd be on board with DRM and other anti-piracy measures?

It verifies every install. After #3 they want you to ring up EA and ask them to let you install the software that you legitimately bought and own a copy of. "on a case-by-case basis". That's quite frankly, bullshit, and it's cost them a sale of each of those two games (plus Bioshock).

If they remove it, I'll buy them. If they don't remove it, I won't buy either, and so whether I decide to pirate them or not affects noone but myself.



We can agree that it's theft in terms of IP piracy. I'll outright admit that I'm willing to be that thief as well if I really, really want to play that/those game(s) without dealing with DRM of that level of suckitude. I have a personal distinction between piracy theft and tangible object theft, particularly in a situation where I am unwilling or unable to purchase the software because of a reason that satisfies my own self.

I'll do better than agree with you on the point of less invasive DRM. Scroll to the almost-bottom of page 4 of this thread and try to work out how many of those games I've bought legitimately have some form of DRM that's not fuck-you-in-the-arse-level DRM on them. I'm not some kiddy warez-collector-entitlement-whore-pirate, I'm the kind of guy who supports software development. And I'm the kind of guy being shit on by this type of DRM.

The problem I have with paying for instant downloads  are when I buy a game I want the box. Paying money for a file doesn't do anything for me and therefore I never do. On the flip side I have no problem paying for an Eve subscription and a Netflix subscription because they are services. I don't buy movies because I don't care about owning movies. I buy games because game boxes have a nostalgia value for me.

Hey didn't the automobile industry try and regulate its safety features, but it took Ralph Nader to bring in consumer advocates and get good things going?

Used book, used video games, used movies, used music, used cars, etc...except used PC games, and that it is horrible to return a PC game to a store after you open it, then the makers of the game want to fuck with my computer, then they wonder why people are tired of it.

I buy lots of video games, but it is getting stupid on the PC side, while I can buy, sell, or rent Xbox 360/PSIII/Wii and so on to my hears content. And oh yeah, I don't have to worry that if I buy a console game it won't screw up my console with its stuff it installs. And yes there is piracy on console, has been around for a long time (while stationed in the Phillipines, I could stroll down town A.C. and buy all kinds of pirated stuff), and isn't going away.

I want game developers to get what is due them, I want them to protect their investment, but they can not screw with my gear or tell me I can not make a back up of something.

This is me. I'm way too strapped for cash to be able to buy every game that I want to play, which isn't many as it is. When I do get the opportunity, I go out and buy the games I pirate. Most the time when I don't is in the case that the only possible way to obtain the game, because it's older, is to buy it pre-owned.

There's no way to legitimize pirating software and I'm well aware of what I'm doing when I do it. But, there's something about not having to leave my apartment to do it that makes any repercussions less influential in deterring me.

The problem with this rationale is that it does not matter. If I decide to grow a couple pot plants and smoke in the privacy of my home, it affects nobody but me. But it's still illegal and I still would have to deal with the consequences and I was caught breaking the law. Because software piracy is breaking the law. Everything else is rationalizing the reasons for breaking the law.

I thought we were trying to convince them to remove the DRM, by making a big issue about it and arguing heatedly for many pages.

Funnily enough making a big issue about it has already had more of an effect in this particular case than the millions of illegal downloads since the birth of P2P services.

I don't rationalize speeding. And there's no reason to rationalize piracy. Unless you're a big pussy that doesn't like things free and easy and needs to involve feelings and right and wrong into everything they do.

This coming from the guy who GUARANTEED spent more money on games than anyone here last year. And the year before. And the year before.

You don't need to rationalize this sort of shit. Stupid laws are stupid.

The fact Zepp thinks there's some kind of moral conflict with breaking that law is just mind blowing.

I understand wanting to stop a pirate that steals things and copies them and resells them. That makes sense. I have a huge, massive, stinking problem with that. But your casual torrenter? Fuck that.

On the note: DRM is the number one way to make me look at "alternative methods" to playing your game.

I absolutely DISLIKED Mass Effect on the 360 when I played it - yet I was still going to drop the $50 on the PC version. Sight unseen. Day 1. $50. Now? HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA NO. I'm sorry but EA is definitely still in their 1 step forward 2 steps back mode and it pisses me off that they just can't even get their shit together, even if Riccitello is 5 steps forward from previous execs. Too bad he's chipping away at that.

Ah, so we've achieved the opposite of what we were going for.

Also, on the topic of this specific EA thing. It seems they're trying to act like a sneaky little asshole kid.

EA: "Alright guys, we're selling candy, but we want you to give us 3 things before you buy the candy. Your soul, your asshole, and your first-born. We'll abuse all three."

Gamers: "Well gee guys, I don't know. The soul is a little too much."

EA: "Ok, we'll take away that soul bit, now bent over and sit your child in a chair over there."

Gamers: "Ok!"

Taking away the phone home all the time still doesn't correct the 3 installations. So, fuck them. Fuck them right hard.

People are going way too overboard on the whole morality thing.

As I said from my post earlier and as is reinforced by people bringing up P2P downloads; piracy and the black market provide a service that legit markets are failing to provide (I'm ignoring money completely here).

It is the nature of the markets that we live in that people will circumvent markets to receive the goods and services they want; its the way our system is supposed to work. If people are using the black market it is a natural indication that something is wrong with the legal markets. There will always be people who will pirate things for the wrong reasons but when you're talking about segments of the 'normal' population doing it, it is because they are trying to do what is right for them. Huge segments of our society (this varies depending on where you live obv.) are based on using our self interest to reach an optimal path. You can blame people for being immoral and 'stealing' property, but under the whims of a market economy the black market is a SIGN that legit markets are doing something wrong. The fact that games companies wonder why piracy is increasing when they are causing it is incredibly baffling, especially with the publishers. Well not really; they're just a bunch of greedy cunts.

Analogy with P2P services: The main one here is obviously music. I wish I had some data to back me up (or otherwise I look like a bit of a dumbass) but I'm guessing so far iTunes music store has been pretty succesful (wiki gives me a figure of 4 billion songs sold). P2P music provided a convenient and efficient way for people to get music. There were and still are lots of people who download music illegally ranging from kids who will probably never buy anything to people who  just want to listen to a whole album to see if its worth it. The fact is that now there are legitimate ways (though still tainted by DRM) of purchasing music online people *magically* do it. Turns out that perhaps every one of those bastards who was pirating music before might not have been that immoral.

I didn't make a moral judgement about it at all.

However, the very root of civil disobedience is that personal morality trumphs societal morality. Civil disobediance proper also reinforces the notion that societal morality (at least in the form of laws) are very important in of themselves, and should not be broken lightly -- which is quite true.

It's a decision not everyone has to make -- a large number of people are quite content to go through life with the the belief that "Morality" and "law" are identical, rather than law being a societal effort to enforce morality (and contracts. Can't forget contracts!).

Human history is full of people who placed their personal moral decisions above the law, even above society's consensus morality -- often with the intent of ultimately changing the law, but in the short-term at least because they felt obeying the law or staying silent in the face of poor moral choices by their society was immoral in of itself.

I'm not promoting anarchy -- civil disobediance, to me, seems to be a good guide as to how to uphold personal morality when it conflicts with society's morals or laws.

While I feel like he and I disagree widely on this issue, Zepp is absolutely right about one thing: there is a tremendous sense of entitlement going on here in regards to the pirating issue.  Veruca Salt wants her golden goose now, dammit!  Pirating software, as Snakecharmer said, is stealing.

I also like Morat's point about civil disobedience, but I'm not sure how apt it is in this case.  Sure, you disagree with a law or the EULA or whatnot, but does that give you the right to pirate software?  The actual financial damage of software piracy is muddied by propaganda on both sides to the point where so we can't know the actual effect, but let's assume that it DOES harm the software companies at least a little.  So you're doing some small, tiny, infinitesimal amount of damage to someone else by stealing from them.  The only question not is whether or not it's moral to attempt to hurt the evil, capitalist corporation (because we're NOT discussing Garage Games here, we're discussing EA) because they're evil and want to screw US over.  And fuck arguing morality, everyone is going to disagree anyway.

My own personal opinion is that the best way to hurt EA is to NOT PLAY THEIR GAMES AT ALL AND STOP DISCUSSING THEM WITH EITHER FROTH OR VENOM.  Generating more buzz for a product from a company that has repeatedly, publicly screwed over consumers, its employees and damn near everyone else it gets its hands on is the wrong approach.

Let's all go ride bikes or something until (certain) game companies decide that they want us to play PC games again.

So even though I have paid for the game, downloading a copy of it that is playable (so that I can, you know, play it) counts as piracy and I do not have the right to do that.  Correct?

In other words, paying for the game does not give me the right to play it.  And piracy in fact has nothing to do with money spent or money lost or money stolen, or the fact that I BOUGHT THE PRODUCT would make it impossible for me to "pirate" it.

The next time somebody tries to make an inane comparison between "piracy" and actual theft, I can point them at this post and say "nuh-uh."  Thank you for that.

Nuh-uh. (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=13138.msg448177#msg448177)

Jesus Samwise. I hope that was supposed to be green and the logical disconnects are deliberate. Otherwise you really aren't making any sense.

Oh shit, I just got served!

If I misunderstood you somewhere, I would welcome clarification.

(edit) It may help to provide context -- in all prior cases in which someone has explained to me why making unauthorized copies of bits is called "piracy" and is wrong, they say that it's because it deprives the copyright owner of money that is rightfully theirs, thereby removing incentive for them to produce more content.  This would be a valid argument if true, but you have provided a counter-example that demonstrates the association between "piracy" in this context and lost money to be invalid.  If you can show me how this example of "piracy" deprives the copyright owner of money that is rightfully theirs, it will remain a valid assertion, but I don't think you can.

Thing is people are trying to apply old fashioned logic to an area where it doesn't really apply. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon, but piracy isn't considered morally wrong by what I'd guess is the majority of the public. Sure its still legally wrong, but that doesn't really matter all that much. It's a fight that the industry can NEVER win using these kind of methods, it's simply impossible. You can't win against an entire generation. Go to your local social hub of choice and say that you just downloaded Madonnas latest album, Halo, Batman returns or whatever. I bet you even amongst the people who knows what downloaded means, no one will give a shit about the fact that you pirated it. If people would start to feel threatened by lawsuits people would simply move on from regular P2P to Darknet.

DRM will never work in the long run, heck it isn't even working all that great now, as verified by the massive out cry even among legit customers. And I can also guarantee you that there will be a cracked copy of Spore which will work. You will see crackers all over the working on that stuff when it's released for the mere challenge and prestige of cracking it.

The only way I see to win the battle is to provide more value for the ones who actually do pay. Online services and customer support comes to mind.

Shhhh.... Careful Sairon.  Not seeing this as a black and white moral issue is likely to lead to a revocation of your dev card.

Quick, downgrade his name to pink.


All the content industries need to start thinking about why this is. And why screaming about 'theft' isn't working out for them.

It doesn't really -- it was more a tangent.

I suppose the most applicable version would be: "Buy the game, play an illegal cracked copy" -- which isn't so much civil disobediance as it is, I dunno, protesting marijuana's illegality by lighting up only behind closed doors.

Still, that satisifies my ethical concerns -- I've paid the creators of the game, and I'm not putting up with their DRM shit -- but it doesn't really go anywhere towards unfucking DRM. Like I said, my personal thoughts on DRM is that a final solution will have to be something akin to Steam: Play anywhere, but only as many play sessions simultaneously as you own keys. Security will be done on their end, via connecting keys to unique accounts.

As long as you don't need broadband, and you don't have to hold a persistent connection to play, I don't see it being too painful a process -- and let's face it, it's the penetration of broadband and 'net access that is driving a lot of the problem from their end, so why not use that penetration to fix their problems AND make it easier for you to play?

The musicians have it worse off. iTune's "pay extra for DRM free" stuff is an interesting step, and I certainly like the ease with which independent groups (my brother has two albums on iTunes) can get onto iTunes without needing a label to push them. Of course, the RIAA has pitched a "How about we charge every internet user 5 dollars a month as part of his/her broadband fee that goes straight to us, and we stop protecting music with DRM entirely" whose audacity made me laugh. :)

I think the most...innovative...(if not the best) solution for this sort of intellectual piracy was actually massive government intervention, creating a music library akin to the Library of Congress. Anyone could download those songs free of charge, DRM-free. Broadband users WOULD have a dedicated tax, but the money would be paid out proportionally to song plays as determined by a rather massive Nielson-type system (all you'd really need is Apple's involvement right now). Since that would, effectively, reward the people whose music is most played and would eventually kill off the RIAA.

Frankly, I'm for anything that kills off the RIAA. :)

Right with ya, boss.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080422-drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys.html

This is the kind of inconvenience that I'm concerned about. What about when Joe Consumer finds out SuperGame won't install after a 3rd or 4th attempt? What if the DRM software fails and he can never install it? What if the tracking service is taken off-line and he loses access to content he paid for?

Yar, yar yar. It's like they're making a market for piracy.

Boy, this is SO the wrong place to post this but I don't feel like digging or searching.  If you pre-order ME (which I constantly call Massive Attack much to the puzzlement of the sales clerk) from GameStop, you get a tenner off the price. 

Carry on the bitch slapping!   :heart:

Maybe MS is busy investing in the Pirate Bay/the prison-industrial complex/both as we speak.

Dang, does that mean I have to take the official dev exams all over again?  :ye_gods:

But Steam is fucking awesome, right?

Well, in Steam's defence, it only requires online validation for online games. Offline stuff works just fine in Offline Mode.

 * Edit: no, i'm an idiot. Steam doesn't even require online validation for online games. I can play Counter-Strike just fine with my net switched off.

The only annoyance I had with Steam was that it required an on-line activation to start with. Having to set up an SSH tunnel just to activate HL2 was a pain in the ass, though if I'd had to do it every time I wanted to play I probably wouldn't have bothered. Is that no longer the case?

I have no idea. As best I understand the Steam mechanic, they do an authorize/deauthorize for each game. You can play it anywhere, but you have to explicitly deauthorize your copy at "home" if you want to play at a friend's house (to prevent multiple uses of a single license).

Frankly, it would work best if Steam ran as "requires internet access to play", but that'd fuck people left and right, so you sort of have a cumbersome system to allow you to mimic what is -- effectively -- simply free software that requires a license check.

Related tangent: Steam's EULA is ridiculous as well.  They basically say that they can turn off your games whenever they feel like it.

I'm not surprised. Otherwise they'd be forced to continue running their servers even if the company went bankrupt. I suspect that, realistically, if steam were going out of business you'd just be able to aquire license keys for your games from Steam as they started shutting everything down.

We just discussed this in our guild and concluded something like this, which made sense to most :

(http://i25.tinypic.com/246ukcj.jpg)

(Yes I'm bored so I made a flowchart)

That is extremely simplified, to put it more in a real situation: Piracy can be a good thing. Can, for the right reasons, while it benefits to some for the absolute wrong reasons. The game marked is really huge now and with the amount of games spewing out from all kinds of developers, there is going to be a lot of bad games out there. A few winners, many losers. Here is where piracy is good. Say there is a game you have anticipated for a long time, but a few weeks pre-launch you see all the reviewers slaughtering it, forums fuzzing about how bad it is. This will most likely cause the average gamer to NOT purchase this game, no matter what. He will try the demo, or he can alternatively download the pirated version if there aint no demo and use it as a sample. If everyone is right and that game is downright a crapfest, he will quit playing with 15-30 mins and just delete from his PC. Developer, publishers, investors didn't lose anything, consumer lost valuable time of his life he can never get back.

Now if this was a good game despise bad reviews, he could, should and probably would go and purchase it. Especially if it has some extras or online features. Developers, publishers, investors etc get money, player spends XX hours enjoying the game.

Lets view this objective and compare to the movie industry. Say you wanted to watch Step Up 2 Da Streets (sp?) at the movies. You enter the movies and watch 10 minutes of the movie and conclude that its crap. You leave the movie and go collect your refund (dunno if this is in the US, in Norway it is at least). You get your money back, you leave and thats it. Now this is what we are "simulating" or doing with pirated games. At least I am. I don't buy that many games, looking at my shelf over here its mostly MMOs, top titles on PC / each console (GTA4, Mass Effect, COD4, Bioshock, Mario Galaxy, Halo3, Ratchet & Clank etc) and its cause not all games are worth the investment. In Norway one game costs about 100-125$ and purchasing a bad game for that amount of money and playing it for 15-20 minutes and proceeding with an uninstall (Gloats at Hellgate London cover), and I'm really unsatisfied cause the game is downright bad and unplayable, have I not then wasted my money I can never get back on something totally ridicoulus and far from worth the investment ? Wouldn't it be better if I downloaded a pirated copy of the game and tried it before making up my mind ? For me, it would and thats what I do.

I know some might disagree, but to me it makes sense. Since you can't refund games, piracy will be my choice of benchmarking "unsafe ware".

EDIT: Of course this might be somewhat biased because the gamer / consumers are extremely varied. There are those who don't buy games no matter what, I'm not favoring them in any way whatsoever even if this benefits them, this is the bad side. I'm talking about those who download GTA4 and play on Live and wonder why their console is banned  :uhrr:

Online piracy is not the same as stealing because there is no object that is converted.  If McDonald's has a hamburger, and I take the hamburger, McDonald's no longer has the hamburger. 

If I shoplift a copy of a game or a CD from Best Buy, then Best Buy no longer has the physical object.

If I download a song off a computer, there is no physical object that belonged to anyone that I have taken from them. 

What you have is an exclusive commercial right to intellectual property, and that right is violated by copying without your permission.  The moral force of that right is debatable.

For example, it's reasonable to protect the ability of content creators to benefit from their work, in order to protect the incentive to create new things.  However the laws governing this are almost entirely drafted and vetted by industry lobbyists, to the point where there is no longer a public domain.

The only reason media companies have rights protecting their products against piracy, and consumers have no rights protecting them against invasive copy protection is that the media companies have expensive lobbyists and consumers don't.

Content owners have greedily used a compliant Congress to expand their rights to a point where a lot of people are no longer perceiving those rights as valid or reasonable.  As a result, people are more likely to violate IP rights than they would be to violate a right to someone's personal property.

But buying legislation and getting people to perceive your invasions as legitimate are different things entirely.  And when you piss off your consumers, they will come up with new ways not to give you money.

For example, as much as people mourn the demise of the local record shop, illegal downloading broke a deplorable and exploitative cartel in the music industry.

If you bought a CD in 1995, it cost you $15 to $18, despite the fact that the dollar was worth about 15 cents more in 1995, because only a small number of companies were selling music and they were engaged in price fixing. 

The elaborate networks like Napster and Morpheus, which listeners developed to avoid paying those prices, were a direct response to the fact that the content owners were a bunch of price gouging assholes.  This doesn't happen spontaneously; it's the result of widespread convictions among customers that they are being treated unfairly. 

Installing Napster and pulling down a CD one song at a time on a 56k modem in 1998 was time-consuming and inconvenient, but it was still better than ponying up an obscene amount of money to a price gouging oligopoly to listen to "Hit Me Baby One More Time."

Customers are only going to accept your limited monopoly rights to regulate duplication of your content if you respect their rights not to be fucked in the ass.  As far as I'm concerned illegal downloading is why consumers can now pay $9 to iTunes in 2008 dollars instead of $18 to Sam Goody in 1996 dollars for an album.

This copy protection stuff is the same kind of scenario.  Some people are going to pirate software.  If you take reasonable efforts to protect your stuff, then that's fair. People will enter a 20 digit authorization code or whatever.  But there is no excuse to backdoor everybody's computer, or make it difficult to reinstall if they have to wipe their hard drive or buy a new system, or to install malware in everybody's registry.  When you do this stuff, you reap what you sow, and the remedy is only going to come when these companies get burned for doing this stuff. 
 

   

Let's not gloss over this part as the discussion goes forward.

I'm just saying. Its all entertainment and its all business, what separates consumer value betweens music, movies and games is the type of entertainment and market as main factors, but ok.

Well, waiver of certain liabilities and disclaimer of certain warranties is necessary.  Otherwise, if WoW has an extended maintenence that runs two hours over, some douchebag class action lawyer might sue them for twenty cents restitution for each WoW player every Tuesday.  The incentive to do this is huge for the lawyers because they collect a third of the value of any remedy.  Basically, one of these guys could sue over a server crash, win one day of free game time for everyone affected, and run away with a big sack of money.
 
Gamers know that there will be downtime for maintenence. Gamers know that there will be occasional server crashes. Gamers know that you will have to download periodic patches to the game client. At the same time, it is obviously favorable to have very clear language indicating that you are not promising that these things won't happen, so you don't have to prove to a court that there is a reasonable understanding of between Blizzard and its customers as to how the game works.  The contract language is to protect them from unscrupulous lawyers who will sue over bullshit.

If someone really wanted to send this to the politics forum, someone might point out that existing copyright law in the US is unconstitutional. So fuck it, pirates are the true patriots!

Personally, I think companies using this sort of protection should just fuck right off.  I thought I'd get that in before it gets moved to politics and I won't see it anymore.  I don't know if Righ is going to buy, but I'd just wait until it becomes Abandoware.

It's funny how they market us stories of Robin Hood and pirates=awesome and then wonder why no one cares about their imaginary property.

"GENERAL WARNING: This game contains DRM software that can be harmful to your computer" on every box!

Great.  So I could lose access to a game I've paid for and they want to give me a nice rootkit to boot... or not boot... yay?

I think software developers need to work on the problem of making all software able to be freely distributed and copied while still allowing those developers to receive compensation. The only thing I can think if is that the developers make a game then allow it to be downloaded for free then some outside source gives them money for making the game and covers bandwidth costs. Hrm.

Services such as Gametap and Ad supported online games (such as the new battlefield)

*yikes, this got long.  Sorry.

You could eliminate so much of this thread by just converting pc games to online services and have done with it.  To play you have to sign in with your account and password to the company's servers, so install it 40 times if you want to, you can only play a single account at a time; no copy protection schemes needed. While it's a small stretch to transform existing single player games to this model, the gap is getting smaller all the time as most pc games either have some form of multiplayer and/or the ability to download patches from official servers, so the "requires online access" should not be a deterant anymore. 

The issue of a game company going out of business thus making your game non functional not only exists today, it always has, so I don't see the argument "but I won't be guaranteed to be able to play it a decade from now if the authentication servers are gone" to really be a reasonable argument against this.  Whether you're talking about old games no longer being supported by a still operating company, to not being able to run on current hardware/OS, there is no reasonable expectation that should be able to "buy once play forever", even with console games.  I have a ton of old games on 3.5" floppys for example; assuming i can get a modern OS to run the old stuff, you generally can't buy pc's with those drives anymore.  Just because i own the old Ultima games on floppies doesnt mean I am entitled to a newer version of that game for free.  If they released an "Ultima game pack" tuned for modern tech and I want to play them, I should buy it again.  To me, that's reasonable.  Eventually, standard cd drives and even dvd's will also become a thing of the past at which point most of the "but I own it!" logic falls apart.  Games, like any other technology driven product or service, will become outdated and non functional naturally over time.  Take your pick from Betamax movies, to 8 track tapes, laserdisc, etc, sure if you happen to still have an old machine capable of dealing with those items they might still work, but if they don't the company you bought your betamax movies from has no responsibility to let you exchange them for dvds, not does it make it reasonable that it's ok to grab a pirated version b/c you bought it once.  Hell, i have a ton of old movies on vhs tapes around the house and we dont even have a vhs player anymore.  If people are ok with the idea that you would have to rebuy that movie you "owned" already on a new format, why do they have such a hard time swallowing the idea of limited lifespans for games they buy?

That being said, the concept of failing to be reasonable definitely exists on both sides of this discussion.  In a perfect world, if I bought a game with appropriate copy protection that wouldnt work on my computer, despite the box requirements saying it would, i should be able to contact tech support of the company that made it, and them either resolve the situation directly or give me money back in a timely manner.  That generally doesnt happen, so yes, the companies that sell games are screwing the consumer by not being reasonable.  However, you don't justify bad behavior by pointing to others bad behavior.  If you had actually done the above reasonable steps and then grabbed a pirate version, I'm ok with that ethically and morally.  Legally I think it would make a great court case to try an hammer through to EA et all the problem of they way they operate, but really, how many people actually DO the above, and i seriously doubt we going to see a single person bring legal action against a software company over a $50 game they can't get to work and can't get a refund on.  Ideally they SHOULD, but realistically they wont and the companies know this.

What I typically see if people jumping straight to the end of the chain, i.e. grabbing a pirate copy, and justifying their behavior by talking about the above, or some other rationale that makes them feel OK about it.  And I'm not talking about warez kiddies that pirate everything because they don't see it as wrong, I'm talking about the people we have hear on this board who do spend money on games.  The problem with that is if you never inform the company making the game that there's a problem with the way they do copy protection, let alone that they are losing a sale because of it, why would they change their behavior?  Companies make decisions based on available information and if you can't measure it, it doesn't make an impact.  So how are companies going to measure lose sales due to copy protection in this industry?  Where's the feedback mechanism?  Voting with your wallet ISNT ENOUGH because it doesn't give the WHY.  Did the game sell poorly because it sucked, was overpriced, or because it had DRM?  If I'm the non-gamer empty suit making these idiotic CP decisions, how am I supposed to know when my vision doesn't match reality (gee this sounds like the design discussions in the EQ thread doesn't it? :)  )

Only way i know of to try and enable change is by giving better information.  If customers let them know about it directly, via emailing several contacts at the company, posting on official sites, emaiing retail partners etc, at least there's a chance some worthwhile information will make it back upstream to decision makers.  If all we do is pirate and never say a word other than to ourselves, why would we expect positive change?

/derail to pop psych
The side issue to this whole discussion, which is what S.Zep was mainly going on about, was a mentality that exists in our society that doesn't respect concept of property ownership, copyright, or IP.  i.e. the warez kids.  As a parent of a soon to be teen and being married to an 8 grade teacher, i see/hear about this constantly.   Humans on the whole are generally lazy and selfish, no shock there.  Pirating is ridiculously easy, hard to get caught doing, and almost cost free so in the absence of morality or ethics to the contrary why wouldn't someone do it?  99% or more of the time they will not get in trouble for it.  "I can get Free movies, music, games, e-books, research papers, etc  sign me up!"  The teenagers I see/hear about daily truly do not understand that just because you can do something doesn't mean it's ok, and the worst part is no one even stops to think things through.  Effortless = thoughless and we have huge swaths of people who just don't think, and when something happens that they DO get in trouble for, they are totally shocked because they have no idea what they are doing might be wrong.  "What do you mean I failed my huge term paper because I copied it directly from the internet?  You said I could use the internet for reseach!"  The internet is a tool, and like many tools it can be put to good, bad or neutral uses.  Many people can't seem to tell the difference and that is the scary part.

God the whole above post makes me sound old.

 

The majority of games I play are single player games which wouldn't even realize if their creator goes belly-up.

The gaming industry just needs to get a real lobby in congress and get funds sent to the FBI to do some real investigation once telcos get immunity. Then take every freeloading jackoff who thinks they are entitled to the sweat of any man's brow and show them how good ol' capitalism works in america. This will add to the prison population and stimulate local economies.

I'll also want government regulation then.  Get rid of those "our product is not our responsibility" EULA's, and if your piece of shit DRM screws up my computer, YOU fix it.  Make them put a warning on every box that the software contains potentially harmful DRM, and provide tech support for it.

I'm not against online validation or software activation codes, but I AM against rootkits and piece-of-shit DRM that does not remove itself when I uninstall the game.

As far as this thread, like I said, I've drawn my conclusions too.  I won't buy (which means I will not play) Mass Effect, Bioshock, or Spore, unless you sell DRM-protection-free versions.  And EA seems the same as always, despite the recent hype about things changing and that new CEO of theirs.

You really don't. IMO, the software industry as a whole needs to wake up and revisit how it abuses the EULA. A self-regulating industry body would be better for everyone involved -- government is too slow to react to changes in standards, etc.

Old OSes can be emulated.  Old hardware can be found, be it Betamax, 8 tracks or old PC games.  Yes, you have to put in a little more work to play the media, but thee's nothing actively denying you from doing so. That is the problem with 'online only' schemes.  

That said, Yes, you're right.  Everything is moving to a subscription service.  EVERYTHING.  You, your company and the government will not own your software, and will be paying a montly/ quarterly/ annual sub fee within the next 5- 10 years.  Not only to stop piracy, but so that the companies have another steady revenue stream. The early work is alread being done with business level programs.

 How many programs are released on an annual basis with more features, upgrades, & bug fixes and offer a 'preferred user' service where you pay an annual fee to get the new version?  (The fee is less, but not always significantly less than repurchasing the software.)   Then within 2-3 years support for the version you are using is dropped and you discover you've GOT to upgrade because of bugs or new hardware incompatability.   I know AutoCAD is like this, as are all AutoDesk products.  I'm farily certain Office has a similar deal.

Soon you'll just see large software companies stop offering sales period. You rent the software from them, and they provide you access as a service.  PC games won't be far behind as they realize that Steam/ Stardock -like applications are much more consumer-relations friendly and don't generate the bad press of DRM while accomplishing the same thing. In 2-3 generations when bandwith and storage are even less of an issue, Consoles will likely do the same.

   The backlash you're seeing is rage against the idea of never owning anything.  Our kids won't have such an issue with it, though.  They'll just happily fork-over the dough monthly like we do for cable, because they simply can't imagine life without it.  :awesome_for_real:

People updated movies from VHS to DVD because DVD is a way better format, both in quality and durability. You'll see less of an immediate upgrade to Bluray, because it's better quality, but most movies don't really benefit from being higher resolution. I have the Blues Brothers on DVD, I don't need an HD version of Elwood hopping around playing harp.

Just because you (X's T) don't play old games doesn't mean other don't. I bought Ultima 7.5 a looong time ago, and I still have the pc to play it on. I have Exult, too, but I prefer playing it on the 486. My game, my decision. Lately the game I've been playing is Simgolf, six years old now. Now, Maxis is still around, so technically I could still activate it, but what about Thief 2? Activation sucks balls, DRM sucks balls. Fortunately most games being produced these days are so crappy (Bioshock) I don't really see myself going back in five years to play them.

But I will go back and play some Freedom Force, even though I have to go through the hassle of removing Starforce later on. Because it's a good game and I buy good games even if they're a pain in the ass and I don't agree with a few things (though I did boycott BF2142 for ads, so I'm being somewhat hypocritical). I won't hesitate to get Mass Effect and Spore, though I certainly hope they rethink the DRM strategy that ultimately won't do anything but piss off honest customers.

Bleh. Hopefully I'll be too old and decrepit to care anymore when that happens.

Actually, it should. You bought a license to play the game. The media it's stored on is irrelevant. If the new version was updated or is different than the old version (in the case of music CDs and movie DVDs) then yes a new license is required.

Why? If nothing else, look at what Google is trying to do with Google Docs and Google bookmarks -- what the PC industry as a whole as been trying to do for a decade+ now. 

Store all the software, critical data, and useful information on remote servers and stream them straight to wherever we're sitting. Let professionals -- with the resources of professionals -- handle storing, backing up, patching, and keeping up to date our software. Only keep locally what we choose.

Bandwitdh isn't there yet for it, but it's getting closer.

Just for myself -- I use Steam and Mozy for preciesly that convienence.

If i buy a new computer that cant play my old games then i am the reason i can't play them, i have in the past kept around old computers for the single purpose of playing old games.  Its quite clearly not the same thing as the company shutting down and closing access to games you could still play.  I'm sorry for devs who take this personally, im sure i would too, but i simply can't see anything wrong with fucking over a company thats trying to fuck over its customers.  Comparing it to robbing old ladies only makes me more likely to convince me you aren't worth lisening too.

Thing is, if you don't like the practices of the company, it's perfectly fine to protest by not buying their game and let them know why.  If it doesn't bother you enough to not play, they buy it.  Pirating doesn't make you the better person. 

- UNLESS -

You are pirating to prove your point then you still have to let them know or it's just a justification to yourself. 

- OR -

You are an anarchist and don't recognise intellectual property.  This is the best reason. 

Maybe it's just me then, but I hate relying on other people. Other people (Never me...  :drill:) are utter fuckups.
Hell, I have most of my shows and movies on DVD and did without cable/network TV for over a year.

Trusting someone else with my games? Keeping them patched up and running correctly on my system? Fuck that.

I never said it made me a better person or it was perfectly ok, all i said on my first post was that i wouldn't feel guilty about it.  Meaning under normal circumstances i would, because its wrong, but since they are assholes i don't feel bad about screwing them.  I'm not running for Pope, im not evil looking enough.

Except they aren't trying to fuck over their customers. An average user installs a game once, maybe twice, and then never touches it again. If it's a game they really like they usually just keep it installed for a long time.

This is going to fuck over resellers more than users. I don't know if that's a hidden intention or not but if I was EB games and similar people I'd be pissed.

I'm already on my third bioshock install.  I certainly feel fucked over because i am not playing it and i can't delete in case i ever want to play again.

Well, as long as you don't feel bad, that's all right, then! 

Still, it would be better if you were an anarchist or the pope.

Our generation wasn't raised with the idea that stealing software is wrong. Our parents generation gave us hell about things they deemed wrong, and looked blankly at us about that computer stuff. In early computers hardware was expensive and software was an afterthought, not a business model. Ask IBM what they thought about software for their MS-DOS computers. Ask Microsoft (inofficially) about their strategy in the earlier days to finding in sort of ok for private users to copy their product so that these people can demand the same software at work from their bosses. As kids we traded disks with games like pictures out of bubble gum wrappers. Hell, my first illegal copies I got from a prison guard who was friends with my father. I just started buying games when I got my own money because I had money to spend and I wanted to show my appreciation for people making games I like and bringing them to make new ones I would like. Guilt? Not a factor.

There is much education to be done about the wrongness of software piracy. Inconveniencing and punishing people that actually buy that stuff - not the way to go.

Xilren nailed it and put down the concepts I've been trying to put into words for the past few days. I accept that on the scale of an individual user there are circumstances where the content creator does not lose anything from an illegal download. However by doing so - even if you have bought a copy of the game and aren't trying to get something for free - you're still adding to the problem as percieved by the publisher. The download 'market' is pretty closely monitored for size and trends, publishers and industry bodies know to a reasonably accurate degree what is being downloaded and to waht degree. What they don't know, because it's impossible for anyone external to the downloader to know, is why you are doing it. Whether you're doing it to circumvent the DRM on your legal copy, because you feel entitled to free games, because the manager at your local Gamestop is a dick, because the option is there and you are weak or because you feel that you should have the option to test drive the game before deciding to pay for it. All of those different motivations just go into the big pile of 'illegal downloads'. From the publisher's POV the venn diagram is two discrete circles that don't overlap, one is labelled 'customers' the other is labelled 'bad guys'. In reality there is some bleed between the two but it's impossible to see unless publishers can persuade The Pirate Bay to put a survey popup on their torrents....

Someone mentioned iTunes as an example of illegal downloading forcing the hands of publishers for a good result. I think that's partly true but also it's a very rose-tinted view of the situation. People stealing music over the internet weren't valiant warriors in the pursuit of freedom, for the most part they just wanted free music. I'd argue that a lot of iTunes success wasn't due to giving illegal downloaders the legitimate market option they'd been fighting for all along but in giving a convenient and safe option to music fans who wouldn't have thought of downloading music in the first place. It turned customers of traditional channels into downloaders (legitimate ones) rather than suddenly emancipating an oppressed underclass of music pirate who'd been begging for the option to pay 99c a song instead of having to get it for free.

Are you suggesting they might be incorrect in their assessment?  Remember, these are businessmen and people with actual business degrees (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=12762.msg447258#msg447258) we're talking about.  Surely they know better than us.

Not really. I'm having a really very hard time seeing how (or why, given the ease of piracy) it is the customer's responsibility to provide market research to a company. Margalis mentioned it earlier in the thread; a company does not have the right to stay in business. Want to know why you are losing sales? Go out and research it, instead of shunting the onus onto the customers (and then automagically somehow blaming it on the pirates). I've never had anything to do with business in my education, and even so i can tell you that for the most part, customers will go for what they percieve to be the easiest to access and holds the greatest number of benefits.

It's a number between none of them and some of them. Care to put a more definite value to it without pulling numbers out of your ass? As I said I'm fairly sure it's not even possible. It's not very surprising that no publisher is coming out to say 'illegally downloading our stuff is ok sometimes'. Even the guys from Stardock didn't say that.

Megrim, it isn't your responsibility to tell companies what you want but if you want it badly enough then you absolutely should. Besides most companies know what customers want, the margin lies in giving people what they'll accept, if you won't accept it, say why, otherwise you're invisible to that process.

Of course not, but there are many folks who are quite happy to, with the number usually being 100%.  Which means they're either stupid or lying, and this damages the credibility of anything else they say.

Not that it matters, because we've already established that money isn't the real issue here, which means that the whole "sales lost" issue is just a smokescreen for some other agenda.

I would just like to add to this conversation that I have and am downloading many games I am too lazy to go and buy, in fact it's pretty rare I actually purchase a game.

You are correct in that it is not your responsibility.  But, i was also assuming that you actually would prefer game companies both a) stay in business making the kind of games you want, and b) remove the idiot copy protection schemes you don't.  If you dont buy the product/service and give no information to anyone that could do something useful with it, as far as market research is concerned, you don't exist.  How exactly does that help improve the situation?  No, you don't have to make any effort to change this, you can just totally rely on the same empty suits that are in charge today to make it better.  God knows they're doing a bang up job now.  You want a better product or service, how about asking for it?

C'mon, it's just not that hard to drop a quick 3 sentence email to 3 people who might can do something constructive with it.

No it isn't. If i want something badly enough, i will go out and take it from the nearest accessible source (i'm using 'i' and 'you' here as substitutes for 'consumers' and 'game makers' respectively). To elaborate in answering your second and third points;

It would appear, just from the discussion we are having on this board, that game-making companies do not in fact know what customers want. That is probably too harsh a statement, but i think it needed to be said. What i really mean by this however, is as follows. Consumers will go out and take what they desire from the field of options available to them. This includes pirating games. It would appear (once more, just from the discussion here on f13) that game makers do not want to acknowledge this reality, let alone take reasonable (bolded because i do not think DRM is reasonable) steps to minimise or disperse the damage that piracy can do to their business practices. Once more to reiterate - there can be no expectation that i will provide any feedback to the product i aquire. Yes, some consumers will provide some feedback some of the time, but i do not think that basing the entirety of an argument on the premise which states; "game makers expect to recieve good feedback from their customers in order to make good games -> if the games are poor it it therefore the fault of bad customer feedback" - is fallacious (by 'games' i mean the entirety of the packaged product, services and support included).

As far as acceptability is concerned, there is something to be said here as well; we are no longer in a time when games are a 'niche' market. Sure, most people here on f13 are happy to support small-scale and indy developers. We give them money, we might spread the word. Those companies might even be lucky enough to develop a fanbase strong enough to support them on a sustainable scale. However, as far as the mass market is concerned - there is a plethora of options available to the average consumer. No-one is going to shed a tear if a company which produces generic fps #1 goes under. No-one is going to bother with actually devoting themselves to giving good feedback to the company which makes the game. Why? Because they will simply move onto generic fps #2 and #3 and #4. There is no shortage of substitutes, and people will, quite parasitically, move on. As such, expecting what effectively amounts to charity in getting good feedback and then by extension arguing that companies are unable to provide good service because of the consumer's lack of participation, is in my opinion, incorrect.

 * Edit: i _think_ this post address both Xilren's and IainC's replies.

I dont think anyone is arguing that b/c consumers dont give free feedback game companies can't figure out how to provide good service (at least im not).  I'm simply suggesting if you want to help try to accelerate the process of market change, providing useful feedback is an easy step you can do.  People here are generally willing to go the extra mile for an indy game shop in the name of supporting better gaming, but cant be bothered for a AAA title?  I'm just curious as to why.

Besides, i think this very thread demonstrates the opposite of "people will simply move on to generic fps #2, or #3" because that's not what's happening.  People are talking about individual games like Spore and Bioshock and are stating they will pirate the game in the face of copy protection just to get that specific one.  If people really did just say "hmm, Bioshock has DRM, no thanks" and moved on to purchase another game we wouldnt be having this discussion at all.

Oh absolutely. We should give feedback, and i agree that it makes for better games, but that's not what is generally going to happen though. And, wasn't there someone earlier in the thread saying that they won't be pirating OR playing Bioshock because of the DRM?

I SAID THAT.  I will do that.

People don't care about "supporting better gaming."   We'll buy from what's out there, not our job to "better" the gaming industry.  That's your job (red names).  We'll also hand a $20 bill to a stranger we don't know and don't really care much about, for the cause of "reducing poverty" and to feel good about ourselves, but once we know you and it looks like you want to fuck us over, well, screw helping.

Anyway, yeah, it sucks that the majority of the replies on this site are "we'll pirate shit".  Speaks volumes.  I won't pirate, I will simply not buy, like I said.  I'll tell my friends and that's about all I'll do.  What I got from this thread is "Mass Effect, Bioshock, Spore have rootkits; don't buy, spread the word."  Good luck with your respective companies, whatever.

I'll be sure to think about this and cry when I have to download The Witcher to play it again since my DVD was shipped to me broken with no way to return it.  I'm such an asshole for wanting to play the game I purchased without having to pay extra for an additional DVD.

No, but depending on the circumstances you might be an idiot for buy a game from a place that you can't return it to even though it was broken.

Get yourself an Australian copy  -no adware.

Sorry I don't want to spend my own money to send the game back, deal with the hassle of arguing with the company to send me a new copy of the game (you do realize that many companies don't make it easy to return or exchanged pc games due to cd-keys right?), and then have to wait to use the product I originally paid for.  Especially when I can go online and in a few hours use the product I paid for.

But you're right, I'm an idiot for ordering stuff from reputable companies on this outdated piece of technology known as the internet.


On another DRM related note, does anyone know what kind of DRM is tied to games purchased through Direct2Drive?

Yep, I'll reply in more depth to Xil's Twins' post later, when I get home from work, but Krakrok has an excellent point. We're either buying the physical game, with media, right of first sale, and the right to do whateverthefuck we want with it. OR we're buying a licence to use that software, and owning or retaining the physical media should not matter.

A floppy drive costs like $10, and anyone with half a brain can ask that their new PC have one. "Generally can't" implies that they're generally unavailable, which is bullshit.

back to work. more later.

Cliff notes version of the thread so far -

When you sell computer games there are three groups of people:

1) People who buy your games
2) People who pirate your games
3) People who have nothing to do with your games

When you put restrictive DRM on your games more people move from group #1 to groups #2 and #3



P. S. There was also a bunch of arguing about morals, rights, and ethics but it was all irrelevant because it doesn't alter the truth of the statements above.

Oh yeah speaking of the Witcher, I'm going to add this to the discussion.

Another reason why DRM sucks and screws over legitimate customers.  One of my friends bought the Witcher (the real DVD from a real store).  Guess what.  The DRM made the game completely unusable and would not run because of some compatability between his cd-rom and the crappy DRM that came with the game.  So while pirates were downloading the game and enjoying it, he couldn't play the game for 3+ weeks until the (well known I might add) DRM company came out with a patch to make it work.

This wasn't an isolated issue either.  Many, many people were yelling on the forums because they couldn't play the game they legitimately bought.  Quite a few people laughed on the forums about how they returned their copy to the stores and just downloaded the pirated version and viola, they could play the game.

Between the complicated cd verification processes and software incompatabilies that are built into DRM, it's not just an issue of "well my software could be shut down if hte company goes under" but an issue of there is no way QA will find every incompatability (whether designed in (i.e. not working when daemon tools is installed) or not) and thus legitimate customers will get screwed over. 

Blizzard said way back when during Diablo/Diablo2 that they know piracy helps them out. Game companies need to be less incestuous and hire more internet people. Game marketing is a joke. The flash gamers are eating your lunch.

Because if it's not the answers they want to hear, it's going to get roundfiled.

People don't want feedback, they want their pet theories validated.

Let's play the imagination game and think about what kind of copy protection Starcraft 2 is going to have.

I bet there's a CD Key to validate the install and make a battle.net account... and that's it. No Starforce, no SecurROM, nothing that has a chance of dinking with hardware compatibility, or lurk in your Windows registry mucking around.

I bet there's not going to be internet validation or limited installs. You'll be able to install and play Starcraft 2 with your internet "turned off" just fine.

And I bet Starcraft 2 is going to be a goddamn smash hit and sell a bajillion copies.

So why is Starforce and SecuROM necessary again?

Where can I find such people?  Every e-mail address I know is either connected to someone who can't do anything about it or won't read what I write.

A quickie before I get more involved later...

I don't know whether it is actually fair to say you ever purchase a game; most games (if practically not all, at least PC ones) required you to go through a EULA to play them. I'm pretty sure all EULAs states that you are merely licensing a game. So you may think you are buying the game but you aren't really  :awesome_for_real:.

As has been mentioned once or twice, most EULAs aren't worth the paper they're not printed on, and local, national and state laws override them.

My console games don't have an EULA I click on to continue, and a lot of my older PC games don't feature them either.

I know, I know, it was more a point about how games companies treat their customers.

At some point the legal ass covering needs to end and its ridiculous how far companies will push the boundaries.

The first time I ever "pirated" a game was for Sims 2 University.  I bought it in the store, and the CD was defective.  It wouldn't install.  Returned it for another copy of the same game (after a LONG painful discussion with the manager).  Second copy was also defective.  I said "fuck it" and downloaded the damn thing.

I don't remember exactly what game it was the next time that started the ball rolling.  I wanted a game.  I couldn't find it here in Korea.  I tried to buy it online.  The publishers wouldn't ship here.  I couldn't download here, because of my Asian IP.

So I said "Fuck it, I tried to give you assholes my money and you wouldn't take it".  And I got the game for free instead.

Try making the legal method as convenient as the illegal one.  Then you get my money.

God damn kids and your sense of entitlement to buy products and use them.  It's a small step from here to killing and raping your schoolteacher.

EW!  Almost all of my teachers were women!  Vaginas are disgusting  :grin:

Can't I rape and kill (order is important here) some of my classmates in the locker room instead?

By and large nowdays, your are buying a limited license to use that software, and we're not just talking games here but commercial software and OS's as well.  Your absolutely correct in that physically having the media doesn't matter (if you buy via download you never even have physical media and can redownload the game more than once anyway), but there seems to be confusion that because i have a box with a cd in hand, my feelings of ownership change.

The reason I brought up the floppy drive isn't because you can't physically get one today (b/c yes, you can with a little effort).  It was simply to try an illustrate the natural progression of technology that will render games unplayable over time.  I still have Apple IIe games on 5.25" floppys; if i don't happen to have a machine that can still run them (which actually i do; like many gamers I'm a packrat about games/systems), and someone hasn't posted that game on an abandonware site and there's not a emulator available, I'm not going to be able to play that game again for free despite me "owning" media that has it, and the company that made it still being in business.  If people can accept that, why is some set number of lifetime installs for a given product setting people's teeth on edge?  Or, more importantly, authentication servers eventually going offline? 

As I said, i think the result of all this is all software will become a service and not a product so the copy protection parts will start going away, but the limited lifespan of the service is here to stay.  Doesn't matter if it's MS sunsetting an old OS, Earth and Beyond shutting down their mmorpg servers, or company X turning off their SP game's authentication servers, it's all the same concept.  When you get a game, you will be paying for access to a service and thus things like idiot DRM and broken dvd's in the mail stop mattering and most piracy issues evaporate (until some cracker hacks the authentication server of course  :-) )

In terms of business not wanted feedback, while i don't doubt that's true for some, speaking from the commercial software side i know we use feedback heavily from current, former and prospective customers.  Sure, we do our own research too, but we get good ideas and suggestions from customers all the time and we'd be idiots to ignore it.  Assuming game companies still want to make money and run as businesses, they'd be crazy to ignore as well.  Course, i think most of the business types running gaming companies don't truly understand their market at all.  There will continue to be market evolution as companies who "get" these kinds of issues do better than the ones that don't, it's just a slow process.

 

Ever get the feeling folks just plain aren't reading what you type?  Me either.

Did you just type something about jiggly tits?

And let's not forget how MS Office became as popular and ubiquitous as it has. It was funny when they tried to restrict it though.

This thread's meandered all over the place. I agree we're renting limited services for all the reasons most recently summarized by Xil. But for the most part, consumers don't like how that feels for games. They seem to gladly accept renting vs owning for movies, but not so much for electronics, books and music. Has to do with consumption vs the equity of owning something you might want to interact with repeatedly.

People here also need to realize how this applies to console games. You don't need a EULA there because a) you're not going to play that game on anything but that console; and, b) the process of copying discs is so laborious as to not matter: and unlike with PCs, that is not going to change anytime soon because it's the console makers that control who own the necessary hardware to make such copies. People gladly accept just how limited an experience they have on consoles and yet cry when someone puts an extra icon in their task bar. This is a much more important double standard than some of the silly hyperbole analogies cited.

But I said that on page 4 too, and expect it to be just as ignored here again  :grin:

Not the same people.

I'm sure it's still out there with Netflix and all that groovy jazz, but man, I haven't rented anything in like a decade I think. At 10 bucks a pop for discount movies, and 15-19 bucks for newer ones, it's easier to just buy it. That way I don't have to remember to return the damn thing.

I don't pay $50-$70 to rent movies.  The proposal is that I do so for games.  THAT is what consumers don't like, not how it "feels" to rent vs own.

Speaking for myself, I brought up Bioshock earlier in this thread primarily because of the limited-install bullshit DRM they applied to the game. Which is the reason I never did get around to buying it, though I have purchased a number of other FPSs.

It's supposed to be a decent game though, so yeah, I would like to buy it. I tend to buy all of the best/most decent games in genres I like. Eventually.

Starforce though = no buy no way.


Oh, give me the correct email address to post an email to EA regarding Spore and ME, and I will give them feedback. I'm not fucking spending hours combing through their websites for the right email address, though.

That's because your examples are shit. Utter, dire, non-sense-making horseshit.
In fairness, I don't recall any post of yours on page 4 being this retarded though, and I can't be fucked going and looking for it.

I'm not sure what you're even trying to say here. I "rent" movies from the video library, and take them back the enxt night or whatever. When I go to a department store and buy a game and a movie DVD and a music CD, I'm not "renting" the movie or the music disc for a limited number of interactions with a limited number of playback devices. I'm buying that fucker.

When I go to the video library and also rent a console or PC game, along with my rented movie, that's renting.

When I buy a console game, yeah I am indeed going to be able to play that game on "anything but that console". I have 2 seperate PS2s. I have 2 seperate Xboxes. And a 360. I can play an Xbox game on all three, and then loan it to a friend before selling it. I can do the exact same thing with the copy of Crysis (with PCs instead of XBoxes), even though it features an EULA.
What the fuck are you talking about?

Oh, as for the difficulty in pirating games, the 360 can be soft-modded in software or switchable. Not sure about how they get the software, but with a HDD involved I'm sure it's about as difficult as on the regular XBox. (XBMC + Network or XBMC + Rip directly), PS2 is laughably easy once chipped. Easier in fact than burning a PC game. I know 10 year old special school kids who go to who can copy their own PS2 software. So, um. Not difficult.

The last point, regarding the taskbar is a strawman. Fail.

I'm not sure the price difference matters that much personally. People buy casual games for $19.99, but not all of the aggregators provide a total unlock. Suppose the DRM check fails because the system goes down?

I think this all still comes down to perception. You'd like to think you're buying something. Why shouldn't you? It's a packaged good that doesn't technically need a call-home DRM check.

Meanwhile, they'd like to think you're renting a service from them. So that they can constantly ping you and send MIB if you do something wrong.

That disconnect between business need and consumer perception is what I think is at the heart of the problem.

You say business need like it is a given. Thats a shift in the power structure between buyer and seller. A shift that has to be accepted to take hold. So "fuck them" and "they can stick those games where the sun doesn't shine" IS a viable option. And we as customers deserve everything we get (or don't get anymore) if we accept rights the companies already gave us in the past taken away without recompensation.

Or simply put. If you are ready to pay the same money for less, you are a fucking moron and deserve it.

So is this thread 8 pages because none of you knew what a BBS was in 1988, when it wasn't a 20 year old argument?

I ran a pirated Worldgroup MBBS with MajorMud and Telearena back in the early 90s and got my parents to pony up for some incoming phone lines and some modems in my spare box so my friends and I could play the games to death.

It was pretty great.

Well, the business need is a given. But to Margalis' and others points, the business need may need be redesigning. They're certainly treating the customers in such a way as to make that a foregone conclusion...

Unfortunately, this won't be a clean transition because nobody's got the magic bullet and nobody else is willing to say to upper management that a $50mil investment isn't worth protecting (in that special land of speech-by-bulletpoint).

Except when people actually do what they preach and don't buy games with those ridiculous installation limits. Because then they are not protecting that 50 million dollar investment, they are hurting it.

Businesses do what they can get away with. The bending over and taking it with a smile on your face is what irritates me in this thread.

Oh hai guys lets all wave our nerd BBS e-peens around!  :uhrr:

I had an 8 line TriBBS with a Doom server that did IPX tunneling.

I was 14 20 years ago. Gimme a break, all my parents allowed me was Fidonet.

I was like 8 or 10 years old when I did mine.

WERE YOU 8-10 WHEN YOU RAN THAT, MR. EPEEN?

This thread got boring 4 pages back.

20 year old argument, man.

All things considered, I'd rather wave my dick around in public.

Repeating it doesn't make it more true.

I still can play my games from 20 years ago with the hardware from those times (or suitable emulation). So how is this the same argument?

Because the stances have not changed; only the complexity of technology and availability of reproduction and distribution methods.  Seriously, not a single word in the last 8 pages has expressed a new sentiment on either side.  You're repeating near verbatim arguments from Usenet in the late 80s.  The invention of subscription models, digital authorization, and digital content delivery have done absolutely nothing to reframe the argument on one side that entertainment is a commercial product or on the other side that people will damn well entertain themselves with only convenience and cost modifying their behavior.

Playing on old hardware and emulation are not the same thing at all.  In 20 years, if the auth servers still exist, you can still play.  If 20 year old hardware didn't exist right now, you wouldn't be able to play.  Emulation is reproduction of proprietary products.  It ain't stealing, but it's just as much pirating as copying the game.  Not to mention that a whole bunch of abandoware and ROMs and such also have been cracked so they can be distributed in addition to the OS/Hardware being cracked for it to run.

Pirates tend to grow older, gain increasing disposable income, and redefine what convenience means.  This leads to their pirate-to-purchase ratio going down, generally.  Entertainment companies tend to grow bigger, develop more complex/powerful technologies, and redefine what a profitable project is.  This leads to their content delivery systems changing (MMOs, consoles, etc) and their interest in revenue protection increasing.  Neither side's behavior is significantly affected by the arguments of the other side, regardless of what a few rhetorical Don Quixotes claim.

And now I've contributed another few paragraphs to the one of the Great Internet Debates (along with Mac vs. PC and WWII).  Pissing in the wind.

It doesn't matter if I can buy 20 year old hardware right now, because I did 20 years ago (ok, my parents did but whatever), I can get it out of the attic and play away. The only thing hindering me from playing really old PC games on a current computer is the fact that I didn't bother to put a 5 1/4" drive into it. Plus the idea that emulation is pirating is ridiculous. Reverse engineering is not illegal, and programming a free Dos clone like dosbox is perfectly valid. I'm talking about one thing, you about a completely different one.

The fact that you don't even want to talk about it but feel the need to do so between your whines that you shouldn't is just icing on the cake.

Oh and yes, the online validation every 10 days (thread title, lest we forgot) is gone. So no side is influenced by the other my ass...

I disagree. Ideas spread virally. You have no idea how many people may have been affected by the ideas expressed in this thread.

One was  :awesome_for_real:

There, I fixed the thread title.

Yea, but at least we get frequent flyer miles for that.

Can we den this shit fest already?

(http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a279/darth-enigmus/thread-fail-stamp.gif)

(http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m20/r3dknight/b4that.jpg)

So deleted before anyone sees it!

What the fuck do you care? Skip this thread if it hurts your poor, delicate eyeballs.

Back in the old days, pages 1-4, we wouldn't have let this happen.

your post needs more context, old timer.

WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia,
Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God,
have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the
Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the
Constitution hereby established:
And whereas it is expedient to provide for the admission into the
Commonwealth of other Australasian Colonies and possessions of the Queen:
Be it therefore enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with
the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in
this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:

HOWEVER, BY VIRTUE OF OUR POSITION AS CIVIL SERVANTS AND MEMBERS OF THIS PANEL, WE CANNOT ACQUIRE THIS MONEY IN OUR NAMES. I HAVE THEREFORE, BEEN DELEGATED AS A MATTER OF TRUST BY MY COLLEAGUES OF THE PANEL TO LOOK FOR AN OVERSEAS PARTNER INTO WHOSE ACCOUNT WE WOULD TRANSFER THE SUM OF US$21,320,000.00(TWENTY ONE MILLION, THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THOUSAND U.S DOLLARS). HENCE WE ARE WRITING YOU THIS LETTER. WE HAVE AGREED TO SHARE THE MONEY THUS; 1. 20% FOR THE ACCOUNT OWNER 2. 70% FOR US (THE OFFICIALS) 3. 10% TO BE USED IN SETTLING TAXATION AND ALL LOCAL AND FOREIGN EXPENSES. IT IS FROM THE 70% THAT WE WISH TO COMMENCE THE IMPORTATION BUSINESS.

PLEASE,NOTE THAT THIS TRANSACTION IS 100% SAFE AND WE HOPE TO COMMENCE THE TRANSFER LATEST SEVEN (7) BANKING DAYS FROM THE DATE OF THE RECEIPT OF THE FOLLOWING INFORMATIOM BY TEL/FAX; 234-1-7740449, YOUR COMPANY'S SIGNED, AND STAMPED LETTERHEAD PAPER THE ABOVE INFORMATION WILL ENABLE US WRITE LETTERS OF CLAIM AND JOB DESCRIPTION RESPECTIVELY. THIS WAY WE WILL USE YOUR COMPANY'S NAME TO APPLY FOR PAYMENT AND RE-AWARD THE CONTRACT IN YOUR COMPANY'S NAME.

WE ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO DOING THIS BUSINESS WITH YOU AND SOLICIT YOUR CONFIDENTIALITY IN THIS TRANSATION. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THE RECEIPT OF THIS LETTER USING THE ABOVE TEL/FAX NUMBERS. I WILL SEND YOU DETAILED INFORMATION OF THIS PENDING PROJECT WHEN I HAVE HEARD FROM YOU.

YOURS FAITHFULLY,

DR CLEMENT OKON

Pussies.  REAL Sysops ran motherfuckin' World War IV, the only BBS software worth consideration.

Calm down, Skipper! I think he's just pointing out how this thread has devolved to a point where it just doesn't matter, so it should be denned.

Seriously though, all threads go off on wild tangents after a couple of pages. I think the fact that this one has remained largely on topic for the better part of 10 pages says something in itself.

Additionally, we don't go denning every other thread that goes for several pages and then veers off-topic, so it suggests to me that it's making some people uncomfortable for no real good reason. If the participants who are making points on either side were devolving into personal attacks, then sure. A tangent on BBSes or a few people posting silly shit (ie Tale's last few posts, RK47's picture) to derail it doesn't mean the ponts made throughout on both sides are invalid.

If anything gets denned from this thread, it should be a case of mod-surgery taking out the bullshit posts and denning those or splitting them off into their own tangent-thread, which is the way things seem to be done here on f13 much more often.

If the people making actual arguments on either side decide to let it rest, then the thread will die a natural death.
Crying out "waaaaaaa, den this thread because it makes me sad" means you hate freedom. And freedom force, and freedom fries.

 :awesome_for_real:

(http://imagechan.com/img/images/irony.jpeg):awesome_for_real:



The problem is not the argumentation.  It's simply going nowhere.  It's like Trammel or NGE.

Ah, so because both sides of an argument are unlikely to be swayed, we'd better den the thread?
Quick! Better den every thread where Schild defends sony or derides the Wii.

By the way, "if it hurts your poor, delicate eyeballs" and "crying out "waaaa, etc" are not personal attacks - they're attacking the behaviour or opinion using irony and hyperbole, not the person.



A personal attack is when I call you a cunt.



Or.

It's the difference between "don't act like an idiot" and "you are an idiot"

Now please stop acting like a cunt because a thread you don't care for hurts your poor, delicate, freedom-hating eyes.

Stephen Zepp, can you please explain to me why it is that your defending people who want me to beg to play a game I have already paid for?  I haven't pirated a single game in my life, nor have I used pirated software.  However I have to tell you the honest truth.  IF I purchase Mass Effect and that is a big IF at this point because of how Bioware/EA is treating law abiding people like myself.  I will lose NO sleep if I need to use a fourth "activation token" and go to a pirating hack/crack web site to get it, especially if EA refuses to give me a fourth activation for free.  I will be damned if any company is going to make me have to beg some man or woman with an outsourced American job in India or some other country to pay again in order to play a game I have already paid for.

Please justify this because for the life of me I can't imagine why you and the rest of the gaming companies are continually trying to further persecute me with DRM's like this garbage.  Especially when I have done nothing but support the further employment of people like you with my hard earned dollars.

Oh, and that was the point where you fell into the sarchasm. I almost added "why do you hate america?" initially but I thought the stuff about freedom force and freedom fries added enough obvious sarcasm. But apparently not.

Stephen wasn't defending DRM and he wasn't defending the companies that are trying to screw companies over. He has issues with the way people justify what he sees as theft.

"Activation token?"

Haha, I'll pirate the shit out of that game and I don't even want to play it.

Maybe, realising that even pirates are going to get subjected to all the advertsing bullshit EA is shooting for, they've set up this whole DRM fiasco to make sure that angst filled denizens of boards like this all pirate the game for great justice, thereby giving EA a bigger advertising market then they would otherwise have had.

It's a conspiracy I tell you.

That only works if you actually play the game after you download it, as opposed to just copying it from folder to folder while drinking copious amounts of rum.

Go and use your reading skills on all the pages not just one.  He most certainly is saying to people like myself that we will be stealing when we are forced by this unethical system to rely on the nearest warez site or hack/crack web site to find a way to play the game I paid for after this 3 activation token garbage is up.  I have said it before and I will say it again.  I will be damned before I go begging an EA outsourced help line for another activation token.  I will lose absolutely no sleep whatsoever if I have to resort to software piracy in order to play the game I paid for.  To hell with anyone who says I am pirating software in doing so because I have paid to play my game.  Its absolutely shocking how much nerve people from these companies have and it shows how damned contemptably arrogant they have become.  The absolute nerve of someone to expounded on how were stealing from corporations is beyond me when they are in essence defending the right of a corporation to steal from me.  To say that this kind of system is justified because people are immoral and steal software simply doesn't pass the smell test either.  There is only one motivation behind this corrupt implementation of "securing intellectual property," that being forcing people to pay more for software they have already purchased.

There will be only one group of people who will be stolen from when this goes into affect, yet I hear nothing of this from stephen zepp.  How is this not corporate theft to people who have already paid for the software to play?  Remember the original defense of this defenseless position was first that if people didn't steal companies wouldn't be forced to invest in copy protection.  Well here is one who hasn't stolen anything but will happily circumvent this despicable ploy to get me to purchase more "activation tokens" or copies of a game in the name of some god damned copy protection.  Call a spade a spade, this is simply an attempt to make us pay more for a product we should already have a right to play when we initially pay for it.

Since I've been responding in this thread from page 1 my memory skills might not be up to task, but my reading is damn sure fine.

I don't remember Stephen anywhere discussing whether or not it was ok to d/l a pirated copy of the game if you already own it (which is what you seem to be arguing).

But, whatever. I'll let you argue with him.

But again I think this goes back to blaming this specific form of copy protection rather than the concept of copy protection in its entirety. For example, if you had to do nothing, could play and install the game as many times as you wanted, but some magical invisible method was used to ensure that was your copy you were playing with, would that be a problem?

I'm asking seriously because it seems the majority of the anti-copyprotection stuff has revolved around the specific implementations, which because of how they've been designed have done little to stop pirating while doing much to piss people off.

I do like what the Sins guys said about making games only for people who actually want to pay for them. But not everyone can do that for any number of reasons (like the opportunistic IP-plays it seems and other business opportunities that don't line up with what gamers actually want at all, much less are willing to pay them).

My viewpoints are different from Stephen's. I was merely trying to convey what I thought Stephen said.

I am against practically all forms of copy protection because generally all they do is harm consumers whilst protecting publishers. I realise its a long thread but I'm not going to defend myself about views that aren't mine; I already stated what I think on the prior pages.

Actually, it's your reading skills that need work unfortunately. Never once did I defend any company's choice of DRM implementations. As Moose said, I have issues with the way people justify their actions. Two wrongs don't make a right, and all that.

If you purchase a product, and later on decide you don't like the way it was protected and elect to then go and use the product via whatever mechanism that is outside of the agreed upon license, then you are stealing. Real world example:

Eugene Water and Electric charges for power in three tiers of use. If you use more power than is defined in the first tier, they double the charge per kw/h, and if you go into the third tier, they tack on another 40% on top of the doubling. If I decide that I don't like this, and rig my meter somehow (using other means to acquire the product) so that it doesn't register my use of the product (power), it is most certainly stealing, and illegal.

Just because the way they charge for power may be unethical in my opinion (for the record, I don't like it, but it's certainly ethical) doesn't mean that I have a moral right to take their product from another source (or in the example's case, take it without them being able to measure it) and use it.

So yes, taking the software in a cracked form from a pirate site to evade the DRM (3 installs) is stealing in my book. The (lack of) morality of their DRM (limiting you to three installs in the first place) does not in any way justify your action.

So it is ok to crack a program if you buy it in good faith and the limitations are not mentioned on the box?

Because that is what happens right now. "Does only work for three installs" is not found on the Bioshock box, and I bet it won't be found on the new ones either.

"Requires Internet connection to play", fair enough.
"Technical copy protection measures", is a very very bad euphemism for "You are fucked after a few installs". It stops working without ever trying to copy it.

What takes away the companies rights to whine is that they don't mention those limitations and take away the customers ability to make an informed decision prior to buying the game. Two wrongs don't make a right, but in this case the first wrong invalidated the terms of the sale.

I can't take anything you say on this issue seriously. The correct term in law is copyright infringement and in most cases it is a civil matter not a criminal matter. Referring to it as stealing is propaganda.

And the analogy is horrid.  Utilities are consumed upon use and finite in amount.  A game is not, and can in fact be duplicated over and over.

I'm willing to listen Zeppster, but if you're going to spout crazy talk we're likely to just ignore any points you make, even the decent ones, since we will have tuned you out like the nutty guy on the corner.

I've already made the case in a sidebar to my main argument that it could be classified as theft of services, not copyright infringement.


I'm not talking law, I'm talking morality. From my point of view in this debate, that's a big freaking difference--and the fact that you seem to equate the law with the morality of an act effectively proves my point. You seem to be saying "it's not against the law, therefore I can do it and it's not wrong"--which is my entire argument--people don't see taking something that they didn't pay for as being morally wrong.

I do. No matter how much I may hate how someone offers something for sale/rental/use/whatever, I don't have a moral stance that supports using it outside of their offer, without their consent.

(http://www.simplephrase.com/motivation/graphics/tenacity.jpg)

OK, that's some funny stuff there. WAH I GOTTA MAKE A PHONE CALL. After 3 activations. Seriously. Your rage brings tears of laughter.

(http://www.juniorenglish.de/Jolly_grammar_handbook_big.jpg)
Can't wait to play Mass Affect.

What if I crack the game myself?  I buy it, crack\disable the activation on my own and limitations aspect and play it.  At what point does it become stealing?  Downloading a complete copy from a warez site?  Downloading the cracked .exe from a warez site?  Downloading a patch program?  Doing it all myself?

And this isn't a rhetorical question as I have in the past dissected programs for my own interest in the past.  I am trying to determine what you have a problem with: the pirates themselves and\or those who run warez sites or anyone who doesn't run a program as it came out of the box or with official patches from the official company website.

hell just buy it, then crack it. we're not stealing it. If it's still wrong, I guess I can live with it.

Is that why your industry continually hides things like how they protect their software?  Please, if you honestly believe that everyone who purchases these games understands that they will be limited to 3 activation tokens your very sadly mistaken, in fact laughably so.  So much so that it begs the question of asking if your even taking your statements seriously.  Don't go quoting Eula's on me either, your EULA isn't disclosed when we buy your product nor can we take it back to the store for our money back once we open it and see what kind of shit your industry is pushing on us.  Believe me, i have tried in two Best buys in the St. Louis area, neither will take the game back once opened.




Your evading the question.  I am not surprised given the condescending arrogance of your defense of a defenseless practice.  Please note NO WHERE IN ANYTHING I STATED did I say I was going to be taking software that was cracked.   What I said very clearly and again I state it for your here, was that I would lose no sleep applying a crack to a piece of software that I HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR.  So to spell it out to you sir, I would own a copy of your software turned worthless by your deceptive and maybe even fraudulent DRM.

Since you addressed the lack of morality.  Lets talk about it seriously.  If there is anywhere a lack of morality it is to be found in your position because you force people who have PAID YOUR SALARY AND PROVIDED PROFIT FOR YOUR SHARE HOLDERS to go to third parties to make the software they purchased work in the manner they thought it was supposed to work when they purchased it.   That they purchased it in this manner isn't their fault for the expectation given to them by years of purchasing games and keeping people like you employed was that they would have a game they could play when they wanted whereever they wanted and was feasible to play.  It isn't until you open your game after bringing it home from the stores that you find out sometimes months later how deep the rabbit hole goes and by then its usually much too damn late.  Don't talk to me about morality as your industry has shown very little.

Also please don't also whine about stealing being wrong.  Yes while everyone agrees two wrongs don't make a right such whining really comes off as little more than the vocalizations of the little boy who cried wolf when you continue to treat people with such little regard or respect.  What goes around comes around and when people steal from you, don't act like the wronged party when your company is actively priming the market place to steal from people who paid to play a game they paid for and now can't.

   

Darniaq I agree completely, and I don't begrudge the industry trying to deter or even stop pirating of their software.  That isn't the issue and I don't think any reasonable person would begrudge them that.  The fact of the matter is this DRM really over steps its bounds in my opinion and therein is where the problem lies.  It goes much further than deterring piracy and it steps all over the person who is supporting them legally. 

Also Darniaq I am hearing many people stating that this won't actually deter the pirates of software.  If this is to be accepted at face value ( and only time will tell if it should be) then who is this DRM really aimed at?  My ultimate fear, sort of a nightmare scenario Darniaq, is that this is the priming of a horrible "slippery slope" for the PC gamer.

Speaking for myself, with PC games, I woundn't be super-happy, but I could live with it.
Something like Steam for example, where I have two accounts of my own, and have "given" one to my mother to use with the Popcap Collection on it.


For console games, it's far more problematic, but we're not quite there yet.



You're not an idiot, Sky. "Contact customer support and it will be resolved on a case-by-case basis". You know those lines are wide enough to drive a truck through, let alone read between, and it already looks quite painful. And that's for every activation after the third.



Playing Grammar Polizei as a reply to someone's argumentitive point when they're clearly not a net.fuckwit is playing strawman, and weak sauce. HA HA YOUR GRAMMAR IS IMPERFECT FOOLISH MORTAL!!!


Also, has anyone noticed if there are any cracks for Bioshock yet that nix the online activation?

Pay for my ticket and I'll do it! Serious note, there are quite a few activation cracks floating around. The only real difference from your run of the mill crack is that you have to replace DLL's instead of just the .exe. I don't see Mass Effect or Spore lasting more than a week  because that's about how long it took for a working torrent of BioShock to hit the net after release.

Mourneli:

--not going to bother quoting your posts, but a few things:

--the EULA for the products I work on is freely available online, before purchase. I hate, as a gamer, EULAs that are not, but I'm also aware from personal research that they aren't enforceable in most states, and that you can in fact return the product (if you yell loud enough in the case of some stubborn chain stores--just use the terms "Warranty of Merchantability", "state law", and "lawsuit" in an acceptably strong tone of voice, normally does the trick once managers get involved. Worst case, emails to regional managers have worked for me personally in the past.)

--I feel both personally and professionally that the types of DRM being used by EA and the like is pretty idiotic, and not helping their cause. GG has an open EULA, and InstantAction specifically simply requires an account, and you can play anything you purchase from it on any supported computer at any time.

--I feel that it's the responsibility of any company that makes a game to provide a working copy, or a refund, from a moral/business ethics perspective.

--I've stated many times that I don't -care- about the "loss" from piracy, but about the moral standards the broad acceptance that "piracy is fine" that seems to be prevalent amongst the recent couple of generations. Personally, I lose not one cent of salary when (note I say when--our products show up on Torrent within 24 hours of release at the latest) a product is pirated.

--Finally, people were stating that "pirating software is putting it to the man", in what appeared to be a revenge motive in some cases, and a "send a message" motive in others. In my opinion, neither do anything worthwhile to the original issue: revenge just makes the companies think they need more restrictive DRM, and the message is the wrong one.

All of these points have already been stated by me in the thread, so call it a re-cap for those that haven't read it :P

FYI, I only responded to this thread twice in the last several days--both when called directly out. I'm seriously not trying to keep it going on my own !

(http://www.planetmagrathea.com/longreview1-Dateien/longre7.gif)

I agree. I can stomach it for now because we're in that transitory phase. Like many problems in the media business, I think the whole gotta-protect-them-all thing is being run by business folks who are not actually interacting with the services they're inventing, and therefore don't understand the fuss.

Yea, pretty much. It's usually the legit folks who get hoses when systems designed to protect companies are invented. They're either not savvy enough to bother getting around things, or not savvy enough to even know there's a constraint (like the folks who will never know until that third install).

As long as that information is not clearly communicated on the box and within the installation routine (and I don't mean buried-on-EULA-line-27 "clear"), you're playing against a rule you don't know with a time limit you won't know until it hits you.

What allows this stuff to persist is the amount of people who either aren't being affected by it, or the throw-arms-in-air type who quietly walkaway.

So my question is: Does DRM exist to deter piracy, or to limit what a legitimate user can do with the software? It's damn apparent that anti-piracy measures do absolutley nothing to stop piracy, and have a very minor effect on slowing it down. Publishers must know that the money and time that they invest in DRM is not accomplishing what they claim it's for, and yet they persist.

Which leads me to believe that they do it to keep the legitimate users under control. To limit how useful their software is.


I don't think that's the case. As I posted above, DRM does not seem to be aimed at piracy at all. Which just may be why people are willing to justify "piracy". They know or feel on some level that publishers are "the enemy", and delivering an inferior product intentionally.

I doubt Joe Gamer goes through that kind of convoluted process to hit that conclusion though. It's more along the lines of "I can't install my game more than 3 times? Fuck that shit! Stupid company!" etc...

If it doesn't work, I think they do it cause they don't know WTF else to do; DRM doesn't work but nothing else seems to, either.

However, it's possible that what they see is that DRM stops just enough piracy to make up for the loss of customers that are pissed off by it.  We're assuming it doesn't work, who knows.

I think PC DRM does stop game piracy at it's most casual level - the person who would copy the disc but it too scared/not knowledgable enough to go to gcw or mg for a cracked exe/nocd. My older brother and my mum would be people like this. So would my wife and, say, almost all of the people I work with. These are the kinds of people who would by and large just tend to buy the original to avoid all the fuss and hassle, and to be sure the software they buy "just works". Sims players, amongst other things :awesome_for_real:

DRM such as found in Bioshock and the upcoming EA titles is a new breed of DRM which it does appear has the legit user as a target. Which ones? Not the most savvy, like us. But the people I just outlined who are the ones "kept honest" by low-end DRM like CD checks. They're also the ones who will be hardest-fucked by things like Bioshock and Spore and Mass Affect.

This is why I don't hate or really have a huge issue with low-end, non-intrusive, non-malware DRM like CD checks, etc.


Neither will stop the dedicated pirate (ie warez kiddiez), or more edumacated software users like f13 readers. I'm not sure - kneecapping the used game market is one thing, but do places like EB in the US even deal with secondhand PC games? I know I'll happily buy a secondhand console game on occasion, but I won't touch secondhand PC games.

Wow. Epic thread here.

I'm going to come out and admit that I skipped about 7 pages in this one and will just post my thoughts. If they're echoes of someone elses, oh well.

If I have this straight, you can install this game on 3 different computers. Past that, you have to call and deauthorize one or more of them. I was a little pissed when I read this because I thoroughly expect Spore to be The Second Coming, but after thinking about it, there are two things to consider:

1.) How often do you (or the average joe) upgrade? For me, it's been an average of 3-5 years per machine. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. If I buy Spore today, I would expect to get at least 10 years worth of it. My current laptop is 2 years old. I'm hoping for another 2-3 years before I consider it archaic and buy a new one.

2.) What is your attention span per game? How many games are you still playing after a year? 2 years? 5? MMO's don't count. I think for me, the only games that I still get into are the TES games and UT99 (which broke all tradition and rendered it's own copy protection null and void after it had been out for a year). The only real problem I can think of is that if Spore is really that good that maybe 10 years down the road I want to re-install and can't access the long gone authorization server. I'm still not all that peeved as I'm sure a crack will be found somewhere that will bring the game back to life or I'll be playing Spore III.

In any event, I think panties are getting needlessly twisted in this case. This isn't like they're using Starforce.

1.) Roughly every 6 months, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. I never fully exchange hardware, I gradually upgrade various parts as the whim strikes me.

2.) About 10% of the games I have installed at any given time are older than, about 50% older than a year. Some games are classics I play all the time, some I just set aside for the newest shiney and play through at a later time. Or if an interesting Mod comes out for it.

So maybe you shouldn't extrapolate from your own experiences and pass them off as how everybody should behave.

Sorry. I wasn't trying to put everyone else in my shoes, just describing my situation and was genuinely wondering what other's positions were on those points. Do some of you really change out enough hardware on a consistant basis that the software would see three completely different machines in a short span of time, say < 2 years?

Depends on what the software sees as a different machine. My current machine went through 2 motherboards and three graphic cards in the last 2 years, on one of those motherboards I changed the processor twice and I'm up to the third hard disk (last change was to get the old one free for my second computer, plus I changed the raid controller). I'm kind of an impulse buyer regarding those things. See - want - buy. Which is why I would REALLY appreciate disclaimers on game boxes as well, if it isn't discussed here and I stumble upon it, I don't do all that much research on my purchases. I check a Starforce list and thats it.

Panties are not getting twisted.  This thread isn't the type of whine thread you see on game forums, where players are trying to get the devs to do something by hyperbolizing the issue.  Took me all of 2 seconds to decide to not play these games anymore, and everyone else not much more than that to decide what they wanted to do about the games and the DRM.  And, otherwise, we're disagreeing on principles that those in this thread cannot really "fix", one way or the other.

But, bottom line, you're not convincing me that my opinion was wrong and I should buy these games.  I hate e-herpes.

Is it new configurations or new installs?  People were saying installs earlier.

If you upgrade, format, or have a disk crash that's two installs right there.  Hope you don't have technical problems which require you to uninstall/reinstall.

This is my view of it.  Stopping casual piracy is great.  I'm fine with some form of disk copy protection, or an account login upon install, or something relatively simple and non-intrusive.

But real pirates aren't going to be deterred by the worst schemes imaginable.  And may even improve the performance of the game by removing overhead.  Rootkits, limited installs, and all the rest just causes a headache for legitimate users.

I finally thought of an analogy which seems semi-valid instead of all this stealing Zepp likes bandying about.  Gun control.  Some people will be against it no matter what.  A large number are okay with some practical steps like requiring permits for heavy weaponry.  When draconian or arbitrary measures are enacted for the sake of getting rid of guns, but only affect those who are going to follow the law without any consequences for those whom are happy to skirt it, people start getting really upset.

(I'm not trying to turn this into a thread on guns.  Just frame it in a context with some precedence since the stealing analogies fall flat for many of us.)

That's gotta hurt.   :awesome_for_real:

If it gets the point across it's worth the pain.

You can have my computer when you pry it from my cold, dead, cheeto dusted fingers?

1) About every two years. I don't generally upgrade components. I usually buy a whole new systen because if you're changing the CPU, GPU and MoBo I figure you may as well spend the little bit more and get a new box. My wife then gets the old box, and her one becomes the 3rd box. 3rd boxes have been getting retired, but I think we'll go for the 4th box next time...

2) Depends on the game and how much I like it. I've installed and played through Max Payne about 5 times and MP2 about 4 times. They're the first things I play on any new PC. Something like Civ2 I've installed about 4 or 5 times. Civ 4 has had 4 installs. KoTOR has had 2 installs. Call of Duty 1 and 2 have had a couple each, along with the original MoH. Return to Catle Wolfenstein has had at least 4. Far Cry has had 3. Spore seems likely to be closer to something like Civ than Red Faction (1 install and playthrough).

A good FPS does get at least 2 playthroughs from me. A good thinking game often gets more, through the years.

See, it's like they're telling me my next install of KoTOR is the last one I'll ever be able to have, unless I want to ring EA and stay on the line and hopefully get someone who knows what they're talking about and is wiling on this particular case-by-case basis to allow me to reinstall the game I bought. My Civ 2 and 4 would be borked. etcetera.

If I own something that stops working, then I feel fully justified in repairing the broken item.  Even if we're talking about software and DRM cracks.

No moral qualms herel.

We are talking here like the ability to call the company for a manual activation is even a possibility for all games.

Game companies go belly up all the time. Many people here replayed Vampire Bloodlines recently, good luck getting a reactivation from Troika games for that if they had chosen to go that route!

While from the companies standpoint that isn't a consideration (we are the best, we will exist forever), we as gamers should be well aware of that. If well acclaimed developers like Microprose and Looking Glass Studios can die a painful death, we shouldn't have to trust the survival of a particular company to keep our games working.

Any product that has to phone home (either via literal phone or digitally) is full of fail for rather obvious reasons.

Not only is there a danger of going out of business, there's the danger of just flipping the home servers off or discontinuing the phone support.

I'm on my third bioshock install in under six months.  I had to replace the hd on the machine i originally installed it on, then i got an unexpected upgrade.  Not going to fall for that again.

Copyright "first sale" doctrine applies to software too:

http://aecnews.com/news/2008/05/21/3414.aspx

That's the goal. Yea, it's not really the result. It merely prevents casual piracy with restrictions that unfortunately also work against casual use (company goes under, OS changes, hardware changes, etc)

The people making decisions about which DRM solution to use are usually not the folks who understand the actual effectiveness of them. They're merely being advised by smart folks. But business relationships trump technical relevance quite often. And it's only the consumer that gets boned.

The goal is to increase sales.


Detering copyright infringement is supposedly a means to an end; but there is little to no evidence that DRM mechanisms which are targeted on copyright infringement have any impact at all on overall sales. To be honest, I think the publishing industry is smart enough to realise this.


Almost no recent DRM efforts have been about copyright infringement, they have been about increasing primary sales by killing the secondary market. Which puts them in extremely dubious moral and legal territory, which can only be sustained so long as the industry can keep idiots in politics, law enforcement and the media confused about the difference between stealing and copyright infringement, and confused about the impact of DRM.

That's fantastic. Glad to hear it.

Can someone give me the cliff notes version of what this "first sale" ruling means?


Even when I understand all the words, the lawyer talk makes them mean not what I think they should mean.



-edit- Is the PC version actually out yet? I need to throw away my money or something  :grin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_sale

It means you can sell your shit. And EA can't stop you.

Even if it is something as sacrosanct as (gasp) a computer game.

And on a related note:
http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=13281.msg454254#msg454254



Oh yeah, the thing is. EA is stopping you. Even if that's illegal.

There are enough countries around that take the consumer's right to resell seriously enough to stop that becoming universal.

I guess two wrongs CAN make a right, but only when it's a big company with lots of lawyers doing it.

No, the onus is only on consumers to do what is morally right and legal. Games companies are under no such obligation.  :awesome_for_real:

I've picked up this, Only run through the first tutorial area so far, seems pretty awesome. It SCREAMS co-op for the combat, shame that isn't an option.


Most of you probably already do this, but upgrade your drivers before running this. It was Crashy McLockup before I got all of my crap up to date again. Pretty sure Hardware/Software sound causes a lot of shit one way or another.


One *really* annoying thing, is there is this small 'stall' while moving through new areas. I assume it's some kind of texture loading or somesuch, maybe it's just my PC.. It isn't top of the line, but it isn't that far out of date... either way, annoying when the game is roughly 10+ gigs installed. Folks with the top end rigs will get a lot of pretty out of the game. I haven't played the 360 version, so I'm not 100% sure on what is actually different, but I assume the PC one will be nicer to look at if cranked up.

On that line, there is a configuration tool, that scans your system and recommends some settings for you, except it ONLY recommends these settings on the first use of it. If you didn't save them right off the bat before you went fiddling with them yourself, I don't see any way to bring back these recommended 'defaults'.


My only other complaint is in order to pause the game and bring up the Squad/Ability menu for combat, you must HOLD space, instead of just tapping it. I'm so used to just tapping space to pause in Bioware games, it throws me off constantly. It can also be a small bit overwhelming with both the quick bar and the various 'fps' combat. It's like half WoW, half Gears of War. Probably just needs a little getting used to.

It took me til your last paragraph to realize you were talking about Mass Effect and not Spore; i was so very confused.  :uhrr:

It took me until the third paragraph to realize he was talking about the actual game and not the DRM.

Righ picked it up.  Crashes a lot.  Realtek.  No point in playing until patch.  Thank you, Bioware, for charging us $50 to debug your game for you.  Dammit.  I have to wonder if the pirates who have already hacked this are having a smoother time of it.  Not stealing, just wondering. 

Bastards.

(http://riversmeeting.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/nelson-haha.gif)


Feeling for you, but only because I know you. If I didn't I would say you deserve it for supporting that POS DRM with your money.

Glad I wasn't the only one! My google radar was going wild for some hitherto unannounced Spore release...

Slight Necro.

So since this is the epic thread that established that piracy is always evil, all the time, no exceptions EVER and that all pirates will boil in hell, I'm curious about this (http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1991064316/m/1381029176/p/1) claim that Ubisoft pirated a no-cd crack from pirates to patch a game that they broke by adding copy protection to stop the evil pirates.

I want it to be true so I can laugh and laugh and laugh...

The same guys who put Starforce on everything for a while?

Delicious.

oh my god do people really still do this?

It's not clear they actually "pirated" anything. It's more like they were redistributing a no-cd crack they didn't write. Also the situation is more complicated than them trying to "fix" any copy protection scheme they added since this involves Direct2Drive which has it's own problems regarding copy protection and patching. It's the D2D patching issue which apparently caused somebody at Ubisoft to redistribute the no-cd crack as a workaround for those poor people who actually buy games through D2D :awesome_for_real:

http://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-no-cd-answer-to-drm-080718/

Even if that assessment is more accurate, it's still a great illustration of why heavy-handed DRM is stupid and going to cost more customers than save sales.

...

All software is covered by copyright.  Period.  Unless you get permission from the author you may not re-distribute it for profit or deprive others of the fruits of their labor.

Hence piracy.

The haXors in this case modified a copy of the software so as to bypass the copy-protection and then distributed that modified code.  As long as they don't charge for it and as long as it's used by legitimate owners of the software, the no-cd crack is in a pretty grey area.  As far as I know you are allowed to modify stuff that you own, for your own private use, as much as you want.

I think distributing the crack, officially, so that UBI can profit from anothers work is very iffy.

No-cd cracks are already freely redistributed. No-cd cracks are also derivative works of the original (i.e. the game). I.e. it's the no-cd crack writers that are infringing on copyrights not Ubisoft. In addition profit has nothing to do with copyright infringement.

Edit:
Unfortunately you are totally incorrect. Without even getting into this situation there is plenty of software out there that's in the public domain -- i.e. have no copyrights at all.

Just because it's in the public domain now, doesn't mean it always was.  By default, software is a protected work.


No, it can be easily shown that UBI profits from the distribution of the no-cd crack which is another's work.

edit:

That's not what you said.

That doesn't matter.

Specifically when profit is involved it is called vicarious copyright infringement. And you can have a no-cd crack that doesn't contain any copyright infringing code. Reverse engineering is legal. Specifically it can just patch the existing EXE file that the user already has. If a modified EXE file is being distributed then it would be infringement.

Not that it matters though. It's not like RELOADED is in a legal entity that would sue anyone. Unclean hands.

The irony is delicious though. Any bitching by Ubisoft about copyright infringement from here on out is null and void just like it is when it comes from Blizzard.

Distribution of copy protection circumvention tools is illegal under the DMCA unless expressly allowed by the copyright holder.

What did Blizzard do?

Last time I checked, "looking like fucking tool" never stopped a company from acting.  It's always good when they do it.  One of the biggest plague of humanity is "do as I say, not as I do".

I've used a no CD crack twice. Once for earth universe assault and once for Black and White 2, Battle of the gods. Both time it was the game decided I didn't have the game disk in my DVD drive because the copy protection was blocking it from seeing it. If I hadn't used the No-CD crack I would not have been able to play the game I bought legitimately.

(not that it would have mattered wuth EAU as I havent played it since, but still)

No, there is a specific reason when a piece of software is not not protected, usually due to action by the original copyright holder, by default all rights are held.  You do not need to reserve them, they are rights.

Circumvention of a copy-protection mechanism may be illegal, but that's absolutely not what's being discussed here.  What is being discussed is the redistribution of someone's work without their permission.  Two wrongs don't make a right and etc...

Maybe a court would rule that FAIRLIGHT or RELOADED released that no-cd code into the public domain when they distributed it via bit-torrent, but maybe not.  Allowing free redistribution of material held in copyright (and by default all software is held in copyright) does not invalidate a copyright.

You're right. In the United States.

---

Copyrights can be selectively enforced, Murgos.

And yet you are still wrong. Your belief of how copyrights works is analogous to the erroneous belief that the First Admendment protects *all* speech absolutely -- it doesn't.

You believe that writing software automatically grants you copyright on that piece software -- it does not. To be eligible a work must be an "original work of authorship". E.g. I can't just copy somebody else's code, put my name on it and claim I have a copyright on that code. If you could do that there would be no point in having software copyrights at all.

These No-CD cracks are typically distributed as modified EXEs (download one from the usual sources to see for yourself) and hence are derivative works under copyright law. You can only claim a copyright on that portion of a derivative work which is different from the original if it is "different enough from the original to be regarded as a new work or must contain a substantial amount of new material." I would argue that patching out the copy protection code does not qualify as "different enough" or "substantial amount of new material". Hence not only is the No-CD crack an illegal derivative work (cause Ubisoft didn't give them permission to create it) even if it was legal it wouldn't have it's own copyright since it's not different enough from the original.

So at best (for Ubisoft) they were distributing a piece code they own the copyright to and at worst they were distributing a piece of code where the patched out copy protection code has no copyright at all There is no piracy on the part of Ubisoft involved here.

And just for fun here's what the latest Vegas 2 No-CD 1.03 note says post-incident (excerpt):

You're still hand waving about illegality of the crack.  That's not a discussion that anyone, other than you, is having, you don't get to redistribute illegal code either.  Judge Trippy does not get to declare from the bench what portion of the crack code constitutes 'different enough from the original' and neither does UBI Softs lead counsel.

As far as the quote from the read.me?  Well, great!  Let's get it out there, I hope UBI Soft starts redistributing, with permission, lots of no-cd cracks, once they realize how popular they are with their, paying and registered, customers maybe they'll stop dicking around with all this ineffective, damaging, copy protection.

Actually I do get to say that. The crack is clearly illegal unless Ubisoft has stated that the crackers are authorized to create that derivative work, and it is a derivative work since they are distributing the entire EXE.

I agree there is some handwaving with regards to whether or not the modified code would be eligible for it's own separate copyright. However ignoring the unclean hands doctrine mentioned by Krakrok above (which makes this all moot since there's no way they could possibly claim a valid copyright on a derivative work that was created illegally/unethically) I'm sure Ubisoft would be more than happy to meet the crackers in a court of law to determine that part.

You know. technically me scrawling "this game sucks" on the splash screen of EVE was illegal according to the EULA as it was modifying a client file.

Ahh lforget it. maybe I'm just into handcuffs.  :oh_i_see:

Does anyone know if a Crack has been successfully engineered yet to get past this three installation garbage?  I am wondering if this version of SecuROM has actually worked on the video game crackers or if all it has succeeded at doing was pissing off Bioware's one time loyal customers and simultaneously inflating EA's profit margins.

I don't know about how anyone else feels but if I was asked to sit in on a jury prosecuting a person who produced software to circumvent this DRM my answer would be I refuse to find them guilty and I don't care what the hell the letter of the law does say.

And that is why juries suck.

On the off chance that someone missed the news... Spore has gone gold and is due to be released September 7.

I believe it's out Sept. 4th in the EU (http://eu.spore.com/whatisspore/platforms/pc.cfm). :grin:

So I picked up the creature creator, to install on my work laptop to have a fool around with the kids in my class, on one of those big interactive whiteboards we got recently. I got around to installing it today. It wants to activate itself online. Apparently I'm not connected to the internet, so it can't verify my legit copy.

As far as work firewalls go, I can connect to WoW, and I'm the only person here who plays any kinds of games, so it's not like EA is specifically blocked.

Anyway. Screw EA and their shitty DRM.

On the bloody creature creator demo.

Ok, sorry to necro, but this is relevant (to me :awesome_for_real: ).

Is there a watchdog community out there that is posting up about which games use intrusive DRM practices?  I've come to realize how big of a deal this rootkit shit is after the fact.  But I want to start putting my foot down about it from here on out.

You all do a good job of pointing out which games have it, but I was wondering if there's a homebase for it. 

No, there's better. Although it's totally related to privacy, for PC games I always check NFOHump.com as release groups always list the copy protection site in the NFO. If you look there, all the way on the right is a little button for a clean NFO. It opens up as a text page in browser and will tell you the Copy Protection type. Since it's a piracy site, they tend to have the information before release as well.

Very cool, much appreciated.  That makes a whole bunch of sense. 

Along with Securom, are there any other big DRM offenders?

Starforce is probably the worst since it's been said it eats components.

Great mention, but I'd like to point out that the site has really been going down hill since it changed from nforce.nl to nfohump.com. Seems like releases are showing up later and later.

The Spore/Amazon debacle is now showing up on the front page of Google News, so EA is getting some terrible press right now.  They've already modified C+C RA3's DRM policies... not good enough standards, but I think they are realizing this isn't going to work. 

One site is reporting 171,000 downloads of Spore by torrent so far.  If even 25% of those are legitimately pirated due to DRM then EA lost some cash due to their stupid policies.  I can't imagine having a 1 star rating at Amazon helps. 

I just took some time to look into this Spore DRM thing.  My wife (!) brought it up to me last night, and when I said I hadn't looked into it she gave me that "I thought you were a gamer" look she does.  I did some research just today and the things I am digging up quickly are pretty interesting to me.

Forbes article about Spore DRM and how the draconian DRM spurred Spore to be the Titanic of torrent.
http://www.forbes.com/intelligentinfrastructure/2008/09/12/spore-drm-piracy-tech-security-cx_ag_mji_0912spore.html

It also has expectedly-intelligent commentary from Brad Wardell.


Here's a quote from a Sept 13 article on torrentfreak.com (http://torrentfreak.com/spore-most-pirated-game-ever-thanks-to-drm-080913/) about how well the DRM is working out.

It's possibly ironic to note that The Sims is currently the most torrented game.

There is also an interesting idea in a ZDNet blog post (http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2617) that Spore has opened the eyes of hundreds of people who had no idea you could obtain any software for free on the innertubes:

That last one is particularly interesting to me and I had not thought of it beforehand.

It's been said before but it is worth saying again.

DRM does not affect pirates.  DRM only affects legitimate users.

The pirate crowd had a DRM free spore EARLIER than the stores had the DRM version.

The pirates can download Spore as often as they wish as long as 1 person in the WORLD is willing to host a seed.  Legit users are restricted to, what?  3?  Until EA decides to not host the key checker any longer?

DRM does not do what you think it does.

Unless they're extremely stupid I don't think this move was made to hinder pirates, it was more targeted at limiting second hand sales. All the bad press this has generated more than likely doesn't make up for it.

It's extremely unfortunate that a number of executive level goofs will simply see '500,000' torrented dl's as justification for even more draconian DRM.

Also, second hand sales are a GOOD thing.  More people get to experience your product.  Full stop.  From the original purchaser who knows he will recoup some of the expense so he can try more items, to the cash poor after-market type that will be more likely to try it and if it's good, more likely to buy the next edition at the full price.

This concept works for books, music, movies, furniture, cars, etc... pretty much everything really.  Trying to limit it is just silly.

This is so awesome.

:popcorn:

The point for me is that if Spore becomes a classic game then I will want to reinstall it and replay forever.     Shit I still reinstall Alpha Centauri and Civ2 every 6-8 months.  The fact I can't do this makes me suspicious that Spore is not a game I will want to cherish.  That and some comments here and elsewhere.


Having the DRM in place doesn't just limit 2nd-hand sales (which for the record is what everyone should be able to do as a consumer) it also fubars the chance of wanting to put this game on your mantelpiece as a keepsake to continue to replay.

Are second-hand sales really that big in the US? EB doesn't take PC games for trade-ins here.

This is insane.  In my younger days I was a pirate.  Not because I liked to steal stuff but I couldn't afford to get every game I wanted, and it was so easy to get a friend's copy.

The last 15 years I have been on the straight-and-narrow and purchased everything I play.  I don't want to return to my pirate days because I know what I was doing is wrong.  But the DRM protections on Spore and other games are wrong as well.

I'm in the uncomfortable position of giving up my favorite hobby, doing something wrong, or bending over and taking it from EA. 

Hey EA, you may be responsible for ending PC computer gaming as we all know it.  I hope you are fucking happy.

I saw some fucking stupid interview with a cunt representitive from EA defending the DRM by claiming that only 25% or 32% of people have installed their copies of Spore on a second machine, and only like 2% on a third machine. This, therefore was justification that 3 installs, like, forever, is justified.

The game has only been out a fucking week.


edit - corrected formatting

In a few weeks you are supposed to buy a new game and forget about the old one. Nobody replays old games anyway

Hm.. found this on the Crymod forums. Looks like the Spore backlash achieved something else?



It's being discussed in relation to Crysis: Warhead, but I imagine it'd be across the board on the new SecuROM games. Wait and see.

Sounds like the Sacred 2 DRM to me. Isn't that from Securom as well?

They are loosening slightly the DRM restrictions on Spore as well:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/09/ea-to-spore-pla.html

In order to track the impact of DRM vs non-DRM on piracy, we'd need a title of comparable hype that had no DRM / copy protection and then track how many times it was torrented. None spring to mind. Any suggestions?

Also, I think the lesson the industry will learn from Spore is not "no DRM", but rather "don't bother developing for the PC as your primary system".

Tribes. Easily an order of magnitude (no solid/internal numbers, but what I've seen scattered about the internet suggest that 60,000 copies were purchased, more than 500,000 pirated).

He asks for comparative level of hype and you quote Tribes?! The hell...

Try Starcraft 2. I bet they will sell more then people pirate, and won't have DRM.

Even though a niche game, Tribes had an incredible amount of hype and "true viral" (as opposed to planned) word of mouth. Obvioulsly it doesn't match in scale, but in ratio of available internet audience to total penetration it was much higher than any other game of the time.

Wouldn't it be so much easier to just compare in scale though?

The issue is that defining 'scale' is a hard thing to do. I'd like to have a useable point of comparison for future pro- / anti-DRM discussions.

It all comes down to this: a lot of people are going "Screw DRM - it doesn't help anyone but pirates!". But if DRM (and I include a lot of things under DRM, so perhaps I should go back to the old term 'copy protection') on a title stops day one piracy which in turn sees sales go up, then yeah, it is actually worth considering.

Perhaps BioShock is a good comparison title for Spore, since its DRM held up for 3 weeks post title launch on the PC?

If 500,000 people pirated tribes (which I doubt), they sure didn't seem to be playing it.

Perhaps pirates don't put much time / value into titles they can get for free?

They probably played the hell out of the game then once they got tired of it told everyone they knew how much it sucked and how glad they were they'd stolen it.

It doesn't have to be particularly hard; Sims and stuff sold/are selling how much? Blizzard's games i'd say are in the comparative bracket in the market penetration/popularity at the least. As such, Spore has had HUGE hype over the past year, ditto for Starcraft 2. Seems like a reasonable enough comparison to me (as opposed to the obviously loaded example of Tribes).

EA have backed down (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/09/ea-to-spore-pla.html) and are patching the DRM out. Unlimited installs and more than one screen name per account, only allowed on 5 seperate machines at a time.

Plus they're threatening (http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/3869.page) to ban people if they keep discussing the DRM on the forums.

Do ya think someone in a suit said "draw a line under this NOW"? :p

DRM is not being removed and where did you see that they are allowing than one screen name per account?

I read it on The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/ea_spore_drm_changes/).


I dunno if that counts as a removal of the DRM or not, but it's certainly a climbdown of sorts isn't it?

It's unfuckingacceptable is what it is.  Not to mention that they haven't said a word on their website about it yet.  I love how the locked thread on their forums says "If there is any change you will be able to read it on the official Spore site" yet nothing is there yet. 

My guess?  They up the installs from 3 to 5, leave the DRM in and never allow multiple accounts.  If they were to side in the consumer's favor on all three they might actually have a game that will sell dozens of expansions ala the Sims.  But at this rate, they put at stake the very future of the base game. 

Ahh... went forward on the wrong page, lost what I'd typed...

Anyway, BioShock removed its DRM a long time post-launch and if Spore's DRM is already cracked at launch, there probably isn't a great deal in having it there.

BioShock appears to have sold 77k units in its first week on the PC (and nearly 500k units on the Xbox 360 according to here (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/34271/BioShock-Best-Selling-PC-Game-of-August)) when no cracks existed. How is Spore looking for first week sales?

I'd be pretty happy if they removed the "one screen name per account". My kid and my wife love the game, but so far they're SOL on sharing creatures because I have the only account name and didn't want to end up with their creations mixed in with mine.

hell, my son HAS an account name -- he used the editor demo. I just can't link it to my spore game.

Excellent.

Down to 12,000-14,000 new users a day now.

It is and I posted about it 11 posts above yours but it's not a removal.

Seems someone got a class action off the ground:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2008/09/23/spore.pdf

I'm not going to postulate on how far it will get, but if there's an offchance it brings about change to how Securom acts, then it's for the best. 

How in heaven's name do EA know how many concurrent installs I have?

Last time I checked PCs do not emit whalesong when they die.


FAKE EDIT: Actually, scratch that, we're talking about Spore, so EA know precisely how many installs I have. But hypothetically, if we were talking about something not shit, my point stands.

Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com) does DRM all week.

(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080924.jpg)
(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080926.jpg)
(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080929.jpg)

you know in a site where they repeatedly curse/swear, berate, put-down -- any kind of outrageous/unfair behavior you can imagine -- this is a pretty tame set of strips.  And no blog opinion.  Are they trying to avoid something that might hurt their advertising?

No blog opinion since they're on vacation.

(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/steal_this_comic.png)

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=14286.msg527140#msg527140

Just to let everyone know... EA actually came through with the utility that lets you recover your Spore install counter when you uninstall Spore.

Here's the link: http://www.spore.com/patch/deauthorization (http://www.spore.com/patch/deauthorization)

That comic is still retarded.

A shame it's accurate.

Too bad they haven't done so for Mass Effect yet. I'm about to go an install down on my PC laptop. Cheers fuckers. I'll steal their software in the future if I ever get the desire to play it. Never got round to playing Mass Effect in any case. I had no inclination to fight the buggy piece of shit. Maybe one of the patches fixed the problems, but I'm past caring now that I'm about to be penalized. So yeah, chances are I won't even steal their software. But I will encourage it. With a bit of luck their staff will all be competing over the same fast food jobs soon.

Unless they've released a new patch in the last month, I still can't play it myself.  Reverting my drivers back a year did let me get through character creation (sometimes) and a bit of dialog only to crash before I could reach a place to save/autosave.  Joy.

EA has released a Securom deauthorizer.

http://activate.ea.com/deauthorize/

still won't buy it.  And I'm a man with nephews, nieces and young cousins to spare.

let it dieeeeeeeee

This game was mediocre and forgotten two months after release, just like I said it would be.

I'm sure it's selling well despite being what is quite possibly the worst big-budget sandbox ever made. The Sims was more fun. Hell, Sim Ant was more fun. It's just very upsetting.

It was a disappointing game. I'll probably pick up the second expansion at some point though. Apparently it adds some more stuff to the Space stage. The first expansion that just has more stupid body parts I will never, ever buy.

Yeah, the body parts thing seems to be a total rip-job. I'm interested to see where they go with the Space Captain thing.

Actually, I would've played a hell of a lot more if they had taken a page from GTA4 and allowed you to turn off your goddamned cell phone/ galactic communicator. People complained about getting nagged in GTA4, but I've found it to be no problem at all. Spore, however, that shit completely ruined what I found to be a fun little game, removing the sand from the sandbox.

It's why I stopped playing.  I loved visiting new worlds and zipping about the universe, but I couldn't go two minutes without needing to be called back.  Really, really annoying.