Spore/Mass Effect Requires A Virgin Sacrifice on Western Coast of Easter Island

[Samwise]

Pirating software, as Snakecharmer said, is stealing.

Nuh-uh.

[IainC]

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.

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.

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

[Phildo]

Oh shit, I just got served!

[Samwise]

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.

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.

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

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.

[Sairon]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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

[eldaec]

Quick, downgrade his name to pink.

piracy isn't considered morally wrong by what I'd guess is the majority of the public.

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

[Morat20]

I also like Morat's point about civil disobedience, but I'm not sure how apt it is in this case. 

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. :)

[Ratman_tf]

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.

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.

[Signe]

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!   

[Samwise]

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

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

[Sairon]

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

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

[Sky]

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.

But Steam is fucking awesome, right?

[Megrim]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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?

[Morat20]

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.

[Phildo]

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

[Morat20]

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.

[photek]

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



(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 

[Litigator]

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.

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

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. 
 

   

[Ookii]

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).[/i]

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

[photek]

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).[/i]

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.

[Litigator]

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?

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.

[eldaec]

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!

[Signe]

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.

[Krakrok]

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.

[ajax34i]

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

[Signe]

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?

[CassandraR]

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.

[KallDrexx]

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)

[Xilren's Twin]

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.

*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.

 

[Tebonas]

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

[Sky]

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.

[ajax34i]

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.

[CmdrSlack]

I'll also want government regulation then. 

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.