Pirating/emulators, and all that good stuff.

Bad grammer equals rape because I said stealing might end up taking money from people who need it for house and medical payments.....alrighty then. plus this is just a forum discussion... chill dude.

Quoting SwerydAss,

reply 26

Bad grammer equals rape because I said stealing might end up taking money from people who need it for house and medical payments.....alrighty then. plus this is just a forum discussion... chill dude.

Communism- its paid for by th government.

Quoting Splitshadow,

reply 16

Just to let some of you know, copyright capitalism is the number one killer in the United States. Do you know why we can't cure cancer or any other disease for that matter? Because it isn't profitable to research a cure if it can't be copyrighted. For example, cord blood cells are over 9000% more effective than stem cells, but no company will make a profit developing methods to use stem cells. PROTIP: We cured cancer in 1962, but because it can't be sold to at a profit, it won't happen.

Whats the cure?

Cord blood cells. They shut off after a while unlike stem cells which keep producing sporadically.

I say if you respect a game developer or artist then you should support them and buy their products so they can continue making the things that keep you entertained.

However, if you despise a certain developer or artist, but still like some of their products, then pirate what you want and the hell with 'em.

Stardock is the developer I respect most of all (well, SD & Firaxis), and thus I won't pirate any of their games. On the other hand, I bought the new CoD(6?), and now I am so wishing I pirated that game instead. $60, and I gotta deal with something like Steam, and the pirates out there who got it for free get a Steam-free game... In that case, piracy was definitely the way to go. Even the single player game requires steam to be running, and man I get a knot in my stomach every time I see that thing load up.

If companies do things that irk their customers off (like force you to dl & use a third-party app before you can play it, even though you bought the disc), then it serves them right to get their stuff pirated, IMHO.

Communism- its paid for by th government.

Too bad I live in the U Ass of A. I would definitley go for a socialist health care... not the obama force people to buy it and if you don't have enough money for it then we'll fine you plan.

Quoting Krynus,

reply 30

However, if you despise a certain developer or artist, but still like some of their products, then pirate what you want and the hell with 'em.

So you would walk into their building and take their product?

You do realize Obamacare contains a great deal of subsidies (read: free money from the government) for people who can't purchase insurance?

True but this is what just happened to me and many others in MA under patricks plan(which obama's plan is similar too)

In november last year the state all of a sudden said that insurance from midwest life was no longer qualified as healthcare in MA so everyone that had it got fined anyway... Gee I wonder if the national gov't will do the same to raise quick cash off of those who get the lower cost care the way MA did.

Never underestimate the desire of government for more money.

Quoting kryo,

reply 12

You can spout platitudes about open source all you like, but that will never justify taking the fruits of someone else's labor against their will just because you think you deserve it; you don't. It's not something you need and no amount of logical gymnastics can justify taking it.

I am a open source guy... and i can say that open source have nothing to do with stealing idea/software/code from other... in fact, trying to include code/software that you have steal somewhere other in some open source project is the perfect way to be banned by the project leader...

And making a software open source don't mean that the software is "free"... in fact, the "free" of the open source mean "freedom" and not "free of charge"... having something open source mean that you can receive the source of the software, that you can modify it for your own usage... in fact, all open source software have a license... some of these license don't allow you to distribute the software, some other don't allow your to distribute your modification...

Please, don't mix the guys from the open source with the pirate... open source permits users to study, change, and improve the software, not to steal it !

Quoting Thoumsin,

reply 36

Quoting kryo, reply 12You can spout platitudes about open source all you like, but that will never justify taking the fruits of someone else's labor against their will just because you think you deserve it; you don't. It's not something you need and no amount of logical gymnastics can justify taking it.
I am a open source guy... and i can say that open source have nothing to do with stealing idea/software/code from other... in fact, trying to include code/software that you have steal somewhere other in some open source project is the perfect way to be banned by the project leader...

And making a software open source don't mean that the software is "free"... in fact, the "free" of the open source mean "freedom" and not "free of charge"... having something open source mean that you can receive the source of the software, that you can modify it for your own usage... in fact, all open source software have a license... some of these license don't allow you to distribute the software, some other don't allow your to distribute your modification...

Please, don't mix the guys from the open source with the pirate... open source permits users to study, change, and improve the software, not to steal it !

Is it hot in here or is it just me?

I think audiences which have a problem with paying (usually college-age young people) will start finding themselves with no one producing content they enjoy. Imagine a world where everything is produced for those of us who are 50+, don't care about the internet. Hello Perry Mason and the Avengers, here's my card and while you're at it, let's do another run at Hitchcock: The Interactive.

Support your industry if you want it to survive.

Quoting TCores,

reply 38

I think audiences which have a problem with paying (usually college-age young people) will start finding themselves with no one producing content they enjoy. Imagine a world where everything is produced for those of us who are 50+, don't care about the internet. Hello Perry Mason and the Avengers, here's my card and while you're at it, let's do another run at Hitchcock: The Interactive.

Support your industry if you want it to survive.

Human trafficking.

Academic uses of copyright material, for the purposes of preservation and academic study, in many countries, is not illegal, as a reply to the original poster.

@Myles "So you would walk into their building and take their product?"

Of course not

On a side note, when did this thread turn into a healthcare debate?

Quoting Krynus,

reply 41

@Myles "So you would walk into their building and take their product?"

Of course not

On a side note, when did this thread turn into a healthcare debate?

Then why do you feel it's any better to steal it over the internet? The simple fact that you're guaranteed to not to get caught?

Copyright infringement = illegal/unethical does not => copyright infringement = theft

and

Copyright infringement != theft does not => copyright infringement = legal/ethical

This.

Copyright Infringement and Theft are two different crimes. They have marked similarities and marked differences, but they're still two different things.

A lot of people, our pal Splitshadow here being one, have a problem with rationalizing piracy. At the same time, there's a lot of problems with rightsholders going berserk. I had a prof once who basically lambasted the class about copyright when someone took a photograph of the blackboard (As if it's any different than taking notes by hand). Heck, the information on the board was the exam schedule, which was factual information and not even subject to copyright in the first place.

As to the original topic, from a legal standpoint copyright infringement is copyright infringement. Unless you get permission from the rightsholder (which can be nearly impossible to find for older titles in the first place) emulators are pretty much illegal. That doesn't necessarily mean there's an ethical issue, however. As has been noted, if the product is no longer being sold or distributed in any means, there's really no victim, since you couldn't have possibly bought the product as an alternative. As well, if you happen to own the original game, the creators of the work have already been compensated. In both cases, it's still copyright infringement, but we're well into the moral grey zone.

OMF:2097

Oh, wonderful memories...

15 years - the lenght of copyright that's been deemed by scientific studies to be the optimal to maximize the amount of work being created, and incidentally only one year longer than the original duration of copyright in the US.

I'd agree with you that 15-30 years is probably a more sensible range for copyright duration. However, so long as the Berne convention stands, no respectable nation will have durations less than life +50. Regardless of what you believe to be right, that's what the law is and is likely to remain for a long time to come.

Unfortunately, there's little public debate on the matter. So long as it doesn't affect their day-to-day life, people don't seem to care about copyright policy, so the factors driving it are generally lobbyists for big corporations. Anyone who tries to take middle-ground and argue for a change to the laws (towards the more liberal, that is) ends up being branded a pirate.

Quoting Darvin3,

reply 43

Unfortunately, there's little public debate on the matter. So long as it doesn't affect their day-to-day life, people don't seem to care about copyright policy, so the factors driving it are generally lobbyists for big corporations. Anyone who tries to take middle-ground and argue for a change to the laws (towards the more liberal, that is) ends up being branded a pirate.

Yep, just like in this thread.

It's always interesting to read the kind of twisted logic pirates use to justify their criminal behaviour.

Piracy is theft, and theft is against the law. That's the only language you need to know.

Quoting Splitshadow,

reply 18

Pirating is like copying your friends homework. It's unfair to your friend, but it's not at all the same as taking his homework and writing your name on it.

Really? You're going to compare illegally obtaining games that can take hundreds of people years upon years of hard work to create to copying down your friend's homework? I believe the arguments for piracy have reached a new low point. Congratulations.

Quoting Fuzzy Logic,

reply 45

Piracy is theft, and theft is against the law. That's the only language you need to know.

Theft is the act of depriving another individual of something, not violating copyright. lrn2language.

Piracy exists for a reason...its a symptom. A symptom of what you ask? People not wanting to buy stuff. Remove piracy and you are still left with the problem people don't want to buy stuff...they simply won't buy it rather than pirate it. Its a convenient scapegoat for every sales slump in every industry ever.

Oh noez CD sales are down!? Maybe thats because they where artificially inflated during the 90's thanks to the migration from cassette to CD dumbass! Once i've got all my old Tapes on nice shiney CD i'm not going to go buy them all again just to boost your damn sales figures.

Oh noez Cinema tickets are down!? Maybe its because you charge extortionate prices for a one time viewing, along with extortionate concessionary prices for a product that usually involves watching a crap movie that was peddled as being good in a grubby unclean cinema (seriously, shouldn't trailers that contain scenes not in the movie be liable under breech of advertising laws for misrepresenting their product?).

Oh noez Game sales are down!? Maybe its because of the crippling DRM installed into a crappy console port for a game thats a cookie cutter genre piece we've played a thousand times before, all for a huge price that will last -perhaps- a day or two at most then serve as a bookshelf filler.

Good games sell - Sins - Niche genre game, gets high critic praise, relatively low system requirements ensures large potential playerbase, lower than normal price opens up increased market, user friendly DRM...end result crap tonnes of profit.

Good movies sell - Avatar - In the era of "Piracy is in ur base killin ur profits", Avatar goes and breaks all box office records.

Good Music sells - Queen - Band that "disbanded" after Mercury died in 1991 are still the biggest selling artists in the UK because people keep buying their stuff.

Of course this is all considering piracy is a bad thing, evidence says its not (demos think tank independant survey showed "pirates" spend more per annum on media than their non-pirate counterparts). All the evidence that says it is a bad thing tends to be privately funded by the industries claiming its killing them, using wacky figures and surveys that they keep secret, only to be proven complete and utter shit within months.

Now thats out of my system...Copyright was invented to give those who create the material fair recognition so guy X couldn't just claim something was their own creation. Its been bastardized for a century by big business, steadily twisting it to give them more and more control over the creations of others. Ask any musician how much they get from a sale of their song/album...and they'll grumble, it all goes into money hungry business people who see creativity and artistic ability as nothing but a resource to be strip-mined. Copyright as it stands is legalised mindrape.

The current publishing model needs to be destroyed (something the digital age is doing) so that due respect and payment can be given directly to the people who put their blood sweat and tears into the things they create. What they create, they own and they profit from...and it never just becomes the property of generic fatcat corperation X.

Or something...

Quoting Myles,

reply 42

Then why do you feel it's any better to steal it over the internet? The simple fact that you're guaranteed to not to get caught?

Well, there's no guarantee there but yeah that has something to do with it...

I wonder if all the anti-pirates here are perfect law-abiding citizens in other aspects of life. Do you speed? It's against the law... Smoke weed? Against the law! Have you ever copied a music cd from a friend? Against the law!

There are companies I will never pirate from, Stardock, Firaxis, Ensemble Studios... to name a few. Then there are companies like Infinity Ward... After CoD6 I'll never ever ever buy another title from IW. So far as I'm concerned that studio is a prime target for pirates. Yo ho ho!

Using IW as an example, my twisted logic dictates that since I'm not paying another dime for an IW title, pirating their stuff in the future will not hurt them in any way since they won't get any more of my cash anyway. If I couldn't rip the next CoD game, it's not like I'll break down & buy it, I'd simply go without. My stubborn & spiteful need to boycott IW for their third-party b.s. supercedes my need to shoot 'em up online.

The way I see it, you have 2 kinds of pirates out there that I'm aware of. You have those who will rip everything & anything they can, like a friend of mine does, just so they can say they have it. That I don't agree with.

Then you have pirates like me, who do it to basically 'punish' those companies that we feel screwed us in some way, like forcing us to use third-party software to play the game we bought, for instance (yes the steam thing really pisses me off, it was down one day & my son & I couldn't even play CoD on single player! wtf is that about?) I'm all for that!

Piracy will never be stamped out completely, but companies can limit it by keeping their titles customer-friendly instead of layering on all that copy-protection crap that basically inconveniences the honest customers. Stardock is going that direction, of course their games will still be stolen off the 'net, but do you think it will be as big a problem for them as it will be for a studio like Infinity Ward? I doubt it.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

Quoting Krynus,

reply 48

Quoting Myles, reply 42
Then why do you feel it's any better to steal it over the internet? The simple fact that you're guaranteed to not to get caught?

Well, there's no guarantee there but yeah that has something to do with it...

I wonder if all the anti-pirates here are perfect law-abiding citizens in other aspects of life. Do you speed? It's against the law... Smoke weed? Against the law! Have you ever copied a music cd from a friend? Against the law!

There are companies I will never pirate from, Stardock, Firaxis, Ensemble Studios... to name a few. Then there are companies like Infinity Ward... After CoD6 I'll never ever ever buy another title from IW. So far as I'm concerned that studio is a prime target for pirates. Yo ho ho!

Using IW as an example, my twisted logic dictates that since I'm not paying another dime for an IW title, pirating their stuff in the future will not hurt them in any way since they won't get any more of my cash anyway. If I couldn't rip the next CoD game, it's not like I'll break down & buy it, I'd simply go without. My stubborn & spiteful need to boycott IW for their third-party b.s. supercedes my need to shoot 'em up online.

The way I see it, you have 2 kinds of pirates out there that I'm aware of. You have those who will rip everything & anything they can, like a friend of mine does, just so they can say they have it. That I don't agree with.

Then you have pirates like me, who do it to basically 'punish' those companies that we feel screwed us in some way, like forcing us to use third-party software to play the game we bought, for instance (yes the steam thing really pisses me off, it was down one day & my son & I couldn't even play CoD on single player! wtf is that about?) I'm all for that!

Piracy will never be stamped out completely, but companies can limit it by keeping their titles customer-friendly instead of layering on all that copy-protection crap that basically inconveniences the honest customers. Stardock is going that direction, of course their games will still be stolen off the 'net, but do you think it will be as big a problem for them as it will be for a studio like Infinity Ward? I doubt it.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

I am by far not a perfect citizen, but the laws I break don't deprive people from just compensation. The argument that you wouldn't have bought it anyways doesn't make it anymore right to take it. You 'punish' companies by not giving them money, not stealing their stuff.

Piracy is stealing. Piracy, however, is not a lost a sale and therefore does not equate to exact dollars lost that some companies try to say it does. Copyright laws does not just exist to give copyright holders a bunch of rights and consumers none. It is a balancing act between the rights of the copyright holders and rights of the consumers. Because the courts are slow working with outdated material and copyright holders have more lobbyist and deeper pockets, plus that pos DMCA exists, the law has been incorrectly leaning too far to the copyright holders' favor and making the situation worse. The rate of piracy, which is huge, largely suggests that consumers, by and large, are rejecting copyright laws as is. Naturally, when the populace rejects a law like they are, there isn't much you can do about it. Those lawsuits haven't done a thing to slow piracy down. Invasive DRM doesn't do a thing to slow them down either. So we'll just keep doing this pointless dance until the lights turn on upstairs and someone fixes the problem in a fair way which makes piracy a lot less sexy than it is now. Until then, developers can raise their fists and shake them all they want, it won't do a damn thing.

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