Understanding Piracy

[*Jess♥]

I was just thinking about this and I would like to talk about it.

Piracy is a very common thing these days. that is copyright piracy.

of course the history of copyright piracy is rooted in organisations trying to monopolise free information.

in the past, the power was with the church and the monks who copied the writings from one book to another.

with the advent of the printing press, the power could be taken away and disseminated. so copyright law was created.

not to protect the little guy, but to protect large organisations.

Things are changing of course.

Now with the internet, it is becoming easy and cost free to copy information.

If I create a copy of any piece of information, it does not take anything away from the original.

If I create a copy of any piece of information, it does not take anything away from the original.

It is possible to reproduce it an infinite number of times. no cost. no work.

It is possible to reproduce it an infinite number of times. no cost. no work.

It is possible to reproduce it an infinite number of times. no cost. no work.

It is possible to reproduce it an infinite number of times. no cost. no work.

It is possible to reproduce it an infinite number of times. no cost. no work.

but 4 is enough to make my point.

In our culture, the current mentality is that a person owns something, they can reproduce it infinite times and sell each copy. but what are they selling? they are actually selling *nothing*? well not quite. they are selling a portion of the original work. when they copy it, they divide the value of the investment that has gone into the work. So the investment can be a combination of things, time spent, materials used, marketing costs etc. Many people who create media are making a gamble. they do not know if they will recoup the costs.

But then again, any artist doing their work does not know if they will recoup their costs. Many artists do their work not expecting any return on it because they are unproven or simply because they enjoy creating their work.
Lots of people creating media do it gratis.

 

So, anyway, lots of people 'pirate'. Pretty much everyone does actually. it's not seen as taboo in our society. One of the most common justifications is that they wouldn't have paid for it anyway. That may be true in lots of cases. in some cases it's not. In some cases it's a matter of, if I can get it for free, why pay for it? In those cases, it's a  matter of convenience.
It's a frightfully wicked thing to say, but I don't mind paying for something if it is easy to do so and gets me what I want when I want it. I do mind paying for something when it is made inaccessible or if I have to jump through hoops to get it.
If Naruto was difficult to find, but Tokyopop or somebody released it every week without fail for a small fee, I would pay that fee.
But quite simply, the easiest way to get naruto each week is to go to whatever site is hosting the scanlation.

 

Today I decided I want to play warcraft 3. unfortunately, it seems  I cannot buy it from a shop near me and I cannot buy it from Steam. That sucks. they could have made a sale from me today but they lost out on that.

[*Mehy]

Its a bit of a cycle really. Take music for example.

In the old days you didn't pay for music. You either saw the radio broadcast (where they made money through advertising) or saw the band live (ticket sales). When technology progressed people gained the ability to make devices that played music for individual people. This meant that concert numbers went down but they started selling music for the devices. Further technological advances made it easier to copy music, driving album sales down. So now it seems the trend is that bands cant make money off of just album sales and they need to do shows. So in a way, its like we've gone back in time.

 

Of course that just applies to music, I know you're talking about piracy in general.

 

There is a delicate balance that happens between pirates and content creators. If the pirates overdo things then creators go bankrupt and things start drying up. Mind you, this is less of a "harmony" balance and more of a "ruthless jungle law" balance.

 

 

Also, if you want warcraft 3 (awesome game btw) Blizzard still sells a digital copy. http://eu.blizzard.com/store/browse.xml?f=c:1,f:1

[odin]

I want to share this video with you guys now that there is a discussion about piracy and Mehy brought up the music industry  just to clarify some stuff about what piracy does to the content creator and how they have different alternatives to not get too affected by it, the guy in the video can explain it a whole lot better than I can.

 

[*Jess♥]

Mehy, thanks for that, I'll have a look at that later. If I can afford it today, I'll buy it.

 

Odin, great video. I agree with most of what he says. I love Steam. I have a fair few games on Steam and love the system.

I am a bit dismayed that my PC can't always run those games, but it is cheaper than consoles and more convenient.

I also agree with the principle of making sure the shops don't make all the profit from the used games.

I've actually been thinking that for a while. why the publishers don't simply demand a cut from the sale of the pre-owned game since the game license is their intellectual property.

but yeah.. the piracy thing... I guess in some ways, used game sales is a form of piracy except the gamestop and etc, are actually making money from sales of the publishers product.

 

edit:

ooh blizzard, keen sense of style! Warcraft III was £9.99 EIGHT YEARS AGO and I would have gotten a box, disc and book with it then.  No way am I paying that price, that's just unreasonable. Especially since I only wanted to play it out of curiosity and don't know if I would like it that much. That's why Steam is so good.

[Solaris502]

if u want to play warcraft 3 and want to pay for it there is a very easy way to do so.

1. Go to us.battle.net

2. Create an account.

3. Once your account is created Log in.

4. Go to us.blizzard.com/store.

5. Search Warcraft III

6. Both WC3 and WC3 expantion are available in both physical and digital versions. ($9.99 each)

    - Note: they also have the Battle Chest for WC3 if u like but that is only in the physical copy. ($19.99)

 

i think someone else mentioned this in the earlier posts but for further reference. No Blizzard game will EVER be found on steam as steam takes about  30% cut from the devs when they sale goes thru steam. This of course depends on the dev and how much Steam wants that title on their service. Blizzard, while somewhat friendly to their fans, is still money hungry and wouldnt want to take the loss of the Steam cut. so they have their own in-house digital distribution via battle.net, which if any of you ever played the original Diablo 2 and Starcraft this may sound familiar. 

 

again sorry if this was talked about earlier.

 

also love totalbiscuit <3

[*Mehy]

I've actually been thinking that for a while. why the publishers don't simply demand a cut from the sale of the pre-owned game since the game license is their intellectual property.

 

 

Interestingly enough, that's exactly what Microsoft announced at E3 last weekend. Their new console, the XBox One, will essentially run off of licenses rather than discs. The game disc is nothing more than a delivery mechanism, which means that unless you register a game you dont have it. They prety much said that they would allow publishers the option of allowing used game sales (or not) at their leisure.

 

It's essentially steam, but minus the great sales and nigh universal selection.

 

On the general front, the difference between used game sales and regular piracy is scale. If you buy a used game, that's one lost sale. If you put a game up on bittorrent, thats an untold amount of piracy. That's why the Napster case became so famous despite the fact that downloading was around before Napster.

 

 

Ha, That Blizzard. They aren't shy to leverage their great reputation in order to fix prices on their games for life. Now if only they wouldnt pretend that Warcraft 1 and 2 didnt exist.

 

Man, this thread is seriously putting me in the mood to go back and play some Warcraft 3.

[*Jess♥]

yeah the thing with microsoft is tricky.

the problem there is that they are screwing with the consumer when the issue isn't the people who pay for the game in the first place.
Me and my friend can only afford to buy a certain number of games in a year, sometimes he lends me a game and I will buy my own copy because i love it so much. but most of the time we share our games because of the cost involved. microsofts system puts too much restrictions in place. it would have been better if they had merely taken legal recourse with the retailers instead of placing restrictions onto the end user.

it's the restrictions to the end user that cause piracy in some cases I think.

It is what caused me to pirate a song once instead of buying it. I couldn't be doing with the incredible hassle of DRM due to having actually lost music i bought in the past; digitally blocked.

I realise that the restrictions are not so bad... but the fact they exist in the first place suggests to me that the games will no longer be mine. the way I understand it, when I buy a game, I buy a license. that license is then mine. I should have free use of that game for as long as I want, how I want. not subject to microsoft's approval.

 

 

edit:

even on PSN, I can buy a game, I can then go to my friends house, sign in and download the game I bought. my friend can then play that game as much as he likes.

[durendal]

The thing is about technology, the more restrictions are imposed, the more people try to circumvent the restrictions.  Coming from a third world country where the common people cannot afford to buy original games, I can see a lot of backdoor channels where they can obtain those games at a fraction of the original cost.  They used to say that putting region lock on DVD would prevent it from being pirated.  Is it still true today?  When the PS2 came out, they say it was not possible to pirate it.  That may be true at that time, but now?  I don't think so.  

 

Sometimes, I understand why some people pirate stuffs.  But often times, it's too much that you should be ashamed of yourself.  Take mobile apps for example.  an app cost roughly around $0.99, do you still want to pirate those?  And yet, it is rampant here.  There is a place here that are full of shops that will jailbreak your apple product and install an unlimited amount of apps for a certain fee.  That's just crazy.

 

Do take note that I am not pro-piracy, but I'm just telling the truth of the reality and how it is right now.

[durendal]

On another point, piracy does have some benefits to a certain degree.  It totally boosts the popularity of a certain brand or product.  Although it may harm the original artist, I have heard some artists thanking torrent downloaders, as they are the ones that boosts their work into cult status.

[*Jess♥]

that's very true.

The game Anodyne was placed onto pirate bay by the creator.

I saw that he had done that and saw that he also put his game on sale for that week.

I paid the sale price rather than take it for nothing.

I think the popularity of that game sky-rocketed after that and I think the creator made a lot more money than he would have done otherwise.

 

The most frustrating part of that story however, is how the British courts ordered pirate bay to be blocked by the largest internet service providers. Many people in the UK cannot access the pirate bay, even though it is often used for legitimate means and helps a lot of people to gain much needed exposure.

[Solaris502]

actually on the point of friends lending friend games xbox kiiiinda gotcha covered there. when u buy a game and it is added to ur library 10 friends/family members now have access to that game and can play it just because u bought it. kinda like oh hey they got it let me try it to see if i like it and if its worth picking up. now whether they can play that game at the same time you are is still up in the air and also if u are playing a game on ur console only one person can play a game from ur library. still tats a pretty neat feature. also muck like on the psn when u buy a game its stored on ur account and u can log onto ur account from a friends xbox and playing just like u were home. only difference is thee xbox has to check into the home server every hour as apposed to every 24 hours. this could cause some problems if their home server is down which is more then likely going to be the main issue with this system.

also its not really microsoft screwing the customers is places like gamestop (us) and Game (uk version of gamestop from my understanding) having worked at one fro about a year its insane how much they make of used games. they buy a game for dirt cheap like 5-10 $ US and then turn around and sell its for almost full price (maybe 3-6 $ less) and the devs never see a penny of that money thats like 500-600% profit margin on a single game. what do they make on new titles? meh maybe 5-10$ corp-wise so they want u to buy used games cause they make bank off of it.

Also places like gamestop and game bully devs on the idea of forced pre-order bonuses because if someone pre-orders the game they are much more likely to actually bu the game regardless if the game is horrible or not.

onto the other idea of piracy being used as a promotional tool i have one game for u "Game Dev Tycoon" if u havent already heard of this game you should check it out. the devs of the game released a legit copy on there site Green heart gaming (i think thats thier company name) and also released a version of popular piracy sites. the game only sold a few hundred copies but was pirated a few thousand copies. with a name like "Game dev tycoon" one can assume it has something to do with being a game dev which i thought was a kinda neat idea. anyway the devs put a condition in the game that could tell if u actually bought the game or not and if u had they thank you for it half way thru the game but if u didnt about half way true the game your company goes under from people pirating ur in game games. kinda ironically funny if u ask me. people were on the games forums asking how they could keep people from pirating thier games if they could research always on DRM and stuff which was kinda funny again cause this was right after the whole SIM City Always on DRM dabocal.

anyway if u want some more info on the xbox stuff i think their offical site is up now with more specs and stuff and i know that Microsoft has canceled all their press conferences until after E3 this week so i think they have gone into quite mode while they try to crowd control all the negative PR they have from all the horrible choices they have made with the ONE.

Edited June 10, 2013 by Solaris502

[Solaris502]

sorry i just read the part about the buy a game buy a license thing. and yea thats how it was back in the days of NES and SNES but things have gotten so much bigger then that now. Now when u buy a game ur not buying a license ur buying a access pass to the game. its kinda like going to a theme park. when u buy that ticket ur not buying part of the park ur buying the rights to enter the park and spend some time there and have fun. you cant buy a ticket go in stay all day then walk out and hand your ticket off to someone standing outside and be like oh here im done with this u can have it now. things dont really work like that with how tech has gotten games are more intellectual property. ur access pass lets u look at it and even play with it but u have no rights to what that disk or cartridge or whatever entails. in all actually even the idea of u being able to sell the game back to a retailer in the first place is kinda illegal if u really think about it. what right do u have to sell something that isnt urs? did u make that game? did you spend the countless man hours coding and programming its systems? then what right do you have to make any money on that game at all? i guess if u want to justify it at all you can say oh well i bought the game in the first place so i helped finance the game by paying the devs but really thats not even true. unless the game you bought is from an indi dev more the likely you just ended up paying the publisher which takes about a 30-60% cut of the profit from the sale not to mention the retailers fees and the shipping fees and such. and again if it is a indi dev the why would you wanna sell it back anyway? we need to support the good indi devs, they have it hard enough as is. 

 

well anyway thats my thoughts on that.

 

oh and p.s. if u havent alrwady noticed im a little enthusiastic about games lol so we need a guyver game like 10 years again. i think the tech has finally caught up to the point that they could make a reaaaaly awesome one.

[*Jess♥]

About the xboxone, I already made a caveat in my second to last post about the game sharing thing.

 

yeah it's good that you're enthusiastic about games I agree to support the devs. that is important because they will make the great games. unless you're called 'aliens colonial marines'. in this case, then the consumer should have a right to a refund.

I think in some ways this is a different cause of piracy. people don't want to risk making an investment in something that may turn out to be awful.

Demo's are good and lite versions. I think the app system on smart phones works really well. lots of free software and lite versions. I've bought many apps because it is cheap and I usually know exactly what I'm getting.

I refer back to Durendal's post. I agree with you mate that is is very sad that people would jailbreak that just to get the apps for free. They really do cost next to nothing.

 

That game dev tycoon game is very clever. I like that a lot. I am wanting to develop games in the future and  I think about it now, how would I feel about people pirating what I made and sold. How would I feel about people reselling what I made and sold.

I guess I want to look at it this way. if I made a unique object, then people could resell that. I feel that would be appropriate. But If it was not a unique object, instead it was intellectual property, it is not something physical, it is the whole conceptual 'entity'. I think licensing is something that cannot be resold. because what is being sold, is not the data, it's not the bits and bytes, it's not the textures etc. what is being sold is the 'experience'.  like a stage play. like a concert performance. what if a person who went to the concert, could take his experiences out of his head and sell that concert experience to another person... I feel that would be damaging to the artists. because they get paid by people going to watch them. to experience it. so games are a performance in that sense. I think most media is a performance.

 

question then.... is is justifiable to experience this performance without paying for the ticket.

I don't personally think so, but then I am a hypocrite because I actually do view the performance without buying the ticket.

or Am I?

we can look at it a different way. a performance is usually in front of an audience of a certain size. could you increase the size of the audience to infinite number and still charge the same ticket price? that may be seen as greedy. If an artist gets paid by the hour, or per performance, then they are paid a set amount. I think a sound economic rule ought to be that the size of the audience determines the price of the ticket. if the performer is the only costing for an event, and the performer get's paid £1000 for the performance and there are 100 audience members, then the ticket ought to be £10 per head. but if you increase the audience to 1000 people, then the ticket price becomes £1 per head.

In this sense, I believe that if a company is pulling in millions of pounds for their product already, then they have already covered their costs and are greedy to expect more.

 

point in case, Warcraft III has already covered it's production costs many times over. I feel it is inappropriate and plain greedy to charge £9.99 for that product.

[*Jess♥]

just a bit of sums here to illustrate why.....

if the digital copy of Warcraft III effectively cost them a penny to produce, then their profit margin for that digital copy is 99,800%

of course there is probably other logistics in effect but I wanna illustrate a point.

[Solaris502]

what you forget is the fact that warcraft III is largely involved in online game play. Online game play requires servers and servers require money to maintain. if they game is no longer pulling in revenue from sales where is the money to maintain the servers coming from? other games? games like world of warcraft maybe? sure more then likely that is where most of blizzards money comes from. but what if they didnt have that title what if blizzards rein of games had ended at WC3? would the game even still be supported after 10 years? maybe, SC and D2 were but then again SC had a whole country almost dedicated to that game. So the company is spending money to let people to continue playing WC. How much does a server cost to maintain? well that depends on how many people still play the game and such. so if u really think about it the company is taking large hits financially because its a 10 year old game that doesnt for the most part sell alot of new units and have no monthly cost to play.

 

now i know alot of old games that still support their online community but they are usually supported by independent private server bases. 

 

now of course Blizz does have Wow and while wow is also a 10 yr old game it does have that monthly fee and it also has a pretty steady income from new units sold. on top of new expansions sold each year and usually purchased with most new unit sales. not to mention they have a online store to sale ingame ... stuff. 

so yes Wow is their plow horse that gives them the wiggle room to keep their older games running.

 

but is that greedy? really, if we think about it if u just look at wow's sales methods you might think yes. but when u look behind the scenes and see where alot of that income is actually going 10 $ or regional equivalent isnt that much to ask for a great game. regardless of age.

 

also if u just wanting to play the single player and dont care about the online play i can see a little more from were ur coming but if u take the whole idea of "its a 10 yr old game" out and just think of it as a "great game" whol wouldnt pay 10$ for a great game with as much content as WC3 has. hell now adays companys charge u 15$ for extra maps or a few extra ingame items. which is the better deal.

 

and dont get me started on the idea of stupidly expensive DLC

 

now also dont take this as im trying to prove u wrong cause i kinda agree with u here, but in the spirit of playing devils advocate and looking at the issue from a different perspective i think some of these points are worth making. 

[*Jess♥]

yes, you made a good point about the servers, but you are also correct in that I am not interested in online play.

I think it would be fine for them to sell an online pass for that type of game and then have a reasonable price for a game that is so old.

it may be a great game, but it is dated and ought to depreciate. I believe the standard price for an old game is £5. I don't think it need be less than that but it shouldn't be much more.

 

I think we scared everyone away

[Solaris502]

Lol sorry bout that.

Yea I mean I donno I feel that 10 is still quite a good price for the base game now I think that frozen throne should be about 5 instead of 10 like the base cause for one its an expansion not a stand alone and the amount of content is considerably less than the stand alone base.

But then again look at like wow that's like 10 for vanilla + 10 for BC + 10 for WotLK + 20 for cats + 30 for mists. That's like 80 in total just for a game that still kinda 10 years old