But I still have some friends that never buy anything digital, after being brought up on pirated software they would describe buying it as “nauseous”. They might own multiple cars and expensive real estate, but still pirate their windows as a matter of principle.
I have a feeling a lot of kids brought up in eastern europe have similar sensibilities.
That mentality simply carried over when the IT boom hit and back then it didn't occur to anyone that copying was a bad thing.
So, similar mentality. I ended up buying all her software (Office, photoshop etc;) but she said it was a waste of money.
I think an issue here is that in lower-income countries software without regional pricing is considerably more of an expense. Something like Office or Photoshop is also quite different than a videogame imho, those are skills that are valuable (or often expected) on the labour market.
That said, I don't believe anybody who has used the 'real' office/photoshop/etc is easily able to go back to a 'lesser' alternative, but that's mostly due to sunken cost and lock in ... but, I don't think a casual user will make good use of the better features in the better software.
We currently see something related to this in the Pharmaceutical industry. There are a lot of statisticians/programmers that learn R or python in university, while most large-pharma companies are using SAS. There is a movement within the industry to pivot or try to pivot to R due to the scarcity of SAS programmers or/and the cost of teaching new employees a new programming language.
If SAS would have more accessible trainings/certifications I am sure R would never even be considered.
They disagree about whether 99% of people who can afford the game (i.e. successful adults) will pay.
This is not a pro or contra buying or pirating argument, and I actually know lots of people who will happily pay for software that is not windows.
> who are ironically paying the most in tuition and housing oftentimes
It's not ironic. They have no choice (other than not attending the university of course). If there is a loophole that lets students not pay the tuition fee without any punishment, a good amount of students would not pay.
- What is valuable as a symbol of love is something completely useless, but which requires you to burn excessive amounts of resources (money). This is because the act of figuratively setting your money on fire clearly signals that you're making a sacrifice (and the amount of money you thus burn also doubles as a proxy for your wealth).
- The scam was established by what's now over a century of ongoing marketing efforts to convince generations of people to consider diamonds as a symbol of love, thus to be priced per rules described above.
- The scam is maintained by finding ways to create artificial scarcity. For instance, lab-made diamonds are very cheap and made to much higher quality than naturally-found ones, but "naturally found" is a perfect discriminator to force scarcity around. Hence it's the mined ones that are used for jewelry.
Textbooks, or videogames, are products of utility, and don't have the aforementioned dynamics. The only thing that's happening is point 3: publishers trying to find a way to make artificial scarcity work, without a benefit of having a good discriminator (all bits are created equal) - hence DRM.
Of course none of that justifies robbery, but in all cases it does justify every effort to prevent artificial scarcity from being established and maintained.
But why is it your problem? Suppose I just wrote a sonnet sitting here in my spare time. I don't want others to know it though so I'll only share it under extremely-controlled circumstances for a lot of money to maintain this artificial scarcity. Why is it your moral imperative for you to crush my carefully-maintained monopoly on my stupid little sonnet?
I currently feel there's a spectrum of cultural importance on media. On the one end, you have your sonnet, that few people even know exists. On the other end, you have Game of Thrones.
At some point a piece of media becomes so widespread that it becomes a part of shared culture. It could meaningfully affect everyone[0], like Harry Potter or even Game of Thrones (I'd expect everyone to be at least aware of its existence). Or a subculture, like Star Trek or Star Wars for people with even passing interest in science fiction (or STEM), or StarCraft for people into PC video games. These works weave themselves into the fabric of society - people lift phrases from them, make metaphors referencing them. Hogwarts is the modern Troy. Being unable to access these works - especially at the same time everyone else around you is perusing them and talking about them - becomes cultural isolation.
With books, we have it solved, thanks to libraries. Almost anyone can get legal access to almost any written work - where they don't have the money, they can substitute it with effort, to get to a library (and possibly convince the library to buy the work, or fetch it through inter-library loan, etc.).
With music and movies, we had it solved in the past too. You could be exposed to popular works through radio and TV, both private and public. This worked better pre-Internet, because while media distribution was regional, the culture was also regional. Not so today - with the spread of the Internet, the culture became international almost overnight. With Internet, enough of us in Poland can enjoy Game of Thrones simultaneously with the rest of the world that it becomes expected of everyone to enjoy it in lockstep with the whole planet.
Videogames gained mainstream popularity around the same time Internet did, so there was never an equivalent of a library, or public broadcasting, for games. You either buy one or pirate it. If a game suddenly gains worldwide popularity[1] and every one of your friends is playing it, you'll either buy it or pirate it, just so you can feel included in their conversation.
And that's ultimately the main justifying factor I'm currently exploring: entertainment media are social objects. One of their most important roles is to glue communities together, by giving people shared experiences to talk about. Once a work becomes popular enough, I can't really blame people who pirate it because they too want to be a part of the conversation.
The sonnet from your example? It isn't popular at all, it isn't part of culture, so I'd consider pirating it as an act of malice. My view would change if I suddenly started seeing it mentioned on the news.
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[0] - Not everyone everyone, as there are plenty of people with little to no access to Western media. It's much less than 50% of the planet, but much more than "the West", so I don't feel writing the latter would be right either - so where I say "everyone" in this thread, it is to mean "everyone within the broadly understood sphere of influence of the Western culture".
[1] - Which doesn't happen by accident; a lot of money and effort goes into marketing, in order to make this happen. And piracy was historically a part of it, too: few people actually bought originals of Diablo or StarCraft or Red Alert in Central and Eastern Europe, and yet they were hugely influential there, all thanks to folks with CD burners in their trucks.
Your argument about their scarcity being artificial also seems pretty flawed to me. Naturally occurring diamonds are genuinely scarce, and most people value them differently from lab created ones (as they are free to do). Perhaps those people are just being stupid, but they’re no more stupid than all the other people in the world who find value in useless things. It’s not illegal to make lab made diamonds, they’re freely available on the market. But just like a pixel-perfect print of the Mona Lisa, they’re not valued quite as much as the real thing.
I presume you’re talking about De Beers (as this is such an often repeated meme)? Their market share is ~23%.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585450/market-share-of-d...
They’re also quite tightly regulated by the EU, and since 2006 have been prohibited from buying stock from Alrosa (the actual largest diamond supplier in the world). So their scarcity is most certainly not artificially maintained by De Beers, as people so often like to claim.
See e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-de-beers-2011-12?...
You’re also quite narrowly focusing on the romance angle (which is the result of successful marketing, not artificially induced scarcity). I don’t think Quavo wears an iced-out AP as a symbol of love, for instance.
The artificial scarcity argument simply defies logic. The entire worlds supply of natural diamonds was created hundreds of millions of years ago, and the earth is done making them.
If your argument is against IP though, why is the price relevant? You support IP laws as long as the price is one you personally find reasonable, so it's basically a system of voluntary donations then?
I'm sorry for jacking your analogy, but I think it holds water. Diamonds are not inherently valuable (to the degree they are priced at retail). They are valuable because of an exploitative supply chain and social manipulation efforts spanning decades. Which does not justify robbing stores and potentially causing physical or mental harm to innocent shopkeepers. But very much justifies replicating the product to render those practices worthless and hopefully deter them from happening more.
The same goes for educational textbooks in many (but far from all) cases. Personally I've had professors who assigned their own books at very reasonable prices and apologize profusely for them costing money to begin with. I've had others who peddled their own expensive books while themselves handing out copies (!) of books by other authors. I wouldn't dream of pirating the former, but I'm pirating the shit out of the latter if I can.
Yes, I agree this is what ownership means in principle. I think the more practical view of ownership is what the current monopolist of violence will let you do with what you possess. The monopolist of violence in most cases being your local government.
There are many real-world examples of being regulated in what you can or can not do with what you ostensibly own. Whether that's real estate, natural resources or intellectual property. Even IP has expiration dates defined by regulators. Do those expiration dates incontrovertibly define what is morally right or wrong to do with said IP? Were the regulators directed by divine mandate when setting those expiration dates?
> It's not to corner people into an easier target so much as to restrict the debate to the issue I take actual exception with.
Just so I'm fully aware of what we're currently debating, is it this?:
> This idea of labeling something as "price gouging" as a moral defense for anything really.
In which case, here's an example in which I personally believe theft is morally justified. Let's say your family is caught in a natural disaster, and you need fresh water to survive. A local opportunist saw the disaster coming and stockpiled all local water sources at low prices, and is now attempting to sell you water for the reasonable sum (when compared to the alternative option of death) of your life savings.
I'm curious about your position on this (intentionally extreme) example. Not as a trick question, but because I'd like to know how rigidly you adhere to the concept of ownership being morally just in all cases. If you still believe theft is morally wrong in this case, that's fine - it just means we believe opposite things.
As for your price-gouging case, an ethical quandary would remain if you were completely broke and dying of thirst no matter how reasonably the water was priced. And/or if the seller was just a neighbor who actually didn't want to sell at all but just keep it for himself. How is it more moral to keep and refuse to sell at any price than to keep unless someone offers you a high enough price? You must either think theft when needed to preserve life is morally justified or not.
If I must take a binary position, then yes. Theft when needed to preserve life is morally justified. In fact, it happens every day on a massive scale. Governments around the world seize up to half of what their citizens earn and redistribute it according to the needs of the whole, for example in order to save lives or support those who cannot support themselves for any of a number of reasons. I support the argument that taxation is theft, but not that it is wrong.
> If you want to argue that IP is not real ownership and should not exist [...]
I don't want to argue that IP is not real ownership. I want to argue that there is no such thing as real ownership, whether the property in question is physical or intellectual. Practical ownership is only what can be enforced through the monopolization of violence. Governments have the power to assert ownership of their citizens' earnings, but for the most part choose to allow citizens the privilege of keeping a portion of those earnings and pretend that they own the goods and services those earnings pay for.
This discussion has strayed quite a bit from the initial question of whether or not piracy = theft = bad. By challenging the reality of ownership, I'm trying to challenge the assertion that piracy is inherently bad because it infringes on ownership and ownership is a fundamental quality of the universe that cannot be rightly infringed upon.
That we choose to adopt certain principles, such as that of ownership, and act as if those principles are "true" in order to make sense of the world, is a perfectly legitimate practice, and I don't believe that you are wrong to do so.
Like textbooks written by the professors actually holding the lecture that change tiny bits every semester, especially in information relevant to coursework, to make used textbooks essentially worthless.
And the simple fact is you are not forced to possess textbooks nor attend the university, no matter how beneficial it may be to do so. This is how people rationalize all forms of crime.
This is a good argument. I'll try to speak for others when I say that the problem is with professors who actively engage in predatory behavior to gouge students. I appreciate that's not the norm, but it happens enough to at least be perceived as a major problem.
The predatory behavior lies in identifying a group of people who already have considerable sunk cost in their education, and then using a combination of methods (such as decreeing a monopoly by assigning your own books, and creating scarcity by insisting on this year's revised edition) to force them to purchase material or potentially waste the enormous sunk cost already incurred.
You write "we" don't do that, so I'm assuming you're a professor who assigns, and maybe even writes, textbooks. I'm sorry if this whole thread is turning into a personal attack on you. For my part, it absolutely isn't meant to be that. It's an attack on predatory practices that (a minority of) members of all professions occasionally engage in. This time the profession in question happens to be university professors.
I think few people have problems with IP law in and of itself. We have problems with the weaponization of said laws to exploit those in vulnerable positions.
The more people pirate textbooks the more publishers will pivot to a business model where they can make money. Such as with online software instead (they're already doing some of that with software like Pearson's MyLab, which forces students to buy the book anyway to get a license). At which point we're back to the same argument about the freedom to set prices.
Expensive textbooks are not the easier target, they are the only target. What people find issue with are certain predatory practices by a minority of bad actors.
I think it's great that you make an effort to pick more affordable textbooks, and I hope that your students are paying for them.
If someone punch me first, I’ll punch back. It doesn’t mean that I think it’s okay to punch people in general, but sometimes it’s warranted.
Not paying for recent version of Windows seems like a poor example, because not paying for spyware is a pretty good principle.
I mean, it takes no effort at all to copy/paste AGPL code into a proprietary project. But you're still not supposed to do it, right?
This is Microsofts doing.
As far as Im concerned this makes pirating windows totally ethical.
Speaking of principles, which principle is responsible for taking a working, perfectly stable OS and releasing "updates" for it that introduce spyware?
I just want to make sure we're holding companies accountable to the same degree we're holding individuals.
I know a lot of people who still have such sensitivities, they have money and houses and still steal cars just because that's how the grew up.
See, that logic of theft, be it software or hardware, doesn't really make sense. Stealing software is just as bad.
>Stealing software is just as bad.
Stealing software the same way people steal physical would require the thief to delete all copies of the codebase. This happens through ransomware, not piracy.
The owner of the copyright infringed car would just download his copy of the car again from the manufacturer. Why would insurance be involved?
I felt like people really wanted to emulate the west, partake in its wealth and successes, on the other hand there was this ingrained sentiment that it was a bit decadent and was not really “us” They didn’t understand us, and had their nose up in the air, snickering about the poor stray EE kids, who couldn’t distinguish investment portfolios from pension funds, the savages.
There was a very strong Us vs Them mentality, and if you couple that with the idea that copying isn’t exactly theft, it has made sure any moral qualms were quickly overcome with peer pressure. You were “stupid” if you even tried to own SW legally.
Its similar to how an american would feel about owning a Japanese good luck flag, or a nazi medal of honor. Yes there was a person behind it, somewhere, with his/her struggles and dreams, but at one point in time nobody really cared.
Couple that with the fact that some software packages were priced as decent cars, it made the decision pretty easy.
Not trying to defend it too much, just putting it into perspective so people might understand a bit better why someone from EE might feel the way we sometimes do.
DRM punishes your customer. Unfortunately modern technology companies have all but trained users to accept being punished for using their product so this behavior hasn't stopped.
[0] reasonable is, of course, subjective. Thus, some will pirate because even $10 is more than they are willing to pay, but you're unlikely to ever get sales out of these people anyway.
I can remember getting a DVD from Netflix, getting sick of all the unskipable previews, and downloading a pirate version before they had even finished. It's so true. When it's easier to pirate, the publishers need to sit down and rethink their whole existence.
In that time frame (where Netflix was still sending truckloads of DVDs across the country) I don't see how downloading the pirated version of a DVD would be faster than using DVD shrink on the Netflix DVD though.
0: This is more commonly/obviously supported for torrents containing multiple files, eg a TV show where you can get episode-1.mp4, then episode-2.mp4, etc.
Gabe literally built a DRM platform.
But he correctly identified that if you just said something people want to hear in an interview then even if you operate in literally the exact opposite fashion people adore it.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_G...
I know like a decade ago, steam emulators existed that could replace the steam DLLs for offline games (or potentially, but more risky: online games that don't rely on valve's servers).
I've not looked into it since, but honestly I'd be totally unsurprised if they never engaged in a war with the pirates on those tools, and they are no harder these days. My impression has always been that the Steam DRM is more intended to prevent casual copying than to be a real piracy deterrent. (This meshes with games on steam often including more invasive DRM systems on top of the Steam one.)
What about all the piracy that happened because of intrusive DRM? It certainly prevented that kind of piracy.
Make a good game and it'll sale.
You can pay $60 for day-one access to any of those games, you can wait a year to get them for $60 for the game plus a DLC, or just the game for $40. As time passes, their prices decay until you can get the full game plus DLC for $10 on sale.
This is great for people like me. I have no problem paying for day-one access for a game I really want to play on the first day (Cyberpunk), but I'll often load up on games when they hit that "bargain bin" price so that I have a backlog of potentially fun games to play.
Sadly CDPR seems to be fixing the wrong things. They even took out great accidental mechanics like the dodge boost, which was incredibly fun and added a lot of depth to the way you could move around the city. A lot of places aren't even accessible without it. You aren't supposed to go there, but a lot of areas reachable with just the double jump a bugged, too. Even without any mods you can reach a few out of bounds areas... I think removing the dodge boost is as if id had "fixed" the double jump instead of rolling with it. Similar with the slide invincibility glitch. I can see why they fixed that, but some way to jump from great highs is really necessary in a place as vertical as Night City. They replaced it with.. nothing. They also made most consumables useless by roving the ability to disassemble them instead of fixing the economy. There's literally no point in any of the drinks now. You also can't re-roll the stats of any legendary gear you find, so if it doesn't have any slots for mods it's useless. And other things. I honestly think that it was a better game at version 1.04. Performance was better, too.
I have actual concrete data about this¹ and unfortunately the percentage is much larger than you realise.
I'm still under NDA until 2024 but it's in the region of 60-80% of sales for certain games, especially RPGs which seem to get pirated the most.
People like to cite hugely successful products being DRM-Free or something as proof that it works, but for every project that works well there's hundreds that die in obscurity.
Also, people like to back a champion to "prove that it works" which inflates the margins of the champion product.
¹ - based on my time at Ubisoft, and based on Ubisoft titles only and when accounting for other differences between franchised games.
Take a person that has pirated many games, how do you know which ones they would have actually paid for? Even if you knew the ones they play the most, it woulnd't necessarily translate to a buy in the same order.
You can also estimate sales within a 5% margin of error. Other factors such as play time and ratings also allow you to understand what sales would have been.
There’s lots of data to draw from.
Is what? Pirated? How can you have concrete data of something that didn't happen? A copy that didn't sell can not count towards sales.
If it is based on sales estimation, then it could simply mean that the game didn't sell well because it was bad. Not every unsold copy of an estimation is automatically a pirated copy.
Keygens tend to be based on the cracker reverse engineering the licence key check algorithm, and then just spitting out a bunch of keys that fit it. Most people will pick the first key the keygen creates, which makes it easy to track the pirated copies.
The only way around the wholesale pirating of games is to make the game totally nerfed unless it can connect to a 'server'. This is why most AAA games all have at least some level of online features.
A release which gained 10M in sales which could not be pirated and scored 80/8 on metacritic can be compared to a release which sold 4 million but scored the same and has the same play time curves.
Obviously this is contrived, there are way more inputs, but you can see where I’m going.
Maybe the full data is more convincing, but ultimately you can't really know whether someone playing your game would've bought it other than if they did. If, for example, each iteration of some franchise sells less with more pirating going on, it probably means your fans don't appreciate the way things developed and just want to see where their once beloved franchise is going. Assassin's Creed used to be one of the best in gaming, but for me it's not even worth pirating any more. Should've developed the current-year story like it was foreshadowed in AS2, but the whole idea of training Miles using the animus to defeat abstergo was jus dropped to milk the fans once a year. Doesn't surprise me when people stop buying in such a case.
I mean, tons of people on this page are saying DRM doesn't reduce piracy and serves no purpose. But it's hard to make that position jive with the fact that the companies with tons of data on how DRM affects their bottom line keep paying for it.
But, you can't stop crackers. Bits of memory are bits of memory. They can be changed. The balance is making games highly available, and having content beyond just the base game. Such as online play, or physical merchandise with the purchase.
If I got a poster every time I bought a game id be liable to buy more games that I may not even play.
Yes, but that's because when you take a physical good off the shelf there isn't still a copy on the shelf. Software does not have this problem.
> Or in other words if software costed no money and always relied on donation, you'd be bankrupt.
There are obvious examples that contradict your point: Linus and The Toady One come immediately to mind. Though, admittedly, they are outliers.
They are doing exactly that. Pretty much all research has shown that DRM schemes are ineffective and mostly just cause problems for legitimate users.
The reason for DRM is mostly
1. Cargo culting.
2. Liability ass-covering (we did our best, it's the DRM company fault our game leaked!)
"Company wouldn't do anything unreasonable." is a really unrealistic takes - companies do unreasonable decisions due to managerial cargo cult pretty much constantly and consistently.
This is so true right here. The crackers who break the DRM just find it an amusing puzzle to solve, and the pirates who use what the crackers create never suffer the annoying side effects of the DRM thanks to the crackers work. Legitimate buyers on the other hand have to deal with situations where their paid for game literally won't run for them without a crack being installed because of DRM or broken-by-design anti-cheats.
(I know this from first-hand experience. Some of my paid games run fine after DRM removal cracks are applied, despite breaking in various fun ways prior to that.)
that and always-on gameplay generally do the job I think, atleast for games.
So it would not be surprising to have a similar situation there.
The people who actually make the software are fully aware that any DRM will be cracked within 48 hours of release (with a few small exceptions).
I guess that's also why AAA games are hyped so much before release, so that many people preorder it.
Never thought about it this way, but it does make perfect sense. Thanks!
The context of _this thread_ is computer games.
That's why I posted it.
However to this day I would rather crack and try and game before wasting $70-100+ on an unfinished piece of garbage, which I firmly believe 8/10 games are now.
With companies releasing broken games like this and 50gb day one patches that still don't fix shit, these days it's the game companies that don't have my trust, not the other way around.
I used to get into Early Access on Steam and we all saw the cesspool of forever-betas in that shit. In fact to this day, 10 years later I think, warframe is still in beta, and I dont think a single game I ever EA'd made it to production, all were thieves. Chucklefish was a great example of that. Jesus and they have control over the forums too so no dissent allowed. They never finished the game but posted pics of their new multi million dollar studio and new houses.
Anyway sorry but fuck games these days.
Edit-spells and stuff
Now with a good job and financial stability I have no interest in piracy. DRM does seem to punish paying customers meanwhile those who will crack the game and pirate still find a way.
When I was poor in college, either I would pirate a game or just not play it because there was just no way I could ever afford it.
Now as a grown up I'd much rather pay for the game both to support the creator as well as not roll the dice on a backdoored keygen.
I HAVE to believe that the number of folks that can both afford to buy the game and would buy the game, but would try to pirate first, is a fraction of a percent of the market.
Please stop punishing your fans :/