Anti-piracy or anti-customer ?

[Yorick]

Originally Posted by Luvian No one is trying to justify Piracy. Go ahead and try to point me to a post where I said Piracy was a good thing. This isn't about piracy being a good thing, it's about publishing companies being idiots. To quote the original poster: While I'm not opposed to software companies making a fair return on their investment, I'm not a big fan of onliine activation, or the installation of invasive, buggy DRM software. If a company wants to protect their rights, fair enough, but I expect them to tell me so *before* I hand over the folding. I don't see any pro-piracy sentiment in that. Maybe you guys should consider getting off your high horse?

You may not have directly Luvian, but the implications have been that piracy enhances sales.

[Luvian]

It doesn't, but it changes the playing field. It is the reality for anything that can be distributed digitally.

Pissing off your customers won't help. Especially when they could just as easily get the things illegally. You say people would rather steal when they can. Why then are people buying when they could steal?

When the other alternative to a pay service is free widespread distribution you can't go around alienating customers. You've got to convince them your more expensive product has a better value than the one from the pirates. That won't happen when the customer feel cheated and distrusted.

BAEN found a way to fight the pirates and it works for them. Stardock simply decided to ignore the pirates and focus on customer's satisfaction, and it seems to work for them. But I have yet to see restrictive, draconian restrictions put on the customers having any positive effect on diminishing piracy. On the contrary; Spore which had online activation and limited installs has become one of the most pirated games of all time.

To get back to what I said in the beginning regarding these schemes. Either the board members leading these companies are total idiots completely disconnected from reality and sales charts, or they are greedy and trying to get some of that second-hand market money. Seeing as they're all successful multimillionaires with stock in a wide range of companies, and seeing what I've read on this subject on the net, I'd say the second option is much more likely.

So to get back to the subject of this topic again I'd say the DRM is anti-customers, but the used market customers.

[Micah Foehammer]

Originally Posted by SpiritWarrior Well mate, i'd like to point out that this seems to be different to what you originally said, and I think Luvian took it that way in the beginning. Taking what you say here, of course there are buggy hacks and cracks around, it is the case for all games. This is the nature of piracy. You may get a buggy POS, or a virus-filled game or something different entirely. I can personally say, that every NO-CD crack I have used for NWN 2 (and for NWN 1 hotu) has worked perfectly and I still use them to this day simply because I tire of messing with DVD's. While a crack may be buggy, it is very rare for one to cause in-game issues like you are describing (this is the first i've heard of it). A NO-CD crack either works or it doesn't (don't you remember the tons of us who used them for BG2?). If it's doing something else, like messing with scripts or causing bugs in-game then the bottom line is it ain't what it's supposed to be.

Okay fair enough. I reread my first post and I see where things could have been mis-interpreted. My second post stated the issue of faulty no-cd cracks better.

Again for clarification, no cd-cracks, although technically illegal, don't bother me if a user pays for the game first and then uses the no-cd cracks simply to avoid the dvd loading. It's the use of them in concert with the bit-torrents that I really object to.

Perhaps I am also underestimating the ease and availibility of the torrents.

What has always surprised me is WHY software manufacturers haven't made a more concerted effort to shut down these torrent sites like they have with the Pirate's Bay?

@Luvian Just for clarification, second hand sales ARE technically piracy in some cases as some EULA's specifically state that the purchaser is in fact only buying a single user license which is NON-transferable. We can argue about whether the EULA is legally enforceable or even valid - but if you accept that type of EULA at face value, any DRM scheme that is designed to prevent second sales for those games is a valid anti-pirating scheme. I realize that is a FINE line though.

I also appreciate that being told in essence that you don't own what you paid for grates a bit, but such is the world of software licensing.

I will also freely admit that my sympathies lie FULLY with the software developers. I'm in the midst of a trans-continental legal battle over a series of copyright violations of some of my authored works so I really don't have ANY sympathy for any attempt to circumvent software licenses. Perhaps my viewpoint is a bit distorted by those circumstances.

[Yorick]

Originally Posted by Luvian Pissing off your customers won't help. Especially when they could just as easily get the things illegally. You say people would rather steal when they can. Why then are people buying when they could steal?

It's become a culture that complete ignores intellectual property rights.

The miscredited song I was talking about was and is available FREE from a legitimate online source, and yet kids were checking limewire first, which had the incorrect credit. "Ease of access" could also be described as "lazy". People usually pick the lazy option first. Such as going to Wikistupida rather than searching through other sources.

Otherwise I don't know.

Anyway, it's often not easier to get a pirated song. Itunes is free, and downloads in two seconds. You can preview every song, and search and organise your files. It costs 99c for a song. That doesn't break the bank.

And if you don't have the money, don't buy it. Go without. "I want I want" when you don't have the money, is what caused credit problems. It's called "greed".

It might be easier to steal than to get a job and earn the money to buy the music, but doing the latter will do your part to ensure more music gets made, while stealing, will do your part to ensure music DOESN'T get made.

[Legolas]

Originally Posted by Yorick 3. People aren't actually getting the book for free, they're getting a download. This is not the same thing, as he said, he's relying on the idea that people prefer to read a book, a paper, bound book, than read onscreeen, or printout the work (which has ink and paper costs of it's own). With an mp3 the experience is the exact same whether you buy it on itunes, or get it from P2P. You hear it out of the same speakers whether legal or stolen. Same with a hacked game. Same computer screen, same mouse... the feel is the same.

It seems to me this would be a good place to look for a piracy solution. Back in the days we had games with outstanding paper manuals, game character miniatures, scratch and sniff cards to add a dimension of scent, and a whole range of extras. While I wouldn't go so far as to make a game secondary to the other boxed content, I've no doubt clever design could sway a good number of pirates towards the legal side.
In the case of film, and particularly song, adding to the experience is perhaps more of a challenge than with interactive entertainment, but finding a way to make a difference may simply mean stepping away from the purely digital.
I do expect there will always be those who don't care about extras (even when they are the standard) and simply go for the picture/track/game, but if you can make sure they are visibly missing out that group won't be near as sizeable as it is today.

[Yorick]

Originally Posted by Luvian But I have yet to see restrictive, draconian restrictions put on the customers having any positive effect on diminishing piracy.

No? You haven't checked history? The British Navy for one. The American navy two. Both diminished piracy on a massive scale. Draconian worked.

As said, the internet is new and will only create laws and "draconian" measures on a need-to basis as it, like any other society, evolves.

I would prefer education myself. I'm not in favour of throwing pirates in prison. But I am in favor of your IP address being checked and blocked if you download illegally, be it child porn or pirated music/software/film.

[Yorick]

Originally Posted by Legolas It seems to me this would be a good place to look for a piracy solution. Back in the days we had games with outstanding paper manuals, game character miniatures, scratch and sniff cards to add a dimension of scent, and a whole range of extras. While I wouldn't go so far as to make a game secondary to the other boxed content, I've no doubt clever design could sway a good number of pirates towards the legal side. In the case of film, and particularly song, adding to the experience is perhaps more of a challenge than with interactive entertainment, but finding a way to make a difference may simply mean stepping away from the purely digital. I do expect there will always be those who don't care about extras (even when they are the standard) and simply go for the picture/track/game, but if you can make sure they are visibly missing out that group won't be near as sizeable as it is today.

Vinyl may well make a comeback anyway. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...tory?track=rss

[Luvian]

Originally Posted by Yorick It's become a culture that complete ignores intellectual property rights. The miscredited song I was talking about was and is available FREE from a legitimate online source, and yet kids were checking limewire first, which had the incorrect credit. "Ease of access" could also be described as "lazy". People usually pick the lazy option first. Such as going to Wikistupida rather than searching through other sources. Otherwise I don't know. Anyway, it's often not easier to get a pirated song. Itunes is free, and downloads in two seconds. You can preview every song, and search and organise your files. It costs 99c for a song. That doesn't break the bank.

It sucks about your miscredited song. Where was it available for free? If it was on itunes or something like that I'm not too surprised the pirates didn't try. Their itunes is limewire so that's what they check first. You could say both softwares are in competition.

I don't see how going to limewire is any harder than going to itunes, you just start the software, search, and then download. But this isn't really about ease of use anyway. It seems pirates would rather spend a while searching and downloading than paying or having to deal with some DRM.

I don't know what kind of deal you'd have to offer them so they see more value in your version than the pirate one, but it seems 99c a song isn't it.

Originally Posted by Yorick No? You haven't checked history? The British Navy for one. The American navy two. Both diminished piracy on a massive scale. Draconian worked. As said, the internet is new and will only create laws and "draconian" measures on a need-to basis as it, like any other society, evolves. I would prefer education myself. I'm not in favour of throwing pirates in prison. But I am in favor of your IP address being checked and blocked if you download illegally, be it child porn or pirated music/software/film.

That's not the same thing. There is a difference between real life piracy and a kid downloading songs in his mom's basement.

File sharing softwares are legal. Their locations are often in strange countries also, and so are the users so they can't be prosecuted under one country's law. And there are much much more digital pirates than there ever was real life pirates. What with some games being downloaded two hundred thousand times, from just one website. You'd probably have to jail half the population of the world before you could really stop piracy. It's rampant, you know.

But Government getting people banned from their ISP? That's something I agree with. It is the government enforcing the law. It does not overcrowd prisons for trivial crimes, and it could actually work for a while, until the pirates find a good encryption/spoofing/ip hider system for their peer to peer programs.

This isn't a physical conflict, it is a technological one. And you can never win a technological war because both sides will always develop new technology. I think piracy is a part of modern life we have to deal with.

[Luvian]

Talking about used games. Here's an arcticle about Gamestop's latest quarterly report, with a decrease in new games sold and an increase in used games.

[Yorick]

Originally Posted by Luvian File sharing softwares are legal. .

Boats are legal too. It's what you do with it that makes it piracy.
the difference between the bedroom kid and the pirate at sea is scale.
The kid in the bedroom is just one of a sea of pirates bringing down an entire industry, while the pirate at sea only affects a portion of his ocean.

One kid in their bedroom, if they upload a pirated song, can potentially steal millions from an artist. Certainly in my experience, the loss of publicity caused by one mistaken upload was pretty significant.

But whatever. It's all small-fry compared to having a daughter. She rocks my world.