I like this post by DarrkPhoenix. I want to mention :
"The only thing up in the air is whether the content producer gets paid as a result of the person acquiring the content under these conditions, and the answer to that question is largely dependent on how the content producer decides to try to profit off their content. "

because spindown says,
"You are exactly right, the existence of piracy is simply a reality that needs to be be dealt with in a pragmatic manner. Whatever one thinks about piracy morally or philosophically is ultimately irrelevant."

But I don't understand what pragmatic could mean here if it isn't dependent on some understood moral/philosophical/ethical reasoning already. I do understand that discussions can be taken off in ways that aren't useful. Speculations that aren't useful, possibilities that are impractical, facts that are irrelevant or unimportant. But, wouldn't you need some sense of what is the most good for the most people and what isn't (and why) in order to decide what to do about piracy or whether it would be a concern compared to not a concern? But maybe I don't understand though and am missing something. thanks!

Being pragmatic about things basically means figuring out what it is you're actually trying to achieve, recognizing what the reality of the rest of the world is, recognizing what your own resources and options are, then given these things figuring out the best way to go about achieving what you want to achieve. It also means checking concepts such as ethics, morality, etc at the door, unless those things specifically are a part of what you're trying to achieve. Now, trying to come at the issues of copyright and piracy from the perspective of what achieves the most good for everyone involved only makes sense if you have the ability to easily change the way most of the world operates. Content producers don't have this power, most governments don't have this power, pretty much no one has this power. Thus any discussion coming from that perspective is not pragmatic, it is entirely academic.

Content producers, for the most part, have the goal of wanting to make money off of what they produce. What they have control over is how they try to monetize what the produce- what business model they go for, what specifically they're trying to sell, what channels they offer the content through, how much they charge for it, how they market it, etc. They have very little effective control over factors outside this realm. Thus taking a pragmatic approach would be them acknowledging what they do and don't have effective control over, what the state of the rest of the world is, and figuring out the best way to make money off of their work based on those things, rather than complaining that the state of the world should be something other than what it is, or expending resources trying to change things that they have very little effective control over.

"What they have control over is how they try to monetize what the produce- what business model they go for, what specifically they're trying to sell, what channels they offer the content through, how much they charge for it, how they market it, etc. They have very little effective control over factors outside this realm. [...]"

I understand what you mean after thinking about it for a while, and maybe that already is happening. Maybe cheap games tend to be sold that way because sellers know that they appeal to a certain group that can and will pay for them at that price. The same for hyped big budget games sold at the price they are (taking into account estimated piracy), and advertised as they are, more like movies.
I agree with Bobbie Smith (IIRC) that digital content could be made even more convenient than it is now. If it wasn't I wouldn't mind though. But I don't think that publishers or most developers will put their games onto peer to peer networks because they think, and I think too, that too many people will take the game for free and not compensate the maker if it isn't part of a definite agreement with that expectation, like with any other kind of thing sold, it protects the seller from dishonesty on the part of the buyer.

If somehow that wouldn't be what would happen, and lots of data of lots of downloading could be tracked and demonstrated that piracy was a stable and so insignificant thing that sellers could safely ignore it, then I could feel more comfortable about it. But even then, if somehow it got out of control, I would want the sellers or a third party to have the authority(or even a community of buyers who are aware of it) to stop it from causing considerable destruction.

I would be happy if nothing changed and people did all compensate reasonably, if media were put out for free without tracking transactions. But that would depend in my mind on a personal ethic and integrity to do it without supervision. If there were practically no piracy already, sellers would have the confidence to try it. I'm not blaming pirates because that is not helpful to the situation. I am making an observation about what I think happens.

It's late and it's all I can come up with immediately.

Your problem here is that you're still thinking of how you'd like the world to be, and refusing to acknowledge reality as it stands. The impact that piracy has is ultimately irrelevant. The past two decades have shown that piracy is not something that can be fought effectively through technical or legal means, and this is part of reality that content producers have no power to change. If someone wants content they will be able to acquire it easily, conveniently, and for a price that they find reasonable. The only power content producers have is to offer their product in such a way that the easy, convenient, and reasonably priced option that many people prefer to use also involves paying the content producer.

I see what you did there....

Mr. Brecht.

It is clear people are afraid, so you get ACTAs and SOPAs and DMCAs and all the other IP laws, but change is inevitable..sooner or later people will drop those laws.

If someone invented Star Trek like replicator, many people would be afraid, wanting to ban it crying "it takes away our jobs!!" but sooner or later people would accept it.
Sure the paradigm will shift completely, and less filler will get made, but who says that is a bad thing?

I just hope I will live to see it.

edit - god damn this horrible quote system, I was responding to fenixp.

I actually got the 'reply' notice, so that's ok :D

Anyway, what I'm saying isn't that system wouldn't be good, what I'm saying is that people, in their current mindsets, are incapable of handling it. It's illegality and some ammount of technical prowess that keeps many from pirating, take that away and they just won't care.

You're saying that people who enjoy the art will support it; I'm saying that overwhelming majority will laugh in my face when I tell them to buy a game they keep saying is 'The best thing they have ever played.' People are complaining that they're treated as bastards, when in reality... They are.

I don't think this is true, For one, what I wrote above. I personally know a bunch of adult, reasonable people that keep saying that 'GoG games are fantastic, I hope I find this one on piratebay!' Reality is that majority of people don't know how to crack a game, so DRM works. If you walked up to them and said "Hey, you can get the game for free! But pay for it if you like it, m'kay," they would just get it for free. If shift of power to customers were to work, we would need entirely different mindsets.

Yes, greed seems to be ingrained in society now. We use phrases like "beating the system" and "it fell off the back of a lorry" to cover our greed. And before anyone says "a lot of people do a lot of good" - yes that is true, and what is strange is that it'll be a lot of the same people. Perfectly upstanding, honest and generous people will happily play a pirate DVD or game, or buy a cheap laptop from a guy in a pub. Petty greed is rife.

For that reason, I believe that no matter what the system was, you would still have an equivalent of "pirates" who circumvent that system for their own ends.

I think that the publishers are not actually scared of these hard core pirates ("selfish gits" in my earlier classification) - because they realise they cant do anything about them and don't count in the "lost sales" argument anyway. Nor are they worried about the small minority who see themselves as "fighting the cause".

No, they are terrified of the growing "don't know better" group who are fuelled by this petty greed.

I spent two minutes searching for a guide on how to crack a game. I think its more accurate to say that the majority of people are too lazy or too insecure about their computer skills. And why should they be otherwise? Another two minute search for any programme I want and I can find a working crack. Ignorance works, DRM is just an inconvenience.

Edit: But perhaps you are on to something. If everyone knew how to get around DRM then they would probably get something more effective. So it's actually easier for people like me and the author of the letter that the majority are unable to get around it. We can keep getting our products in the most convenient manner with with the most convenient price while the rest of world has to suffer convoluted security measures.

I develop very high cost software for which we feel the need to use complex hardware and/or software based licence protection. It causes no end of support nightmares and additional development grief. On several occasions I have suggested simply pretending that we have protection in there and dutifully sending out licence updates each year to our users. I was only half joking.

Heck, I think my Windows 7 is pirated the legal way.

You wonder what that means?
A friend has got a volume license for schools or whatever and given me one. Which is probably still legal under EU law ("Erschöpfungsgrundsatz") unless that was planned from the beginning (in which case it might be cheating) or possibly unless he would have taken money for it.

Microsoft can't do anything since their check shows my license is genuine.

In all seriousness then, what do you think is the best way to protect your software? Since you have to deal with it everyday your insight would be a lot more conclusive than our hypothetical. Is the scarecrow tactic really the most cost-effective deterrent?

It is not directly comparable, it is a completely different type of market. We are dealing with a relatively small number of clients and are using licensing for other purposes, namely to police:
- access to separately licensed feature sets
- "size" limitations - how large a system they can model with our software
- concurrent user access limits
- annual support contracts

I suppose, rereading the above, there are obvious similarities.

We are largely protecting ourselves from organisational laziness, rather than deliberate piracy. Where an organisation might purchase a licence and then allow (through action or inaction) the software to propagate to all their users, or might forget to renew their annual support contract.

You are also dealing with different numbers. Remove three or four zeros from the user base of a mainstream game. Add two or three zeros to the per-unit cost.

Personally, I would like to live in a world where we could trust each other. So if one of our customers find they need a new feature or an extra uses, they just send us the money.

Sadly, I don't have an answer - if I did then I wouldn't have to "deal with it every day".

I don't have much say in this, but I would prefer if our system was based on enabling an organisation to manage their "account" with us as opposed to us policing their account. In other words, if they find they need an extra user or feature, they turn one on (so to speak) and send us a cheque. If the "account" was audit-able at both ends both in terms of what was enabled and what was used then that should be sufficient. It would wok the other way also by allowing us, or them, to look at their usage and say "here, we're not actually using all the licences we are paying for, lets reduce our number of licences".

As for the games industry - I certainly think DRM is a waste of time and an annoyance to legit users.

Continuing along those lines we can consider how Valve and Ubisoft have found distribution models which limit piracy more than most. They're not going bankrupt as far as I see... :)

So the insight here is that defenses of piracy, even if based on moral principles of consumer defence (consumer entitlement?), or based on pragmatical might makes right (and where does that road take us in the end?) force distributors to escalate their methods.

At the end of the the day, the producer of content will not produce unless he is content with the level of control he will have. In this case that means a trend to Steam, always on DRM, etc...

So even from self interest (we like GoG more than Stam don't we?) we should not ignore considerations of how the world should be.

Living only for the short term is how we got in this huge debt mess we're in, let's consider the incentives of the kind of system that such pragmatic considerations take us to. Forced euthanasia at age of 60 anyone?

Don't take me wrong, I agree with everything you said so far, and it sees you're ok to live with it. But are you really? And do you see the kind of consequences such thinking points to?

Is it so hard to take the moral stand as it comes to entertainment? We're not talking about necessities of life here.

People are talking about piracy like some thread that is looming at the horizon. That is wrong. Piracy is real and it has been with the internet since it began. I downloaded PS1 roms in the late 90s and played them on a hacked PS1. Even before the internet, piracy was a part of digital media. My brother had a collection of over 100 pirated C64 games in the early 90s/late 80s. Right now, piracy is at an all time high. Just about every person knows how to get games and songs for free. And I'm not even talking about elaborate forms of piracy, there is streaming of movies, or downloading MP3s from youtube available even for the biggest computer dummy. Is the enternainment sector dying? Quite the contrary. In a time of economic downturns the sector grew massivley. There have never been more bands, more games or more movies and the whole sector is making more and more money. The last couple of years have been dubbed "the second great depression", somehow this hasn't affected the entertainment industry, despite ever growing piracy.

So far piracy has no negative effect on the industry on a financially relevant level (Well, the "big five" record companies had some serious losses, but I don't really care for them).

So why the "big hate" for piracy?

In my opinion, this has nothing to do with people being concerned with the devs getting their money. The most common arguement here was "pirates don't deserve it". This implies that I deserve it because I paid for it. In the minds of many people, that excludes "freeriders". Because if I paid for it, so should he! This isn't about "justice" this is about envy. People are angry that they were "foolish" enough to pay for something others get for free. They feel treated like a fool by the pirate. This is a backwards and wrong way to think about this. I pay because I want to pay. I pay because I want the dev to have my money. And I don't care if others are getting it for free. I don't care if they "deserve" it. The relation is between me and the dev. He gave me joy, I support his effort. And I'm not talkning about some utopia here, this is how things are happening right now in the internet.

Take the Louis CK example. And this isn't the only one. Many bands have released content for free and later made a profit by selling it via their website.

There has been some eleborate socialogical studies made about this, maybe I'll dig out my other post, but I'm not going to type this now again.

And for a closing thought, how much more does a person that paid 5$ for a HiB deserve the games than a pirate? Or people who join IGN prime only for a free game, with no intention of ever using that service properly and leaving it after they got the code?