Agreed.

I don't even know where to begin with your response. I feel like we're 50 IQ points apart. You fail to see the contradiction in your own morality on this issue just like you fail to grasp the basics of logic and argument formulation. Best I can offer you at this point is that we can agree to disagree, and move on.

You're right, we ARE 50 IQ points apart, let me explain it for you in words you'll understand.

Used:
Bob buys book
Bob has book
Bob reads book
Bob gives book to Jane
Jane has book
Jane reads book
Bob can not read book

Copy:
Bob buys book.
Bob has book
Bob reads book
Bob copies book
Bob gives copy to Jane
Jane has book
Jane reads book
Bob can read book.

Piracy:
Bob buys book
Bob has book
Bob makes lots of copies of book
Bob gives copy of book to anyone that asks
Bob has book
Jane has book
Steve has book
Tim has book
Many more people have book
Many people can read book

It's not about how many people experience the media for the purchase price.
It's about how many people can experience the media concurrently.

If you don't agree with that point of view, that's fine and dandy, that's all you have to say.

Also, just a piece of advice, next time you decide to insult someone, don't make it one so blatantly open to be flipped around on you. Being on the receiving end of your own insult is a rather embarrassing situation :p

I counter with compensate creators for the media/art you enjoy that you intended to buy if you did.

Is there supposed to be an insult in there somewhere? I guess I'll just have to take your word for it.

Anyways, yes, I disagree that concurrent users matters. I still don't see anything from your arguments to convince me otherwise. I doubt anyone else does, either.

Bob no longer has the book. Bob doesn't give a shit about the book because he already read it. It doesn't matter if Bob made a copy for himself because Bob will probably never read it again. Bob wants to know what the hell you're trying to say with your examples because they suck ;P

I'm just giving you a hard time, but I truly don't believe your argument is logical. Perhaps I'm not understanding it correctly or you aren't explaining what you are trying to say correctly, but either way it does not seem to be logically sound.

Edit: The bottom line is that people want to get paid for what they produce. So, the number of people that experience a product per purchase is exactly what matters. It is completely irrelevant that Bob gave his copy to Jane without making a copy for himself. What matters is that two people experienced the work of an artist for the price of one copy. I guarantee you that if you asked the owner of that material what mattered more, they'd say "Fuck it, let Bob and Jane have a copy, I just want to make sure anyone that uses my product actually pays me for my work."

I think our key difference lies in this:

Many people I know love to re-read books, re-play video games, re-watch movies, etc. or just maintain a "collection".
So if a person sells/gives it away, to me they're saying "I am truly done with this." If they maintain a copy for themselves they're saying "I am not done with this", whether it is to be part of a collection or enjoyed again in the future they have the desire to maintain ownership of it, instead of passing the ownership on to someone else.

The issue, to me, lies there.
They are maintaining ownership, and giving someone else ownership.

On the small scale (1 or 2 "extra" copies) I don't really care, I don't really do it myself, but it's one of those "eh.. it's 'wrong'" cases. Where I start to have issue is where instead of "I gave a friend a copy of this" is "I made a copy of this available to every single person on the internet who knew where to look".
You know what...

I think I will ask some of the ones I know. ;)

To be fair, there is an EULA when you first connect to the console's online service, and when a new update is applied. You have to agree to that to get digital games, but it is only applied to the delivery method and connecting to the company's network. The actual games themselves don't try to restrict usage through an EULA like PC games can, though that may change next generation.

It won't. The public/courts won't allow it. They drew the line in the sand with the online pass, which I am suprised has not been outlawed yet, I doubt the publishers will be allowed to go any further. The OP is notoriously sinister, as several games sold with it have since had their online servers shut down, which demolishes the pretense that the extra fee was needed to maintain servers, which is of course the official line, though the actual reason is "We want to discourage/kill used game sales".

But but but what if I'll never have the money in my lifetime to buy a Ferrari? How will I support that industry without the money? *slightly sarcastic*

I would be interested to hear what they say. The only reason I can think of that artists want to control their work is to make sure that they get paid properly. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone always did 'the right thing' for example, then we wouldn't even need copyrights. Bob would buy the book, finish it, and give it to Jane, and then when Jane was done reading it, Jane would send the publisher/writer a check for their wonderful story.

I understand what you're saying about collections and what not, but I think our difference here is in how we consider games, movies and books as products, compared to how we consider other goods, such as a chair, a fork, or a car. I consider books, movies and games experiences rather than just physical goods that can be reused and resold. That's why as I see it, a publisher wants to make sure that they get paid based on the total amount of users that experience their product, as opposed to being interested in there being a finite number available product, which would technically serve only to limit their profits.

So if you consider it from that point of view, then once Bob has experienced the book, it doesn't matter whether or not he keeps a copy for later after he gives it to Jane. He's already experienced it that first time, so whether or not he wants to read it again, probably doesn't matter. And then Jane gets to experience the book for free, so the publisher has given out two experiences for the price of one book.

Technically, one and only one person could buy a new book, and then give it away when they are done with it. And then that person gives it away, and so on and so forth. At the end of the year, 10,000 people have read the book but they've only sold one copy. The argument that it seems like you're trying to make, says that the publisher would be okay with that scenario because the number of copies remained fixed and the product changed hands without being copied. However, if instead 10,000 people bought the book, and all of them made one copy and gave it away, then 20,000 people got to experience their product for the cost of only 10,000 books. But in this case, assume that those extra 10,000 people weren't going to buy the book anyway - that's the key - so in the end, they essentially sold 10,000 experiences and got paid for all 10,000. I think the publisher would prefer the second choice.

Now neither of these situations is ideal, and of course copying the book is illegal, but I'm just using them as examples to try and understand what you're trying to say. Anyways I think we've beat this horse to death, but if you ever get around to asking your publisher friends about this, I would definitely be interested in hearing about what they had to say.

Publishers nothing.
Publishers are soulless, evil corporations that only want money, money and more money. Publishers have no friends and sit alone in their homes, sleeping on giant piles of money, and sipping on the tears of crushed artists from diamond wine glasses.

Artists are what I care about and know. :)

I'm just going to post my 2c. This is a fairly controversial subject so I just want to make it clear that I mean no ill will to those who disagree, and I take no offence to any upcoming rebuttals of my post.

I'd also like to remind everyone that isn't quite the black and white issue we like to make it out as. Piracy has its good side and its bad side, the question is more which outweighs the other.

I'll start out by saying that I don't think it's fair the way digital distribution works in this day and age.

In the past, all goods were to some extent made by hand, even something like a book - sure there were many copies out there and the author did not have to individually write every copy, but he did have to pay a publisher to produce more copies, which were then sold for a fee.

If a book was stolen from the shop, then you could say the author lost the cost of producing that book. If however someone purchased a copy of the book, read it, was done with it, and then gave it to their friend to read - the authors did not have a problem with this, after all, it only cost them the one fee to produce the book in the first place, so why charge two people? Technically this too like piracy will have resulted in some people who would have bought the book not buying it because they were able to receive old copies from friends - was there a big uproar about this? No, of course not, if the book was a hit, the author made a good sum of money.

Now the same author can type his book up once on a computer, not pay a single person any money, and have it available as a PDF file that can be copied infinitely without him having to pay a penny - and he can charge people for every copy made, effectively in the short term giving him a limitless well of money. The guy can spend a year writing his book and then spend 20 years selling millions of copies without spending a penny, constantly making more and more money. He's not continually getting free money from something his work has long been paid off on, something inferior to a book that you can hold in your hand - even in the rights department, since now, if someone hands this book over to his friend when he's done with it, he's now labelled a pirate and liable to be sued for a vast sum of money.

At this point you're probably thinking that I don't understand that the content creator deserves the money they've worked for - of course they do, and this is the thing, through digital distribution a content creator can become a self publisher for free, sell 10x as many or more copies due to the vast influence of the internet - but that's not enough, they now want to publish the little guy who downloaded a few books or games because he simply couldn't afford them or wanted to try them before he bought them - and rather than charging him, y'know, the price of the software downloaded, he's suddenly knocked over the head with a $100,000 fine because of all the peers that connected to his computer to download bits and pieces of the files while he was downloading them for himself. This is plain ridiculous, and only motivated by greed.

The fact of the matter is piracy isn't causing people to not get sales. It's doing two things One as a positive is that it's spreading the word and getting knowledge of games/music/film/software/books etc out to people who didn't previously know about them, or who might not have considered purchasing them until they tried them out and saw how good they were. The other is more negative - some of the people who pirate the item would have bought it but since they're able to obtain it for free they won't part with their money.

Now the fact of the matter is, you can't stop piracy unless you shove a load of unwanted DRM in your product - if you do that, you'll probably lose more customers than if you'd just been okay with the fact that no matter what you do some people are going to pirate it anyway - even worse if people get past the DRM as then even more people will pirate it in retaliation to this, even some users who normally don't pirate and simply want a DRM free version. Fining the little guys who aren't making any money and are just sharing or downloading files is not the answer, it's just harming people who aren't thieves or villains, but are simply using the internet for what it was designed for - sharing of files and information.

If you make a good digital product and advertise it well, particularly in the case of large companies, you will rake in much much much more than you need in profits and any initial loss in sales due to people pirating it will quickly be made up for by both legitimate and pirate owners of the product spreading the word about it and how well made it is - even moreso if you stray away from greed and DRM, as people will be genuinely happy to use the product and will recommend it to their friends.

In the information age this is one of the best ways to increase product sales, and for this reason I think if someone were actually to do an experiment in which two near identical products were created, the same amount was spent on advertising the products, but one of the products was easy to copy and give away and the other was filled with DRM - I think the DRM-free product would make a lot more.

Now if you're the creator of a product and you want to reduce the number of people pirating it, there are a number of things you can do other than DRM:
1) Make it good - this goes without saying, but if your product sucks, I'm sorry but not many people are going to want to pay for it.
2) Make the price reasonable. $50-60 for a game is not reasonable! SImple as that. I refuse to ever pay that much for a game no matter how good it is, if you're going to put a ridiculous price tag on it, I'm going to pirate it.
3) Make sure it's DRM free, or the DRM is unobtrusive - if your product is filled with nasty DRM, I'm either going to find a pirated copy that gets around the DRM, or avoid it altogether.
4) Make it worth the amount you charge - Don't charge $20-30 for a digital copy of a game when it's costing you very little/nothing to give out these copies - if you want to charge more, offer a real CD, a manual, a nice box, a map of the game world, a poster, whatever, physical goods are nice, and no-one can ever pirate the fancy hardback manual you made, sure they can have a PDF version but it's not as nice - even in the case of abandonware where the money isn't really going to the author any more I've bought many a game just for the nice box, manual and extras. I'll even pay extra cash for it over a digital copy, for sure.

Now I don't want to write a whole book on the subject but I think anyone who's bothered to read so far has made up their mind by now whether they agree with me or not, so now I'm going to explain when and why I pirate:

If a game has completely sold me with their trailer and ingame videos and the whole idea and concept, and the reviews are good, the price is reasonable, it's not filled with stupid DRM etc - I'll buy it outright.

If a book has good reviews, seems interesting, and is available as a proper in-hand copy and not just through digital distribution - I'll buy it outright.

If I was unsure of a game prior to knowing how to pirate, I simply avoided it like the plague, I'm a frugal person and I don't go around purchasing things unless I'm sure I'm going to like it. Since discovering piracy, rather than dismissing those games as not worthwhile because they failed to impress me prior to trying them - I pirated them, tried them out, and in many cases I was pleasantly surprised, found out I liked the games, and bought a copy. Some notable examples: Neverwinter Nights, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Arcanum, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital, Minecraft. All of those gems I'd have never purchased were it not for piracy, in the case of Minecraft in particular I think a large portion of its userbase discovered it this way, I'd say about 50% of the people I know personally who own it pirated the game prior to purchasing it. None of the people I know who pirated it didn't go on to buy it - the quality and addictive gameplay were enough to encourage purchases from everyone involved.

If a game seems poor at first and upon pirating it I still find it to be poor - I wouldn't have purchased it, and I still won't purchase it.

If a game is incredibly overpriced or full of obtrusive DRM, I'll pirate it, and I won't consider buying it unless that changes.

For reference I've pirated probably 80-90% of the games I've tried. I currently have around 60-70 games currently installed on this computer, around 50-60 of which I own legitimate copies of (most of which I'd tried before for free either on friends computers or via piracy) and the other 10 are pirated, some of which I never plan to buy and have simply not got around to uninstalling, some of which are great and are in my wishlist for the next games I go ahead and purchase, and some of which I'm trying out at the moment to see how good they are.

Tl;dr: Piracy can be good and it can be bad, I argue that it's good because imo if your product is good it'll help spread the word and increase sales more than it'll reduce them. In my case it's certainly done that.

The end.

Yes, my mistake, and I agree.

Jesus, just need to make a correction:

Self publishing is not really free.. well unless you're self publishing garbage. >.>

For a writer:
Yes, I can write a story (I've done so), turn it in to a PDF with free software and sell it online without spending anything but my time, and a bit of bandwidth, my work will not be available place where people actually buy ebooks, will probably not be formatted well, not to mention it will probably have a mountain of mistakes in it since I didn't bother getting someone to edit it, and while "technically" under copyright, it's not officially copyrighted.
For n author to go self-published, preferably they want to get a good editor, they want to get it copyrighted and get an ISBN, they want to get it formatted for Kindle, Nook, etc. and get it available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. All of this costs money, easily upwards of around $1,000 US or more, depending on the editor and the length of the book.

After they have done all this though, even with the highly increased exposure, money doesn't just magically roll in. They have to spend time, and often time money, promoting themselves to try and get even enough sales to recoup the costs of publishing, let alone actually "make money".

For a musician:
Where do we begin? They have to buy and maintain their instruments, after that yes.. they could just record sessions on to their computer and sell them online, once again for the cost of bandwidth and time.. but if they don't want to suck, they need to get either good recording equipment, or time in a recording studio (neither is cheap), then record the tracks, which can take many hours in the studio for a single 1 hour long album, then they have to either have the good software, or hire someone to polish up the tracks and format them for an album. Then they want to get it copyrighted, and get it on to various sources where they can actually get people to buy their music.

Once they have done that, they are still, once again, a single name in a sea of millions. So they need to spend their time and money playing live shows wherever is willing to take them (and if they're lucky pay them a pittance), to try and get big enough that people actually know their name and want to buy their music..

As we go in to video games, movies, etc. the costs start to rise even further for the artists who want to actually produce a quality piece outside of traditional means.

The digital distribution market isn't a "magic money button" for artists. The internet is an incredible tool for the struggling artist, but it still requires them to put in time and money, and a good chunk of both, to actually be able to try and make it on their own.

Digital distribution is a magic money button for Publishers (whether books, movies, music, games, whatever) though, and that's where one of the problems rests. Publishers charge as much for the digital copy as they do for the physical, and give the artist the same cut... so there's a huge chunk more profit in digital over physical for publishers, especially since digital cuts out the 2nd hand market.

Within the realm of your budget is an unspoken part of what I said. Also, within reason, if you're someone who stays home all the time volunteering in a foreign country you probably can't pay for all the English speaking movies you watch. I know from experience ;)

In the end if you want to support what you enjoy you probably will to the best of your ability. There are always selfish fucks who don't connect the dots, not sure what can be done about them anyway so companies should probably focus on making purchasing easier for them than piracy, like Steam does for PC games.