I thought it more 'incomprehensible' than 'hilarious'...;)

Well I will allways belive that banning pirates from the internet is justified.

I do not belive there ever will be a true "silver bullet" solution to the problem.
As long as there is a demand for it, pirated software will allways be available no matter what. Handling it case by case would be best.

One thing I think would have a large impact is what Time Warner is now doing in my area.
Not only are you just paying for internet service now, the service plans are becoming "flexible". Your paying for it like pay for a utility.
More bandwith you eat up = more you pay for the service.

So the download junkie down the street is now going to have to pay a lot more for all that massive downloading.
So you get a 2 pronged effect,
1. After getting the rather new and much larger bill for using up the bandwith, he's going to think twice since its going to cost him money now.
2. My connection speed goes up =D.

Piracy has existed as long as writen media has existed.
It's just untill recently it has not been a (big) problem for the industries.
It really hits the bottom line now.
Studio "A" may have turned over $100,000,000 in "profit" but a large ammount of that money is reinvested as wages, material, ect.
Companies and industries are not cash sponges soaking up revenue, money is a constant flow through them.
"If" there is a raw, true bottom line profit, its probably only 3-5 cents on the dollar. And thats only if things are running right without unexpected losses.

Piracy was time consuming and somewhat expensive back in the day, and that was the best deterrant as a result. Only really determined individuals were prosecuted. Even large operations didn't affect the bottom line of a industry much.

P2P sharing was hard to, usualy it involved buying a blank (insert whatever), copying it yourself and then giving it to the other person, in person.
DvD burn drives didn't exist and VCR/casset copies sucked.
The industries cared, but not enough to spend money chasing down everyone with a VCR and a tape deck and then prosecute them.
It was way to many people that made copies that were not as good as the originals and only gave them to the people closest to them. They would have ended up spending more money chasing everyone down then what they would have earned if everyone bought legal.

Well computers came along.
First data storage was limited, computers were very expensive, dial up modems were slow.
So the industries didn't care so much about computers in the home either, untill CDs came along.
The movie and music industries tried to block the DvD hard drives in home computers, as well as hard drives that could burn thier own CDs. Thier fear was justified but fell short since you still would have to buy blank CDs, copy them yourself and then give them to someone personaly.
Then MP3 came along with faster internet connections, harddrives doubling in size every few months and a global internet with servers overseas.
Napster treated the music industry with all the gentleness of a prison anal rape.
The was also an unawareness of what everyone was doing was wrong or not. Copyright infringement was not a hot button issue since it was not actively prosecuted or covered by the media.
Personaly, my first memory about the issue was reading a story about a young boy who downloaded about 12,000 songs not knowing it was illegal. I thought in disbelief, there are not 12,000 GOOD songs.
Well everyone found out it was wrong to do what they were doing, but didn't care. They were getting something free from the magic world of the internet. And alot of people in thier own form of logic still think what thier doing is not wrong.
And the best part? It costs people praticly nothing to do it. All you have to do is get a half decent computer with half decent internet connection and your set.

So yeah its eats into the bottom line of a industry when they have such a large ammount of sales lost and have to spend extra revenue on security on thier product.

Well I don't care that its "copyright infringement" or any legal meaning its still theft in my eyes.
Go apeshit, or whatever, I don't care.
If I were to beat the hell out of you in an alley and take your stuff,
Is it a mugging? Or will you call it "agressive negotiation"?

Using arguments like "it was a shitty game" is not good enough.
Read a review, thousands are online right now for praticly any game you can think of. Game makers buying off the game informer website? Well read some player submited reviews.

"Not avaible in my country" Sorry, nothing anyone can do about that. Then again downloading pirated software mare not be a crime where you are so feel free.

"I am a student and/or I can't afford the new games with my current job" Sorry to say this but, You should probably shift your priorty from gaming to finding a better job for yourself or finishing school. Or, you could just be patient a little while and watch the price of the game drop after a couple of months on the shelf. It won't kill you.

I like Stardock's SINS game and how they treat thier customers. If Stardock makes another game soon I'll probably buy it.
I haven't bought an EA game in I don't know how long. (probably have if it was from a company owned by EA and I didn't know) Why? Well It kinda goes back on principal of how they treated thier football game franchise, they are dicks.
Blizzard? WOW was both the best and worst game, played it a while. It was fun but recycled alot of the same elements over and over.
Blizzard makes abother game soon? I probably won't buy it since they lost alot of thier creative team recently. Unless it gets good reviews I probably won't even look at it. I came close to buying Hellgate since it had much of the same team that made the games I liked working on it. But I waited and found out that it was nothing like what everyone wanted it to be.
So yeah I use shopping skills for buying games. I look for what I am interested in, read reviews, look at player reviews, and be patient. Guess what? I very rarely get burned. It still happens but o well.

Not so much--TWC is tying the transfer quotas to the speed tiers. So you can get fast and (comparably, but still low by any sane standard) high cap, or slow and low cap. It rather annoys me since if they take it national, it means my prices are liable to go up. Hopefully the backlash is enough in Texas that they don't.

I expect, as do many, that file sharing is just a scapegoat in that particular case. They're likely just doing it to try and make a bit of extra cash while not having to bother building up their network any. Plus there's the added benefit of strangling online streaming video (it was recently found that Youtube and similar are using more bandwidth than P2P overall) so people have to keep using cable TV.

So unless you happen to be unlucky enough to live in a monopolized area, they are going to lose a ton of customers to a provider offering standard flat-rate and "change their minds". If my ISP started throwing excrement like that, I'd switch faster than you can say something that takes a really short time to say.

And that is what industry-wide agreements are for. (aka "trust" or "cartel", which is supposed to be illegal, but big companies are getting away with it more and more) If everybody does it, you have nowhere to go. And all the companies get to make more cash for less investment. Everybody (who matters) is happy!

And here we come to the crux of the problem - companies abusing the rights of the customers, while at the same time a lot of noise is being made about certain individuals abusing the rights of companies.

And as usual in such things, those who are the least to blame take the punches, on both sides.

I agree, kryo. This sounds like a case of a media giant not wanting to spend money to upgrade existing infrastructure to handle a greater bandwidth load. Is it just my imagination or is it the case that the more money people have the stingier they become?

Well, otherwise they wouldn't have that much money in the first place.

Yeah alot of people localy are not exactly happy with TWC's "plan".

Myself included was not exactly happy with it since I used to do alot of online gaming.

It has had the effect of slowing down people's usage of the service tho.
I was just pointing out that now mass downloading is no longer widely avaible for the same low price of a casual user. And not many people like spending more money for a chance to get something "free".

That doesn't make sense - it is still cheaper to download a pirated game than to buy a legitimate copy, no?
And besides that, flat-rate is still the norm in the "free" world as far as I know.

So I should think this is just one of them "business strategies" at work.

Oh yeah, with all the problems in the world, Piracy of entertainment is the scourge of society. Why do they even concern themselves with this? Maybe they should try to get on the free-content train like NBC has. They could make so much money through advertisements if one system was able to monopolize the trade of free content like iTunes has the paid content. But that would be to hard. They just like to blame it on Internet users like us.

In my opinion, the game companies are screwing the customers harder than that the pirates are screwing the game companies.

Like Zaisha said, it's basicly a cartel. That's really the big problem (by far not only in the entertainment industry). There's a bunch of producers working in the same market. They know not to lower their prices because they know when they do that so will the other guy, and all producers would get stuck into lowering their prices untill they're at a minimum and thus their profit is down to a minimum. They don't even have to make a deal with each other, they just know not to lower the price, meaning there's no way anything can be done legally. It's the big problem of current capitalism only most people don't see it or the ones who do are the ones who don't want people to see it.

Take cd's for example. The actual cost of making a cd is 10 cents (actually less but ok). Even adding transport and sales costs (which are both very cheap for cd's) to that won't get it near 50 cents. Now, artists often get contracts for several million dollars or more. Up that they get a percentage of every cd sold, usually around ten percent. Next to that there's alot of band merchandise and live tickets being sold. Making any well known artist extremely wealthy. It may sound strange, but still after taking off all these costs we're not even near the actual price of a cd. Because the record companies will add alot of money to it. What for? Buying a new cruise ship, the last one was only 20 metres.

It's really not much different for the gaming industry. Except of an artist there's a bunch of developers who get paid normal wages and more money goes into developing in general.

This is not how capitalism was intended to be fair. The idea is, take all costs, add a little bit profit for the boss and you got a product price. And not take all costs and add 30 times that for the boss.

In short, capitalism is made in such a way that product prizes are connected to producing costs. But because competition is not working, prizes are only set to maximize profits. Which mean that maybe a select few people get very rich, but consumers are screwed. And especially in the entertainment business this is extreme, due to actual producing costs being very low (thanks to current technology), but because it's a high quality luxury product, companies can ask alot of money for it.

Personally, I find that worse than piracy. Especially since most illegal downloads would not be a purchase otherwise (which means nobody lost anything in the economic sense). Ofcourse, people who download everything and don't support any of the companies/artists they really like I certainly don't respect, and the people selling it for their own gain even less, let that be very clear. But downloading what I wouldn't buy anyway doesn't bother me no, and I certainly don't see why it should.

Personally I think it's a good bad situation. Software like Macromedia Suite and Microsoft Office is ridiculously over priced and people in school can't afford it. If they ban pirates like school people who NEED this software for school it will just make it even harder for people to do things therefore making people less happy and eventually forcing companies to lower software prices to make them more affordable. Game praters though should be banned as games are not a necessity and it just takes money away from those companies. Honestly I remember going on ot macromedias site one time and they were selling software for like $1000... then people wonder why pirating came along.

---Warning: Developer Rant. The following is not targeted directly at anyone here, but rather a general public attitude that some individuals hold---

Not all entertainment industries, companies, and practices are the same. I am tired of people ignorantly looking at any business as 'the man'  - some faceless corporate behometh ready to squash anyone in sight. Guess what? Ironclad is a corporation....ahhhhh run for your lives!  Come on. We are just regular people with names, families and lives, just like you. No one here has a head of grey hair, wears a suit to work, and drives a BMW. We just happen to work hard doing something we love. I can't stand 'the man' any more than you do. I hate getting ripped off too. I was recently speaking to a kid at circuit city who was telling me how upsetting it was to have so much merchandise stolen everyday. I replied by saying, I know exactly how you feel. I explained that I owned a game development studio and how irritating it was when pirating got out of control.  I could tell he was nervous and scrambling for something to say as I stood there looking into his eyes. At first he said he didn't believe me, then he remarked, "well you don't actually recieve much from the sale of games anyway, do you?"  I was dumbfounded. 

Well, I know it isn't directed at me, but to reply to it anyway. I certainly don't think they're all the same, the ones that actually do give a quality product and support will certainly end up on my game shelf.

Actually, I do wonder. How does it work it funding at Ironclad? Is there some group funding it all and reaping the benefits?

The way I see this subject, is that in a lot of cases, it's not piracy really.

They download a program, yes, but it comes down to whether or not they deprive the makers of it of any profit, which is what the laws come down to, and say the person wouldn't have bought the program anyways, then downloading it does not deprive the makers of any of their money.

I think that there is a lot of difference between customer-friendly corporations like Ironclad or CCP (makers of EVE Online and generally known for their dedication to their work and free expansions which is a rarity bordering on endemic nowadays) and behemoths like Sony (famed for ramming a thriving online community (SWG) into the ground regardless of the wishes of the majority of their paying subscribers) or EA (have-money-will-take-more-for-every-thing-you-can-imagine-and-some-you-can't).

While I do not condone piracy simply because I know how much effort goes into making a game, I cannot say I care too much about the general attitude of the corporate bigwigs towards gamers (and we all know what kind of bigwigs I am talking about) either.
Ultimately "sticking it to the man" is just as empty an excuse for ripping off as "piracy is the root of all our woes". Ultimately, the sooner everyone learns to be honest with themselves, the sooner will a pirate stop and ask himself what exactly is he doing and the sooner corporate chiefs will do the same.

And then perhaps there will be less wailing and gnashing of teeth and more honest and fun gaming.

wrong on two counts. well, maybe. dunno if you live in the US, if so then your gas tax isn't being set aside to fix roads. the federal tax goes to the general fund where it can be spent on silly things like $10,000 toilets and laws prohibiting incandescent light bulbs. (better stock up on them by 2014. personally, i'm gettin' into that black market.) your millage may vary with state taxes.

what you don't take into account is the affect of adjusting the price on demand. it's a simple point to miss, but when you think about it, your assessment would have to assume that your demand for gas is exactly the same as it was when it was $1.50/gal. I dunno about you, but I sure as heck ain't pining for a Hummer H1 anymore (H3's are for pansies who suck at overcompensating :-D)

it would be fair to say that we wouldn't get 100% of the difference the tax would make. the savings wouldn't be phenomonal. still, gas stations and oil companies in general know that enough people scan the town for the cheapest price. even reduction of a few pennies will cause people to flock. competition is what makes capitalism great!



ahh, but that's not the whole story about the pirate market. most probably wouldn't buy the item. but some would. it's at least worth figuring out how many. back in the days of Napster ("You'll never shut down the real Napster." i'd be impressed if anyone gets the movie reference without googling it) there are many songs i would have bought CDs for had Napster not been available. in fact, when i grew a conscience and got out of my college days narcissism i actually did buy several of them.

though, arguably, DRM has for a while driven people into piracy who weren't there before. there are stories about average joe folks who, say, wanted to copy a dvd because their kids might damage the original copy and, finding they can't because of pesky CSS, they download the movie using Kazaa or equivalent. they aren't bad people, and sometimes they don't know better. all the same, it's clear that fighting piracy will at some point actually bring about further piracy as folks who wouldn't do wrong otherwise are driven to the dark side.

At any rate, you can't just "ban" someone from the internet. The only way you prevent it would be to tail the individual pirate FBI-style, and there aren't enough FBI agents and anyways I'm sure they'd prefer to tail the really bad criminals. anyone with a laptop can access the internet at a free hotspot. then there's hotel kiosks, cyber cafes, your friend's house, and so on. if you are a college student, and i bet most pirates are, you have an account with your school.

i suppose you could "ban" it in the sense that Bad Things will happen if we catch you trying to log on. sort of like the Prohibition in US history, only less effective. (ever wondered why bootleggers are called "bootleggers"? it's a prohibition reference to hiding booze in a flask in your bootleg.)

I'm a bit late, but this is a fun discussion.  However, several critical facts have been skipped over if you're thinking at all about the US.

To have a constructive debate on any subject, you need to have something you agree on.  Most (999/1000) people's opinions on copyright law are completely baseless, though the better informed half may have enough "rules of thumb" to figure out some stuff.  Really, though, unless it's your job or a hobby it's too complex and there's too much false info and too many lies floating around for the ordinary person to figure it out.  Since we're (mostly) from the United States and US law copyright law originated with British law and spread to much of the world, it's the best basis. 

Firstoff:  The whiny pirates are partially right.  Intellectual property is not actually property, and abusing it isn't theft.  This has no bearing on how "wrong" it is, or whether you can get punished, though, but it does place some important limitations on the extent to which copyright is applicable.  Effectively, copyright is a government-gifted monopoly over the use and distribution of a work and derivatives, so that cool people like Stardock will make more (or as the Constitution says, to promote the progress of science and useful arts).   This means that application of the copyright monopoly is heavily limited through the principles of Fair Use.  The author's creation is not their baby, and the Supreme Court does not look kindly on those who forget this (see Sony v Universal City Studios).

This is where you run into problem territory trying to force people off the net.  Shaking them up for money (i.e. settlement letters) appears to be a rather dubious practice, as shown by the judicial responses in Arista vs Does.  Forcing them off the net is going to be extremely difficult:  the RIAA's IP address hopscotch is not going to work here - and you really, really don't want to mess up and (for example) take a classroom offline due to educational use of material which fits under Fair Use.

Practically, you'd have to force every ISP in the country to do an unprecedented level and range of deep packet inspection, replace all wireless access points with new versions which don't allow for open wifi, and generally lock down the internet to the point where the content providers themselves would take a heavier financial loss than from piracy. 

Even then, you'd still have false positives and only catch the less technically adept (the opposite of who you want).  Basically, this is a hilariously bad idea. 

Your post is wasted on this bunch. Welcome to the "useless post educating idiots" club.

@ProzacMann

In Toronto, we can take out game software from the library. I am not sure how up to date the list is from our local library.

And why don't students take out books from the library. Well..they do. But as far as textbook goes, you can only take a book out 2 weeks at a time, and you need the book for the entire semester and at times the entire year. And every other student in your course needs to use the book too. Soo everyone figured it is cheaper to just xerox the entire text. I were in courses where the prof told us in the case where the book is ridculously expensive to just photocopy the book.

That seems to me to be assuming that the price is *not* being driven my supply and demand. If the cost is driven by Supply curve X Crossing demand curve Y (Simplistic I know, but close enough for forum econ 101) then taxes don't change where that point is.

Sure there may be indirect affects on the supply curve because of profitability on suppliers and so on, but that's the same supply curve that's going to be moved by the demand going up anyway, so I'm not seeing that as all that much of an issue - the affect on price is still going to be so much lower than the tax revenue you're losing that it's kinda silly to contemplate it.






Oh, I certainly wouldn't argue that Piracy has *no* effect. But the effect is entirely demand side, because unlike theft, piracy *can't* affect the supply - the producer can for *effectively* supply all the demand he can get.

So, you have 'mini-markets'

The first two are the non-downloaders - the 'honest' market, who will buy it, or do without - downloading has no effect on this market, and what I'm going to call the bootleggers, people that downloaded illegal copies.

The Bootleg market is divided into
A) the Pirates - the 'dishonest' market, who have no *intent* of buying a copy. This market is also actually unaffected by the downloading - either they were going to get an illegal copy, or do without.
The Rationalizing Market - people that were influenced by the existence of the bootleg copies.

Now, some of those people had money to do two things, and wanted to do three. There is a legitimate problem with this, because if the three things were take the girl out to the movies, dinner afterward, then listen to some Barry White in the apartment, by odd coincidence you can't download the dinner or the movie, so somehow Barry White just got screwed.

Somehow poetic justice, yet still unfair. (And God - there's a *GREAT* Anti-piracy commercial in there somewhere - Barry White, standing in the apartment going "Hey Man, you paid for her Dinner, You paid for her movie, and now you're gonna diss me? You paid for that CHICK FLICK, and now you want my help? For FREE? You can get Celine Dion for your happy ass white boy!" Cameo "Don't get me involved here Barry - the guy did this to me last week. Kinda pathetic really . . .")

But - the Rationalizing market is itself more than that. There are people that download, don't like it, and don't buy it. People that download it, like it, and do buy it. People that bought a copy, then downloaded a cracked version because the DRM rendered it unplayable. These all come into play, and if you are going to try to stop piracy, *this* market, is where you need to figure out why people bootleg copies.

The problem comes when the producers assume that the Pirate Market and the Rationalizing Market are all thrown together into one mix - when you actually *need* to distinguish the two, because the Pirate market, however much worse it may *look* is actually not the market you care about because they aren't actually costing you a darn thing. However by lumping these two markets together, you are driving the people you *can* get money from away from you.

So - Ignore the 'pirates'. Sure it's not fair - the law, and 90% of the ethics are on the side of the producers, but at the end of the day, would you rather be right and broke or compromise your principles, admit there *is* a difference, and make more money?

Jonnan

BTW - I knew that in Indiana the gas tax is dedicated to highway funds, but it looks like it mostly is federally as well - per

History of the gas tax

I haven't found anyplace else that has it all in one place - I prefer .gov when I'm sourcing stuff like this, but everywhere else seems to confirm what they have here - it looks like from 1990 till 1997, from 17.7% to 37% was allocated to the general fund, but that stopped in 1997, and federally it goes to the highway fund, mass transit fund, and <1% to 'other trust funds'.

So it's actually not in the general fund - eliminating that gas tax will result in your not having to worry about buying gas cuz of all the potholes and blown tires - {G}.

Jonnan

Here at Illinois State University, we do it somewhat differently. First, there is a thriving second-hand market. Second, for instances like you mentioned the local Kinkos is set up to print off copies of books (or parts of books, no sense copying the whole thing if you only need 3 chapters) and either "bind" them or punch them for a 3 ring binder. Far cheaper, but still legal and the author gets *some* royalties.

As for "banning from the internet", it does seem somewhat impractical. But for a third offense, I think it would be far more enforcable - and a greater deterrent - to simply sieze the offending computer. Someone who would scoff at a joke "banning" would think twice about risking their custom gaming computer.