You just have to think of your worst qualities and exaggerate them. Everyone has the potential to be a pirate. But, luckily, we all feel compelled at varying degrees.




In the right? No. I disagree. You can't win any moral argument on the side of a thief, except maybe at a table of thieves.



Very few people are professional thieves or professional murderers. The "decent human being", I'm assuming, fills the rest. I've never seen someone who wasn't decent according to somebody. Since I personally know of no professional thieves or professional murderers and since I know nothing about their particular mentalities, I figure I must have been identifying with decent human beings. And you have been unfair. For all I know, thieves and murderers are decent, too.

[edit: Nobody is exclusively a thief or exclusively decent. There are no good people. There are no bad people. People just do decent things more often or less often than others. I identified with the decision to steal, not the people who would. After all, if the world consisted soley of people who would never steal, then this debate would never take place!)

BS. Their excuse is piracy.

The reality is poor business practice, and bad products.

your argument is moot, it's a two way street. If companies used better business practices there would be far less demand for piracy. Meaning less need to act like a criminal.

also allow me to demonstrate your comments thus far.
A large corporation takes steps to murder everyone that does business with them because they could be spies from other companies! But its ok, don't you dare try to murder them back though and be a criminal.

I think you just have some prejudice against retribution. Treat people like criminals and criminals they will become.

Robin Hood. Stealing from the rich and privileged who overstep their bounds? It isn't that taboo you know. Hence why piracy only really has bad stigma with... you guessed it the rich and privileged who treat people like scum.

It would seem plausible that such an approach would make you more likely to offend however - for example it would be highly likely that you will care less what happens to a company who treats you as a criminal than one who treets you as a good customer, and thus the impact of one of the potential reasons you wouldn't pirate (you like to benefit others/don't like to hurt others) would be decreased.


No, this is one of the problems that comes from taking the basic prisoners dilemma and trying to generalise its results without giving enough attention to what may have changed, or to possible exceptions/alternatives to the standard result; Emotion is not the only reason why someone might pay for a game instead of pirating it, and thus you cannot (correctly) say that the best decision for everyone would be to steal if you discount only the emotional reasons. The number of assumptions you need to make for your result to hold are far too numerous to make the end result of that much significance. In effect you'd need to assume that if a game was sold at both full price and for free, both versions identical and equally easy to obtain, with no difference in the risks or severity of problems with either games, and no emotion on the part of the purchaser, oh, and both versions being of equal legality, then everyone should get the one for free. Hardly an overwhelming result really!

It's not a street, it's a downward spiral of bad behavior. Continuing your own bad behavior while demanding the other party fixes their bad behavior won't fix anything.

Why should they have the sole burden of changing behavior? Why should you be free to continue while they have to change?



Correct. You call the FBI and the police and get the law on their asses.

They'll probably murder you before you murder them otherwise - after all, there are many of them and only one of you. Not a solution.



Retribution has proven to often be ineffective and nearly always leads to escalation of violence. I have valid reasons for having "prejudice" against retribution.

Misinformation, ignorance, or stupidity are also possible explanations in the absence of emotion. I only assumed that people were all smart, sane, and well-informed.



Violence? That's absurd. You mean like Waco? Yeah, that worked great.



As long as you aren't from one of the barbarian countries, you are rich. The bum who lives in government housing here lives larger than a neurosurgeon in Nigeria. Robin hood makes a decent argument if people are starving or oppressed, like people were in pre-revolutionary France. Why does it matter if rich people all have million dollar hovercars here, as long as you have a rolls royce and all the Nigerians starve?

Still not enough, since plenty of people will purchase a game rather than pirate it if they are smart, sane, well-informed and rational. However it is a step forward that you are at last recognising rationality isn't the only assumption you need to be making!


Not necessarily; in many of the countries where you can have countless people who are in absolute poverty you can also have extremally rich people. A neurosurgeon is going to be well educated, unlike the majority of the population, and hence is much more likely to be in the wealthy (and very small) group of that society.


Well the core argument is actually relevant even if people are well fed and free. It's basically just that the government should use taxation to redistribute wealth from those with lots to those with little (and/or that those who can most afford to pay taxes should be taxed more than those who can least afford it). It's the reason many countries will feature a progressive rate of tax, since the disposable income of someone on $15,000 a year will be far less than 10% of someone on $150,000, thus it is deemed unfair to tax that first one as much of a proportion (or a greater proportion) of their income than the person on 150k. You also have the more general welfare ideal of having everyone on equal incomes (that is, if all else was equal, it would be better to have everyone earning an equal amount than to have the extremes of some very rich and some very poor). This then leads to a trade off being made between pursuing more equal incomes and the negative effect that such policies will typically have on aggregate income, with the balance/final outcome depending on the governments own priorities (in terms of the political spectrum, as a simplification left wing governments will place a greater emphasis on equal incomes at the expense of total income than right wing governments_.

Cobra, downward spiral of bad behavior? Perhaps you could check into reality briefly?

There is no downward spiral, regardless of whether it's bad behavior or not.

First, copyright infringement is a fiction created by people to advance society. Intellectual property exists solely because we say it does. This is part of the reason so many pirates say fuck off. Most of the world gets told this absurdly moronic idea and thinks what? you can't own an idea? What kind of crack are these crazy westerners smoking? To them, it's not immoral to steal ideas because you can't own them anymore than you own the air you're breathing. It's as if you went into a tribal culture where land wasn't owned and started putting down fences. It wouldn't be immoral for them to ignore your fences because to them, you don't even own it. The massive piracy rates around the world are not a product of immorality because copyright isn't even a moral issue. It's a reward for creation with the intent to fuel technological and artistic expansion and make everyones lives better. It's social engineering that hasn't caught on everywhere yet.

Second, it's decreasing, not increasing. This is fact, get over it. The microcosm that is the PC game market does not constitute a global trend in piracy. Since no one will actually publish studies on it, we don't even know that PC games are increasing in piracy either. Piracy in general is dropping.

Third, most of what is considered piracy now, wasn't. There was no law against copying and sharing Doom with your friends in the US. Sharing only became illegal here with a 1997 court case that ruled it as such. You can check the copyright act if you don't believe it. Sharing is still legal in a lot of places. Only an idiot says the sky is falling when something legal becomes illegal and the crime rates suddenly jump. Never mind that copyright wasn't even a common concept a few hundred years ago. Even where it existed, you had to be given permission to have your work protected.

Fourth, riding your high horse solves as little as the RIAA suing people did. They really enjoyed their falling sales, so much that they kept suing and blamed the losses on piracy. Moral outrage isn't a problem, it's an airhead response to something you object to. It's like the Catholic church objecting to condoms and birth control pills, never mind that people were already screwing like rabbits and getting abortions from quacks using coat hangars. We don't dare let them avoid the pregnancy! Piracy needs studied, in depth and honestly, by people that haven't already got a horse in the race. It's stupid to be spending trillions on an issue that's probably not even losing them money. Unfortunately, assholes like you and Sly are stuck on how it's stealing, regardless of whether the theft of a digital object with no physical loss is a good or bad thing in the end for the company trying to sell it. Being stupid just because you're entitled to it doesn't get you ahead.

There is one fundamental problem with Sly's argument (and those of his supporters), which while keeping the vitriol level, and consequently the amusement value high, has been troubling me no end.

Let the police worry about the law.

Let the companies worry about maximizing income.

Nowhere in the stock price is the company's moral index reflected (which would suck for most of them). Nowhere in the profit motive does the morality of theft figure in (which is reflected in companies' behavior).

The company's job isn't to make sure everybody follows the law, it's to make enough money to keep the shareholders rich and the employees happy. This doesn't necessarily involve draconian protection. The price of the DRM is a major factor, as is the fact that with a linear increase in the hypothetical concept of "draconianness", the rate of decrease in the piracy rate is lower than the rate of increase in people who don't buy because of the risk of serious problems as you hit the more intrusive "solutions". By the time you've hit the really intrusive stuff, like SecuROM and Starforce, you're easily scaring away more customers than you have gained by pirates buying your product. That is the key fact for companies, one that Stardock understands. Pirates =/= customers. Changing the piracy rate is only worthwhile if you gain customers. From a company's point of view, the law doesn't mean anything to them, it's only impact is what measures it lets you take. Don't confuse the job and rights of the government and the corporation, please. DRM is a voluntary revenue enhancing measure undertaken by the COMPANY for god's sake. The law has more effective ways to do their job than the moldy styrofoam deterrent of DRM.

I have a question related to piracy.

Why is modding a piece of gaming hardware illegal. I am referring to things like psp, Wii, ps3, Xbox 360.

I know that reverse engineering a piece of hardware or software can be consider illegal. Though, if i do it in the privacy of my own home and not doing it for profit, then i still don't see why it is illegal.

But say with modding the psp, what if i just want to mod it so that i can use it for some other functions, like reading documents or install some custom homebrew word processor.

I was at my local EB games, and i ask the sales person regarding where i can purchase more UMD movies for my psp since there are so little kicking around at Best Buy or my local Future Shop. The guy told me just rip the movie from DVD and put it onto my psp. I then ask him about whether it is worth modding my psp because i want to use it to read documents on the go. His answer is that he can not answer me, because modding psp is consider to be illegal.

So if someone can explain to me exactly which law i am breaking by modding hardware, that would be great. I know it voids the warranty, but i did not know it carries any legal peanlty.

I have none. It's usually that way.



It's not as if anyone here can change anything. This is just for fun, to see how people feel. But you are right. The police should handle this virtual looting. However, new laws need to be put into place. In the meantime, steal away. They won't stop you. If you have the heart for thievery, that is. And I suspect most of us do.

On a side note, the people I despise most are those who try to rationalize what they are doing. Stop being a sissy. Either be a thief and know it, or be moral and make no need to deceive yourself.

for the love of god get off your high horse, for all we know you could pirate software as well and just be trolling. This is far more likely than you really being this out of touch with the reality. From what it sounds like you live on an Amish reserve, hitting up the cybercafe after riding 20 miles to the nearest town on your bicycle. I mean that is more plausible than you really being so luscus.

I have seen many many piracy threads in the SINS forums and for the life of me I don't understand why. (possibly because the games so dame easy to pirate go figure)Regardless I find that pirates are portrayed in a bad light, but are truly a necessary 'evil'. I myself have pirated some games, but most of them I did so to try out before buying because they had no demo or they were out of print and I wasn't about to fork over 60$ and up for some old software just for nostalgia sake. Call me a criminal if you must, but i have bought more games then I have ever pirated and most of them I bought because they are qualities pieces of work and I wanted to support the developers.

One thing I have noticed about piracy is that it won't be going away anytime soon and that is actually becoming and integrate part of life on the internet and I dread the day that the government will actually tighten the noose and police the web to the point that the freedom's the internet provide is brought to an end, but in all truth piracy rarely makes a dent in sales on good products (Star Dock being proof of this) and I hope and pray that the 'threat of piracy' does not get taken to an unnecessary extreme as it will surely end the 'golden age' of the internet and ultimately lead to a great loss of freedom. i admire Star Dock's boldness in not making it impossible to pirate there game and that they allowed the people (there fans) to decide whether or not they want to pay for it. I my self payed for the game and hope that Star Dock continues to please and amaze me in the near future with equally amazing products.

Cobra, your argument is fallacious. When I download a game, I'm not depriving the store of a copy for sale. A better equation would be if I could get a perfect copy of that Ferarri while letting the owner keep his car.

Here's the way I see this whole piracy argument, from the view of someone who's been burned by DRM on several occasions.

DRM is like telling someone who owns a power drill "Ok, you can only use this drill under these conditions, anything else and you can't use it and the drill will shut off". It's something you own and can do whatever you wish with it. You can modify it so that it spins faster or is a pump.

It's limiting what you can do with it with no basis in reality.

EULA's are, imo, completely stupid and unenforceable. Since I never agreed to the contract when money was changing hands and I can no longer return the product, it's null and void (Legally is another issue though).

Piracy is more like free advertising, good or bad. A pirate is another voice who's played your game, if it's good, he'll pay for it and become a customer or he'll just spout off it's awesomeness/suck factor to anyone who'll listen. Why is he even being considered? He's not someone who paid for your product so why are you meant to care about him?

Equating a downloaded copy of a game to a physical product is stupid. When the physical product is stolen, the storekeeper can no longer sell that copy. When the digital product is copied, the original owner still has his copy.