Interesting blog post on DRM and piracy

"If developers spent more time improving their PC gaming experience, and less time complaining about piracy, we might see more successful PC games."

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THIS!

Good stuff makes money. Bad stuff doesn't. Mediocre stuff does 'okay'. There's a fair amount of 'head in the sand' going on with companies that lay heavy on the DRM. What foolishness.

Look at what Jonathan Coulton did with thing a day.

Theft is theft. You can't justify theft. You can't rationalize it. Someone (often hundreds of someones) spent thousands of hours away from their families mainlining redbull and cigarettes to put food on the table, pay for some well-deserved vacation, and keep a job that isn't reprogramming Medicare cost forms.

Whatever the hell they want to charge for their product is their right, their perogative, and the market will decide if it was the right price.

When you steal, you stole those people's time. You stole their futures, you stole a piece of their job security. You broke the market so that fewer people must pay more to offset the costs of your theft.

Intellectual property thieves can hide behind their masks of self-righteousness or whatever other pretense they want. They are still just petty thieves, and everything they do leads only to the financial ruin of others for selfish, petty gratification.

Was someone trying to justify piracy? If so, I missed that part.

I hope nobody showed up to the thread yet to equate piracy with theft.

As a game critic I play a lot of games.

I can confidently assure you most of them suck. If I didn't get these for free, I wouldn't pay for them.

dclary said:

Whatever the hell they want to charge for their product is their right, their perogative, and the market will decide if it was the right price.

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I agree, they do have the right to set the price they believe is fair, and the high rate of piracy shows the market considers that price to be $0.

While this doesn't directly relate to games, check out the newest bit related to DRM coming to you soon:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/07/fcc-hands-hollywood.html

dclary said:

Theft is theft. You can't justify theft. You can't rationalize it.

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Did you even read the article, or did you just see the word 'piracy' and start screaming?

dclary said:

Theft is theft. You can't justify theft. You can't rationalize it. Someone (often hundreds of someones) spent thousands of hours away from their families mainlining redbull and cigarettes to put food on the table, pay for some well-deserved vacation, and keep a job that isn't reprogramming Medicare cost forms.

Whatever the hell they want to charge for their product is their right, their perogative, and the market will decide if it was the right price.

When you steal, you stole those people's time. You stole their futures, you stole a piece of their job security. You broke the market so that fewer people must pay more to offset the costs of your theft.

Intellectual property thieves can hide behind their masks of self-righteousness or whatever other pretense they want. They are still just petty thieves, and everything they do leads only to the financial ruin of others for selfish, petty gratification.

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I would agree with you on general, but programmers for most games are paid by the job. If the game sells 150 million copies and everyone has to have it, they still make the same as if it had flopped and walmart employees use it to stop their chair from wobbling.

And as for myself. I've pirated a few games, though I won't say which ones. One of them, I bought the commercial version and the DRM was so bad I couldn't play it. So I got a cracked pirated version that wasn't all DRM raped to play the game. That I paid for.

Another one, I still have the commercial disks. Or whats left of them, I wasn't going to pay $50 bucks to replace 1 cd of a game that I already bought twice.

And the other time. I had bought a game from a developer because I liked the game before it. It had played well and the game box was telling me about how much better this version was than the first. I forked over $50 bucks for the largest piece of non-returnable shit I've ever dealt with.

Stronghold two. Don't play it folks.

So I pirated the first one to feel less cheated.

Now While I'm not going to say that these were for sure right reasons to do it, they counted towards those "Lost sales to piracy" that they're so busy freaking out and tallying up. But they still had a legit sale from these piracy sales.

I'm just saying, this is a lot bigger problem than the black and white they make it out to be.

If you buy a game, you can just download the tiny DRM-removal crack separately. No need to downloaded a multi-gigabyte precracked image. Gamecopyworld is your friend (and no, before anyone has a kneejerk hernia, they don't offer cracked games, just the cracks).

Nivarion said:

I would agree with you on general, but programmers for most games are paid by the job. If the game sells 150 million copies and everyone has to have it, they still make the same as if it had flopped and walmart employees use it to stop their chair from wobbling. .

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Scenario writers and artists, and clued in programmers, are also given royalties.

It's pretty common to equate programmers and UI artists/designers with writers and artists in term of books getting royalties.

I note that the the argument you use is awful similar to the one another kid gave me about shoplifting--she's stealing from a Big Company.

Mind it's still stealing, and at the end of the day, some person(s) money gets docked, somehow.

That said, I purely loathe DRM and it's enough to make me not buy something in digital form; that goes for hardware dongles and decrypt keys too.

Medievalist said:

Scenario writers and artists, and clued in programmers, are also given royalties.

It's pretty common to equate programmers and UI artists/designers with writers and artists in term of books getting royalties.

I note that the the argument you use is awful similar to the one another kid gave me about shoplifting--she's stealing from a Big Company.

Mind it's still stealing, and at the end of the day, some person(s) money gets docked, somehow.

That said, I purely loathe DRM and it's enough to make me not buy something in digital form; that goes for hardware dongles and decrypt keys too.

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I don't condone just flat out piracy of a program you don't own in another medium, but I do think its a way overblown problem. As the article pointed out, they can't really tell how many sales were lost to start with.

IMO the cure the big companies are coming up with are worse than the disease. Point in case are DRM and dongles.

Pirates can get around the dongles and DRM and anything else they come up with, so the only people who get shafted are the honest costumers.

One thing I've always questioned is why they don't have full demos. Like when microsoft put out Age of Empires 2. They released a demo that let you play all the random games on a set map, and two campaign levels.

Lots of people knew that it was a quality game that would play well on their system before they ever even bought it. It was one of the deciding factors for when I bought it.

Interesting. That game used to be quite expensive, but you can get it and #1 and the expansions for $10 at walmart now.

Lhun said:

No it's not, and repeating the mantra will not make it so. It is an infringement of copyright, which is neither technically, nor morally, nor legally the same as stealing.

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You need to re-read Title 17--and notice the use of the word "theft."

To download software you have not licensed or paid for and that is intended to be licensed and/or paid for is theft. It can and has been prosecuted under both IP laws and under violations of the "real property" laws. One of the charges successfully prosecuted against hackers is that of theft.

Medievalist said:

You need to re-read Title 17--and notice the use of the word "theft."

To download software you have not licensed or paid for and that is intended to be licensed and/or paid for is theft. It can and has been prosecuted under both IP laws and under violations of the "real property" laws. One of the charges successfully prosecuted against hackers is that of theft.

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That covers legally - what about technically and morally?

JimmyB27 said:

That covers legally - what about technically and morally?

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Well, I do have a dog in this fight--I am *theoretically* losing royalty income, were the games I worked on still being sold.

They aren't--and we made the code available for free. The games live on, in devices that weren't even invented at the time.

But.

While I do not buy the argument that an unpaid for illegal/unlicensed stolen mp3/ebook/application = a lost sale

It's still ethically and legally wrong.

The fig does not want to be free, as Doc Searles put it, nor does information.

Lhun said:

One might draw a somewhat justifiable parallel to theft when talking about people who pirate and sell others intellectual property, but that's not the kind of piracy the industry screams about.

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The idiocies of the law are a different issue. There are a number of laws I disagree with strongly, but I obey.

The DMCA is one of the most idiotic laws ever. Artists/creators of all sorts should be paid. I'd be in favor of the U.S. adopting the droit morale, for instance.

But the DMCA is used to control the flow of information, not to protect the rights of creators. It's far too easy to abuse the DMCA--and I hate that companies I used to respect routinely exploit the DMCA for unethical reasons.

I also am completely convinced that DRM is idiotic in the extreme--and I think it will mostly have disappeared from consumer goods in five years. I note that negotiating lately with Random House re: ebooks is hair-pullingly frustrating because they think DRM is effective.

Medievalist said:

Well, I do have a dog in this fight--I am *theoretically* losing royalty income, were the games I worked on still being sold.

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You're only losing money if they would have bought the game if they hadn't copied it. That's not always the case, and I'd argue, its not the case most of the time.

Its been a long time since I've pirated anything (college), but if the game was good, I bought it. PC games aren't like console games, you're can't really demo them before deciding to buy.