| LuckyTrouble said: Logic: People assume piracy is some huge detriment to the entertainment industry as a whole. They picture millions of dollars being lost to those pesky pirates who chose to duplicate the product freely rather than pay for the original legitimately. They say that pirates are stealing and are taking sales away from developers. Of course, all of this ignores some pretty basic concepts. 1) Piracy is not theft. Theft is taking the original so that nobody else can use it any longer. Piracy is duplicating a product, maintaining the original, and taking a copy. Nothing is ultimately lost because nothing is actually taken except copied code. With that in mind, we're at the first level of why piracy is not lost sales. 2) People tend to assume that every pirated copy means one lost sale. What this doesn't acknowledge is that somebody who commonly pirates likely had no intention of buying the product to begin with. It isn't a lost sale if there was never intent to purchase. That's logic used to justify harsh DRM policies that people seem to think deter pirates. Having been a part of a couple of game system piracy scenes, I can safely say that a dedicated pirate will wait months for any anti-piracy efforts to be broken just so that they won't have to spend the money if they need to. In the end, all DRM really hurts is the people who legitimately purchase a game, being forced into an always online state or otherwise. 3) Piracy accounts for an exceptionally small percent of people. Such a small amount that even if every person who pirated a game purchased a physical copy instead, it would hardly impact sales. It would be hard to argue that anybody would notice the boost. Piracy is an insiginifcant part of the game and software industry that people are just really desperate to act as if it's something bigger because there is a lot of legal money in treating it that way. In the end, piracy is blown way out of proportion and is used to justify terrible DRM policies by those that don't understand that it is completely and utterly pointless. |
Wow, this has a lot of problems.
1) theft is taking something that does not belong to you. When you buy software (I.e. Game, music, etc.), you are not buying the code, you are buying the right to use said code. Pirating enables you to use the code without paying, aka stealing the ability to play the game. Piracy is theft.
2) sales have nothing to do with the fact that you piracy is taking something that does not belong to you.
3) the amount of people pirating will go up if nothing is done, so while it may not seem like a big deal now, it may be too huge to handle if left out of control.
in the end, DRM wouldn't be a problem without piracy, so if you want it to go away, do your part and don't pirate. If you can't do that then stop bitching about DRM policies
