| Squilliam said: Actually its kind of like the 'common resource or tragedy of the commons problem' See individually it doesn't hurt if one person pirates a game, you can look at it and say "hey im not causing any harm, its just little old me sick of high prices, whatever" however you have to consider the effect of what millions of individuals do, so whilst they do little harm individually its the behaviour of millions of people working the same way which causes the damage. Thats why things like quotas exist, and thats why the penalties are so harsh for exceeding quotas in fishing for example even though the individual damage is minimal they have to create a big enough disincentive so a whole population of fishermen stick to the rules to preserve the fishing resource for everyone. Now replace fishermen with gamers and fish with game developers, and think about what happens if the fishermen pillage the fish resource. |
Back in the day, I remember when discussing this, the pirate went off and showed how there were free games out there (like the Apple II program EAMON), so piracy didn't hurt anyone really.
