Your stance on piracy ?

[loves2splooge]

Approve or disapprove

Giving it some thought, the software piracy issue is not very clear cut morality-wise. If you stole $60 directly from me, I would be a lot more pissed off about that than someone pirating one of my videogames. Our society places a lot more importance on physical property rights. And that's understandable. My perception of someone stealing $60 from me is that they are a real douchebag and I hope they get beaten up and gang raped in an alley one day. My perception of some person downloading one of my $60 videogames? Yeah it hurts knowing people don't want to pay for your work but my perception is that they want to save some money. All these anti-piracy folk try to make it as if software piracy is on the same wavelength as physical theft. No fucking way.

Instead, I see piracy as basically copying a recipe from a restaurant to make your own meals (instead of paying us to make it for you) but doing so with 100% precision (instead of say 80% precision or whatever. Depending on your skill and familiarity at cooking of course. Great cooks can reach close to 100% precision. Whereas a terrible cook may be closer to 0% precision. lol) Just like how restaurants would be wise to protect their intellectual property (recipes), it would be wise for software companies to protect their intellectual property. Only difference I see is that the software pirates have more effective methods than homecooking. I think there is a place for DRM (ie. disc checks) but I feel that companies take it way too far.

My thoughts on DRM

I think the standard disc check DRM is good enough. The really tech-savvy and motivated pirates are going to crack the more batshit annoying methods anyway (ie. requiring internet connection to play/install/license, install limits, etc.) I remember trying to crack Vampire the Masquerade and it was really annoying trying to do so and all it had was a disk check. And many other people had trouble cracking it too. It seems like you need a certain level of tech savvy to learn how that kind of shit works. I'd rather buy the game off Steam for $20 than bother trying to crack it again. I don't see why piracy protection has to be any more harder than that. You're never gonna beat the tech-savvy geeks who have not only the skill but the patience to crack shit. They are a lost cause.

I haven't tried Steam but from what I heard it sounds pretty reasonable except for ONE major thing: 1) You can't resell your games. If you own a license, you should be able to sell it. Otherwise, you don't own the license, you are just "renting" the license. You might as well stop selling games and just charge monthly subscriptions or pay for play if you want to eliminate true ownership like that.

Why do I pirate?/Why I don't pirate

I pirate because I can and because it's a money saver and pretty convenient in many cases. That said, I have to admit that I don't pirate games too much anymore. I've pirated games for my DS (flash card with a 2 GB microSD with about 25+ DS Roms on it and more on my hard drive. lol), PC, PS2 (softmod. Though I rarely touch my PS2 these days), PS1 (my PS1 is broken now though. I resort to emulators instead now and I use a Dualshock controller with a USB adapter + Xpadder to play these games on an emu) and I always like to dig out old-school games from the internets and play them on an emulator (most of which are abandonware).

But I never bothered to mod my 360 because I like being able to take the thing online and I like having the peace of mind of a 3 year warranty. I only play legitimate copies on my 360 and given that my rental subscription only costs $20/month (2 games out at a time) and I'm having trouble making time for games, I'm not exactly in a rush to pirate 360 games to save money. Gaming doesn't have to be expensive. Basically as far as the 360 goes, there is way too much effort, risk and sacrifice involved with piracy that I feel I'm better off with my current arrangement.

Software in general

I pirate that shit like hell and without any remorse at all. When I see the outrageous prices that M$, Adobe and scum like them charge for software, that just motivates me to find the biggest, most expensive piece of their software from the internets and just pirate it for shits and giggles. Even the student edition of MS Office costs an arm and a leg ffs. Fuck that shit, I'll take Enterprise edition for $0 Alex. I have to admit that even if software was cheap, I'd still pirate it but when your stuff costs an arm and a leg, you're practically asking for it.

Music

I never buy music anymore. I used to buy Music CDs even during the illicit mp3 downloading days. But then I stopped doing that because I figured that I'd be better off saving the $15 (sometimes $20+ for some albums) on stuff that you can't pirate. Especially seeing as how the only real disadvantage to downloading pirated MP3s is that the music quality is a little lower (I can't even notice considering that I listen to music on my MP3 player and laptop. Sometimes I play it on my Xbox while I'm playing a game). Basically there's virutally no risk involved and you get only a slightly inferior product for free. So that's why I do it.

Movies/TV seasons

The quality difference from Blu-Ray and DVD to Xvid is way more noticeably than CD Audio to MP3. But Xvid is "good enough". I'd rather get a lower but still decent quality Xvid movie or tv show episode rather than rent the Blu-Ray or DVD. And the HD-res MKV stuff you can download (if it's available on torrents or piracy sites) is pretty darn good and way better than Xvid if you can get a hold of that stuff. Obviously it's not Blu-Ray quality but pretty good.

When you buy a Blu-Ray or DVD, you get a bunch of exclusive extras that you won't find in a Xvid or MKV file but I don't care about that stuff. If you are a movie buff that cares about that stuff, buy the movie.

For me overall, Xvid and (when available) MKV is good enough for me. I'm not nitpicky on quality. If I was, I'd subscribe to Netflix. And if I was a real movie buff that really wanted the extras, I'd buy the Blu-Rays and DVDs.


Why I think it's done and what can be done to reduce it

Piracy is committed for one of three reasons. The #1 reason? Pirates pirate because they can. #2 reason? People like to save money. #3 reason? Because people feel that pirating something furthers a cause that they have. Whether the cause is to punish a company for putting out crazy DRM (ie. EA and the Spore debacle). Or to "fight the system" (corporate greed or maybe they are opposed to intellectual property rights or maybe they are a part of the copyleft or open-source movements and feel that information should be shared freely.

As for what can be done to reduce piracy? On the PC end, invest in quality disc check anti-piracy protection. Like I said, the real tech-savvy pirates are going to crack the stuff anyway so your best bet is to use protection that is hard to crack for casual pirates but won't inconvenience the end-user to much. I think a disc check that's made to be hard to crack would be the best protection. If that's not enough, then stop making single-player PC games then and move them to consoles. Because install limits, online connection requirements and digital distribution that doesn't allow resale is bullshit.

On the console end, Sony should continue doing what they are doing. Making the PS3 an inpenetrable fortress (aside from the geohot hiccup. But still no pirated games played with that hack yet). And Microsoft's banhammer method is very effective without being too much of an inconvenience for legitimate owners (you just have to make sure to put legit discs in. No backups. You can install to the hard drive if you want to minimize disc wear and tear). Nintendo needs to get their shit together though with Wii piracy protection. XBLA, PSN and Wiiware/Virtual Console need to allow resale of digital distributed games and DLC though for the same reasons that I feel resale of digital content should be allowed on the PC. Piracy protection is one thing but you shouldn't screw over customer rights.

On handhelds, Nintendo needs to get their shit together. Sony is starting to get their shit together with the inpenetrable PSP-3000.