Very good point. As time passes and technologies change, basic business models must adapt to consumer demands. I mean hell, even when piracy is illegal in so many places it bossts the economy, imgaine if people threw away their archaic "morals."

nice wallotext

you do know that it's only valid in your country though, right? cause every country has a different law on copyright...
(technically copyright is mostly US and UK, the mainland europe version of the law is significantly different from what I read)

second hand sales are a measured, predictable and understood risk that are accepted risk that can be mitigated against to some extent. pirated games are not and represent a significant threat to developers, publishers and platform holder business models.

You may be right, and sometime in the future publishers will have to change their business model, especially as developers will be able to circumvent them by releasing directly to their audience, in a similar way to the music industry.

I don't know whether the Geohot hate is justified or not. It concerns me that the Sony perceive this to be a significant enough risk to remove an application from their software as i would rather they did not. And I don't know if publishing what he has will really damage the industry or not, but he is a very capable hacker, he may not even have to allow pirated game to run on a PS3, but the information he is releasing may allow others to do that.

I don't know if people will agree with you or not, will you agree that pirating is wrong, and fundamentally different from second hand sales? Is this not comparable to car sales?

i wouldn't buy pirated games, but i know people who do and that's their decision, i'm not about to shop them though! I do sometimes buy second hand games though, but only where i can't find new versions, usually just for my PSP.

Words fail me.

I think there is a basic misunderstanding of copyright. I'll use as an example something that is actually an appreciating asset for which the original creater gains no direct benefit beyond the initial sale: Art. Specificallly Fine Art (paintings sculpture etc).

One of my closest friends is a professional artist. His art sells for quite a lot of money, enough that he doesn't need a day job. 8 years ago he sold me a painting for $5000, today it's worth is about $20-25,000. My friend, and his inheritors retain copyright over that painting in perpetuity. But that copyright does not entitle him to a single cent if I sell that painting to someone else. What it does entitle him to is the the absolute control over whether and how the painting can be copied (i.e. make a limited edition print of the painting, put the painting on some T-shirts, publish images of the painting on websites etc), and what royalties he will be paid for any monetary gain being received through the copying of said painting.

Same law and principles apply to all copyright materials.

What makes piracy illegal and immoral, is that pirates copy the material and sell the material for monetary gain, but they do not fairly or adequately compensate the copyright holder.

There are many people who believe that copying and distributing material where no money (or other tangeable benefit) is changing hands (i.e. free distribution) is both morally acceptable and generally beneficial. Though under current copyright laws it remains illegal. Ethical people who believe in the principle of free distribution obey copyright laws for products over which the creator of the material asserts legal copyright. They may not agree with that form of copyright, but they abide by it's restrictions when asserted.

It is both legal and moral for a person who owns a single copy of a copyrighted product to dispose of that single copy as they see fit. They can lend it privately, give it away or sell it for whatever the buyer is willing to pay. You cannot distribute it in any way that would allow it to be played / viewed on more than one device at a time, because then that's copying.

Game rental businesses enter into a rental agreement with the publisher (copyright holder) whereby fair compensation is agreed between the rental business and the copyright holder. The copy right holder (if they are not the game developer) enters into an agreement with the developer regarding fair compensation for revenues received for the games. If the developer doesn't obtain indirect compensation (through the copyright holder) from rental agreements, but only obtains compensation for retail sales, that is a morally questionable action on the part of the copyright holder not the renatl business, and an incompetence on the part of the developer in failing to ensure they receive compensation for all copies of the game that are made.

People who conflate copyright infringement with trading in second hand goods and legal rental businesses have a haywire moral compass. I suppose such people want all libraries to be demolished given millions of people around the world read numerous libary books for which they don't pay anything. I suppose you also want the police to raid every school fair and yard sales where CDs, DVDs and videogames are being sold to help raise funds for schools and charitable community organisations.

The other thing you might want to learn is really who is losing out from piracy. For the most part developers who do not retain copyright get a fixed amount of money from the publisher / copyright holder for the IP they produce. The amount is normally capped, and once that cap is reached the developer has no legal right to demand more, no matter how much the publisher / copyright holder makes off the IP. So for a great many games, especially the ones coming out of the indie studios, the developer pretty much gets paid the maximum amount they're ever going to get paid for a game. Most of the most popularly pirated games coming out of small indie studios would fall into this category, because a game that is popularly pirated is normally a game that has sold well in legitimate retail channels. So who is really denying full financial gain for indie developers. Now this is an example of what is legal but morally questionable.

I will never say that piracy is always wrong just as I will never say that theft is always wrong (poor man stealing a loaf of bread to stop from starving) just as you buy used copies of games you can't get any other way some people download pirated copies of games that are not available to them but yea I would never buy a pirated copy of a game also but I would also not be so quick to judge someone in china buying a $2 copy of a game when it is the only reasonable way of them getting a copy because they only get enough money to spend that much on games in a week or even month after you take living costs into consideration, the only other way would be for him to steal a copy and that would hurt the retailer/customer who he stole it from far more than the pirated copy could hurt publishers.

so a Chinese man/woman selling a copy of the Mona Lisa for $20 for a living is stealing because it is a lost sale to the luve that wouldn't accept less than $20b and even then they may not sell it?

Some points.

Using law more or less negates everything you said up until the bolded part, since law has no effects on piracy and its effects. Which are actually very counter intuitive it seems.

If you are gonna have police go and raid servers that are basically search engines, then I really don't see how a school or a yard sale is any different.

You also have really bad stats, because the most pirated games are not actually indie titles. Here, brush up on that statistic:

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56285

and 2009:

http://torrentfreak.com/the-most-pirated-games-of-2009-091227/

Just about all the games on both lists were either huge disappointments, widely regarded as trash, or sell ridiculous amount of retail copies which scales with piracy.

Now, to the effects of piracy. First of all, pirates of music statistically buy more music than non-pirates. This has been shown in several studies, some of which were done by record industries.

Then you have the study done by the government showed that not only did piracy not have an effect on the industries at all, but it might be beneficial to the overall economy, period. Here's a link in case you missed it:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/20/dutch-research-institution-says-piracy-good-for-economy-not-responsible-for-music-industrys-problems/

So it seems that piracy has no averse effects overall.

What does this have to do with Geohot? I saw his name mentioned once(twice?) in this thread...