i was against burnin games too but meh when u have a roommate burnin games all the time i was like fuck it why not.. been hooked since

But if you steal a game (even from a store), you aren't stealing the intellectual property from the company which made it. They still have it, hence you didn't deprive them of it, hence you didn't steal IP.

To steal IP would be to break into a company and steal all the copies of a game's source code, for example.

Piracy is wrong and illegal, but I don't think it's stealing.

Perhaps you should try that dictionary. Theft refers to physical property whereas copyright infringement refers to intellectual property.

I have had this discussion with several lawyers, and not a single one has disputed me. If you went into a court of law and referred to this as theft, then the opposing attorney would object, and it would be upheld. If you continued to do so, then you would be held in contempt.

That's damn right.

At the going rate, it would take about $24,000 to fill an 80GB Ipod.

Let's look at some other things.

Broadband internet access: Without P2P, it's doubtful that this service would have expanded to the point that it has right now. People certainly wouldn't pay so much money just to make web pages load a little faster.

High-capacity hard drives: Prior to P2P, almost no one needed more than a 20GB hard drive, and most OEM PCs shipped with 4-10GB hard drive. Nowadays, you can't really buy one with less than 160GB. This wouldn't have happened had it not become necessary for people to store large amounts of media files.

CD and DVD recordable drives: Without the need to backup large amounts of media files, these would never have become as prominent. All people needed before P2P was a floppy drive to back up text files.

Portable Media Players: It should be pretty obvious that the vast majority of songs and videos that people are carrying around were acquired via P2P.

Where Sony failed and Apple succeeded was that Apple had a plan to get at least some users to purchase content and they made significant profit. They made it easier rather than harder to purchase content, which was enough to become one of the biggest sellers of music. Also, they priced their product at a premium which guaranteed a healthy profit. Apple NEVER sacrificed profits for market share.

Ditto. What he said.

Also, everyone I know with a PSP (which isn't a lot of people) has hacked theirs - at least to be able to run old games under emulation.  No one that I know has hacked a 360 (though plenty of the same people hacked their original Xboxes - though they did it for things like xbmc, not pirated games.  I think online is just way more important now and the 360 sure seems a lot harder to hack than the original xbox was - where's xbmc for 360?  does anything like that even exist?

sony was never into services, they always been a pure hardware company, they sold cds and dvds for a long while now.

they got into digital services with the psn store and selling tracks on itunes.

and sony only does that with their gaming division, their vaio notebooks are top notch in premium (carbon fiber built and coloful LCD display, blu ray drives).

Piracy is easy to blame for a business failure.

I think it mostly deals with copyright infringement. That's what I remember them teaching me in school. I went to school a long time ago though. The example used was taping songs off the radio. That used to be the cool way to pirate stuff.

I used to pirate games all the time until one day it just hit me, I didn't enjoy a single game I was playing because none of it had any value to me. Not only was the developer losing out, but I wasn't getting any enjoyment out of the stolen murchandise. It made me sick and jaded just playing and throwing away whilst never caring. I could have paid for my games, but I didn't because I didn't have to. I was a determined little pirate, you'll be surprised what a good warez site and a 56K modem can achieve over time.