If it is not for illegal reasons moding may not be a issue but because it can be used for illegal reasons it should be not discussed on the site.

@thetonestarr

Isn't downloading a form of coping.

Honestly, that is a fair policy.  The community at large will persecute an individuals if they become more flagrant in their openness that they are a media pirate.  They already do it if you are a trolling Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo fanboi.  Why not for this?

Heck it could be something that can pull those waring factions together...  NAH!

Technically and legally, you're not the one copying it in that instance. The website you're downloading it from is copying it for you.

Side note: I find it particularly fascinating when a person condemns a videogame pirate, then turns around and pops a burnt CD their friend gave them into their CD player. Or turns on their MP3 player to listen to those tunes their buddy uploaded onto it for them. Or opens up utorrent to watch that video they just finished downloading. Helloooooooo, hypocrisy.

Some people might just be kidding.Additionally I belief right now the main priority for everybody is that the issues of 2.0 are fixed.

Well this is a silly idea. at what point do you call someone a pirate or a modder?

for example, I support the industry by purchasing all my games. However, for my DS I have a M3 cartridge, I use it to play Snes, GB and Nes roms, I don't use it for current DS games, I buy them. I own 95% of the roms on my DS in real life. Would I class as a pirate? By definition yes, but in reality no.

And I'm sure many people on this site run roms like me, whether it be on the PC, DS, or whatever. You would lose half the members overnight for minor discrepancies, and I'm sure ioi will not want to do that.

I think that promoting piracy is the issue not general comments.

Some people don't see piracy as wrong, though. I hate to use the comparison, but it would be like banning people people for being gay. It's just a different point of view.

Just my own two cents, based on my understanding of human psychology and market behavior: stopping piracy would have a minimal impact on sales at best. Generally speaking, people will pay close to what they feel something is worth. If they pay more than they feel it's worth, they have a tendency to feel cheated and are more likely to resort to underhanded tactics later to get something (or they'll refuse to buy any more until prices go down and leave it at that). If they pay less than they feel it's worth, they tend to be more inclined to continue buying at that price until it stops being that way.

That said, those who resort to piracy and modding tend to be on the far end of the "costs too much" spectrum. Meaning that, even if those weren't options, they would still not willingly pay full price for these goods and services. There is no real surprise in this: a logical consideration of supply and demand mechanics reveals that, at equilibrium of supply and demand, there is still a mass of consumers not buying the product because it's too expensive for them. Piracy and modding is, by and large, this surplus of unsatisfied consumers that market equilibrium cannot fulfill. Meaning that, in attacking illegal and extralegal activities, you're by and large attacking consumers who wouldn't buy your product anyway because they feel it's too expensive.

So let's take the psychology of this a step further and analyze how a customer reacts to this sort of thing. A customer who has been attacked for not paying what they feel is an unfair price will not simply give up and pay the unfair price. In all but the most passive cases, they will set themselves against the industry that has attacked them instead, and lower their expected price even more, because clearly the industry has no interest in them anyway. In essence, attacking piracy alienates potential customers you could get by lowering prices.

There is this simplistic and unrealistic idea going about that, if you don't fight piracy, everybody will resort to it in the end. However, this goes against one of the most basic tenets of societies world-wide: that we are trained from a very early age to provide recompense for goods and services. While there are a select few who reject this, most of us do not. And to assume that greed will undo this social programming for all individuals is more than just madness, it's nonsensical. This argument essentially invalidates itself, since if it were true, society would never have risen and anarchy would be rampant, due to humans everywhere rejecting basic social programming that allows us to live closely together without trying to kill and rob each other blind.

The tl;dr version of all this is that piracy is only harmful to the market in the minds of those who have not considered the reality of why society even works in the first place.

Pirating games affects everyone here if your a gamer and I cannot believe some of you people who are "protecting" them. If it weren't for thieving bastards maybe new games wouldn't be $60.

I say ban everyone who admits to pirating, they are useless theives and should be treated no better than someone who would steal stuff out of your home. And yes this includes people who steal MP3's.