Many Forms of Piracy

[DCillusion]

Pretty much every company on Earth has complained about piracy.  No longer limited to nameless criminals, many companies now threaten every citizen on the planet with the consequences of file-sharing, (as much as they complain - I think they love being able to attack everyday people).  Pirates, however, didn't just steal the riches & properties of merchants.  A just-as-common activity of pirates was to "hijack" a person's method of transport, (in the old days - their ships).

Everyone knows about, & hates, spyware.  It slows your computer, (method of transport), steals your ram, and a host of other problems.  It takes special software to remove it, and even then it doesn't always work.  Lately, I've had problems with 2 spyware programs.  One keeps advertising different CD's, (all from Jive Records), the other shows me upcoming titles from Electronic Arts.  I had to update my software to remove the EA spyware.  I still haven't been able to remove the Jive Records one.

it could be argued, & probably is, that these come from independent companies, but I've never heard of a store that sells music from 1 label or 1 store.

Spyware isn't, technically, illegal & neither is filesharing.  I say, if large companies want to gain any ground on filesharing, they're going to have to stop acting like the pirates they hate sooooo much.

........Although the truth is they just hate that, for the first time, you can hurt them as much as they can hurt you. 8)

[Helm]

Piracy is software theft and although I might do it and you might do it, making up lame excuses about how it "isn't really. no, wait, it is. No it isn't exacty" doesn't change that. I agree the companies are being very reactionary and most of the measures they're taking (even more convulted copy protection, online validation) will not stop piracy, but does that mean anybody's "winning?"

[Haddas]

Some companies, I'm not mentioning any names here (UBISOFT!!!), go too far with the validation process. It was real hell for me to play FarCry on my PC. And sometimes my internet is broked, so I can't install some new games at all, because of the whole online validation thing.

[DCillusion]

I'm not saying I agree with software theft, or even file-sharing in general.  But it, at least in the United States, isn't illegal.  Which is why it exists.  50 programmers in a basement appartment don't survive against the combined forces of a 50-billion dollar industry by breaking the law.  Consider the people who've been arrested: kids with Camcorders in theatres, and kids who E-mailed songs that hadn't been released yet, (this was touted as filesharing arrests, but it wasn't).  Ethically illegal is quite different from literally illegal.  Many companies are trying to make it illegal - & this is what the industry considers winning.  Piracy is a derivative, & appropriate, name the industry placed on people they consider thieves.  If you use the term, you can't "pick-&-choose" what aspects of pirating you'll consider.

But that's not really the point.  The point is the industry is never going to gain ground in courts by doing the same quasi-legal activities of their intended targets.  It's like saying "They throw rocks at us & we throw rocks at them.  We want the courts to stop them from throwing rocks, but we're gonna' keep throwing our rocks & it's gonna' be okay."

I don't care if the industry cracks down - I don't download anything illegal; so why should it be okay for Electronic Arts & Jive Records, and others to download illegal data from me.  I've heard plenty of people screaming "File Sharing Losers Should Be Shot"!!  Let's start with the people who made the first claims

[Darth Mandarb]

Software companies need to stop spending (wasting) time and energy on copy protection shit ...

It's a complete waste of time.

For every hour they spend trying to stop the masses from pirating it's another dollar added on the price of the software.  And then, five minutes out of the gate, somebody has cracked the protection and it was all for nothing.

Just develope the game, put it out there for a much cheaper price, and you'll sell twice as many of them.

It's the same thing with the CD industry ... they'll just never learn.

[TerranRich]

I totally agree with you, DCIllusion. If they want US to stop pirating their software, then these companies had better stop spamming us with adware and spyware. You wanna flood my screen with pop-ups for your crap? Fine. I'll pirate it. One side has to stop first, and I'm holding out for as long as I possibly can.

Do you want to know the definition of irony? A pop-up ad...for anti-spyware software.  :

[dasjoe]

darth, i disagree. i know one copyprotection which actually works and has not been cracked.

operation flashpoint. pretty good, you didnt even notice that the crack went wrong. i was playing it on a lan, my shooting was very bad, getting worse, enemies obviously cheated, missions are unsolveable.
now that i've bought the game it runs fine

and, trackmania had a very difficult protection. took them about 7 months to break it. (for the latest patch, that is)

[DCillusion]

I agree with you, Darth.

You can do a fun experiment with software.  Download a P2P client & make a list of the hottest games with lots of copy-protection & games with little-to-no copy-protection.

- Games with the most, (like Half-Life with its "file-dongles", or The Sims with "embedded anti-copy code"),  are available, with cracks, in unbelievable amounts - like 900 sources.

- Games with the least, (like Baldur's Gate), will have 1 or 2 sources.....if at all.  It shows that if you don't treat your customers like thieves, they won't act like thieves.

Dasjoe - Copyprotection you don't notice is fine.  I think Darth is talking about games where you must register online to play (Half-Life 2); use a code-wheel (Out of this World); map star charts (StarCon 2); or worse........The game doesn't run even after you legally purchased it (7th Guest, XIII).

People say copy-protection is a waste of time because for every 1 that can be named that works, there are, at least, 5 that don't.

[Helm]

I guess the number of sources where you could get these games have nothing to do with the fact that Half-Life 2 was the most anticipated game of they year, whereas Baldur Gate is old and huge and everybody who's cared enough to play it has played it already.

[Darth Mandarb]

Copy-protection that's invisible is no better than obvious copy-protection.

My problem with copy protection is that it causes the price of software to rise.  There's so much R&D into it that in order to cover the cost of the R&D they must tack on to the final cost.

Software is rediculously over-priced (as are CDs) and I'm never going to be convinced that a CD, and a little booklet, in a box is worth $59.99.  Even with marketting, distribution, etc.  It's way over priced.

[Ghormak]

The most simple kind of copy protection at least stops the clueless casual gamers, who don't know much about computers, from burning copies of the games for their friends. I don't think they should give up copy protection completely.

[Darth Mandarb]

The most simple kind of copy protection at least stops the clueless casual gamers, who don't know much about computers, from burning copies of the games for their friends. I don't think they should give up copy protection completely.

Yeah ... the old method of having to look on a page in the manual ... something like that works for me.

I don't have a problem paying for things.  I have a problem paying too much for things.

[Ishmael]

I agree, software and CDs are WAY overpriced these days... I would have bought, Doom3, UT2004, KOTOR, HL2 etc. But I don't have that money on me. So I've pirated a couple of them, and I can say, Doom3 would have been worth maybe 25â,¬, but not 55â,¬. And I'm not playing that 50â,¬ just for some multiplayer game which I don't play that much, if at all, online anyway.

All Quake 2 engine games are neat. No need for the CD after installation, unless you want to hear the original music. I bought Heretic II for 7â,¬, and that was worth it, though I could just have pirated it, with no diffrence, I didn't get a printed manual anyway...

[Bernie]

I only got to play Splinter Cell 2 with a crack because the original kept complaining about cd emulation software or something - even after I uninstalled all of those programs.

Being a gamer isn't easy these days anymore.

[Helm]

I don't understand when people say 'this game is worth 20 bucks, not 50 as was it's original price'. How do you do these calculations? I either like a game and want to play it, or I don't. I'd pay the standard amount of money one pays for game software for it (which I agree currently is way too much, but that doesn't have to do with the quality of each idividual game), or I wouldn't. Just that this analogy between price and enjoyment derived from a game seems weird to me.

[Peter Thomas]

I'm still trying to figure out what the hell this debate is about!

The title talks about all different forms of piracy, but the majority DC's post was all about spyware, and now we're putting price in a ratio to fun.

I thought he just wanted to know how to get rid of his Jive Record ads? ? ?

[Kinoko]

Helm: So you agree that games are overpriced but you can't understand where desire to keep your money isn't always eclipsed by wanting to play a game? There's very definitely a limit for me. It still shits me that XBox and Gamecube games cost so much, let alone PC games. I pretty much never buy PC games and it's because I just can't justify the price. It's ridiculous, and Mr. PC game company, your game probably isn't worth that much of my money.

I can make my own god damn games for free! ^_^

[Helm]

I agree that games on the whole are overpriced. I do not agree/understand when somebody says "this game was enjoyable to the point where I'd pay 10 bucks for it, but not 40, whereas this game was so enjoyable, I feel the 40 were justified." I am puzzled by how people are able to make this calculations and present them seriously.

Not having enough money to buy a game is a different issue, as is having money but not being willing to spend it on computer games. This as well, is completely understandable. But I don't get people who are obviously playing a lot of games, and rating them by how much money they'd pay for them.

[InCreator]

Well, I go with Darth's first post in this one:
I human makes a lock, human can make a key-

So why not invest into decreasing the will/need to make a key instead?

There is no non-crackable things. Even if a game is so solid and though to crack, it will be compensated by something else - like these internet validations? It's 2005 and internet has made crack suppliers life more difficult...

While Steam games (Half-Life 2,CS) are in my favourite list, there's always an element of disgust -- I have to pay my ISP (for Internet) so I could play the game I paid for!!! 

Maybe I don't give a heck about internet at all, I just want to play the game. Validation takes only a minute. A minute a day. But I'm paying for whole month, this means that 99,9%  of the money is wasted! (As I said, it's 2005 -- "get a dial-up connection" isn't as easy anymore as it may sound.) Just to make sure some people won't steal the game.

A game from the company, not me. So me - and all the ones who bought the game are actually paying money so the team behind the game could get even more money and at the same time wouldn't lose any to thieves. Well, if that's not some cheeky attitude here, what is?

Well, this is all theoretical. Of course, no-one would make such investment for just a computer game.

Valve - and all these other software companies must think very highly of their products, if they allow themselves such freedom.

Am I the only fool who feels this way?

edit: And nowadays, games suck anyway. In golden DOS age, a game was released when it was ready. Now what the fuck do you mean by "update", "patch" etc words anyway? So, we pay for game, ISP - so we can do validation/registration, and also the damned updating every month? So basically we buy uncompleted and buggy crap! And pay further so we can move step-by-step (time-internet-updates) to a thing we actually wanted to buy in the first place.  And it is so with most games, ain't it?

Oh, this is so-oo unfair.

[Snarky]

Most computer games see 90% of their sales within the first month or two of release. Developers and publishers know that the copy protection will be cracked eventually, but every week or even day they delay that moment by means fewer sales lost to piracy.

As long as the cost of developing the copy protection is less than the profit they make from additional sales, copy protection doesn't raise the price of the game. Pirating a game instead of buying it does.

I don't believe copyright violation equals theft, and I won't pretend I've never pirated software, but I don't think it's unreasonable or unfair for developers to protect themselves. Just as long as they don't restrict the legal things I might want to do with their product. That does piss me off.