I hate being dragged back into stupid arguments, but whatever.



International treaties say otherwise. Sweden is a member of the EU, and thus subject to the various UN copyright treaties. I'm glad to see you think of yourself as a teenage Martin Luther King, though - let me know when your campaign of civil disobediance gets the laws changed.

Re: the apples and oranges thing - yes, apples and oranges can be compared. Anything can be compared to anything else, depending on the points used the the comparison. If I had compared piracy to knifing a guy and stealing his private copy, you'd be right to question the legitimacy of the comparison. If I truly tried to compare apples to apples, I would say pirating games is the legal and moral equivalent of pirating movies or music. You'd agree, and the comparison would be pointless, as it didn't illustrate the differences in our point of view. Some contrast is necessary.

In this case, I'm comparing piracy with petty theft or shoplifting. In both cases you are illegally obtaining a game of the same approximate value. In terms of severity of penalty, piracy carries higher fines, but less chance of incarceration, so we'll call that a wash. Rarely does anyone suffer physical injury as a result of either. In both cases no necessity of life is involved - you could live quite well without the game. So from my point of view, the two acts are legally similar and morally equivalent. They are NOT identical, and I never said they were.

Aha, so now international treaties go before the country's own laws? and how are they going to be enforced? anti-terrorist groups dragging away random passerbys into dark cellars, perhaps?

Do you actually think people care if the laws down in France or something, say we can't pirate? That's right - we don't. Laws are made by humans and aren't failsafe.

I'm pretty sure the police force, even the ones in court, are more-or-less pirates too. And the police isn't just some kind of weapon you bash the rest of us with, they're human too. Really, trying to use laws against piracy when you're talking Sweden is moot. Sweden is one of the leading gaming countries, and probably the leading piracy country - is that going to change? no. It's especially hilarious when some people try to paint up the image, that piracy gives a country bad reputation:

1. We don't care.
2. That's false.

I don't know how to go with the rest of your post. Explaining your point at the end of the post does help sometimes.

In conclusion, I'm a nice pirate and going to remain one.

The point of treaties like this is not to enforce outside laws on a country. The treaty is a guarrantee that each signatory country will enact legislation enforcing the treaty terms within their jurisdiction. So no, the treaty doesn't come before your own laws, it has been written INTO your own laws. Here in the US, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1996 was enacted to fulfill the US obligations under that treaty. If you check your legal code, I assure you that you will find similar provisions.

And now I see you have resorted to the "everybody does it, so it can't be wrong" defense. And saying police doing it makes it right is just hilarious. If I applied that where I live, apparently drunk driving, home invasion, stalking and rape would be legal. Police officers here have been arrested for those things recently.

The games companies aren't likely to bother to check whether you're a "good" pirate or a "bad" pirate (if they actually share your view of the distinction, which I doubt). The DRM companies *certainly* aren't going to make the distinction when pushing their products. The sites from which you download get to use you as a statistic when selling their advertising space.

Thus you and the other "good" pirates are *very much* part of the problem. You fuel the paranoia of the gaming companies leading to ever more irritating DRM, and money being spent on anti-piracy solutions which, personally, I would much rather have seen spent on giving us better products!

I thought of a better analogy to piracy - an art museum.

The museum may circulate a flyer with a sampling of the works they have on display (a "demo"), but they require a fee for admission to see the full contents. However, there is a back fire exit with a lock I could pick.

I am unlikely to spend my own money paying to get into a museum. Does this mean I should be able to sneak in, take a look around, and then decide whether I should pay for admission? It's not like me viewing the museum's full content prevents them from showing to paying customers, right?

Well that's too bad, won't do a thing about piracy then. Swedish officials don't give a crap, and one (possibly more) minister has even admitted to piracy, and encouraged others to come out of the closet. Lobbying and otherwise trying to enforce something upon the government is considered illegal here, so MPAA have nothing to say. That international corporations think they can bully us around like pets is the truly hilarious thing.

As long as we're not suffering terror bombings, disappearances and blockades etc, we won't lift the piracy, no matter how many funny guys in lawsuits want to come over and try to persuade us.

Heh, and I see you've applied the ''I'm going to take it out of context and apply it to situations/things it wasn't intended for'' offense. Reminds me of the people that resort to ''if I'd take your logic and apply it to *completely out-of-context thing it wasn't intended to be applied to* it'd fail horribly''.

But this is going nowhere - we're bashing our heads into brick walls. Let's end it.

Why doesn't someone just start a video game rental service? Pay to play for a certain amount of time. Wait, that's right. Wow got that.

That's fine. Just don't complain about DRM and copy protection. Because while the hackers may be able to crack the most popular stuff, we'll all end up suffering with more and more intruisve copy protection that won't be cracked because it'll be so pervasive that only the most high profile things will end up being cracked.

I don't like copy protection but I'm only one voice and seeing jerks who think it's okay use what I worked hard on without compensation makes it hard to be sympathetic.

That's a pretty good analogy.

So pirates aren't so much like thieves as they are just parasites. Kind of like a tape worm in the stomach of life.

The worst part about all this controversy is that it is giving REAL pirates a bad rap. Check out The Best Page in the Univserse to see what I mean.

There are actually a few good aspects to certain elements of game piracy, but only to the elements that pertain to games that are difficult to acquire/made by companies that have since gone out of business. For example, I had a purchased set copy of the various Might and Magic games(the main RPGs), but lost the CDs some time ago. Piracy through file-sharing allowed me to regain a copy, which I think is certainly fair.

Unfortunately, this same beneficial aspect also causes a huge number of problems. For example, Titan Quest and its expansion pack, Immortal Throne, was a very good game, but the profits Iron Lore should have seen from it were destroyed due to piracy. (That is, the game had a security feature that would immediately dump the user to desktop if it failed a security check, which all pirated copies for awhile did. Because the game was leaked via piracy slightly early, with this feature, the game was mentioned as being plagued by horrible bugs, which no legitimate copy of the game was plagued by at all.) As a result, Iron Lore was forced to shut down a couple months ago.

In essence, while there is a silver lining, piracy on the whole is not good. Take it from a former pirate who contributed to Iron Lore's demise: it's far better to spend the money to support the game companies rather than to be greedy and get everything for free. If people had been willing to do that, we'd probably be seeing a Titan Quest II. Instead, we see jack squat.

The art museum analogy is not bad, I guess. With PC games the difference is that the money involved is somewhat more, and there are more things that can potentially "go wrong" with a game, like compatibility issues, system requirements and major issues glossed over in reviews. The proverb "once burned, twice shy" applies to computer gamers as well, so someone who buys a game that won't work with his system and doesn't get a refund is probably going to download the next one.

One thing that occurred to me for companies to reduce their losses to copyright infringement is to improve distribution channels. Likely not much of an issue in the USA, but certainly in Europe is the following scenario: I want an English version of a game. Unfortunately, I live in Germany, and all retail stores here only stock the game in the German version, as does the German Amazon. Now my (bad) choices are: Bite the bullet and get the localized version with frequently crappy translation, or import the game from UK and pay a large shipping fee, as well as the bother of having to make payment via PayPal (since I have no credit card) instead of a simple bank transfer, as I could with a German distributor.

Stardock makes great games and thus builds trust with its customers. For them, this has the effect that people who already have one of their games are much more willing to take their advertisement on faith and buy a game without downloading it first. Still, please try to make it easier for people to actually buy your games. I chose the second route as detailed above with GalCiv, and I hope that I don't have to do this often with games I like.

(off topic)

torfbolt, have you tried Play.com? I used to buy games from them when I lived in the UK (so got the English version, obviously!) - good prices with free and speedy shipping. I mention them because they always shipped from Belgium, so I assume they'd ship the UK/US versions to Germany for free as well.

Lack of credit card might be a problem, though.

An (albeit very late) reply to Kryo comment, because I agree with where you start but think your conclusion is way off:



I totally agree with this premise. In fact, that sounds like an excellent test to judge the state of IP protection in a particular region. Without IP there would be little economic incentive to create new works, so new ideas produced would be limited to a smaller scale. As you scale the level of IP protection up you're allowed to scale your new works larger and larger, because you should be able to recover more money. The more protection you have, the bigger the projects you can undertake.

So with zero IP protection, you can spend only as much free time as you and a few friends can scrape up to make a game you're passionate about. With a small amount of IP protection, you can take a risk with a programmer an artist and maybe a couple of others to produce a game you'd want to buy. And with a massive old heap of IP protection you can spend 40 million dollars and employ a small army to bring your checkbox-filling sure-fire-hit formulaic game to life.

Unfortunately when there's one group spending 40 million dollars on a game, it forces others to try and match that or appear to have poor production values. Great cut scenes and ultra-high def artwork just don't make themselves. You'd also find you have to match the millions spent by the other guys just to get the same level of press coverage as them (money spent on advertising, press junkets, and just general bribery), all to compete for a *LIMITED* consumer budget.

And it is definitely a limited consumer budget. Just ending piracy doesn't mean there's magically more money floating around, despite what the industy wants to imply. Piracy costing $500 billion (according to UK stats), and you want to claim all that money? Well some other industry is going to lose out then. Joe Bloggs is not just sitting on that cash in his bank, he's been spending it on other items like appliances, food, and cars. Those industries are going to hurt if they lose that money.

Coming back to the $40 million game though we face the true purpose of IP, the promotion of the development of the arts and sciences, which in this case is gaming. Command & Conquer 3 cost tens of times the budget of Command & Conquer 1, but has it advanced gaming by the same amount? FIFA 2008 cost tens of times more than FIFA 1998, but again has it really done that much more for gaming? Does anyone actually think "I've just having so much more fun with these games than the ones I played a decade ago. This budget increase was totally worth it!"?

And if anyone thinks that's just nostalgia speaking, we have an opportunity in this console generation to witness low budget games competing directly with higher budget ones. Thanks to the DS we can see how much fun games can be when studios are able to take more creative risks and actually innovate when huge budgets aren't at stake. I always used to be a strong PC gaming supporter, but this year I've only bought TotA (not exactly a high budget game either) and UT3 (more as a sympathy purchase, haven't installed it yet). On the other hand I've bought and finished 11 DS games and it's been a total breath of fresh air. Now I'm not saying everyone has to agree, and they may say the DS stinks and has rubbish graphics, but it's the biggest selling console this generation which does counts for something and it's in no small part thanks to the unique games. The DS hardware though will evolve in the same way as every other console has, and the budgets will increase to the point that truly innovative ideas are simply too risky to attempt.

So to summarise for the TL;DR folks:

1. No IP protection = too small budget = discouragement for developers. Fair enough.

2. Turning up the IP protection allows bigger projects. I say game budgets are too big. Big projects discourage risk, and discourage innovation. This would be fine by itself but big budget games also make it hard for small budget games to exist because big budget games can buy shelf space/advertising/reviewers and simply shout down the smaller games when it comes to getting the word out. The domination of sequals and movie tie-ins further show the risk aversion of the gaming industry.

3. Bigger projects also require bigger backers, forcing gaming companies to merge together to stay competitive. We're already down to just a few main players. At this rate we'll be seeing ElectronicUbiVision in the next few years, followed quickly by Star Powered Games.

4. The DS shows that games can be produced on a low budget, with more innovation, on a 66MHz machine and still sell fantastically in 2008.

5. There's only so much the average American has available to spend on keeping themselves amused each year. When someone develops a $40 million game, that's 20 x $2 million games that may never be. There's a greater chance the gaming envelope will be pushed by one of those twenty games, than one megablockbuster.

6. Great IP protection is what keeps the ElectronicUbiVision's in business. It's those companies which are the biggest threat to Stardock, and what push it off the shelves at the shops. They are the ones that drown out Stardock in the gaming press. The are the ones which place huge ads across gaming media and on national TV, draining the consumer of their limited entertainment budget. When Stardock shouts for greater IP protection it sounds like turkeys voting for Christmas, since it will just empower the big companies to crush them some more.

So really this is just a long way of saying that it's big companies that hurt Stardock more than piracy, and piracy hurts big companies more than it hurts Stardock. Stardock makes good games on a reasonable budget which people with money enjoy and that helps them win against piracy. Big companies make so-so games and then try to trick people into buying them with flashy graphics, big ads, and throwing money around. Piracy deals far more harshly with that kind.

WIllythemailboy


Willy unless you tell me that you have always obeyed the law to the letter, you don't have rights to tell anyone to get caught. I am pretty sure at some point in your life you must have went over the speed limit while driving (yes going 3 miles over the speed limit is still breaking it), littered in streets, or something else.

on to my random rant

1. Yes most of us who download know that it is a crime when we download things online. SO what? most of us aren't rich enough to waste money on a game that looked good only to find out its absolute crap.

2. There is a big difference between stealing something of material value compared to a game floating around the internet. The person who downloaded the game is not guaranteed to buy the game.

3. I am not sure if this is 100% accurate but I have heard that Microsoft Windows became so popular because people were pirating Windows so much that it ended up becoming mainstream. Piracy has also helped Galactic Civilizations upto some exent

4. DRM wont work (sony DRM rookit anyone??)

Extra. Why is everyone so rigid when it comes to something new. Thats the reason why we have so many problems in the world

Problem with DRM is it all comes down to trust. If the copy protection scheme Frogboy postulates comes about and it doesn't work well because of the DRM messing everything up well... People will go back to something that works. There is a good reason why Vista isn't selling well because it is a steaming pile of DRM that doesn't work well because of that reason.

That and if you get really bad DRM shoved down your throats with no alternatives or recourse... There is always the court of public opinion and that court is distinctly unfavorable to unreasonableness. Look at the Bioshock controversy. Bioshock PC sales are crud and that game is now $30 and falling because they put digital bondage all over it that broke the game and it was widely reported. Comcast unblocked bit torrent because it lost big time in the court of public opinion.

I agree that in nations where noone pays for IP anyway DRM is a good idea but in countries like the US where the majority of people are willing to pay for IP putting DRM all over something is just getting to be intolerable.

To use the museum analogy what if the museum in order to stop people from looking at the paintings for free put a protection screen in front and only handed out goggles to paying customers. Now in order to see anything with the goggles you have to cross your eyes and give yourself a major headache. These screen are also 5 feet in front of the actual painting so people who sneak in the back door can just stand between the screen and the painting and see it in all its glory without getting a headache... That is what DRM is and that is why it doesn't and will not work...

If a company wants to put a flaming hoop for me to jump through in order to get what I paid for they can keep their stuff and I'll keep my money. And if they fail because noone buys their product because they don't have the trust of the consumer well that's a good thing they deserve to fail from their terminal stupidity. Yes I'm bitter... Losing $800 worth of hardware to Starforce and Pace Interlock (which cost me MY valuable time when it crashed my computer at random intervals and I lost data which I then had to spend hours recreating) will do that to a guy.

Composed - Sure I can, I don't pirate games. Or anything else. I don't even buy used books unless new ones are out of print.

1. You're hardly alone in not being able to afford everything, or to get burned buying crap. I can't, and I have been burned. So what? Grow up - risk is part of life. Do a bit of research before you buy stuff and you won't get burned as often.

2. There may be differences, but that certainly isn't one of them. There's no guarrantee a thief would have purchased what they stole, either.

3. Piracy as a form of advertising? Sounds like a really stupid piracy rationalization to me.

4. Couldn't agree more. I personally won't buy a game with Starforce on it. That doesn't mean a better scheme couldn't be found that actually works.

Extra. This is hardly a new situation. Copyright laws were made when the printing press started making piracy a problem for literary works.

Not *everyone*. I'm part of that exception group

While I don't support piracy in any way, shape or form - it must be said that some developers / publishers are equally criminal at times releasing games that are essentially betas yet charging full price (and to top it off, providing no post-release support). These sorts of game releases really shake some people's faith in purchasing PC games. I'd say it accounts for a small minority of people who pirate but I'd thought I'd mention it nonetheless.

PS: Thank god Stardock isn't one of them.

Baen Free Library

Damn, I really wish there was an edit button. I realize my refers to books, not games, but it's still a semi-valid rebuttal, I feel... at least to that point.

I'm well aware of it. If authors and publication companies choose to allow their works to be downloaded freely, that is their choice. That is, by definition, not piracy. It's frankly a good buisiness model, for books anyway - but it shouldn't be forced upon those writers and companies that choose not to participate.

Why should I risk my money on something that might not give me hours of enjoyment??
Its just about being smart to avoid being stuck with something that would gather dust on the shelves
I do research on the game when I download it to try it out



Yes, thats true the thief wouldn't have purchased it. But downloading something doesn't stop someone else from purchasing it. If the material it self is missing, the producers are actually losing money (rather the store you stole it from)



I already said its a crime (read my post again if you want), its not rationalization. But you cant just claim piracy hurts a company without any actual proof that the people who downloaded the game would have actually purchased it. How can you be so sure that the people who downloaded the didn't go out and buy it because they liked it??



If the security feature works perfectly without being a hassle, what seems to be the problem with them implementing it?? I don't mind having a DRM on my computer that won't annoy me or end up being a security issue.


This will be my last post on piracy, since Im pretty sure I can't get through to you and you can say the same for me. I agree with you that it is a crime, but I would rather pay for something good than crap without taking a meaningless risk.

PS when you go to buy a car, you can test drive it. Before you buy a couch, you sit on it to see if it has the right feel. Get game developers to make a good demo and I would rather download that to try out the game.

Kryo don't get troll baited.

Frogboy, stop scaring me!!!!!!! What has brought on this sudden doomsday prediction! If you worry bout spore, I'm not buying it. It may be the one game I looked forward to, but the copy protection is ridiculous. Hell Windows XP copy protection is ridiculous IMO!

I wish to make games of my own. Ones that will give people a nostalgia feeling of the good old days. If there is no place for company like yours in the future, then there is no place for me on this platform either.

OK , let's see "Mass effect" is out.
Wanted to buy it - 3 attempts on different "direct download" sites including EA itself - 3 failures "due country restrictions".

So what I have left to do ? - Right, Torrenleech, PirateBay or Demonid.
Do I feel OK with it ? - No , I will even probably buy original later but WHY push potential legal customer into this ?
(Thats what I do like about SCD/Impulse).