The factual accuracy of this is irrefutable, the vast majority of them either result in a sale themselves,
I have already said I have nothing against those that use pirated games as a kind of unofficial demo.
or would never have been one to start with because the downloaders either don't have the money to start with or don't care enough to spend it.
Because the shoplifter cares.
Value is irrelevant, it has no bearing on the difference between theft and copyright infringment.
I beg to differ. Your argument centers on the opinion that a boxed copy is more valuable than a downloaded copy.
Ignoring the moral and long term implications of downloading all your games, would you take more than you currently buy?
That's even less valid than anything I've brought up. Removing morality and long-term thought from the equation, obviously everyone would choose the more enjoyable and easy action. But since we're debating morality (I assume, since it wouldn't make much sense to debate whether copyright infringement and theft are legally recognized as identical and I can't think of a third option), ignoring morality doesn't make much sense, does it?
Do you not grasp the difference between real loss and potential gain?
I do; my thought process is as follows:
Theft: material loss for distributor, publisher and seller equal to cost of production and transportation. There is now one unpaid-for copy of the game.
Piracy (with regards to the one posting the game, not the one downloading it): distributor, publisher and seller are paid for one game. There is now an amount of unpaid-for copies of the game limited only by the number of people who go to that website.
Piracy (with regards to the one downloading the game): no measurable loss for distributor, publisher or seller. There is now one unpaid-for copy of the game.
Conclusion: putting a game up for download is morally worse than theft. Theft is morally worse than downloading an illegal copy. Piracy is as close to theft as is possible on the Internet, as the sole distinction lies in theft requiring a decrease in the number of available legitimate copies, which is impossible to do when the medium one is working with is by its very nature not limited by supply limits.
The statistics that have been taken show it to be closer to one for a thousand downloads, and in many cases far less.
I'm pretty sure you'll get onto me for lacking basic reading comprehension skills here, but I can't figure out what "it" is supposed to be.
Now that we've established this, lets ignore it. Pretend a downloaded copy is a lost sale. Walmart sells a game for $50, and you "steal" it instead of buying it. Walmart payed 30 to get it, Walmart is out 20 bucks in profit. Why? Because Walmart is still selling the games they have, they simply aren't going to be able to sell that one more, it will never be made because mass production, while mass, is done as needed, not all at once in expectation of record sales for the lifetime of the product. If, on the other hand, you actually steal that game from Walmart, they are out $50, $20 in profit and $30 that they already paid for it. Walmart is fucked, they've actually lost money. When you download it, they simply make less because you would have bought it instead and given them their $20 profit.
You raise a good point here. I have only one thing to add here: Wal-Mart is really the only part of the production chain that has a reason to prefer theft over piracy. The boxing company is paid whether there is a sale or not. The publisher is still paid by Wal-Mart when they sent the game out, so they aren't affected by what happens afterwards. The publisher isn't paid when the game is downloaded, so there is a loss relative to what they would have received had the guy gone and taken his free game from Wal-Mart. Given this hypothetical situation, we have a choice to either screw Wal-Mart, screw EA, or give them both what they want. This is quite a dilemma.
Your second response. You claim consumers are informed on the contents of EULA's because they know they are there?
No. This isn't a cause-and-effect relationship. They are informed on the
pertinent contents of the EULA (NOT the entire text, which you seem to think I am saying)
and they know that it is there.
I then provide more, make a claim that even among single publishers, the EULA's have relevant variations, listing some of them in the process. You then say it doesn't matter, presumably because your asshole is already stretched out enough that it doesn't hurt anymore?
If you can't follow and grasp the problem with your argument, you need to read your own posts very very carefully and only respond after you've discovered the paradox of your argument. Your potential way out that you simply ignore all objectionable restrictions because they aren't enforcible and thus don't exist is naivety and no different from the pirates from a legal perspective.
As long as you just play your game, you won't be be breaking any of the reasonable restrictions in the EULA. The unreasonable restrictions can be considered irrelevant not because I don't like them but because an attempt to enforce those restrictions in anything but the most extreme cases would be grounds for a class-action lawsuit. There is a gray area with resale; I consider it morally permissible because the publisher has been paid for one copy and there is still only one copy in use (which really bugs me when I can run a game without the disk. I can't morally sell Stardock's games, as that would create multiple usable copies).
As soon as you break the license, you're committing copyright infringment according to the publisher.
Which is unreasonable, and would probably be ignored in most courts (yes, I am aware of Blizzard vs. l33t haxxorz, but that was a minor court and not a normal situation). However, the acts that we're debating aren't defined as copyright infringement by the publisher, as copyright law already did that.
The final section of your post. Wrong. This is basic economics. In any medium, you have costs, both fixed and variable. The cost of software is relevant to the discussion. For sake of round numbers, pretend Sins cost one million dollars to develop. The development cost of Sins for 300k copies, per copy, would then be a whopping $3.33 a box. Naturally they have other costs, advertising, production, post release support, various distribution costs. The actual cost of the software itself though? Negligible per copy. The more copies, the more negligible it is. If you sell enough, the box itself becomes a greater cost. The process behind distribution is almost always a greater cost.
Price is the other side, a function of supply and demand, and only when you meet the correct price, will you sell that copy. If you have too many copies, as is the case with internet piracy, the price becomes a problem. As a black market, illegal in nature, this is not a problem for the majority of your customer base and you can largely ignore it, charging a price based on legal supply and demand, ignoring the illegal supply and demand.
The value of the software has nothing to do with an individual box, it is increasing with every sale. Value is how much something is actually worth. Not the wishful thinking of the company producing it, the actual results. The value of Sins is however many millions of dollars they've made off it, the value of a pirated copy is nothing. You can't subtract nothing from millions and make it a smaller number. A pirated copy has no value because it's not paid for. It doesn't matter what you call it, a copy of software has no value unless it's sold. That price is often zero, they wont buy it unless it's free, regardless of their access to the illegal market. Piracy is just another one of the factors in value. Based on demand, you can milk a certain amount of money out of a certain product, at a certain price, for a certain cost. Free copies on the black market factor into that demand.
I wasn't using value as a synonym for price. I meant that computer programs have roughly the same importance placed on them by society as physical objects do, and so should be viewed in the same capacity despite their lack of a physical presence. This is the only sense that I ever use value in, as there are plenty of other synonyms for cost.
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Take any two companies, compare their US EULA's, then come back and tell me that crap. There is no standard, and a lot of them are pages long. It's neither rational nor reasonable to expect anyone to remember all the bullshit in the last one they read, and it likely only vaguely resembles the one they're buying. One license will give the user the right to modify, another will restrict the making of backup copies. One license will give the licenser a unilateral right to terminate yours without cause, another will only have unilateral termination on your part. You can't even go by companies, they change them regularly in an attempt to close methods of reverse engineering by banning more and more normal actions or preventing things they just don't like, such as used sales.
I hate to say this but console software is pirated