Now before anyone starts locking or deleting this topic and banning me, just wait, give me a minute, ok?
Now, I'm not advocating or supporting it, I just wanted to air an idea or two. I always argue with a friend of mine, because he insists piracy is bad and decreases sales of whatever media involved. His big example is downloading music.
I've pointed out that this is rubbish, because album sales are up to about 230 million per year, an increase of 3% over last year. Computer game sales are also up, despite there being less titles released and everyone bitching about piracy. Sales of cinema tickets are up to 180 million, another increase, making the UK Europe's largest cinemagoing country (Germany sold about 170 million, and they have a much larger population. This is just the situation in the UK, but I'm not really hearing anything about dropping sales anywhere else.
Discuss?

Discussions about piracy are fine as long as no one links to warez or directly tell people to download pirated stuff.

What I want to know is why piracy is always counted towards lost revenue for these companies...
I mean, how do they know that the person who downloaded their product would go out and actualy buy it if they couldn't download it?

For example: Person A decideds to download a game because he/she has no money.

How is that a lost sale? Since clearly person A wouldn't have been able to buy the game in the first place.

I don't think the majority of people who illegally download games do it because they can't afford to get them legally because they could clearly afford a reasonably good PC and a broadband connection.

Some do it because they want to save the money they do have for other luxuries, and most of the others do it because they enjoy thinking that they are ripping off a multinational corporation. And I end up paying more money for a game because the company has no choice but to increase its price to allow for piracy

However, I also think that some software companies can go too far to fight software piracy. I had been interested in buying Half Life 2 until the reviewers started complaining about the amount of stuff you have to download to get it to work. As my internet connection is patchy I decided to give HL2 a miss.

Actually, HL2 just suffers from an incredibly complex and highly unnecessary copy protection scheme. According to a local newspaper review, you don't actually download much if you already have the DVD. It just connects to the Steam server to confirm that you're legal, then downloads a key to decode EVERY SINGLE BYTE for the 4gig installation...

Still, at least its not StarForce. THAT is bordering on malware already.

How large do you think the increase would've been if noone pirated?

Keep in mind that it's a bigger market to feed too (those 3% only comes from people who pay for the software) => more demands on a higher quality product (more competition) => more costs + less income due to piracy => higher prices for paying customers or bankruptcy.

So say that those 3% have to reach $500'000 for the company not to go minus on it - the scenario is as follows: 40'000 people decide to enjoy this game.

1) 30'000 pirate it and 10'000 buy it legally. The pirates generate no income and thus the final price for one copy of the game must cost at least 500'000 / 10'000 = $50.

2) All 40'000 buy it legally. The cost for one copy now becomes 500'000 / 40'000 = $12.5.

3) The increase on 3% = $500'000, thus, 100% = 16.7 million bucks. Now say that everyone buys it legally, and the company gets to charge $50 for it: 40'000 · 50 = 2 millions - a 12% increase. Imagine how the sequel looks now, with 1.5 millions more to play around with.

Person B decides to throw a brick through the window to some car retailer and steal a car, because he/she has no money

Because people need to entertain themselves somehow. Either with a bottle of cheap whisky, a computer game or by staring into the wall (or whatever). If they can do it for free, well then noone makes any cash on it, except for the thief (pirate). It's really like stealing a pair of shoes because you want to afford a new pair of jeans too. It can simply can not be justified - not in my eyes, at least.

Why? Because it makes it more expensive for me, for you and for your parents/girlfriend/wife/whoever buys it for you on your birthday. Thus - it is not only wrong and egoistic, it is also a complicated way of shooting yourself in the foot if you or your friends ever plan to buy a game legitimately :lol:

But in that case the car retailer has actuly lost the car so thay can't sell it to anyone else. Copying a music track/game or whatever is exactly that... making a copy. The original is still there to be sold.
Thus you can't compair copying a music track and stealing a physical object like a car.

"Person B decides to throw a brick through the window to some car retailer, make an exact copy of the car and drive away in the copy." would be a better analogy.

I'm not saying piracy is right, because at the moment it does mean that the developers/music artists make less money. But that's mainly down to the now outdated business model that these industries operate under.

No, the original is still there to be copied and those copies are there to be sold cars work the same way - thousands of copies of a particular type are made and then sold. The only difference is that software is just... software =) You're not selling the CD/DVD, the manual or the little box it's packed in - you're selling the software.

If you would build a volvo from scratch then you're not really copying it. Then you've built it :o

If you would take a game and look at it and then program an entirely new game - or make a cover on some song - then, apart from the plagiarism :lol:, alright, but that's another thing

As much as I disdain piracy, I have to agree with the anology on the stolen car. While you technically ARE stealing from the company in question, you are not commiting theft. It's like building the exact same car, with no purchased license or anything. You're stealing the chassis and overall car, essentially they lost the purchase because you own a car of their design illegally.

Therefore you lose morality all the same. Would you build a car and sell it, only to have a ton of people all build the exact same type of car and drive it while you suffer the fact that they would have had to pay you to have that luxury if they obeyed the law? What if you were trying to scrape a living together off of this particular car design? You'd go bankrupt because your car was essentially stolen by hundreds. Despite the only thing being stolen was the idea, it still caused harm. Which is why I feel that piracy DOES make an impact.

Has anyone looked at the sales record for System Shock 2? Does anyone know how many System Shock 2 fans exist? Does anyone know how much money the game made despite its large fanbase?

Things like piracy caused the downfall of the System Shock series. It wasn't the only factor, of course, but it was indeed a big one. And now with the System Shock license a complete mess, the game cannot be continued.

Also, I have noticed that not one of my friends possesses a legal copy of either Baldur's Gate II or Giants Citizen Kabuto. Neither series was continued. (Although I know the Baldur's Gate engine was continued. But essentially, Baldur's Gate only moved on as a Diablo clone on the consoles.) So what I see definitely contradicts the numbers indicating that Piracy isn't hurting anyone.

Looking Glass were making huge losses long before System Shock 2 was finaly released due to a string of badly rated games that didn't sell well. Out of all the games they released the only ones that made them a profit were the Thief series and System Shock 2. But even these weren't enough to stop Looking Glass from going bankrupt.



Theres no "series" of Giants because Planet Moon decided to make another game instead, not because Giants didn't sell well, but because they realised that any sequal to Giants just wouldn't be as good as the original. Their 2nd game was Armed and Dangerous, which has a similar gameplay to Giants. Unfortunatly it didn't get good reviews due to not having a multiplayer mode and so it hasn't sold very well.

It just seems to me that a lot of people are moaning about piracy, but they're making lots and lots of money. The markets for games, DVDs and CDS is thriving, despite piracy. Companies don't put prices up because of piracy, they put prices up because they want a bigger profit, and quite frankly the usual RRP for media is quite plainly stupid anyway.
£40 for a game, £15 for a CD and £20 for a DVD? I'm sorry, but there's no way I'm paying that. I don't mind companies making a profit, it's necessary for capitalism, but making a stinking fat profit? Greed seems to afflict a lot of people these days.

Then you are not entitled to own a copy of the contents of that CD or DVD. It's that simple.

Fullauto, i can see your point, but there are legal ways to go your way, too. Download Freewaregames and/or applications, download free music (like www.electromancer.com, where young DJ's let you hear their music for free)and and and, there are lots of possibilities to live the way of non-capitalism.

But if you want that new fullpricegame, well, you have to buy it, everything else is illegal, no matter with what intention you have.

Another way (seldom used) is to simply say: No, i don't need that. You would be amazed to see how many things you don't really need to live.

If you copy a game you actually support the "system" you want to fight, simply because you give in to their seduction.

I disdain piracy. The musicians/programmers spent long hours making something that they want to get paid for. Granted, the retailers and the middle-man always up the price for stuff which is sometimes siginifacant. Downloading the file not only bypasses the middle-man and the retailer, but also shorts the guy/gal who worked on it. Sometimes their salaries are based off of sales.

The downloading of games/music seems to be reserved for the upper-middle class because they have the necessary income to afford DSL or broadband connections. Sure, you can still download these files with just a dial-up connection but look at the time it takes. Who wants to spend 3-4 hours waiting for an album or a game to download?

If I REALLY want some album or game, and don't want to pay full retail on it, I wait. Then I buy it used off ebay for cheap. If I end up not liking it, I'll try to resell it and recoup some of the loss. At least the game/music was purchased legally where the money went to the respective licence owners. In addition, if I end up liking it, I'll have a hard copy on disc which I can use anytime I want to replace a corrupted file/track. That's my rant anyways.

The traditional trade system goes along the lines of, person A has something, person B has something. Person A gives their something to person B, who gives something in return. Both lose their original possesion, in exchange for the others item.

Computers make that scheme a fair bit more complex.

Person A has some media, person B has some money. Person A gives their media to person B, in exhange for money. Person A now has money, but still has their media. Person B has the media, but no money. Nor does he have the right to sell on the media he has bought.

Given that the price to copy software (or music) is free, what you are in fact paying for is two things. One is the license to own that media, and the other is the storage material that holds that media.

Now, these days, your software publishing companies (and music recording companies) would like to think that these two things are not mutually exclusive. That is, if you do not own the licence, you have no right to the storage material, and if you happen to break the storage material, you lose the rights to the media, and thus have to pay for both again.

As a general rule, state laws over ride this. You'll note that just about every licence agreement notes this. So, that law only applies if you're in a location of the world where it's not ruled otherwise. This means that if you own the licence, you may use the media regardless of the state of the storage material. For example, you may make a copy of the media, and use the copied disc. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you can pirate the media - you can only use one copy at a time. What it boils down to is that backups are legal, but you can't distribute them.

But, consider this. The recording industry likes to say that the reason CDs cost so much, and performers get such a low percentage of the procedes, is that the storage material costs so much, as does the distribution costs. If that's the case, why not simply spread the music across the web, and cut out the CDs in stores altogether? Prices would plummet, and I bet piracy would go down with it. The only real answer I can think of is that the recording industry is full of lying greedy pigs; but it might just be that they are simply stupid.

Now, I may sound harsh when I say that, but let's face it, it's true.

If any music can be played on headphones, or through stereo speakers, it can be recorded and stripped of any copy protection mechanisms. And yet the recording industry continues to create new copy protections, which only prevent paying customers from playing the music - but don't stop pirates from copying it. They then up the price of their albums due to the development costs of these redundant 'copy protections'.

Let's face it. Either they're making extra money there - greed - or they really don't know their hurting only their customers - stupidity.

The same thing can apply to computer software. Just look at what happened with Steam - early customers couldn't play because the official servers died, but pirates could because they could make their *own* servers.

This tends to... annoy... customers, who turn to piracy. It's more convieniant. Not only is it cheaper, it's easier. The only catch is, it's immoral. I could rant on for hours (and I type pretty fast, so that's a lot of text ranting), so to sum up - the above reasoning isn't an excuse for piracy, but it is one of the reasons why it's about.

Perhaps piracy would drop if sellers made their products more conveniant to use by not implementing copy protections that prevent the media from being used by their customers(regardless of intentions, let's face it, that's how it turns out), and if they used more practical and inexpensive distribution methods.

I suppose they could continue to rely on un-enforcable anti-piracy laws, while continuing to make things harder and more expensive for their customers. But can you really see that causing a drop in piracy rates?

Bravo, Bomb Bloke. Well stated!

Though there is one thing that might be misleading:


The "storage media" you refer to is blank CD's. I know for a fact that the media itself is pretty inexpensive, as is the cost to burn a retail CD from the "master". I recently had to get 100 CD's made for my roommate who is a local recording artist. From memory, the total bill was something under $5 USD per CD.

CD's are so damn expensive because the record labels take a deep cut of the total record sales. To do this, they crank up the price. That's why musicians frequently get screwed out of millions; the record labels "siphon" off their share first, the recording artist gets what's left. Granted, distribution of those CD's do cost some money. The record clubs/stores also crank up the price some to offset their business costs. But the biggest cut always goes to the record labels, that's just the way the industry works, and if anyone tells you different, he/she's lying!

That's where the 'lying greedy pigs' bit comes in.

I didn't point that out myself? Oops, thanks for the extra notice there.

And let's not forget the most important point here : All intellectual property rights goes to the recording label, NOT the artists.