Bondfc11 :
I find it amazing how many people have no idea what they are talking about. Piracy doesn't cost anything? Really? Every argument on this page that started with that premise is an auto ignore. Start a business and then let's talk about anti-capitalism. To the one dude that cannot quote properly - where would you be without someone else paying your way (a business owner)? Are you self-employed not making a dime off of a capitalist enterprise? Probably not. But you start your whole argument with that premise. Interesting.
RCguitarist :
Yeah, that quoting thing didn't work out quite so well, and apparently I can't edit my post.
Its good to see that you gave yourself a username that fits you well...clueless. You have no idea about economics or how the real world works. For example, have you even thought about the $50k-ish income making programmers and artists who develop games for EA etc? Thier livelyhoods depend on the income from those games. If they make a good game and it is pirated to all hell, their development studio closes. And dont feed us the line of BS of "if its a good game i will buy it". We both know that you would come up with some excuse not to. Being against corrupt executives i can understand, but being anti capitalism i cant. Look at the countries that have communism in them and tell me with a straight face that you think life there is better than it is here.
Actually, to all you nay-sayers, I've studied quite a bit of political economy (probably more than the all of you combined) and have a quite good understanding of how it functions in the real world apart from its idealizations, e.g. Keynes, Ricardo, Hayek, Marx, Smith, Mises, etc, but all in all I don't accept the fundamental premises of most of political economy other than Marx's critique of it and the critiques and analyses which followed him. Profit itself is theft because the capital required to produce goods or services was A PRIORI created by workers, with workers being the ones who actually create value (necessary value and surplus value) as determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity, with the only thing entitling capitalists to both capital and the products thereof as engendered by labor being money and power (in this instance, class) relations enforced through legal institutions. Therefore, capitalists are entirely superfluous to the production and distribution process while disproportionately benefiting from it in contrast to workers or even the piracy communities, and therefore I'm going to steal from corporations and laugh about it. No matter how you want to cut it, we can live without capitalists and corporations but they can't live (as a class) without us.
This is simply the best way that I can frame this without having to go into too much depth about it. So what would be my solution? Abolish the capitalist class or abolish class altogether. Could you not discern how I made a distinction between independently to smaller scale produced goods and services and corporations when it comes to piracy? Profitability is almost never an issue for these corporations in which the upper tiers and shareholders are the ones who are reaping the profits, and wages aren't derived from profit (although profit is often reinvested into new projects and expansion, which isn't necessarily a good thing for either workers or consumers) rather than being a part of the initial investment (necessary value). Piracy is a marginal phenomenon and like others have argued doesn't constitute an actual loss for the company. And instead of this bourgeois notion of trickle down economics and sacrifice on the behalf of the workers or even consumers, maybe upper management should be forced to take reductions in pay? Honestly, a lot of the stuff EA puts out while still selling in the millions is crap to begin with and I'm not obligated to buy crap or even expend the necessary amount of time to pirate it, compensate for an inherently unstable economic system where inflated budgets and the overaccumulation of capital and its tendencies results in people getting laid off with a decline in living standards, or to apologize for hierarchical relations and power structures. One of these days that bubble's gonna POP POP POP, and everything will come tumbling down just as it has many times before.
Oh, and none of those countries were or are actually communist, and I'm not even a Marxist. China, where virtually all commodities are produced these days so corporations can circumvent labor regulations and laws that were implemented because of the threat of class struggle (influenced by revolutionary ideas) in the Western world, being thoroughly capitalist but under an authoritarian regime of a Communist Party, actually have some pretty bad work conditions and wages to deal with. You shouldn't conceive of a company as a whole rather than in parts, and then decide who it is that you become partial to, all notions of *just corruption* aside. And personally, I agree with Shark. Fu** your business and fu** a capitalist. I'll buy something from a co-operative, if out of principle more than it being an actual form of resistance or potential alternative to capitalism, but then again most companies aren't co-operatives. You want to spearhead something? Make sure UK Crytek workers get paid and soon or stfu and not apologize for Crytek as a company or market dynamics, because you can't blame piracy on that one.