Piracy Megathread: Do you object to piracy, and if so, why?

[i_hate_flying]

Where I live, piracy is only a crime if one profits financially from it.

People in this country cannot think for themselves because the government does and has always done that for them. Everyone obeys the laws and does as they're supposed to. You will almost never even see anyone break the speed limit.

Let me give you an example. Take a factory. It's allowed to pollute only so much in a given year here. Otherwise, it could pollute a lot or hardly at all. Instead of deciding to "do the right thing", it pollutes the 5000 kg of X every year as allowed by law. When I heard this about a particular factor near me, which is allowed to dump a certain amount of waste into the fjord every year, I thought it was weird. As I read this in the newspaper, I asked someone, is Factory Y really allowed to dump X kg of Z product every year? The reply was "If that's what it says in the newspaper, and if that's what the newspaper says that the government allows, then it must be true." I then asked what they thought about it, and they really couldn't answer. The mentality here is that the government knows what's best for the people. This is not the way I was taught to think. Where I'm from, you're not supposed to trust anything that's in the newspaper and one should know that the government is looking out for the best interests of corporations, not the people.

Here, instead of doing some thinking, the people take the easy way out. They follow all the laws and the government keeps making new ones. Here, The Pirate Bay is a very popular website and there is no such thing as bandwidth throttling.

With that said, I prefer a country with laws that look out for the best interest of the people and protects them from the interests of corporations. Being around a bunch of zombies, on the other hand, has its disadvantages in addition to being downright annoying and making it hard to have meaningful relationships with people. It's good to come from a different place at this stage in life and work/live in a country such as thing, however. Glad I didn't grow up here.

My personal feelings about piracy are quite liberal. I believe that one should be able to try-before-you-buy. I own over a thousand CDs, and many of them were mistakes. I was very anti-mp3/downloading music until recently, when I became informed about the degree to which record companies have been/are taking advantage of the consumer as well as the artists. Three words: Nine Inch Nails!

 

[i_hate_flying]

Umm... google is your friend?

I was thinking the exact same thing. Other than the word plagiarism, the act of what he just did, is there a word in the English language for this type of material he just posted? It tries to state something as fact, which cannot exactly be tested or refuted, whilst it tries to be the all-encompassing, definitive statement. I've been living abroad for too long, I'm losing my eloquence.

"if it was not for piracy. only the select elite few would have access to books today"

And in 2008, the internet wouldn't reach trailer parks?

 

[mmahoney]

1. I think that the answer to this question is by no means immutable. I don't think anyone should pirate games released within the last few years ( though I don't blame those that do to see if they like games without demos ). The developers have a right to the money made off of a game. We should respect that and buy the games that we play. I do think that for old, hard-to-find games, there is an exception. Some things just aren't worth the money asked for due to rarity.

2. Yes. They were almost exclusively old games that are very hard to find nowadays ( and I'm glad I didn't pay for most of them ).

3. I definitely think stealing from a store is worse than adding a torrent to utorrent. This is true for a couple of reasons. For starters, as previously mentioned by another, stealing from a store incurs loss on the part of the store and shipping centers, packagers, etc. Secondly, it takes someone quite depraved of a few key moral attributes to steal from a store. It does not, however, require anything beyond a bored 12-year-old to download a game off of The Pirate Bay.

4. My limited defense is not all-encompassing whatsoever. There are some things that I think are just fine to pirate. For instance, games with creators long out of business. Games that are near impossible to find. Games that you are 110% willing to pay for if you like, but can't find a demo for.

But, this is merely the opinion of a 15 year-old boy.

 

[brexak]

Do the math and all you that say piracy is not the problem will shut up. during crysis 1st month out, sales were poor meanwhile pirate bay and other websites had 13,000 people downloading it 24 hrs a day for months. do some math, assume download takes an average of 10 hrs multiply 13,000 by 2 since 10 fits twice in a 24 hr period and you get 26000 downloads in 1 day, multiply that by 7 182,000 downloads in one week multiply by 4 728,000 downloads in a month then consider 6 other sites doing the same multiply by 6 that's 4,638,000 downloads in one month. since I never saw any decline for months multiply that by 4 months 18,552,000 possible sales for crysis that's a conservative number since I only used 20 of the 24 hr non stop download period and there are far more sites and methods for pirating. yes people have problems do to the viruses and spyware that comes with pirated games and have to redownload but its still a huge figure and again I left a lot of hours out. this is only a raw calculation to give an idea of the problem.

 

[randomizer]

Really old thread...