You just have to think of your worst qualities and exaggerate them. Everyone has the potential to be a pirate. But, luckily, we all feel compelled at varying degrees.




In the right? No. I disagree. You can't win any moral argument on the side of a thief, except maybe at a table of thieves.



Very few people are professional thieves or professional murderers. The "decent human being", I'm assuming, fills the rest. I've never seen someone who wasn't decent according to somebody. Since I personally know of no professional thieves or professional murderers and since I know nothing about their particular mentalities, I figure I must have been identifying with decent human beings. And you have been unfair. For all I know, thieves and murderers are decent, too.

[edit: Nobody is exclusively a thief or exclusively decent. There are no good people. There are no bad people. People just do decent things more often or less often than others. I identified with the decision to steal, not the people who would. After all, if the world consisted soley of people who would never steal, then this debate would never take place!)

BS. Their excuse is piracy.

The reality is poor business practice, and bad products.

your argument is moot, it's a two way street. If companies used better business practices there would be far less demand for piracy. Meaning less need to act like a criminal.

also allow me to demonstrate your comments thus far.
A large corporation takes steps to murder everyone that does business with them because they could be spies from other companies! But its ok, don't you dare try to murder them back though and be a criminal.

I think you just have some prejudice against retribution. Treat people like criminals and criminals they will become.

Robin Hood. Stealing from the rich and privileged who overstep their bounds? It isn't that taboo you know. Hence why piracy only really has bad stigma with... you guessed it the rich and privileged who treat people like scum.

It would seem plausible that such an approach would make you more likely to offend however - for example it would be highly likely that you will care less what happens to a company who treats you as a criminal than one who treets you as a good customer, and thus the impact of one of the potential reasons you wouldn't pirate (you like to benefit others/don't like to hurt others) would be decreased.


No, this is one of the problems that comes from taking the basic prisoners dilemma and trying to generalise its results without giving enough attention to what may have changed, or to possible exceptions/alternatives to the standard result; Emotion is not the only reason why someone might pay for a game instead of pirating it, and thus you cannot (correctly) say that the best decision for everyone would be to steal if you discount only the emotional reasons. The number of assumptions you need to make for your result to hold are far too numerous to make the end result of that much significance. In effect you'd need to assume that if a game was sold at both full price and for free, both versions identical and equally easy to obtain, with no difference in the risks or severity of problems with either games, and no emotion on the part of the purchaser, oh, and both versions being of equal legality, then everyone should get the one for free. Hardly an overwhelming result really!

It's not a street, it's a downward spiral of bad behavior. Continuing your own bad behavior while demanding the other party fixes their bad behavior won't fix anything.

Why should they have the sole burden of changing behavior? Why should you be free to continue while they have to change?



Correct. You call the FBI and the police and get the law on their asses.

They'll probably murder you before you murder them otherwise - after all, there are many of them and only one of you. Not a solution.



Retribution has proven to often be ineffective and nearly always leads to escalation of violence. I have valid reasons for having "prejudice" against retribution.

Misinformation, ignorance, or stupidity are also possible explanations in the absence of emotion. I only assumed that people were all smart, sane, and well-informed.



Violence? That's absurd. You mean like Waco? Yeah, that worked great.



As long as you aren't from one of the barbarian countries, you are rich. The bum who lives in government housing here lives larger than a neurosurgeon in Nigeria. Robin hood makes a decent argument if people are starving or oppressed, like people were in pre-revolutionary France. Why does it matter if rich people all have million dollar hovercars here, as long as you have a rolls royce and all the Nigerians starve?

Still not enough, since plenty of people will purchase a game rather than pirate it if they are smart, sane, well-informed and rational. However it is a step forward that you are at last recognising rationality isn't the only assumption you need to be making!


Not necessarily; in many of the countries where you can have countless people who are in absolute poverty you can also have extremally rich people. A neurosurgeon is going to be well educated, unlike the majority of the population, and hence is much more likely to be in the wealthy (and very small) group of that society.


Well the core argument is actually relevant even if people are well fed and free. It's basically just that the government should use taxation to redistribute wealth from those with lots to those with little (and/or that those who can most afford to pay taxes should be taxed more than those who can least afford it). It's the reason many countries will feature a progressive rate of tax, since the disposable income of someone on $15,000 a year will be far less than 10% of someone on $150,000, thus it is deemed unfair to tax that first one as much of a proportion (or a greater proportion) of their income than the person on 150k. You also have the more general welfare ideal of having everyone on equal incomes (that is, if all else was equal, it would be better to have everyone earning an equal amount than to have the extremes of some very rich and some very poor). This then leads to a trade off being made between pursuing more equal incomes and the negative effect that such policies will typically have on aggregate income, with the balance/final outcome depending on the governments own priorities (in terms of the political spectrum, as a simplification left wing governments will place a greater emphasis on equal incomes at the expense of total income than right wing governments_.

Cobra, downward spiral of bad behavior? Perhaps you could check into reality briefly?

There is no downward spiral, regardless of whether it's bad behavior or not.

First, copyright infringement is a fiction created by people to advance society. Intellectual property exists solely because we say it does. This is part of the reason so many pirates say fuck off. Most of the world gets told this absurdly moronic idea and thinks what? you can't own an idea? What kind of crack are these crazy westerners smoking? To them, it's not immoral to steal ideas because you can't own them anymore than you own the air you're breathing. It's as if you went into a tribal culture where land wasn't owned and started putting down fences. It wouldn't be immoral for them to ignore your fences because to them, you don't even own it. The massive piracy rates around the world are not a product of immorality because copyright isn't even a moral issue. It's a reward for creation with the intent to fuel technological and artistic expansion and make everyones lives better. It's social engineering that hasn't caught on everywhere yet.

Second, it's decreasing, not increasing. This is fact, get over it. The microcosm that is the PC game market does not constitute a global trend in piracy. Since no one will actually publish studies on it, we don't even know that PC games are increasing in piracy either. Piracy in general is dropping.

Third, most of what is considered piracy now, wasn't. There was no law against copying and sharing Doom with your friends in the US. Sharing only became illegal here with a 1997 court case that ruled it as such. You can check the copyright act if you don't believe it. Sharing is still legal in a lot of places. Only an idiot says the sky is falling when something legal becomes illegal and the crime rates suddenly jump. Never mind that copyright wasn't even a common concept a few hundred years ago. Even where it existed, you had to be given permission to have your work protected.

Fourth, riding your high horse solves as little as the RIAA suing people did. They really enjoyed their falling sales, so much that they kept suing and blamed the losses on piracy. Moral outrage isn't a problem, it's an airhead response to something you object to. It's like the Catholic church objecting to condoms and birth control pills, never mind that people were already screwing like rabbits and getting abortions from quacks using coat hangars. We don't dare let them avoid the pregnancy! Piracy needs studied, in depth and honestly, by people that haven't already got a horse in the race. It's stupid to be spending trillions on an issue that's probably not even losing them money. Unfortunately, assholes like you and Sly are stuck on how it's stealing, regardless of whether the theft of a digital object with no physical loss is a good or bad thing in the end for the company trying to sell it. Being stupid just because you're entitled to it doesn't get you ahead.

There is one fundamental problem with Sly's argument (and those of his supporters), which while keeping the vitriol level, and consequently the amusement value high, has been troubling me no end.

Let the police worry about the law.

Let the companies worry about maximizing income.

Nowhere in the stock price is the company's moral index reflected (which would suck for most of them). Nowhere in the profit motive does the morality of theft figure in (which is reflected in companies' behavior).

The company's job isn't to make sure everybody follows the law, it's to make enough money to keep the shareholders rich and the employees happy. This doesn't necessarily involve draconian protection. The price of the DRM is a major factor, as is the fact that with a linear increase in the hypothetical concept of "draconianness", the rate of decrease in the piracy rate is lower than the rate of increase in people who don't buy because of the risk of serious problems as you hit the more intrusive "solutions". By the time you've hit the really intrusive stuff, like SecuROM and Starforce, you're easily scaring away more customers than you have gained by pirates buying your product. That is the key fact for companies, one that Stardock understands. Pirates =/= customers. Changing the piracy rate is only worthwhile if you gain customers. From a company's point of view, the law doesn't mean anything to them, it's only impact is what measures it lets you take. Don't confuse the job and rights of the government and the corporation, please. DRM is a voluntary revenue enhancing measure undertaken by the COMPANY for god's sake. The law has more effective ways to do their job than the moldy styrofoam deterrent of DRM.

I have a question related to piracy.

Why is modding a piece of gaming hardware illegal. I am referring to things like psp, Wii, ps3, Xbox 360.

I know that reverse engineering a piece of hardware or software can be consider illegal. Though, if i do it in the privacy of my own home and not doing it for profit, then i still don't see why it is illegal.

But say with modding the psp, what if i just want to mod it so that i can use it for some other functions, like reading documents or install some custom homebrew word processor.

I was at my local EB games, and i ask the sales person regarding where i can purchase more UMD movies for my psp since there are so little kicking around at Best Buy or my local Future Shop. The guy told me just rip the movie from DVD and put it onto my psp. I then ask him about whether it is worth modding my psp because i want to use it to read documents on the go. His answer is that he can not answer me, because modding psp is consider to be illegal.

So if someone can explain to me exactly which law i am breaking by modding hardware, that would be great. I know it voids the warranty, but i did not know it carries any legal peanlty.

I have none. It's usually that way.



It's not as if anyone here can change anything. This is just for fun, to see how people feel. But you are right. The police should handle this virtual looting. However, new laws need to be put into place. In the meantime, steal away. They won't stop you. If you have the heart for thievery, that is. And I suspect most of us do.

On a side note, the people I despise most are those who try to rationalize what they are doing. Stop being a sissy. Either be a thief and know it, or be moral and make no need to deceive yourself.

for the love of god get off your high horse, for all we know you could pirate software as well and just be trolling. This is far more likely than you really being this out of touch with the reality. From what it sounds like you live on an Amish reserve, hitting up the cybercafe after riding 20 miles to the nearest town on your bicycle. I mean that is more plausible than you really being so luscus.

I have seen many many piracy threads in the SINS forums and for the life of me I don't understand why. (possibly because the games so dame easy to pirate :p go figure)Regardless I find that pirates are portrayed in a bad light, but are truly a necessary 'evil'. I myself have pirated some games, but most of them I did so to try out before buying because they had no demo or they were out of print and I wasn't about to fork over 60$ and up for some old software just for nostalgia sake. Call me a criminal if you must, but i have bought more games then I have ever pirated and most of them I bought because they are qualities pieces of work and I wanted to support the developers.

One thing I have noticed about piracy is that it won't be going away anytime soon and that is actually becoming and integrate part of life on the internet and I dread the day that the government will actually tighten the noose and police the web to the point that the freedom's the internet provide is brought to an end, but in all truth piracy rarely makes a dent in sales on good products (Star Dock being proof of this) and I hope and pray that the 'threat of piracy' does not get taken to an unnecessary extreme as it will surely end the 'golden age' of the internet and ultimately lead to a great loss of freedom. i admire Star Dock's boldness in not making it impossible to pirate there game and that they allowed the people (there fans) to decide whether or not they want to pay for it. I my self payed for the game and hope that Star Dock continues to please and amaze me in the near future with equally amazing products.

Cobra, your argument is fallacious. When I download a game, I'm not depriving the store of a copy for sale. A better equation would be if I could get a perfect copy of that Ferarri while letting the owner keep his car.

Here's the way I see this whole piracy argument, from the view of someone who's been burned by DRM on several occasions.

DRM is like telling someone who owns a power drill "Ok, you can only use this drill under these conditions, anything else and you can't use it and the drill will shut off". It's something you own and can do whatever you wish with it. You can modify it so that it spins faster or is a pump.

It's limiting what you can do with it with no basis in reality.

EULA's are, imo, completely stupid and unenforceable. Since I never agreed to the contract when money was changing hands and I can no longer return the product, it's null and void (Legally is another issue though).

Piracy is more like free advertising, good or bad. A pirate is another voice who's played your game, if it's good, he'll pay for it and become a customer or he'll just spout off it's awesomeness/suck factor to anyone who'll listen. Why is he even being considered? He's not someone who paid for your product so why are you meant to care about him?

Equating a downloaded copy of a game to a physical product is stupid. When the physical product is stolen, the storekeeper can no longer sell that copy. When the digital product is copied, the original owner still has his copy.

You're right, piracy is closer to trespassing than theft. The company didn't sell you a disc, they sold you an admission ticket to the shiny new theme park they just built. Even though you're allowed to come in, your admission ticket doesn't give you any rights regarding the attractions in the park; the company still determines the way they should be used.

The pirates in the park may not physically prevent the company from selling more tickets, but they do use up server resources, resulting in the paying customers waiting in line longer to ride the newest coaster. DRM started as the equivalent of getting a hand-stamp to prove you paid to get in; it has degenerated to requiring all visitors to wear clown shoes, giant novelty foam hands, and an oversized sombrero - then kicking people out if the sombrero falls off  :LOL: 

No. I would not tell you that I am a non-pirate if I were a pirate, and I would not tell you that I were a pirate at all.

Your post illuminates a depressing point. People who side with non-pirates are 'trolls', which I believe means people who create posts in disagreement with the general consensus. It follows that people have generally concluded piracy is legitimate, and anyone who disagrees is a 'troll'.

I am toying with an idea, and I am conflicted. While I view myself as a moral person, I also do not want to be used. While I believe piracy is wrong, I also no longer believe buying games is right. So I have a choice. I can either abandon games entirely, or I can become a pirate myself. In that case, my only defense is that I know I am immoral. But I only question the amount of guilt I would have to feel. Would it be worth it? If so, what else am I capable of? Is this a world made for pirates?

You're a troll because you post stupid shit every time someone tells you something you apparently already know is true.

Piracy fills voids, it's always filled voids, and will always fill viods. Laws are artificial factors, when they manipulate the market, they create voids. The illegal market takes up the slack at some middle point depending on the risk/reward factors. Since we've been getting royally screwed by the companies the last couple decades, the reward is pretty fucking high.

The companies are directly at fault in their own losses, assuming they even have any. The rest of the software market isn't pirated anywhere near the level the games are. They target the young and dumb, avoid going after more mature and thoughtful audiences that buy more often(notice how the really well selling games break the fucking high schooler demographic?). They release bug riddled products and then fail to support them adequately. They write multi-page licenses that aren't even mentioned at sale or anywhere on the packaging. They cover themselves against lemon laws and other legal avenues of recompense for fraudulent products with those licenses, restrict your usage far beyond that of the standard copyright laws, and give themselves legal grounds to rescind your purchase or various parts of it. The simple act of claiming that the software is licensed without stating so before purchase is outright fraud and would result in jail for any other industry.

The next idiot that says they're obviously not going to sell you a million dollar piece of software needs to read the fucking copyright act. The whole point of copyright is that your rights to copy it are retained when you sell it to someone. A license to say the same thing is what you would need if there were no such law on the books. It's really, really simple, my dog could figure it out.

The pirates may or may not be trash, but fuck feeling sorry for EA. I'd be more inclined to give them medals right now.

I ask earlier



A few posts later you pass this off as your own idea, even though that is exactly the Prisoners Dilemma I told you would crop up in your class.



Dude, you really need to pay more attention in your class. You either missed the point your lecturer was trying to make, or they are feeding you this stuff specifically so they can then run through the flaws in follow up classes and explain why its not part of modern economic theory.



..... I feel like the guy in Good Will Hunting who catches the guy in a bar plagiarising a history book, misunderstanding it and passing it off as his own idea.

The problem with some people who side with "non-pirates" is that the pollute the discussion with short-sighted mis-information and language-pollution. Which is why they often are referred to as trolls.

Example: "copyright-infringement is theft". Which is not the case, copyright infringement is copyright infringement. There is a reason that we have such nuances.

Same goes for the whole "piracy" term. Perhaps I'm old, but Piracy used to refer to people who SOLD copyright infringing materials, such as copied games and movies on floppydisks and video-tapes (which was quite normal in the '80s and early '90s). It had nothing to do with people just copying stuff for themselves.

Every week I get some Chinese guy stick his head round the door were I work and ask "DVD you want DVD yes?".

Like if I was so minded to view an illegal copy I would spend £10 on his dodgy cam-recording from the cinema rather that just download the full DVD quality rip off the net!

Even HMV will sell you the full DVD with all extras if you wait a few months for not much more than that.

Sheesh, is this still going? Really guys, anyone would think you're trying to beat a world record for the longest argument. It's pretty simple really. The companies are simply trying to blame their sales problems on pirates, and therefore they get excessive DRM to prevent pirates. This in turn annoys their customers who actually buy the game, who turn to pirates to get the game, or disable the DRM. The company makes less profit, and blames pirates, getting even 'better' DRM, and so on. In the end only the DRM companies make a profit, and pirates are still ahead.

Now I'm not saying pirating is a good thing. But when you think about it, it's the proverbial lesser of two evils. I would rather download a crack to disable DRM rather than have to wait for it authenticate the game on the internet every time, or screw around with my system files. I have bad internet connection, it only works half the time, and can take up to 10 minutes to load a page as simple as google. Now if I want to play, say, Mass Effect, there's no way in hell I want to wait 30 minutes for it to contact the server, and authenticate my game, and that's if the connection even works. So I'll download a crack to disable the authentication process, and I can now peacefully play my game. Meanwhile, the company will get bad sales because of the obsessive and frankly, fucking useless DRM and blame it on pirates. The vicious circle continues. It's only when companies actually get off their fat asses and bother to sort out their problems, make good games, and get rid of the shit DRM that the pirate problem will be solved. And even then, you'll still have pirates. You can't get rid of pirates, ban them, lock them up, torture them, even kill them, but pirates will still exist.

Basically, Pirates=Bad.
Companies wasting time with DRM=Even worse
So pirates will win.

Oh and @SlyDrivel, stop calling other countries 'Barbarians' you utter xenophobic crap. Get out of your cosy little sheltered world, take a nice step into the real world, stop deluding yourself, experience the, frankly, much better cultures and traditions of other countries and stop spouting this drivel about how the USA is superior to the 'barbarian countries'.

The racing has ended and I'm back
Most, or at least some, of my post will be off-topic:


I only said that your post made you sound like an agist, but now I really think you are one. I truly hope I had some job right now (though not on top of the already eight-hour day at the high school plus the homework, which usually leaves me one hour of free time each day). I get little money and I'd really like some free space and my own house. You can complain about all the taxes, but, in return, I could complain about that you can gain money unlike me (that I doubt you spend at all, stealing things).

You also used the Robin Hood reference. Someone already said it's 2008 now. Am I wrong or do you own a computer? Yes? Well, then you should be able to afford all the food and medical supplies. The ones Hood stealed from didn't give much or anything for their people. And does this also mean you haven't got anything from the corporations you're stealing from? Finally, the ones Robin Hood gave the stuff to were suffering and starving to death. I assume you are suffering from similar things too? No? Then goddamnit don't refer to heroes (fictional or not) to justify your crimes!

And now since this seems to never end, this will, with 90% accuracy, remain my last post in this very thread. I'll choose the "Options -> Quit -> Return to Main Menu", and leave you here to preach your religion for all you want.

This guy is right.

Rather than just tearing your comment apart I'll just revel in the fact that you wont be posting anymore instead.

PS. robin hood was a metaphor not meant to be taking directly from the mythology, but I mean sure okay what I really meant was pirates steal food and give it to the poor... yep that is exactly what I meant.