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Perturabo -> RE: Pirate Bay founders lose Court case (4/19/2009 9:24:46 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Hertston
The fact you find it 'offensive' doesn't stop it being true.
It's not true. There's no such thing as a "human nature". The "why should I pay for anything if I can have it for free" crowd is just an indication of failure of their parents, not of "human nature".
This or there are different human subspecies whose psychology is completely different because of different genetics, which also kills the point of talking about "human nature".
quote:
ORIGINAL: Hertston
You've completely missed his point. He 'respects' them only so much as at least those people admit what they are doing, as opposed to making up assorted spurious excuses for it.
I noted his point and I simply disagree with it. He wrote a long article about how DRM is the only thing that significantly decreases piracy and about how even games that are cheap, get both store and digital distribution (World of Goo is even sold in Poland for 19,99 PLN), don't have DRM, have demos, etc. still get 90% piracy rate. Then he completely missed the inevitable conclusion of the statistics - that for every person who pirates "because of" who will not stop buying, there are many people who follow the "why should I pay for anything if I can have it for free" philosophy and who will not buy anything unless they are forced to.
Then he writes a conclusion about "the culture of piracy" assuming that the first group is in fact the second group and that their "excuses" are simple lies and that they won't buy anything anyway unless forced by DRM.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Hertston
Games are rather different, which is why I focused my own comments on music and movies, but the simple fact is that most 'pirates' simply are not 'hardcore'... they are in fact very 'casual', and are just doing what what a whole generation of their friends are doing.
It depends on what you mean by "hardcore". To me, it means that they follow the "why should I pay for anything if I can have it for free" philosophy and don't have any sense of obligation towards the authors/publishers, and towards the society in general. Which is what I'm talking about when I call them anti-social. Simply, you can't have a working society with such people.
I wouldn't say that most of pirates aren't "hardcore". Statistics from the article say something completely opposite - if game that isn't cracked in first ten days sells in millions units more than one that was cracked in the first days, it means that millions of the pirates out there have money for buying expensive hardware and expensive games and still chose not to buy the games unless they are forced to. It's not normal.
The same thing with the mentioned cheap games with both store and digital distribution.
It's hard to say what is the scale of the problem basing on anecdotal evidence because internet forums tend to attract people who are deeply involved in gaming and people tend to flock to people with similar morals - so, it's quite possible that they simply don't have any friends that are hardcore pirates - which makes the picture of the situation totally distorted.
I'm still in school (I had to go to another school because my previous school turned out to be a hoax - most of my class went to school only to escape from the army or to not have to pay for social and medical insurance, and because according to liberals cleaners, security guards and other people who do simple and dirty hard work are some kind of subhumans that don't deserve to be paid enough to support themselves, even when they work full time or more) and I'm going to a local youth palace for comic and journalism clubs.
I'm often shocked to see how wildly different people are in different circles.
For example all people in the comic drawing club buy stuff whenever they download or not.
On the other side the ones from the journalism club are completely different. They behave in different ways - they don't show respect to their teacher, all the computers are full of pirated stuff - for example, I come to write an article and there two movies and ten music albums on the desktop. It's not normal.
When I went to school for the first time this year, I went for a tram after sleeping just a hour that night. So, I bought tickets, but I forgot to validate a ticket, partially because I was half-asleep and partially because I used to have a monthly ticket that didn't require validation. So, I had a bad luck and there was a ticket inspection and I had to pay 50x the price of the ticket just because I forgot to validate it (it's the same as someone who rides without a ticket would have to pay).
So, I got pissed off and decided to stop using trams.
Also, since I was in the journalism club, I wrote an article about the non-proportional penalties for something like that.
So, I talked to my friends and practically everyone had a story like that. Actually one of my friends got a penalty for sitting down to search for a ticket before validating it.
Then I went to a journalism club, so, they have listened to it and one girl told her about how it's horrible that a ticket inspector gave her a penalty three years ago. So, I asked her if she buys tickets, and she said that never, just as the rest of people theres O_o .
Ok, so these guys basically, don't even feel obliged to pay for bus tickets and even those draconian penalties don't frighten them because they'll "save" a lot of money, even when they'll get caught, which apparently doesn't happen often O_o . Now, that's hardcore.
I think there is only one such "person" in my class - a guy that works as an agent/financial advisor. He is different from everyone in class and doesn't exactly fit in.
Similarly, one day, I wrote an article about prices of music CDs, video DVDs and computer games. So, I talked with them about it and they responded somehow artificially, like they were imitating somebody else's opinion, not speaking from their own experience. It turned out that they don't buy stuff at all. I can't understand them - they are completely alien to me.
More, in my previous school there were similar people - they had cash, but downloaded instead of buying (which probably was why they had so much cash) and bought things like electronic hardware and cars instead. I think I was the only person in my class that didn't have a car and one guy even had his own flat.
One day we went to McDonalds with our programming teacher and started talking about maturity exams. There was five of us - it turned out that everyone except me cheated on maturity exams, including our teacher O_o .
Our programming teacher is another story - we've done only 1/3 of the programming school program. One thing that I remember is that he always told us about various ways to cheat our customers - mainly by making them think that we've done a lot of work when something required changing only one line of code.
So, the point is that people from different social circles think in various ways. The world may look nice when one talks with friends or with fellow fans, but outside the circle filtered out people there are vast hordes of people whose way of thinking is completely alien.
So, I spend most of my free income on music/books/manga/games - in last year I bought whole Rozen Maiden manga series for about 200 PLN (8 tomes, 25-35 PLN each) - I saved my school money every day - I took full second breakfast, a bottle of mineral water refilled with cooked tap water, a thermos full of hot tea + school things and hauled it 7 kilometres to school to save on tram tickets, water and tea. This allowed me to save 5-10 PLN a day which is 1-2 minimal hourly wages. It allowed me to order a tome every week.
Well, that's how fans behave.
But how many real fans are there? A game may be played by millions or even tens of millions but only hundreds or thousands will be on gaming forums.
There are innumerable hordes of people for who real things like morality, justice, paying the authors and publishers, etc. are much less important than illusions of materialism like buying a new cell phone, a new hardware, a car, getting smashed, partying, paying for college, etc.
Seriously, there are people who work in UK who would prefer to download a game from torrent than pay 7 GBP for. And this kind of people are majority of pirates.
I don't have a cell phone, I don't have an I-pod, I don't have a digital camera, I don't have a new computer, I don't have tons of things, hell, my coat has 10 years and I think my sweaters have about 7-5 years. If I wouldn't buy stuff, I would have all of them.
Hardcore pirates simply buy things like electronics, clothes, etc. instead of buying games/music/etc. because they don't have to pay for stuff. So, the hardcore "why should I pay for anything if I can have it for free" exists because it's simply profitable and results in tangible material wealth of the people who practice it.
That's the silent majority I'm talking about and material wealth is their main motive.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Lützow
and corresponding magazines will have to spotlight indie studios again, because there is nothing else left to write about.
I suspect that the magazines will simply move to consoles to keep the ad money.
quote:
ORIGINAL: JudgeDredd
Back to libraries? I await the day when some other fat cats representing authors decides to make money from libraries.
Why exactly would it be bad? It would be good both for authors and for people who can't afford/don't want to have their own books. Now it's good only for the latter - which isn't exactly a good thing. Especially for the authors who are limited to a national market.
Video rentals work like that and somehow no one says that they are evil. Why should book authors be treated worse than the authors of other media?
Because they can't afford as good lawyers as the gaming/video/music industry? As I have mentioned before, such imbalance creates unfair competition - it's simply unjust.
As for the radio thing. It's simply idiotic. Though, I suspect that it came from the customs of hypermarkets that usually play radio because they discovered that it makes people buy more things. Still, having to pay for listening to radio at work is unjustifiable.
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