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+--- Thread: Is Piracy justified? (/thread-3022.html)
Is Piracy justified? - retrolinkx - 02-23-2016
For a small project in one of my classes, I have to do a 90 second presentation of something and I thought I would do it on piracy and if it's a justifiable act.
I thought it'd be an interesting topic to talk about so why not.
Do you guys feel piracy is justifiable? These were some of the reasons I came up with.
It doesn't hurt big companies as much as you think.
Pirating stuff can be good. You could tell others and they could buy the product. Free advertisement really.
Companies pirate stuff as well. It's not just us.
Companies bring this on themselves. You can't get some content in some countries, you have no other option.
Piracy can also make YOU buy stuff.
Poor people need this, or if the rates are very high (Australians have to pay like 90-110 dollarydoos for games)
Anti Piracy can hurt consumers a lot more. DRM can be more hassle than it's worth and can hurt paying customers more than pirates.
If the company behind the product is gone, the true developers are gone, you're just giving money to some faceless company.
Obviously, I'm just using an interesting topic. I think it can be justified in a few ways as seen above, but mostly it's just for people who don't have the money and/or they're selfish.
What about you guys? Also, any more ideas to throw at me would be nice.
RE: Is Piracy justified? - Takahashi2212 - 02-23-2016
The way I've seen is this, if the product that I'm pirating is so old that the only way I can purchase it is via the second-hand market, or the item wasn't even released in my region, I don't see the harm in the pirating it.
RE: Is Piracy justified? - Psychospacecow - 02-23-2016
https://strawpoll.me/6898671
Here. Use this to see if responses via poll differ from responses via comment.
I think there's too many factors exist to outright deny the possibility.
Might want to watch this.
RE: Is Piracy justified? - SamuraiGaiden - 02-23-2016
I am a strong anti-piracy person. Piracy is theft, it is wrong, and there is never a good reason for it. There are no real benefits to it, because every pro argument you might have is countered by 4 anti arguments. I'll takes yours one at a time.
Quote:It doesn't hurt big companies as much as you think.
I've recently read a report (by Arxan Technologies, I think they were called?) that the Video Game industry has an total revenue of about $84 billion and loses $74 billion a year to piracy, as of 2014. That's almost equal to their revenue. It does hurt and it hurts smaller companies and indie companies a lot harder.
It hurts the industry as a whole, too. Imagine how much better games could be if they had an extra $74 billion to spend on making better games and hiring new people!
Even if we assume those people wouldn't have bought the game, even if they didn't pirate it. That's fine, just don't play the game. That's how money works...you want something, you get money, you buy the thing. If you don't want it enough to get the money, you don't get the thing. Welcome to economics.
Quote: Pirating stuff can be good. You could tell others and they could buy the product. Free advertisement really.
It is not free advertisement. If you pirated a $12 game then it was a $12 advertisement. Also most pirates don't tell their friends about the game and then their friend goes out and buys it, most pirates just hand another pirated copy over to their friends.
Let's assume you have 10 close friends...even if 50% of your friends went out and bought it and the other 50% pirated it themselves...if the game cost $60 then you just made the company $300, but you also caused them to lose $360.
Quote: Companies pirate stuff as well. It's not just us.
Hate to sound cliché but, if a company jumped off a bridge, would you jump after them? Serials killers kill people, too; does that mean its okay to kill people?
The companies that pirate stuff should be charged and punished just like any individual who pirates. And look at...was it Silicon Knights? They pirated an engine and now they are gone. The composer for DBZ Budokai lost his job because he ripped off other peoples' music.
Quote: Companies bring this on themselves. You can't get some content in some countries, you have no other option.
There are numerous things wrong with this ideology. First of all, the reason some content doesn't make it to some countries is because of business politics and finance. The company isn't licensed in Malaysia, so they can't sell the game in Malaysia, or the company expects only $4 million in sales in France, so spending $10 million to translate it into French would be a poor business decision.
Quote: Piracy can also make YOU buy stuff.
Generally it doesn't. Anecdotally speaking my wife has a friend who is a big pro-pirating games guy. I told him about how I had recently picked up Mount & Blade for $6. This game was made by a small Indie Game company comprised of two people: A man and his wife. He pirated the $6 game and told us that like he was proud of it.
Did he then go out and buy a copy once he figured out he liked it? No.
Did he complain when the company took over three years to produce the game's sequel? Yes.
Maybe they could have lowered their production time, if people had purchased their games and they could afford to hire more staffers.
Quote: Poor people need this, or if the rates are very high (Australians have to pay like 90-110 dollarydoos for games)
Poor people don't need video games. They want video games. Not getting what you want is a big part of being poor; trust me, I grew up very poor. Did I pirate games? No, I struggled to get the $6 it cost to buy a game and I purchased it, normally a used copy, and I played the hell out of those games.
Would you use the same excuse if the poor person walked into your home and stole your games? It's the same thing, just piracy happens to someone else and not to you.
Quote: Anti Piracy can hurt consumers a lot more. DRM can be more hassle than it's worth and can hurt paying customers more than pirates.
This is true. But the reason that DRM exists is because of pirates. If people stopped pirating so much, we wouldn't need DRM.
This excuse like complaining that the local grocery store closes so early. Yeah it closes at 8 pm because it got robbed at 9pm everyday for a month, so they closed earlier. If thieves would stop robbing stores they could stay open later.
Quote: If the company behind the product is gone, the true developers are gone, you're just giving money to some faceless company.
Some faceless company that spent a lot of money to produce the game. Remember the 'true developer' gets a small portion of the proceeds because they fronted the least amount of money.
A developer might spend $2 million on a game and you may hate EA, but EA gave them $1.8 million of that money. So if the developer closes down and EA is still distributing the game, that's still EA's money that they spent and now are not getting back.
The reason the developer closed down is usually because there weren't enough of their games that sold. If their game is the #1 rated game in the world and it only sold 20,000 copies because 60,000 people pirated it...that company goes out of business, because they expected to sell 80,000 copies and spent more than they made to produce it.
Also even when a developer goes out of business, people within the development company may still be getting royalty revenue in some cases.
RE: Is Piracy justified? - Takahashi2212 - 02-23-2016
I'm sorry, how exactly do you prove that the video game industry loses money to piracy? Like, what are they counting as money lost due to piracy?
RE: Is Piracy justified? - Melcadrien - 02-23-2016
That's a loaded question and the answer can be just as gray as it could be black and white. We all know piracy is illegal but we also know that without it we cannot access parts of our recent past without it because the content that exists for it is either out of our price range or is no longer in a physical format(In gaming terms, that is).
I remember making a presentation on whether emulation, gaming in specific, is justifiable and that in itself is also in the similar field.
RE: Is Piracy justified? - SamuraiGaiden - 02-23-2016
(02-23-2016, 02:57 PM)Takahashi2212 Wrote: I'm sorry, how exactly do you prove that the video game industry loses money to piracy? Like, what are they counting as money lost due to piracy?
The report that I read by Arxan, as far as I understand it, tracked interactions of pirated software on Deep Web sites, torrent sites, and other places that piracy is common. In other words they went to piracy websites and tracked how many times pirated software was downloaded. They then presumably calculated the value of the pirated work compared to how many times it was pirated.
So if I pirate a copy of Street Fighter V (its the picture on the sides of the page, so I'll use it as example) and it sells for $60 normally, I then put it up to be downloaded and 100 people download it. That's $6,000 in theft.
This is also just digital distribution of pirated software, because it doesn't take into account if I were to physically pirate it. Like I break and copy SFV and then distribute the copied game to my ten friends. That's $600 that goes un-reported.
If anyone wants to go through the rigamoral of reading the report, you can find it online here (pdf format):
Piracy Report
RE: Is Piracy justified? - Psychospacecow - 02-23-2016
SFV would be a bad example because its server dependent and multiplayer focused. The other part of things comes in that you can't reasonably claim that many people would have gotten the game in the first place. Its an outlet for folks in an age where demos are non-existent. If you want some hard numbers, look into the details of that video I posted up top and follow along with it, see what happens. I think it's gonna be interesting data and I'd love to be proven wrong.