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Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

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Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#151

Post by jiggy2011 »

marcamillion wrote: post #135
kruk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just about the game. I believe many people involved in distribution of illegal content do it out of a genuine desire to share. For every released movie, every song, a book or a piece of software there exists a group of people with no means of accessing it in a legal way (and probably another, much larger, of people who can't afford it).

Maybe SOME people involved in doing it was for a genuine desire to share. Let me tell you, though, there are a lot of rewards from being "first". Either the first person to get your hands on a pre-release item, or the first one to rip it, or the first group to release it, or the first racer to move it the fastest to the top. It is beautiful in its simplicity - but there are many incentives to get people to be 'the fi…

What sort of rewards other than being known in the warez scene (not even under your real name). You can't buy anything with it or boast about it in public.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#152

Post by w1ntermute »

rdl wrote: post #113
glomph wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private torrent trackers are also fuelled by this drive. The 'game' abstraction has been made so real with ranks, stats, leaderboards and so on. It really is quite amazing how willing people are to sink time into providing a service, moderating, sourcing, encoding (people sink LOADS of time into learning the finest details of x264), cracking, uploading and distributing all for for no material gain outside 'the game'.

All that stuff existed with TOPSITES, ftp, etc. before the torrent sites. The torrent sites are just the "retail" level of the game; the real players are getting prereleases, ripping, potentially cracking, and doing stuff on topsites.

Yeah, the scene is where it's at. I explained the scene in detail in a comment 2.5 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636785

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#153

Post by robryan »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #99
cremnob wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's semantics and is irrelevant every time this topic comes up because no one is actually talking about legal definitions. Pirates always seem to miss that it's a moral argument when they trot out these familiar lines (the irony isn't lost on me). Whether or not you're guilty of petty theft, shoplifting, larceny, or burglary is for your lawyers and the courts to determine. For me and others from my position it is mu…

Why don't you try to stop preemptively dismissing other people. Calling it "immoral" doesn't mean anything unless you define morality and that's a loaded gun. The point is that legally, there is a distinction between depriving others of property and infringing on a copyright. If they're different crimes, they're treated differently, addressed differently, etc... how on Earth is it not relevant to discuss?

Do we need to define them as moral or immoral though? They are different crimes but both crimes currently.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#154

Post by jiggy2011 »

markokocic wrote: post #62
eli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though it'd be better still if they paid something. Microsoft offers special low-cost editions of their products for developing nations, don't they?

No, they don't. I even remember that the prices for legal Microsoft software in one of those "developing nations" were higher than prices in the USA. And it's not only Microsoft, some other companies (Audodesk, Adobe, Apple) also keep higher prices and worse quality in some of poor countries than in the USA. It's kinda like they try to punish people that want to buy their software legally. For me, it's an easy decisi…

Wouldn't the issue be that if they sold Windows for say $10 in china that westerners could just import it for $10 + shipping and then install language packs once they had it?

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#155

Post by robryan »

mappu wrote: post #81

Even now that i can afford it, i'd still choose pirated software over DRM and phone-home license checks. Pirates always get the better product (with the possible exception of AAA online multiplayer games).

You could always buy a copy and then use a pirated one.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#156

Post by robryan »

yozmsn wrote: post #141
gfodor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not certain but Dreamspark requires some type of "student verification" process, which may be prohibitive to many young people who could stand the most to gain from access to these products. I certainly can't imagine my 13-year-old self, who was a big enough geek to be giddy warezing Turbo C++, getting access to Dreamspark.

Yeah, you need to have a .edu email address, which if I understand correctly is not something high schools or middle schools give out anymore, as the .edu domain has become exclusively for higher education (Universities, etc), still most of the tools you get from Dreamspark aren't all that important and the open sources alternatives are often better.

This might not be true if your goal is to develop games for windows.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#157

Post by w1ntermute »

jrockway wrote: post #129
glomph wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private torrent trackers are also fuelled by this drive. The 'game' abstraction has been made so real with ranks, stats, leaderboards and so on. It really is quite amazing how willing people are to sink time into providing a service, moderating, sourcing, encoding (people sink LOADS of time into learning the finest details of x264), cracking, uploading and distributing all for for no material gain outside 'the game'.

Interesting reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

More info in my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636785

One change from 2.5 years ago, now the scene does FLAC releases (finally): http://i.imgur.com/YZjUw.png

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#158

Post by pyre »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #151
marcamillion wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe SOME people involved in doing it was for a genuine desire to share. Let me tell you, though, there are a lot of rewards from being "first". Either the first person to get your hands on a pre-release item, or the first one to rip it, or the first group to release it, or the first racer to move it the fastest to the top. It is beautiful in its simplicity - but there are many incentives to get people to be 'the fi…

What sort of rewards other than being known in the warez scene (not even under your real name). You can't buy anything with it or boast about it in public.

Sometimes pre-release sources are rewarded financially. I have no idea where the money comes from[1], though. This was the case for the Academy member that was busted a while back. IIRC, he was just selling his DVD screeners to pirate groups.

[1]: I get that the group pays for it, but what the source of the money is, I don't know. Are people just sinking money into for the 'props' of being first? Is there a greater financial reward for being first (if so, where does it come from)?

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#159

Post by jawngee »

cageface wrote: post #140
kstenerud wrote: post #76

I'm one of those people who would pirate just because I could. It was almost a game, trying to amass as much warez as I could, to the point that 90% of the stuff I got I either never used, or used only once. That changed over time. As my time became more valuable, I couldn't spend all day fiddling with software anymore. I became more focused, downloading only stuff I used a lot. And then it hit me: It would be far ea…

It probably depends on the business, but I know several developers of music production software that can correlate huge drops in sales with the release of new cracks of their software to the exact day . I think we are a little too quick to assume that a pirated copy is not a lost sale.

I suppose times have changed, but back in the 90's music software companies used to leak their software to groups to get cracked (this was back when Radium was the defacto group). In fact, #audiowarez used to be a 50/50 split between devs and users iirc. Memory is a little dusty.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#160

Post by pyre »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #95
ciniglio wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, by this logic, BitTorrent piracy is a $0 problem? Doesn't sound right to me. Not that I'm really pushing the $495 figure either, mind you.

Actually yes, well actually approaching zero, and I realize it doesn't sound right. The cognitive dissonance comes from the economics of information, they work differently than the economics of goods. Imagine this thought experiment. Imagine there was a 100% fool proof copy protection scheme in China, and the only way to acquire Microsoft Office would be to buy it. Try to imagine how many people, who make $1000 in a…

  > Since the replication cost is nearly $0
  > they really are guessing at consumer value.
There still is the fixed cost of creating the DVD content. Maybe not encoding the movie, but putting together the menus, extras, easter eggs, packaging, etc. Also, the fixed costs grow when considering things like 'remastering vault copies.'

The variable costs might be close to $0, but the decision to create the DVD still costs something.

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