Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
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Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#2Thoughtful, fair, interesting discussion. I'd love to see Park hang out here and comment (does he?). I personally agree with everything he wrote, but I imagine there are positions out here he didn't consider.
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#3Park mentions people might think piracy is "a victimless crime against rich fat cats and celebrities who don't really need the money". I wonder what would happen if instead of a fancy logo of the development company at the beginning of a game, there was an picture of the developer/development team with his/her/their names. With a picture, the faceless corporate entity becomes an actual person with a name. Has this ever been tried before? I suspect if it ever became too persuasive, then the crackers might just remove the picture, but it is a thought.
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#4He is close to arriving to the conclusion I generally have reached when thinking about piracy issues when he says this:
> People have been violating copyright and pirating and plagiarizing since long before the modern era. There's just something, deep down, that makes people believe that these sorts of ethereal products, or knowledge, can't or shouldn't be protected.
To me, the real issue is this: No one spontaneously thinks that sharing something freely sharable with friends and family and fellow humans is inherently wrong. "Intellectual property" is an unnatural and learned concept. If I had an infinite supply of food, I would not think twice about handing it out to others. I didn't use to, but now I do think that the problem is largely one of future shock and legislation: we simply have to come to grips with the reality that digital information will be copied, and that someone possessing a piece of digital information will expect it to be copyable.
So where does that leave him? I don't know. Maybe there is no decent business model for selling games like AI War in this age. Just like other business models have disappeared or, for that matter, appeared with the digital age.
I don't think the problem is that people in general view piracy as a victimless crime. I think the "problem" is that, deep down, people don't think it's a crime at all.
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#5I feel like, fundamentally, the problem of piracy with digital goods is something like this:
I'm a wheat merchant. My store is located 10 minutes outside of town and I give people a fixed amount wheat in exchange for money. But one day there's a huge pile of relatively undefended wheat that people can just take for free (even if illegally) in the middle of town. Suddenly my wheat is no longer worth as much.
Seems pretty simple to me.
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#6Interesting and I'm happy he doesn't see adding DRM as a solution. I wonder if he thought about long term effects of this piracy.
In the context of one game you can see piracy as lost sales, but in the long term those are people that were exposed to your product and that you may convert later. I know that I did copy a lot of games before working, but then for a couple of years I bought a lot. Now I play rarely, but most of the games I bought were from developers I had previously copied.
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#7Long-term piracy concerns aside, the author can take that listing on NowTorrents with a pinch of salt.
If you try entering any garbage text in the 'search' you'll see auto-generated results (soon to be search-engine indexed) which claim to have that item available for download. All you need to do is sign up for an account to see 'em! Yeah... It's an old scam and probably ropes in more worried developers than it does pirates.
Keep an eye open for pirated copies and adapt as you can, but don't freak about every piracy notice you receive on Google Alerts.
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#8I feel like, fundamentally, the problem of piracy with digital goods is something like this: I'm a wheat merchant. My store is located 10 minutes outside of town and I give people a fixed amount wheat in exchange for money. But one day there's a huge pile of relatively undefended wheat that people can just take for free (even if illegally) in the middle of town. Suddenly my wheat is no longer worth as much. Seems pre…
By your example linux users pirate Windows and Macs since linux's free.
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#9Park mentions people might think piracy is "a victimless crime against rich fat cats and celebrities who don't really need the money". I wonder what would happen if instead of a fancy logo of the development company at the beginning of a game, there was an picture of the developer/development team with his/her/their names. With a picture, the faceless corporate entity becomes an actual person with a name. Has this ev…
I think the WROX series of programming books (and nearly all tech blogs with thumbnail photos) make a compelling case against showing developer headshots. There's a reason we became computer nerds.
Re: Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
#10I feel like, fundamentally, the problem of piracy with digital goods is something like this: I'm a wheat merchant. My store is located 10 minutes outside of town and I give people a fixed amount wheat in exchange for money. But one day there's a huge pile of relatively undefended wheat that people can just take for free (even if illegally) in the middle of town. Suddenly my wheat is no longer worth as much. Seems pre…
I think a better analogy is:
You're an apple merchant. You sell apples, which are generally better quality apples than the ones people can get elsewhere. However, some of those people have now begun planting apple trees from your apples' seeds, and thereby getting more of your apples without paying you for them. These apples still aren't quite as good on average as your apples, since sometimes they come with worms.
This situation wasn't terrible until recently, when someone invented a way to make apple trees grow faster, and now the time to grow an apple tree in someone's backyard from one of your seeds is halving every few years.