DarkenDragon wrote:The problem with your reply is your trying on the coat in their presence, not taking it home leaving it in your closet or throwing it out afterwards and then saying you don‘t like it and not paying for it. the bottom line is you took their work and didnt compensate them for it. It is the company's choice to decide what they are willing to give away for free, not the customer. This is why a demo is created cuz they chose to do so. This right should only be in the hands of the company because it is sad to say that the majority of the world does not share the same truthfulness to be willing to pay for others hard work after hey have obtained it. So is it moral to pirate the game if you use it as a demo? Absolutly not. Because you should always pay for someone's hard work weither you liked it or not because it is their work after all
You prove my point rather than dispelling it, if I tryed on a "coat clone" took it home, and throw it away, or come back and buy the original, I think it is a stretch to say I've done anything immoral or wrong. Illegal, sure, against the will of the company, definitely, but wrong? I don't think so.
You assume I believe that I don't have to pay someone for their hard work, and I don't know where your getting this from. If you enjoy their work and want to use it, of course you have to pay for it, but I'm not going to pay a company just for playing the new Blops at a friend's house, trying before you buy is widely accepted by everyone, just not the way I'm trying things.
CobraA1 wrote:
. . . except that the metaphor breaks down, because in the case of piracy you've made an exact duplicate of the coat and bought it home, with only your say-so that you'll pay for it.
Yup, I'v set up a system where I'm not at the mercy to do whatever the creator and distributors of a product want me to do. I get to decide what I want to do. If I downloaded the game and played it forever without paying, that would be wrong, but I think you still have all your work ahead of you if you intend to imply or even prove that trying the game first is somehow "wrong".
CobraA1 wrote:Physical items are a lot easier for businesses to protect, because it's so difficult to create an exact duplicate. Digital items, not so much.
. . . which is why you're seeing a big push towards services in the digital realm, because it's a lot easier to continue to profit if you offer your software as a service.
Do you really think that attempting to require always-online to single player games is because they somehow hate their customers?
Didn't say it's because they hate their customers, I said they are willing to annoy inconvenience and restrict their customers who actually payed to make a failed attempt to combat piracy. I find this to be very disrespectful, especially in the case of starcraft 2 where people were crying out and even the news was having a field day complaining about how ridiculous Blizzard's "always online for single player" scheme was. When your customers are that inconvenienced, and you don't care, and the single player gets pirated anyway, I find that to be a total lack of respect.
CobraA1 wrote:Nah, it's largely because they want to turn their products into services. Because making a digital product act as a physical product is nearly impossible.
A piece of software is a product, even if the company streams the content to the customer and tries to keep the content hidden on their own server's. They are switching to making their game a service as a way of implementing DRM and trying to remain in control of their product.
CobraA1 wrote:As a side note: It may be interesting to see how things develop with 3D printers, as even physical products may start seeing some of the same problems . . .
Now you might have pushed me to the limit of my pro-piracy platform. Using a 3D printer to break copyright is a terribly immoral thing to do. It destroys the livelihoods of inventors and product producers. However, if you printed out 1 copy of something copyrighted on a 3d printer, just to try it, and used that to inform your decision to buy that product or not for yourself or your company, suddenly the immoral quandary disappears.
CobraA1 wrote:
My claim was never that "it doesn't have any benefits" to begin with.
Excuse me for not being specific, my point is, you must understand why we prefer to use a whole game as a demo, instead of feature-light crippleware as a demo.
CobraA1 wrote:I don't think we break that agreement if we end up buying it
You can't guarantee that most people end up buying it. Most businesses want the transaction to be something they can guarantee.
What they want is irrelevant to me, of course I can't guarantee everyone will pay, and I don't think it should be guaranteed that everyone that tries the game for 5 minutes is forced to pay. Thats kinda the whole point of piracy for me.
CobraA1 wrote:and we don't break that agreement when we try a game at a friend's house
Assuming your friend has a licensed copy, there's no piracy in this example, because there's no unlicensed copies being made.
Copyright law is about making copies. Businesses can't claim copyright violation in examples where no copies have been made.
It isn't just about making copies, if my friend wants to stream copyrighted materials to me or others this is illegal. technically, if you read your terms of service, only members of your household are allowed to play your games. I'm glad license holders have unwritten permission to let visitors of their households play their games, in fact, Steam actually added the ability to "loan" your games to other people's accounts, but both of these things are given by the company and can be taken away by the company by your policy of obedience.
Let me ask you frankly, if a company flipped their decision, and said "You can never let members of your household or visitors play the game" would you respect this and abstain or would you do it anyway? The reason companies don;t make this policy is because it is almost impossible to enforce, much like how it is impossible to stop the pirates.
CobraA1 wrote:I disagree, anyone with monies who pirates, usually ends up buying the games they like so they can support the developer.
Evidence needed.
You asserted the opposite was true, where is your evidence for this claim? We both make an assumption, yours is based on the cynical view that pirates just steal stuff and say "fudge them", and mine is based on the fact that, as an adult, I have some extra money to spend, so sometimes I like to give it to the game companies that I love. One of these scenarios is more commonplace than the other.
CobraA1 wrote:It is very tempting to simply keep the pirated copy and not pay for it, because the pirated copy was free. Regardless of financial status, most people like free things.
It's also very childish and irresponsible. Personally, I find it hard to do when I really like a game or the company that produces it. Maybe others have no heart or conscience, but I think if you have money, and you love a game, that love is enough to push a person to buy that game.
CobraA1 wrote:Same goes with capitalism.
Say what? Haven't seen that word in this conversation before. We're not talking about whether businesses are owned privately or not. Heck, even China has problems with piracy.
I posted the comment on capitalism in response to this:
CobraA1 wrote:I don't really consider piracy to be a high, almighty, and ultimately good thing. I've yet to see anybody really hold it up as a moral ideal that everybody should strive for. Most of the time, I just see people barely squeaking out a thin justification for it.
The capitalist ideals of letting a company do whatever they want and control their products long after they have already sold said product to a customer is not "a high, almighty, and ultimately good thing". In fact, I think if you sell a product, your right to own and control that product ENDS and the customer now gets to do anything they want without damaging others, I am aware the law says otherwise, but I find this to be quite immoral.
CobraA1 wrote:Regular people don;'t have access to the backbone of the internet
Well, maybe someday we can guarantee that email always goes through pipes that are clearly labelled "backbone," and maybe someday we can guarantee that bad actors are never on pipes labelled "backbone."
. . . I wouldn't count on it, though.
Botnets can create absurd amounts of money, I wouldn't be surprised if some of their owners have access to what you call a "backbone."
Well, I disagree. I don't think that even the very rich have access to the "backbone" lines of the internet that run between large email companies and ISPs (the Gmail mailserver -> Yahoo mailserver part of the email trip) enough to steal the secrets of the companies I am trying to protect. Only the NSA and other governmental organizations really have that type of unfettered access.
Well, I think your hypothesis that locally run email servers are more secure is equally baseless.
CobraA1 wrote:Being that there is no evidence being passed around, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this. I've seen plenty of evidence that this simply raises the stakes, and concentrates the hackers' efforts on cloud providers. How many times have I seen some report of some large database being stolen (often exposing embarrassing practices, like having plain text passwords), with the provider scrambling to get everybody to change their passwords?
Literally this happened once with HeartBleed, and it was POSSIBLE not very likely that all passwords were compromised. Other than that, gmail has never lost it's entire password base and asked all user's to change password. Has yahoo or microsoft lost every password for email before? That would be news to me, and I'm tempted to give you the old "evidence needed" thing you keep doing.
Hacker's focusing on the cloud rather than the local email server is EXACTLY the evidence I submit that my scheme is more secure. I can provide you news articles that big companies like Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft are informed of security vulnerabilities before the general public (although I don't have absolute proof the reporters and large companies aren't lying). If they get to patch vulnerabilities before you even become aware of them, I don't understand how you can claim your security is better than theirs.
CobraA1 wrote:This whole idea of "oh, we can hire dedicated security teams and experts" has pretty much fallen flat on its face. I find it laughable, sorry.
How many times do I have to read about these failures?
I never asserted they are perfect, what I said is they have access to better resources than you or I do, and thus have a better chance of stopping hackers. Do you really think small companies advertise when their security is busted to the news? Saying you don't hear about these breaches, does not somehow imply that small companies get hacked LESS than large companies.
CobraA1 wrote:
Right now - we've got no guarantees that these businesses are actually practicing what you preach. Sure, that's the hypothesis - but where is the evidence?
I can only speak from personal experience. Almost every company that I do a "penetration test" style of security audit on has a small list of vulnerabilities that their IT/IS team has missed and these vulnerabilities are well documented, if I did that same security audit on google, none of the known vulnerabilities will work, because they have security auditors like me running pen tests constantly.
Can you prove with evidence your security is better? If not, I guess we're both making hypotheses? Except common sense tells you that having faster access to the knowledge of security vulnerabilities in your software or hardware obviously means a better chance to fix said vulnerabilities. Not a guarantee they will fix it mind you (IE: the widespread vulnerability of SQL was a crazy few years of large company insecurity), but unless your small company writes its own patches for security vulnerabilities, it would be impossible for them to patch said vulnerabilities until the parent company of those pieces of software/firmware release some kind of patch.