Who here acctually buys movies, music tv shows, e.t.c.

[N36fSL3A]

So you're rage quitting over an annual debate? lol

[Disch]

There's a difference between ragequitting and calmly taking a breather from the Lounge. He's doing the latter.

So it's not a "ragequit"... it's a "calmbreak"

[BHX]

Lumpkin wrote:

How are they losing money if the pirates had no intention in purchasing the product?

First, that is a bs reason people give themselves and others to try and justify and remove any guilt they have for doing something they know is illegal.

I've worked in retail for five years before going to college and no one seems to understand. The companies are already out all the money and are completely dependant on if the game sells good or not. Lets say they have to sell 200 units to break even and all over is profit. They sell 160 and no more, but then find that 50+ pirated copies around which means there should have been sells for 210 units because companies don't care about the intentions pirates spout about having no intention to buy the game. For every illegal copy found it is figured as sales loss because it is still the full game that you were supposed to buy before you could play it that you are now playing for free because you got hold of it without paying for it.

Disch wrote:

But the difference is I honestly could not care less about any of the companies I pirate from. I would be perfectly fine if all of them went out of business tomorrow.

Too many people feel like that, but you don't take into account that people like you (or your parents, sisters, brothers, friends) by the hundreds and thousands (depending on the company) will be left with no job when they close. Think about this, companies are not required to let employees know they are closing or going to close. Walmart shut down a entire store in Canada because it went union, a local Sonic just up and closed one day, and I knew the manager (who took several months to find another job because of her age).

Hell, I sent my resume to places my college felt appropriate and places locally (when my career services advisor figured it she said I had sent in around 150 between what she sent and the ones I told her locally) and I got one reply back from them so it is harder now to get a job. Wanting to put a company out of business will remove those jobs from the market and put more people for that field into the pool with you and they will have more experience to most likely get the job you want.

How would you feel if you worked for a company where you programmed software for a living then was put out by the company because of lost sales due to piracy?

How would the rest of you feel if you put out a game or app of your preference looking to make a profit to put towards future apps and ended up making nothing on it because it was instantly pirated and put out online? Yeah you may be happy that there are tons of copies because it implies it is being played, but then you are hit with the reality of if you don't sell any of them you must find another way to make the money to put into your future plans or do them to a lesser extent due to not having the finance to put into it.

Piracy has consequences no matter what you have told yourself to the contrary.

[Dy7SLyTq]

excuse my language everyone... but what the fuck!!!! when the hell did you get back? i the forum missed you. now we just need zereo (even though hes still on the irc channel) and graywolf

[BHX]

DTSCode wrote:

excuse my language everyone... but what the fuck!!!! when the hell did you get back? i the forum missed you. now we just need zereo (even though hes still on the irc channel) and graywolf

A day or two ago. I mainly game back for the debates in the Lounge because I do my helping on two other sites so I don't feel obligated to worry about the beginners here or how the beginners are handled here anymore. Basically, I removed the reason I ragequit.

Lumpkin wrote:

So you're rage quitting over an annual debate? lol

Well like Disch said, not ragequit, but rather he is just calmly backing out of this discussion. Also, annual? Didn't we have this debate like two or three times before my ragequit in 2013?

As for the topic, who still buys? I do, I recently bought the BluRay/DVD/Digital of Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, and The Wolverine. I buy MP3 Music from Amazon regularly and then download them to my laptop so I can listen to them at night while coding. I have netflix to watch older movies, series, and cartoons (mainly for my son). I actually buy books too to read, here is my programming collection I have downloaded to my laptop through Amazon's Reader through the browser: http://prntscr.com/2jdcmc

[Disch]

BHX wrote:

I've worked in retail for five years before going to college and no one seems to understand.

Well... retail is something else entirely. I thought we were talking about the impact on software developers/musicians/film industries.

Retail isn't impacted nearly as much by this. Traditionally, how it works in retail, is the amount of product they carry is proportionate to the demand of the item. So if sales of music drop off... then stores will simply start carrying less music (and eventually none, if it drops off enough).

The real problem with the retail end of this is that it's archaic and is being surpassed by a vastly superior way to shop.

Put this in perspective. In music... your [legal] options are:

1) Go to the store.

Maybe they have the music you're looking for... maybe not. Odds are, unless it's Justin Beiber, One Direction, Lady Gaga, or some other mainstream pop idol, the music you want is going to be difficult to find, if it can be found at all.

Assuming you can find it, wait in line, check it out, drive home.


or 2)

Go on Amazon/iTunes. Find virtually anything that's for sale, even obscure artists. No worries about it ever being sold out. Purchase it instantly. Don't have to leave the house.


Also... music in stores is still sold on CDs. Who the hell still listens to CDs? Nobody. The first/only thing I do if someone gives me a CD is rip the MP3s off it. After that I throw the CD in a box in my closet never to be seen again.



Movies and TV shows are the same way. Why drive to the store, spend $180 on buying the complete Breaking Bad series... when I can spend $9 or whatever a month to watch it, and any other show I want on Netflix?



And it's not just media. It's everything. I went into a Best Buy recently to look at computer stuff. Their selection was tiny. Compare that to newegg where they have practically everything.. but it's all cheaper, they ship it right to your door, and there are tons of user reviews and recommendations.



The reality is... physical retail is just becoming more and more obsolete. Companies like Best Buy and other retailers are feeling the pinch.. and it won't be that long before they fold entirely. Everything is going online. Everything has been online for years.

Piracy has very, very, very little to do with that.

Too many people feel like that, but you don't take into account that people like you (or your parents, sisters, brothers, friends) by the hundreds and thousands (depending on the company) will be left with no job when they close.

I realize that. My sister is a manager at Best Buy. My brother is a struggling musician. I worry about both of them.

But that doesn't change the cold reality. The economy is founded on outdated principles. If those principles are changing... then the economy must (and will) change along with them.

I'm not going to give my money to a dying business to help keep my brother and sister employed -- I'd rather just give my money directly to my brother and sister if it comes to that.

Walmart shut down a entire store in Canada because it went union

Not sure what point you're trying to make here, other than providing one of many examples why Walmart is a horrific company and you should never ever shop there (which I agree with -- there was another thread about this some time ago).

How would you feel if you worked for a company where you programmed software for a living then was put out by the company because of lost sales due to piracy?

It would suck.

Ideally, nobody would ever commit crime, everyone would be employed at a job they love, and the economy would be bulletproof. Sadly, none of those are true. Reality is harsh.

If our economy is so fragile that it can be broken down by internet piracy, then maybe it needs to break down. Putting a bandaid on it and hoping the problem goes away is unrealistic and will just keep it weak.

Piracy has consequences no matter what you have told yourself to the contrary.

I agree 100%.

I think the difference in our philosophy is that we are approaching this from different angles.

You're saying "Piracy is wrong, people shouldn't be doing it or else you'll hurt the economy".

Whereas I'm saying "Piracy is real. The economy better figure out a way to work around it".




EDIT:

BHX wrote:

As for the topic, who still buys? I do, I recently bought the BluRay/DVD/Digital of Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, and The Wolverine. I buy MP3 Music from Amazon regularly and then download them to my laptop so I can listen to them at night while coding. I have netflix to watch older movies, series, and cartoons (mainly for my son). I actually buy books too to read, here is my programming collection I have downloaded to my laptop through Amazon's Reader through the browser: http://prntscr.com/2jdcmc

Notice how all of the examples you provided were not physical retail stores, but online options. Kind of supports my earlier point.

[BHX]

I see your point, but I do have three things to say, but I have to admit you do have a very valid point.

Disch wrote:

Retail isn't impacted nearly as much by this.

I guess it depends on the store. For example, Walmart's top two departments (when I worked for the local supercenter) was Electronics and Sporting Goods. Best Buy is all about electronic and media so I don't know if they could survive if they dropped movie/series/dvd/music and went to solely hardware/equipment/accessories and geek squad. Walmart would have a huge chunk of sales that would be missing if they removed pirated materials from their stores (Books, Movies, Games, Music). The sites though make it so you can find out if the store near you has any in stock and get it today if you want it otherwise you have to wait for it to get to your house (which doesn't bother me as I just the first of January bought GTA 5 and yet to actually play it on my PS3). I suppose the argument then becomes if you need the item right now or if you can wait for it to come by way of UPS/FedEx/USPS.

Disch wrote:

Whereas I'm saying "Piracy is real. The economy better figure out a way to work around it".

There is no way to work around piracy without shutting down every game dev company and doing away with consoles. Then at that point the PC game community would be through the roof and almost impossible to get your foot in the door due to all the veteran teams pumping out games. The only alternative I have seen offered is to make games free to play with in-game content you can buy (DLC, armor, quests, weapons, etc.). Only time will tell how this will play out.

Disch wrote:

Notice how all of the examples you provided were not physical retail stores, but online options. Kind of supports my earlier point.

Not all, but two are. I buy all my movies from Walmart on the combo packs if they have them. I still have to watch The Wolverine and now planning to get the new Riddick movie. Otherwise, yeah, I got tired of blowing money on physical books that eventually fall apart so if I can I buy ebooks (but for the record that entire collection, minus the C++ Programming for Beginners, I have physical books for that are falling apart with pages loosely put in where they have fallen out). I buy MP3s music because there are some albums I don't want to buy the whole album just for one or two songs I like on them (that and I don't like having to dig through me and my wife's HUGE CD collection as is to find them all again).

[3hM2Nwbp]

out of context wrote:

If our economy is so fragile that it can be broken down by internet piracy, then maybe it needs to break down.

Do you really realize what happens if when the economy breaks down? Think things were bad in the 1930s (~123,000,000 people)? Think of what happens with almost 3 times as many mouths to feed. I'm guessing that it's going to happen well within our lifetimes. Best case scenario, most of the people don't starve (aka. the ones that take to a life of crime and steal from the honest minority).


If you claim that piracy is helping to accelerate the seemingly eminent collapse and still support it...what kind of society are you trying to build?

*I realize that the above is out of context...but my main point is: where does it stop? Piracy is socially acceptable, neato! Why can't we legally raid our neighbor's pantry for food? All they have to do is figure out how to work around it. Hey, it worked for the piracy crisis.

I've always been an advocate of an iron fist regarding intellectual property rights...amongst other socially accepted illegal activities.

[LB]

Disch believes in natural selection - let the bad economies die off to be replaced by better ones.

Unfortunately the economy is not subject to natural selection :(

[Disch]

I guess it depends on the store

That is true. I was generalizing but it does vary a lot depending on the store and the target market. Point taken.

There is no way to work around piracy without shutting down every game dev company and doing away with consoles.[snip]The only alternative I have seen offered is to make games free to play with in-game content you can buy (DLC, armor, quests, weapons, etc.)

Notice the irony of you saying "there is no other way" then proceed to offer another way.

It's a lot harder to pirate Xbox/PS3/etc games than it is to pirate PC games. So when you say "do away with consoles", I was thinking the exact opposite. Making everything console-only would do a lot at fighting piracy.

But there are other things that can be done. Another idea that comes to mind is to watermark the binary and require the client to sign into a webserver. I think Steam already does this, and has been very successful.

Or make money not on selling the game, but selling items in game. (Which, now that I typed that... is exactly what you already mentioned).



The real challenge is with music/movies. If you can hear it, you can rip it. And if you have it ripped, you can redistribute it. I have no idea how that could be prevented. Game and software dev has it extremely easy by comparison.

Not all, but two are

Ah, whoops. I only saw Amazon/Netflix mentioned so I guess I assumed too much. =)

[oGbjE3v7]

BHXSpectre wrote:

For every illegal copy found it is figured as sales loss because it is still the full game that you were supposed to buy before you could play it that you are now playing for free because you got hold of it without paying for it.

Well that's where that kind of thinking fails. They think their product is the best pile of shit anyone has seen. Thinking that people pirate it to get some of that shit. No matter what the reason is, pure or otherwise, i have no doubt the majority of people that pirate the game would not buy it if pirating wasn't an option. If you want to look at pumpkins statement another way, they want free stuff and if it's not free they won't buy it. If you need an example, you need not look any further. SimCity. The game was basically pirate proof and yet a year after it's release it's getting an offline mode. Which basically means they are conceding, opening up the game to piracy.

First, that is a bs reason people give themselves and others to try and justify and remove any guilt they have for doing something they know is illegal.

Being illegal or not doesn't coincide with it being right or wrong morally. It's illegal for gay marriage (for the most part in the US), does that mean you believe homosexuals should feel guilty for going to another country, getting married, then coming back ? I don't.

[3hM2Nwbp]

Disch wrote:

The real challenge is with music/movies. If you can hear it, you can rip it. And if you have it ripped, you can redistribute it. I have no idea how that could be prevented.

Perhaps by making the risk of doing so outweigh the cost that would otherwise be applied? Want to steal? Fine. How about you pay the intellectual property holder 10x the original cost if you get caught. The technology to catch these criminals exists (within the NSA?). Automating the process would be trivial.

[S G H]

What if the owner doesn't know he's being "stolen from" ?
Like a hack, people going into his PC downloading things, without him knowing?

[LB]

There is no real reward for distributing something for free, though there may be some mental reward in the satisfaction of defiance.

[Mats]

Disch believes in natural selection - let the bad economies die off to be replaced by better ones.

Unfortunately the economy is not subject to natural selection :(

Humans however, are.

[3hM2Nwbp]

EssGeEich wrote:

What if the owner doesn't know he's being "stolen from" ?
Like a hack, people going into his PC downloading things, without him knowing?

I guess automating the process down to a specific machine would be trivial, however when you try to get down to the specific person using it I can see where it might get hairy and require an investigation.


(unrelated, didn't want to make another post)

The internet is analogous to a public library with a heroin factory in the back. No one in the library wants to be hassled / regulated (and it makes sense, 99.9% of the patrons aren't doing anything wrong). Still, every day heroin gets exported. Everyone complains when you try to board up the back end of the library to stop the heroin factory. Now heroin is great for making money...and everyone sees that the producers aren't getting punished for it and join in. All of a sudden, instead of just a few patrons making heroin, you have (well, I don't have exact statistics..) a lot more.

Three obvious solutions:
1) Make heroin legal (even your children can get it)
2) Board up the factory (block access to the good and the bad)
3) Remove the operators (but that's a lot of work...since there are so many of them now)

Just replace 'heroin' with 'stolen music' above to fit the topic.

I think the best choice is #3, personally.

[Disch]

Wow did I get ninja'd....

Luc Lieber wrote:

Do you really realize what happens if when the economy breaks down?

I meant that more as rhetoric than as an actual statement. I don't think our economy should (or will) break down. My point was that I don't think our economy is so fragile.

There are far bigger issues with the economy than internet piracy. If you want to talk about things that are likely to cause collapse, take a look at what Wall Street deregulation has done (and continues to do).

Attacking internet piracy while that is going on is like trying to keep your house from being flooded by putting sandbags on your front door while all of your other doors and windows are wide open. (analogies are fun).

but my main point is: where does it stop? Piracy is socially acceptable, neato! Why can't we legally raid our neighbor's pantry for food? All they have to do is figure out how to work around it. Hey, it worked for the piracy crisis.

Slipperly slope arguments are really hard for me to follow. I don't equate change in public mentality with moral deterioration. The internet is a relatively new technology, and we're defining how we want it to be used. People have decided they want it to be used for porn to pirate media.

I don't really see that as "bad" so much as I see it as change.

In cases like this, it really does come down to will of the masses. If most people want to live in a society where piracy is okay, then I say go for it. Likewise, if people want to live in a society where raiding each other's houses for food is acceptable, go for it.

The difference between the two is really just numbers. More people are okay with piracy than are okay with B&E/mugging.

izrex wrote:

i have no doubt the majority of people that pirate the game would not buy it if pirating wasn't an option.

I'm not sure I believe it's the 'majority', but it's definitely a considerable chunk.

There's no way there's a 1:1 correlation of pirated copies to lost sales. That simply is not true. I don't think anyone really knows what the ratio actually is.

[Disch]

Luc Leiber wrote:

Perhaps by making the risk of doing so outweigh the cost that would otherwise be applied? Want to steal? Fine. How about you pay the intellectual property holder 10x the original cost if you get caught. The technology to catch these criminals exists (within the NSA?). Automating the process would be trivial.

So.... take an already struggling middle/lower class society and plunge them even deeper into poverty with outrageous fines for trivial crimes. Sounds like a great way to help the economy. =P

Or maybe you'd prefer jail time? Why not fill our already overcrowded prison system with these dastardly villains.


Over-extreme penalties are never the answer. I'd rather have a society with a bit of crime than a society that lives in fear of persecution.

[3hM2Nwbp]

Disch wrote:

So.... take an already struggling middle/lower class society and plunge them even deeper into poverty with outrageous fines for trivial crimes. Sounds like a great way to help the economy. =P

The triviality of a crime is subjective to who is on the short end of the stick. (Think about your brother and his career, especially if he didn't have anyone to help support him if everyone simply steals his work and leaves him with nothing.)

Disch wrote:

Or maybe you'd prefer jail time? Why not fill our already overcrowded prison system with these dastardly villains.

Jail time doesn't really do anything to force a fair exchange. I really don't see the point of prison systems other than keeping dangerous individuals locked away from society. I won't go into my opinions on what to do with prisoners-for-life, as that's for another conversation. How about forcing all prisoners to work to atone for their crimes instead of keeping them locked up? IE. A bank robber gets his wages garnished until the amount stolen is paid back in full, or he / she dies; whichever comes first. Giving criminals a free roof over their head makes absolutely no sense to me. What am I saying? I am paying for the roof over their head.

Disch wrote:

Over-extreme penalties are never the answer. I'd rather have a society with a bit of crime than a society that lives in fear of persecution.

I'd only argue that enforcing fair exchange is almost always the ideal answer. Whether it's an apple on a market stall or a piece of art on the internet, stealing is stealing. It's the job of the government to see to it things are set right. Note - this is not a $10,000 fine for stealing a $5 t-shirt, but rather, possibly...$5 plus the cost of the wages of those involved in resolving the crime.

On the note of over-extreme penalties...that's one of the big problems that I see happening right now - the charges don't fit the crime. My co-worker got a DUI charge last year and had to attend some ridiculous 30 hours of "counseling" (at a cost of $300 / hour) on top of the huge initial fine. The "counseling" involved a group of other offenders talking. One pseudo-scientist (psychologist) was present. I think the fact that insurance covered most of the "counseling" had something to do with the number of hours required, but there's no way anyone could possibly prove that. </conspiracy>

Likewise, the charge for piracy doesn't fit either. (no charge)

[Mats]

Fair exchange is not a good answer. It turns crime into a fair gambling game! The penalty should, in almost all cases, be at least a little worse than fair.