You just have to think of your worst qualities and exaggerate them. Everyone has the potential to be a pirate. But, luckily, we all feel compelled at varying degrees.




In the right? No. I disagree. You can't win any moral argument on the side of a thief, except maybe at a table of thieves.



Very few people are professional thieves or professional murderers. The "decent human being", I'm assuming, fills the rest. I've never seen someone who wasn't decent according to somebody. Since I personally know of no professional thieves or professional murderers and since I know nothing about their particular mentalities, I figure I must have been identifying with decent human beings. And you have been unfair. For all I know, thieves and murderers are decent, too.

[edit: Nobody is exclusively a thief or exclusively decent. There are no good people. There are no bad people. People just do decent things more often or less often than others. I identified with the decision to steal, not the people who would. After all, if the world consisted soley of people who would never steal, then this debate would never take place!)

your argument is moot, it's a two way street. If companies used better business practices there would be far less demand for piracy. Meaning less need to act like a criminal.

also allow me to demonstrate your comments thus far.
A large corporation takes steps to murder everyone that does business with them because they could be spies from other companies! But its ok, don't you dare try to murder them back though and be a criminal.

I think you just have some prejudice against retribution. Treat people like criminals and criminals they will become.

It would seem plausible that such an approach would make you more likely to offend however - for example it would be highly likely that you will care less what happens to a company who treats you as a criminal than one who treets you as a good customer, and thus the impact of one of the potential reasons you wouldn't pirate (you like to benefit others/don't like to hurt others) would be decreased.


No, this is one of the problems that comes from taking the basic prisoners dilemma and trying to generalise its results without giving enough attention to what may have changed, or to possible exceptions/alternatives to the standard result; Emotion is not the only reason why someone might pay for a game instead of pirating it, and thus you cannot (correctly) say that the best decision for everyone would be to steal if you discount only the emotional reasons. The number of assumptions you need to make for your result to hold are far too numerous to make the end result of that much significance. In effect you'd need to assume that if a game was sold at both full price and for free, both versions identical and equally easy to obtain, with no difference in the risks or severity of problems with either games, and no emotion on the part of the purchaser, oh, and both versions being of equal legality, then everyone should get the one for free. Hardly an overwhelming result really!

Misinformation, ignorance, or stupidity are also possible explanations in the absence of emotion. I only assumed that people were all smart, sane, and well-informed.



Violence? That's absurd. You mean like Waco? Yeah, that worked great.



As long as you aren't from one of the barbarian countries, you are rich. The bum who lives in government housing here lives larger than a neurosurgeon in Nigeria. Robin hood makes a decent argument if people are starving or oppressed, like people were in pre-revolutionary France. Why does it matter if rich people all have million dollar hovercars here, as long as you have a rolls royce and all the Nigerians starve?

Cobra, downward spiral of bad behavior? Perhaps you could check into reality briefly?

There is no downward spiral, regardless of whether it's bad behavior or not.

First, copyright infringement is a fiction created by people to advance society. Intellectual property exists solely because we say it does. This is part of the reason so many pirates say fuck off. Most of the world gets told this absurdly moronic idea and thinks what? you can't own an idea? What kind of crack are these crazy westerners smoking? To them, it's not immoral to steal ideas because you can't own them anymore than you own the air you're breathing. It's as if you went into a tribal culture where land wasn't owned and started putting down fences. It wouldn't be immoral for them to ignore your fences because to them, you don't even own it. The massive piracy rates around the world are not a product of immorality because copyright isn't even a moral issue. It's a reward for creation with the intent to fuel technological and artistic expansion and make everyones lives better. It's social engineering that hasn't caught on everywhere yet.

Second, it's decreasing, not increasing. This is fact, get over it. The microcosm that is the PC game market does not constitute a global trend in piracy. Since no one will actually publish studies on it, we don't even know that PC games are increasing in piracy either. Piracy in general is dropping.

Third, most of what is considered piracy now, wasn't. There was no law against copying and sharing Doom with your friends in the US. Sharing only became illegal here with a 1997 court case that ruled it as such. You can check the copyright act if you don't believe it. Sharing is still legal in a lot of places. Only an idiot says the sky is falling when something legal becomes illegal and the crime rates suddenly jump. Never mind that copyright wasn't even a common concept a few hundred years ago. Even where it existed, you had to be given permission to have your work protected.

Fourth, riding your high horse solves as little as the RIAA suing people did. They really enjoyed their falling sales, so much that they kept suing and blamed the losses on piracy. Moral outrage isn't a problem, it's an airhead response to something you object to. It's like the Catholic church objecting to condoms and birth control pills, never mind that people were already screwing like rabbits and getting abortions from quacks using coat hangars. We don't dare let them avoid the pregnancy! Piracy needs studied, in depth and honestly, by people that haven't already got a horse in the race. It's stupid to be spending trillions on an issue that's probably not even losing them money. Unfortunately, assholes like you and Sly are stuck on how it's stealing, regardless of whether the theft of a digital object with no physical loss is a good or bad thing in the end for the company trying to sell it. Being stupid just because you're entitled to it doesn't get you ahead.

I have a question related to piracy.

Why is modding a piece of gaming hardware illegal. I am referring to things like psp, Wii, ps3, Xbox 360.

I know that reverse engineering a piece of hardware or software can be consider illegal. Though, if i do it in the privacy of my own home and not doing it for profit, then i still don't see why it is illegal.

But say with modding the psp, what if i just want to mod it so that i can use it for some other functions, like reading documents or install some custom homebrew word processor.

I was at my local EB games, and i ask the sales person regarding where i can purchase more UMD movies for my psp since there are so little kicking around at Best Buy or my local Future Shop. The guy told me just rip the movie from DVD and put it onto my psp. I then ask him about whether it is worth modding my psp because i want to use it to read documents on the go. His answer is that he can not answer me, because modding psp is consider to be illegal.

So if someone can explain to me exactly which law i am breaking by modding hardware, that would be great. I know it voids the warranty, but i did not know it carries any legal peanlty.

for the love of god get off your high horse, for all we know you could pirate software as well and just be trolling. This is far more likely than you really being this out of touch with the reality. From what it sounds like you live on an Amish reserve, hitting up the cybercafe after riding 20 miles to the nearest town on your bicycle. I mean that is more plausible than you really being so luscus.

Cobra, your argument is fallacious. When I download a game, I'm not depriving the store of a copy for sale. A better equation would be if I could get a perfect copy of that Ferarri while letting the owner keep his car.

Here's the way I see this whole piracy argument, from the view of someone who's been burned by DRM on several occasions.

DRM is like telling someone who owns a power drill "Ok, you can only use this drill under these conditions, anything else and you can't use it and the drill will shut off". It's something you own and can do whatever you wish with it. You can modify it so that it spins faster or is a pump.

It's limiting what you can do with it with no basis in reality.

EULA's are, imo, completely stupid and unenforceable. Since I never agreed to the contract when money was changing hands and I can no longer return the product, it's null and void (Legally is another issue though).

Piracy is more like free advertising, good or bad. A pirate is another voice who's played your game, if it's good, he'll pay for it and become a customer or he'll just spout off it's awesomeness/suck factor to anyone who'll listen. Why is he even being considered? He's not someone who paid for your product so why are you meant to care about him?

Equating a downloaded copy of a game to a physical product is stupid. When the physical product is stolen, the storekeeper can no longer sell that copy. When the digital product is copied, the original owner still has his copy.

No. I would not tell you that I am a non-pirate if I were a pirate, and I would not tell you that I were a pirate at all.

Your post illuminates a depressing point. People who side with non-pirates are 'trolls', which I believe means people who create posts in disagreement with the general consensus. It follows that people have generally concluded piracy is legitimate, and anyone who disagrees is a 'troll'.

I am toying with an idea, and I am conflicted. While I view myself as a moral person, I also do not want to be used. While I believe piracy is wrong, I also no longer believe buying games is right. So I have a choice. I can either abandon games entirely, or I can become a pirate myself. In that case, my only defense is that I know I am immoral. But I only question the amount of guilt I would have to feel. Would it be worth it? If so, what else am I capable of? Is this a world made for pirates?

I ask earlier



A few posts later you pass this off as your own idea, even though that is exactly the Prisoners Dilemma I told you would crop up in your class.



Dude, you really need to pay more attention in your class. You either missed the point your lecturer was trying to make, or they are feeding you this stuff specifically so they can then run through the flaws in follow up classes and explain why its not part of modern economic theory.



..... I feel like the guy in Good Will Hunting who catches the guy in a bar plagiarising a history book, misunderstanding it and passing it off as his own idea.

Every week I get some Chinese guy stick his head round the door were I work and ask "DVD you want DVD yes?".

Like if I was so minded to view an illegal copy I would spend £10 on his dodgy cam-recording from the cinema rather that just download the full DVD quality rip off the net!

Even HMV will sell you the full DVD with all extras if you wait a few months for not much more than that.

The racing has ended and I'm back
Most, or at least some, of my post will be off-topic:


I only said that your post made you sound like an agist, but now I really think you are one. I truly hope I had some job right now (though not on top of the already eight-hour day at the high school plus the homework, which usually leaves me one hour of free time each day). I get little money and I'd really like some free space and my own house. You can complain about all the taxes, but, in return, I could complain about that you can gain money unlike me (that I doubt you spend at all, stealing things).

You also used the Robin Hood reference. Someone already said it's 2008 now. Am I wrong or do you own a computer? Yes? Well, then you should be able to afford all the food and medical supplies. The ones Hood stealed from didn't give much or anything for their people. And does this also mean you haven't got anything from the corporations you're stealing from? Finally, the ones Robin Hood gave the stuff to were suffering and starving to death. I assume you are suffering from similar things too? No? Then goddamnit don't refer to heroes (fictional or not) to justify your crimes!

And now since this seems to never end, this will, with 90% accuracy, remain my last post in this very thread. I'll choose the "Options -> Quit -> Return to Main Menu", and leave you here to preach your religion for all you want.

Rather than just tearing your comment apart I'll just revel in the fact that you wont be posting anymore instead.

PS. robin hood was a metaphor not meant to be taking directly from the mythology, but I mean sure okay what I really meant was pirates steal food and give it to the poor... yep that is exactly what I meant.