Is piracy a serious issue for game developers?

[Kid Charlemagne]

Actually, full-quality DVD rips are probably the second most common format after DivX-compressed ones (and even those sport a loss of quality invisible to most TVs).

Sure, there are "DVD Quality" rips, but it's important to know that DVD by itself isn't a particularly great mark of quality. There are bad DVD's of movies, and good DVD's of movies, and to make the latter rather than the former takes a lot of work and optimizing. I've read Psionicists Wiki link, and it didn't change my position or knowledge of the situation at all. The best pirated DVD's will match up poorly to the worst quality prpfessionally produced DVD's, IMO. Even DVD screeners done at professional production companies are lesser in quality than the eventual final DVD's.

The difference is hard to discern. Most people - probably even me - can't tell the difference. But everything about them in terms of picture quality is likely to be better. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I've been a professional video photographer and editor. I've worked in those production companies - including ones that make Academy screeners - and I've worked on shows for network TV and cable. I no longer work in that field, and DVD authoring isn't my specialty, but I dabble, and given access to the source material I could make DVD rips just like you find on the net, maybe better. And I know the limitations. The $500,000 edit suites still can do more than a guy with Premiere at home. Or even a guy who has access to $15,000 worth of equipment, like me.

 

[The Sigil]

Oh, I wouldn't say that, necessarily! Driving dangerously is wrong, driving fast is not neceessarily so.

It's certainly illegal, though.

And there's the rub.

The arguments can, by and large, be summarized thusly:

1a. Most (not all) publishers will tell you that "pirating" stuff is (morally) wrong.

1b. Most (not all) downloaders will tell you that "pirating" stuff is (morally) right, even if it's not legal... in the same way that speeding may be illegal, but that doesn't make it wrong.

2a. Most (not all) publishers will tell you that "pirating" causes lost revenue. Some will say each download is a lost sale. Some will say some downloads are lost sales. Some will say that only a very few downloads are lost sales.

2b. Most (not all) downloaders will tell you that "pirating" does not cause lost revenue. They will tell you that if it wasn't free, they wouldn't have purchased it. They will tell you that they want to "try before they buy" and then say, "well it wasn't that good" (in which case, the download has a higher probability of causing a "lost sale" since the downloader already admitted an interest and without the download might have been willing to buy).

3. There are no studies with relevant data, because doing such studies are incredibly tricky... and when they are done, they tend to be contradictory. Depending on whose study you believe, you will conclude that (a) MP3 swapping helps CD sales, (b) MP3 swapping has no effect on CD sales, or (c) MP3 swapping hurts CD sales.

4. There is often a semi-tangential discussion on the goods and evils of copyright as currently ensconced; downloaders frequently point to "unreasonable copyright" to defend their activity as (a) a form of civil disobedience or (b) justify their copying on moral grounds ("copyright is broken, therefore I am under no obligation to respect it") and (c) PDF products - especially DRMd ones (another tangent) - do not behave like regular RPG books with respect to Right of First Sale doctrine. Publishers often counter those arguments with (a) you aren't "sticking it to the man" but rather sticking it to a "mom-and-pop shop" and (b) point out that if copyright was significantly shorter, even 7 years, most of the "pirated material" would be under copyright anyway, but usually have no answer to (c).

5. As a tangent to copyright, "Fair Use" often comes up as well and how that is defined. If you own a PHB, is it "Fair Use" to have a scanned/OCR-d copy provided you don't share it with others? Is it okay to buy a PDF then send a copy to your whole gaming group? Etc. etc. etc. This tends to be muddier water to navigate, because not only is moral right and wrong ambiguous (as it is in the 4 above sets), ethical/legal right and wrong is ambiguous (because "Fair Use" is decided on a case-by-case basis).

6. Economically, people point out that (especially for PDF publishers), demand is greater at the "free" price point than any other price point - and that it's extremely hard for publishers to compete with "free" and turn a profit. In some cases, the product is identical (PDFs being shared), in some cases better/worse (see comment about region-free DVD rips or consider a low-resolution image-scan with no OCR of an RPG book).

There, in a nutshell, are pretty much all the arguments that either side floats. Where I stand on these issues is pretty-well documented, no need to re-hash them; anyone who cares can search for them.

--The Sigil

 

[Kurotowa]

Professional writers are paid. Professional means you make a living at it. Work you publish yourself gets you NO credit in the professional field, because anybody can do it. Having somebody pay you means that your work is valuable enough to merit consideration. I have tried to write, and that is the way it is.

Professional writers are paid pennies. Of the professional writers in my family (professional meaning published by a large publishing house and doing it nearly full time) none has ever earned a good living, certainly not enough to support themselves. So what's your point?

By definition, somebody who pirates property is not a "potential customer." That is like calling a shoplifter a potential customer under the theory that if they like what they stole, they may come back and buy some. The phrase, "I want it," is NEVER a good reason. Nobody cares what people who say this want, because it is almost always self-serving and acquired at the expense of others.

Again, I disagree. Someone who downloads a movie or book IS a potential customer. They have already shown interest in the work. The fact that they downloaded it instead of procuring it from a different more legal source just means there was a compelling reason for them not to (going by the assumption that people don't break the law unless they feel justified somehow). Maybe it was the price, which says something about the resources of a lot of people or the pricing structure of the legal version. Maybe it was the distribution, or the availability, or the quality. All of those are areas that can be explored for ways to make legal versions more attractive. But branding every person who downloads something as a selfish thief ends the discussion entirely on a very poor note.

 

[D_Sinclair]

Read my post above. You think it's wrong. It's not wrong in other cultures.

Unfortunately, those few cultures left that do not possess a developed concept of individual ownership are few and far between. Worse for your argument is the fact that they are also typified as primitive, and therefore aren't likely to have an understanding of a calculator, let alone the capacity to log on and steal. Comparing sexual behaviors of different nations isn't exactly a suitable analogy. I'd also like to point out that while Japan may have loose sexual morals, they've done more to crack down on illegal file trading than any other country, up to and including the shutdown by force of three different file trading services.

Another flaw in your argument is the fact that virtually no one who is taking things they do not own and not paying for them comes from one of those few cultures with no sense of property ownership. Just because some other culture does something does not make it right for you to do so as well.

 

[Falkus]

Professional writers are paid pennies. Of the professional writers in my family (professional meaning published by a large publishing house and doing it nearly full time) none has ever earned a good living, certainly not enough to support themselves. So what's your point?

So, your immediate family is representative of the entire writing community? Unless there are four thousand professional writers in your family, you do not even begin to have enough samples to make any claims about the writing community.

gain, I disagree. Someone who downloads a movie or book IS a potential customer.

You mean WAS a potential customer. After all, once he acquired (illegally) a coupy of said information, he no longer needs to purchase it.

They have already shown interest in the work. The fact that they downloaded it instead of procuring it from a different more legal source just means there was a compelling reason for them not to

And the reason, to quote Scott Adams, would be: He's a greedy weasel.

oing by the assumption that people don't break the law unless they feel justified somehow

What a silly assumption. People break the law because they don't think they'll get caught.

Maybe it was the price

In which case, he shouldn't buy it, if he doesn't want to pay for it.

But branding every person who downloads something as a selfish thief ends the discussion entirely on a very poor note.

Someone is acquiring something they have no right and failing to compensate the people who deserve the money because they made said thing. I call 'em like I see 'em. That's was my moral justification back in my pirating days. At least I was honest with myself. I was doing a bad thing, but at least I didn't try to pretend I was some modern day Robin Hood fighting against the Man. I stole stuff because I was greedy and didn't want to pay. And that's why you steal stuff, and that's why anybody steals stuff.

 

[Sundragon2012]

Someone is acquiring something they have no right and failing to compensate the people who deserve the money because they made said thing. I call 'em like I see 'em. That's was my moral justification back in my pirating days. At least I was honest with myself. I was doing a bad thing, but at least I didn't try to pretend I was some modern day Robin Hood fighting against the Man. I stole stuff because I was greedy and didn't want to pay. And that's why you steal stuff, and that's why anybody steals stuff.

Thanks for your honesty.

I felt exactly the same way when I was pirating things. Hey, I was a kid in Toys R' Us with an unlimited shopping spree. The temptation outweighed my character at the time and I stole what I wanted. I felt bad about it from time to time but I assuaged that by getting something new and distracting. I never pretended to be anything more than a thief which is exactly what I was.

Morally I was a thief.
Ethically I was a thief.
I had no right to do what I did but I did it because I wanted to....very simple, very clean and uncomplicated rationale.

Funny thing is that outside of that I was about as morally "good" as anyone can reasonably be. I saw my piracy as my only vice/character flaw and accepted it as it was. Everyone has some vice I thought so I felt that it was if not ok, then at least tolerable.

I wasn't increasing the sum total of shared information in the universe, I was a guy who preferred to get for free what other schmucks had to pay for, period. Early on, there was the charge of getting away with it but then later it was as matter of fact as personal hygiene, just something you did every day. There was no overarching philosophy or righteousness and if you asked me even then whether or not I was doing the wrong thing I would have admitted that I was without a second thought. In fact I would get into arguments with others who did what I did but attempted to justify their behavior.



Chris

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I just got back from Russia to find my relatives from New Orleans had to move in with me...so forgive me if this has been covered already:

Yes it is. And it's called copyright infringement for precisely this reason. If you steal a car, someone loses his car. If you download copy of X, the developer doesn't lose his copy, rather an imaginary sale. That's why there are different laws for copyright infringement and theft. It's the same thing with tax fraud and stealing, you don't use the same term for the two.

First- let me state that I'm an entertainment attorney, so I deal with copyright all the time.

Copyright Infringement is one of the numerous subclasses and synonyms of theft including larceny, burglary, robbery, conversion, embezzlement etc. that have cropped up in English/American jurisprudence over the last 800 years or so. The law gives them seperate names and rules because of the nature of the properties affected by the crimes and the nature of the type of crime committed. Copyright infringement is the name given to a particular kind of theft (unauthorized reproduction or use) applying to a particular kind of property (intellectual property).

Black's Law Dictionary
Theft is..the act of stealing. The taking of property without the owner's consent...the fraudulent taking of personal property belonging to another, from his possession, for from the possession of some person holding the same for him, without his consent, with intent to deprive the owner of the value of the same, and to apporpriate it to the use or benefit of the person taking...Theft is any of the following acts done with the intent to deprive the owner permanently of the possession, use, or benefit of his propertty: (a) Obtaining or exerting unauthorized control over property; (b) Obtaining by deception control over property; or (c) Obtaining by threat control over property; or (d) Obtaining control over stolen property knowing the property to have been stolen by another.

(Emphasis mine.)

Compare to US Copyright Info

Make no mistake- copyright infringement IS theft in any jurisdiction in which a sovereign (King, country, state, etc.) has recognized that property rights exist in intellectual property. I'm not aware of any country that doesn't at this point, and most countries respect the laws of others (in theory, at least).

And from my experience (not scientific evidence, but it is what I have personal knowledge of), it IS the little guys who get hurt the most. Most of my clients are in the music biz. One of my buddies has a small record label that released an album for a new band that was selling for about $10...except on a Russian website that was selling pirated copies for $4. He can't afford to touch them, and they're moving about 10x his legit sales in the pirated copies. Those sales will never generate royalties for his clients, and will not count on Billboard's sales numbers- which is a critical measure of a band's popularity.

So, while Hasbro may not be too concerned right now, smaller companies like Green Ronin or Malhavoc could stand to lose A LOT. Heck, long term, even WOTC might encounter trouble if their sales fall just shy of Hasbro's expectations...They might face budget cuts that could cost jobs.

 

[Psionicist]

Make no mistake- copyright infringement IS theft in any jurisdiction in which a sovereign (King, country, state, etc.) has recognized that property rights exist in intellectual property. I'm not aware of any country that doesn't at this point, and most countries respect the laws of others (in theory, at least).

What about this then? http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=search&court=US&case=/us/473/207.html

(a) The language of 2314 does not "plainly and unmistakably" cover such conduct. The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of 2314. The section's language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud. Pp. 214-218.

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

DOn't care what kind of moral wriggling and yanking out of moldy old arguements you do.

It's still stealing.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Dowling v. United States 473 U.S. 207 (1985), the case you cited, is not on point. The appellant, Dowling, was challenging whether he could be convicted under the copyright law for transporting illegal goods "stolen, converted or taken by fraud". The Supreme Court held that he could not.

They did NOT decide that the bootlegs and pirated materials were not stolen goods, or that copyright infringement wasn't theft, or that Dowling didn't commit an illegal act. They just held that the material Dowling was transporting was not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud." In fact, the illegality of Dowlings acts are discussed both in the holding and the dissent.

Understand: "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" needs to be read as a whole. In other words it means stolen by fraud, converted by fraud or taken by fraud. Fraud was not involved here.

Here, the US gov't tried to extend copyright infringement into an area it didn't belong, probably in order to get access to harsher penalties. If they had tried to convict Dowling of the transport of stolen merchandise, he would have lost and not been granted audience into the Supreme Court. In fact, they may have even done so- the case ONLY covers the 2314 count- no mention is made of other charges that may have been leveled against Dowling, and reading the case's first footnote you'll find that there were multiple counts, to 6 of which Dowling's co-defendants plead guilty.

The copyright infringement occurred, it was a theft. It just wasn't "stolen, converted or taken by fraud," and Dowling was a transporter of stolen goods, not a copyright infringer.