[HN Gopher] Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Mi...
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Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecraft creator
(2011)
Author : ROARosen
Score : 254 points
Date : 2021-03-03 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| jjjeii3 wrote:
| It's much easier to watch a pirated movie copy than pay for a
| movie service. Just open a website and select video. Done.
| Registration is not needed, no payments, no subscriptions etc.
|
| and if you use an app for a movie service, then they will usually
| install dozens of trackers. Here is the list of trackers used by
| a tiny app LastPass:
|
| AppsFlyer, Google Analytics, Google CrashLytics, Google Firebase
| Analytics, Google Tag Manager, MixPixel, Segment
|
| When I use a website, most of trackers are blocked by uBlock
| Origin, so I don't care that much.
| paxys wrote:
| Are you saying it is easier for the average person to download
| a Torrent than sign up for Netflix? Because that is absolutely
| not the case.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's easier for the average person to download a Torrent than
| sign up for Netflix, find out that the thing they wanted
| isn't there, try to look where it would be available, find
| services that say it has it, sign up for that, find out that
| it is available there only for other countries, and when you
| finally find it somewhere it's not with the language
| dubbing/subtitiles that you want - meanwhile, the same option
| you couldn't get legally is easily available on torrents
| where it Just Works.
|
| The illegal services are strong when they win on selection
| and availability; in markets where it _is_ easier to just
| sign up for Netflix (I assume they exist, perhaps you live in
| one of them) undoubtedly privacy gets less popular. And
| Netflix is a good example, I know people who view on Netflix
| stuff that 's there and pirate the stuff that's not.
| kuschku wrote:
| How do you sign up for netflix without a credit card?
|
| How do you sign up for netflix if your total monthly budget
| us $40?
|
| There's a lot of groups for whom torrents are easier than
| netflix.
|
| (Even in forst world Germany, an affordable CC is hard to
| come by)
| jjjeii3 wrote:
| No, I mean websites like putlocker etc.
| rhino369 wrote:
| It's still not easier than netlfix or any major video
| store.
| paxys wrote:
| Those sites have 50x the amount of tracking, popups, spam
| and straight up malware than even the most intrusive
| commercial product out there.
| mindcandy wrote:
| As a game developer, there are two conflicting stories I have
| heard about game piracy for multiple decades.
|
| From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never
| going to buy anyway.
|
| From the AAA producers: >50% of lifetime revenue for a game is
| made in the first 3-6 months after release. During that time,
| they sit and wait in dread for "Crack Day". The exact day the DRM
| crack is released, revenue permanently drops hard.
|
| I've read similar stories from small non-game desktop ISVs here
| on Hacker News. That they can clearly see on their revenue graphs
| the release dates of updates that contain DRM changes. Of course,
| most people on HN work on web-based software. Web based software
| has pretty much completely overtaken desktop software because of
| it's many advantages --such as being impossible to pirate.
|
| I wonder how many people here have actually worked on a pirate-
| able product? Phone apps are technically pirate-able. But, like
| console games, pirating is such an inconvenience (compared to
| desktop piracy) that it is relatively rarely done. But, even on
| phones, most of the revenue is to unlock server-based features. I
| can say from experience that app hacking for client-side features
| in phone apps happens quite a lot despite the inconvenience.
|
| Meanwhile, Minecraft was a story of someone in exactly the
| opposite situation from a AAA developer. Having zero reputation
| and zero marketing budget, it made complete sense for Notch to
| give away his game for free at first and slowly increase the
| price as consumer awareness and confidence grew. At all points
| Minecraft was the Indie Dream Story of starting as a nobody and
| gradually growing an audience who hands you money out of respect
| for your product rather than as a requirement of transacting with
| you to attain it.
| XorNot wrote:
| The thing about revenue is I wonder how much of that breaks
| down demographically. While I'm sure there are some anti-
| culture adults in the mix, the biggest motivation to pirate
| anything is when you're not an adult who has independent,
| disposable income (and in years gone by, the whole "debit Visa"
| thing didn't exist and meant online purchasing was basically
| locked off to the young) is that it's a completely viable and
| easier option to just bypass the people in your life who
| control that access (parents).
|
| Even if your parents are willing to sometimes buy you games or
| software or whatever, there's got to be an element that a much
| easier path is just downloading it once a crack is available
| since you're more worried about burning that extremely finite
| supply of political capital then someone else's profit.
| npteljes wrote:
| Notch got really lucky. These views about piracy not mattering
| are practically survivor bias. There are the rare vendors who I
| think profited from the pirates in the end, Microsoft and
| Adobe. Them making their software easy to pirate, coupled with
| the existing laws at the time basically made and maintained
| their flagship products the de-facto standards which can be
| felt to this day. But these again are the rare examples where
| piracy was useful - for most, it just sucks money out their
| pocket.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > These views about piracy not mattering are practically
| survivor bias.
|
| It's not about survivorship bias. It's about where he was
| starting from and the risks involved given that. An indie
| game dev's largest risk is remaining in obscurity and never
| making anything. In comparison, piracy is basically a non-
| factor. Of course large, well known studios care about
| piracy. Because they're already large and well known - they
| don't have to worry about making literally $0 in revenue on a
| title.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I worked at Blizzard a generation ago and there was no copy
| protection and then copy protection was added to products while
| I was there. IIRC what a producer told me was they had sales
| numbers for Starcraft in Germany without copy protection. Based
| on projections (prior Warcraft expansions) they expected the
| expansion to sell 1/3 the copies of the original game. But they
| added a simple CD copy protection scheme to the expansion and
| sales of the expansion in Germany were 3x the original game, so
| about an order of magnitude greater sales, which one can sort
| of infer that piracy accounted for 80-90% of Starcraft player
| base in Germany. This is just my one anecdote, YMMV.
| yarcob wrote:
| I make client side Mac app with trivial copy protection and
| unlimited free trial, and people still pay for licenses.
|
| My app is practically almost free except for a nag dialog, and
| I still make a living from it.
|
| Piracy may matter to big companies that have lots of employees
| who try to extract every possible cent from their audience.
|
| If you just want to make a living from your software, you
| should not waste time worrying about piracy.
| centimeter wrote:
| > If you just want to make a living from your software
|
| This mindset is not compatible with creating multi-billion
| dollar software like Windows or GTA 5. The only way to do
| that involves financial structures that are more complicated
| than just making a living.
|
| That's not to say I think such software is necessarily a
| _good_ thing, just that it wouldn 't exist without aggressive
| profit optimization.
| finiteseries wrote:
| macOS software automatically excludes >95% of the human
| population from its user base, and the remaining bit is
| incredibly wealthy and used to the macOS tradition of high
| quality botique software for a price.
|
| The PC and Android gaming markets are slightly different
| beasts.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > Piracy may matter to big companies that have lots of
| employees who try to extract every possible cent from their
| audience.
|
| I don't necessarily think AAA game studios are trying to
| extract every cent. But they do exist in a pretty unique
| situation in software. Since they invest a ton of money up-
| front to produce a game, and something like 85% of their
| sales occur in the first month or so. And those profits are
| invested back into the creation of the next game.
|
| Piracy is very much an issue in this situation. Delaying a
| crack by one week is probably the difference between solvency
| for studios.
|
| It is absolutely the case that some game studios might not be
| effected by piracy. Either because they don't make their
| money from the game, but instead from selling in-game items,
| their product needs online support for maximum fun, or some
| other reason. But the industry is definitely big enough for
| piracy to be both a problem, and not a problem for different
| players.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| > I don't necessarily think AAA game studios are trying to
| extract every cent.
|
| While this is true, the ones who don't tend to get eaten by
| the ones that do, eventually. Fantastic game studios are
| one flop away from closing their doors most of the time, so
| attrition is high, and the allure of recurring revenue via
| predatory microtransactions is hard to ignore.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Conversely I know a number of music software (VST) developers
| who simply _gave up_ because piracy nuked their income.
|
| There are specific niches and specific relationship models
| where piracy won't do this. But there are far more where it
| will.
|
| Ultimately it comes down to the ridiculous notion that
| because cost-of-copying is effectively zero then so is
| product value.
|
| This handily ignores the hours/days/weeks/years of
| development effort that can go into a product, and the use
| value - which may translate into income - that it offers
| users.
|
| As a creator you certainly have the option to decide on the
| relationship model you want with your customers. _Piracy
| removes that right._
| nsilvestri wrote:
| VST developers also exist in a space where their $100+ USD
| products are one of dozens that a person wants use, in a
| relatively small market, where many people are hobbyists
| who don't make money off their music. DAW entry costs are
| already high, with two of the most popular being Ableton
| Live Standard at $450 and FL Studio Producer at $199. They
| don't expect amateur Joe to license thousands of dollars
| worth of software just so he can post to his 15 followers
| on Soundcloud.
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| I think you're understating the size of the studio
| production world who are as much extensive consumers of
| comparatively inexpensive VST plugins as they are
| consumers of multi-hundred dollar workstations.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| "a living" is a matter of degrees.
|
| The argument is that your living could be more substantial,
| if you did worry about it.
| ben_w wrote:
| Every piece of Mac shareware I made was hacked instantly,
| judging by the "free license codes and patches for games" lists
| they appeared on. The patch must have been an automated attack,
| too, given I'd made the deliberate business decision to have a
| license code check of: licenseText.length > 0
| jimz wrote:
| * From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never
| going to buy anyway.*
|
| Really? Maybe times have really changed but I know a lot of
| people, myself included, who pirated software - starting in the
| mid 90s for me - because we couldn't buy software since we were
| too young to make money and lived in constant fear that the one
| time our parents do buy some game or piece of software it turns
| out to be total crap. At this point, even though my education
| have led me to a more nuanced and philosophical objection to
| the enforcement of intellectual property in the manner at least
| the United States does, and equates physical property either on
| par with it or even underneath it, the only times I pirate
| software now is if there's no trial version, and if it's
| something I really want to use long term I'd purchase it
| anyway. Effectively the only long term sort of piracy I conduct
| at this point is to circumvent blackout rules on sports
| streaming because for whatever reason a whole fifth of MLB is
| blacked out on mlb.tv where I am but the biggest streaming
| package only shows 2 of those teams. Access, ultimately,
| determine whether someone pirates. That includes cases when
| access is outlandishly expensive or simply barred, and even
| knowing my share of anarchists and career criminals as defined
| by state I really don't see people who are ideologically
| committed to piracy in an absolutist sense. It's like, if I can
| pay $25 a month for unlimited access to JSTOR it would entirely
| be for my intellectual curiosity but I'd do it, but that's not
| an option so sci-hub when the article isn't available is kind
| of the only reasonable option. The alternative is simply to
| give up and find something else to be curious about.
|
| Some aspects of reverse-engineering/cracking in the scene was
| gamified to such an extent where it became a prestige sort of
| thing, a competition for its own sake. That tends to stop
| where-ever your rivals stop, and as a result it's never a sure
| thing that patches would be cracked, for example.
| magnetowasright wrote:
| > Access, ultimately, determine whether someone pirates.
|
| Totally agree. Netflix's streaming service is a great example
| of this. Initially, Netflix provided easy access, so most
| people I know stopped pirating films and shows. Mostly with
| the exception of new episodes of shows that aired in
| Australia weeks (or more) behind the US air date. Nobody
| wants to be weeks behind on GoT, not when the internet
| explodes as the episode airs.
|
| Then Netflix's Australian library was gradually gutted. VPNs
| were a pretty good way around the lacklustre Australian
| offerings. Then that became a tenuous workaround at best,
| especially as major studios split and made their own
| platforms, each at least $10 a month, with no guarantee that
| the things worth watching were available to Australians. So
| what do a bunch of people with VPNs do with nothing to watch?
| They pirate.
|
| Sci-hub is unfortunately so necessary. The whole situation
| feels a bit like Spotify where the creators of the content
| that these journals/companies charge for don't really get any
| of the money. What an 'innovation' that is.
| csallen wrote:
| The "lost sales" point seems like a red herring to me.
|
| Theft is about taking rivalrous goods. If I steal your apple,
| you no longer have your apple, which is injurious to you.
| That's why theft is illegal. Piracy and copyright are about,
| literally, copying. If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3
| and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually
| just a better more abundant place now.
|
| Copyright is about granting limited monopolies as an incentive.
| We make it illegal for people to copy based entirely on the
| idea that more people will create stuff if they know they can
| monopolize the profits for a time. Which is sensible in some
| cases, but I personally believe people would still create all
| kinds of stuff, if not more.
|
| Regardless, I do think lost sales exist. I made a paid iOS app
| that was cracked and saw my sales drop. But I also think it's
| important to recognize that this is still not theft. It's a
| copyright violation. These words mean different things.
| mindcandy wrote:
| The semantic details are a distraction.
|
| Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people
| want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome.
|
| Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less
| stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone
| is worse off. Bad outcome.
|
| In the end, we want more good outcomes and less bad. There is
| a lot of conversation around piracy's relationship to the bad
| outcome. But, a lot of it is armchair-CFO arguments and based
| on looking for excuses. People directly affected by piracy
| report that the relationship is either quite clear or that
| they have given up and don't bother fighting or even
| measuring it.
|
| Should piracy be legal? Maybe? Doesn't really matter at the
| consumer level. There is it de-facto unenforced 99.9% of the
| time anyway. What matters for producers and consumers in
| practice is the practice of DRM. In practice, the vast
| majority of software work these days is on server-side
| products and a huge component of that is the implicit DRM
| aspect.
|
| Desktop software has relatively been in a terrible lull since
| the consumerization of the internet. A lot of it is due to
| the awesome features of the interwebs. But, a whole lot of it
| is that it's a lot harder to actually get paid for desktop
| software vs server-based. It's a damn shame. But, no one
| knows what to do about it.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You're not stealing an object, you're stealing the _use value
| of a product._
|
| As a rule, you don't buy software, you buy a license to use
| it. So effectively you're stealing that license and the
| income it would generate for the creator.
|
| Music and other media are the same. You don't pay for the
| bits, you pay for a license to access and enjoy those bits.
|
| Which is why it doesn't matter if the delivery system is
| paper tape, carrier pigeon, optical media, or instant
| download from a server.
| simonh wrote:
| People can give away stuff for free right now if they want,
| so I don't see what you mean by the "if not more" comment. I
| don't mean that in a snarky way, I joust wonder what you
| mean.
|
| A lot of content, and software, takes a huge capital
| investment to create. Blockbuster movies can cost hundreds of
| millions of dollars to produce, AAA games can certainly cost
| tens of millions. This is also why open source and and Libre
| software never took over the world the way many of its
| proponents assumed it would back in the 90s. Many
| applications take more than just coding chops to create, it
| takes QA engineers, artists, designers, project managers,
| market research and domain experts dependent on the market
| segment (medical experts, radio engineers, etc). It can take
| a huge capital investment to put all that together and that
| money needs to be made back somehow.
|
| Even music takes recording studios, sound engineers, session
| and backing musicians, artists for the album covers and
| posters, music video production teams, etc, etc. It's a
| serious business. A committed artist in their bedroom can
| work wonders, but not all music and associated material can
| be produced in a bedroom.
| vimy wrote:
| Theft is taking something without paying for it. In the case
| of games, music, etc, you don't pay for the file itself but
| for the work the artist put into it.
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| > Theft is taking something without paying for it.
|
| According to this definition, dumpster diving would be
| theft. The harms caused by theft and copyright infringement
| are different. Calling them both theft is just a marketing
| ploy. Stealing something deprives the owner of its use.
| Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government to an
| artist on a piece of intellectual property. This is
| socially beneficial because it means more people can make a
| living by creating art. Copyright infringement means
| evading this monopoly, and is harmful for the same reason
| that granting the monopoly is beneficial.
|
| For example, dumpster diving is neither theft nor copyright
| infringement. It's not theft because taking food that has
| been thrown away isn't depriving anyone of its use. It's
| not copyright infringement, because we as a society do not
| deem it socially beneficial to grant anybody a monopoly on
| food production. This is true even though the dumpster
| diver is taking food without paying the farmers who
| produced it.
| dcow wrote:
| In a society where copyright exists, sure. I think the
| point is that meatspace copyright laws don't translate well
| into cyberspace because they were designed to apply to a
| world where the act of creating copies itself takes work.
|
| You aren't paying for the work the artist put in, if you
| were that would be called a commission. You are paying for
| the right to experience a copy of the artist's work.
| Usually you're not even paying the artist, either. The
| studios and publishing companies reap the profits. It's not
| different for studio developed games.
|
| Do I pirate things these days? No, I am capable of paying
| and we've figured out streaming. Will I buy a proprietary
| product without trying it first? Probably not. Would I pay
| if I didn't have the means? Absolutely not.
|
| I firmly believe that once a work of art has been created,
| it is oppressive to try and dictate who can experience it.
| I'm copyleft, not a rampant pirate.
| musicale wrote:
| > Theft is taking something without paying for it
|
| But taking something without paying for it is not always
| theft; and one could imagine thieves paying a token amount
| for something in order to claim it is not theft.
|
| Most importantly, copyright infringement, unlicensed use,
| and piracy usually fall into the category of "IP theft,"
| which differs from real theft of physical property in
| important ways such as the harm caused to the owner (e.g.
| potential lost sales or licensing revenue vs. losing a
| physical item) as well as associated penalties and
| remedies.
|
| > In the case of games, music, etc, you don't pay for the
| file itself but for the work the artist put into it.
|
| You're paying for the file and the rights to use it.
| juskrey wrote:
| I can confirm that publishers were begging to install the copy
| protection which at least lasts for several days, not even
| weeks or months. The math for that was pretty simple - on
| average, most impatient gamers, who buy the product in the
| first days, really do not care about the price but will prefer
| free option.
|
| To repeat, this is on average and works given 90% of games die
| after first weeks of sales in any case. Economies of megahits
| are way different.
| Cypher wrote:
| can confirm, I buy games I enjoy playing after I pirate. if I
| can't pirate it I don't play it. if u got ads or
| microtransactions then I don't play. sure the world has moved on
| to live services and mobile games but I won't play those.
| api wrote:
| ... says billionaire.
|
| Piracy is relatively harmless to those who are selling tons of
| something. In fact it may help them due to increased virality. It
| could be thought of as deferred revenue or "unintentional
| marketing spend" if you've got something viral that piracy is
| helping spread.
|
| It can be extremely harmful to small creators and smaller/startup
| companies who are attempting to make a living or get a business
| off the ground.
|
| It sort of boils down to the diminishing marginal value of money.
| A small creator losing 20% of barely enough sales to make a
| living could find themselves in real financial hardship, while a
| large creator or corporation losing 20% of sales of something
| high-margin like software or media may not even notice.
|
| Edit: Then there's perverse incentives...
|
| Piracy is a driver for so much software becoming a "service" with
| components (or even the whole app) that live only in the cloud.
| The cloud is the ultimate DRM; you can't pirate it if you don't
| have it at all. This is creating a generation of software that
| can't be downloaded or run independently at all. I can run old
| DOS apps in a VM, but when this stuff goes obsolete or fails it
| will vanish forever and often take your data with it. It's also a
| privacy nightmare.
|
| Piracy can also create a dumbing down effect if it requires
| skill. It results in older and/or more educated people pirating
| and therefore reducing the revenue outcome for the more
| sophisticated and higher-brow content they consume. I've wondered
| if this might not be a hidden reason behind the horrid state of
| pop music. Cheap catchy low-brow pop aims at a younger and less
| educated audience that doesn't know how to pirate.
| CraneWorm wrote:
| > Piracy is a driver for so much software becoming a "service"
| with components (or even the whole app) that live only in the
| cloud.
|
| There are many reasons for moving into saas space:
|
| You move into cloud and now your client doesn't have to
| maintain additional servers, they probably get support too.
| This becomes a trap because if they decide they don't like your
| service... now you hold their data too and since it's in your
| service you control how locked-in with you they've become and
| how difficult it's to replace you.
|
| Now you charge in subscription, you get monies all the time! If
| your clients are individuals you can now have all manner of
| stoppers and dark patterns to keep them subscribed!
|
| To me... greed, and then more greed are two main drivers for
| saas.
|
| > Cheap catchy low-brow pop aims at a younger and less educated
| audience that doesn't know how to pirate.
|
| Be careful on that high horse up there, if you fall you'll
| break your neck.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| This might be true if you have a hit product with multiplayer
| functionality, but for regular Indie games piracy absolutely
| leads to lost sales.
|
| I implemented anti-piracy techniques into my Indie PC title and
| saw about a 20% improvement in sales as a result.
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree with you. I don't get why people are denying the
| experience of others: DRM and anti-privacy measures improve
| sales, period. If it's free, people just take it and don't
| think twice about the creators. Best observed in open source
| software, where even maintainers of critical components can go
| without much of a payment, never mind a living wage.
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's not a "lost sale". There's no such thing as a "lost sale".
| Sales of software isn't quantum physics, there's no
| superposition of "sale" and "lost sale".
|
| Your example isn't even meaningful. You had a game for sale and
| during some period say a 20% improvement in sales. You
| attribute this to your anti-piracy technique like you added
| that in isolation of everything else. You have no way of
| knowing what generated your increase of sales.
|
| What's far more likely than the anti-piracy techniques having
| anything to do with sales is the upload date updated on your
| distribution platforms and people not only saw it in the "new"
| section but it had more (or more positive) ratings than the
| last time you pushed an update.
|
| There's only customers and non-customers. There's no difference
| to you between someone playing a competitor's game, just not
| buying your game, or pirating your game. They're all just not
| your customers. There's seven (eight?) billion non-customers on
| the planet.
| DaveSapien wrote:
| Could you elaborate? I am nearing the release of my game on PC
| and would appreciate some tips, thanks.
| CptFribble wrote:
| I think this is a big part of why games have moved to the
| continuous development/games-as-a-service model. It's not just
| for longer-term recurring revenue; continuously adding new
| content is the ultimate DRM, as pirate versions keep falling out
| of date (for single player games) or the content isn't even
| accessible without a legit version (for multiplayer games).
|
| The confluence of DRM, recurring revenue, and the social nature
| of humans are why the biggest and most successful games these
| days are centered around multiplayer elements. I believe it's
| also why so many companies are trying to produce e-sports titles
| or shoehorn competitive spectacle into their games.
|
| Honestly, the only piracy that's really a problem is larger
| studios ripping off indie games and either beating them to market
| (off an early release), or out-marketing them. I'm not a mobile
| dev, but I've heard tons of stories of independent devs with a
| decent release getting their games rapidly cloned by the likes of
| King, who have bigger marketing channels, more money to spend,
| more devs, and preferred access to spotlight spots on app stores
| and industry publications. This isn't the kind of piracy the
| article is talking about, but I think it's the more relevant
| discussion around software and IP theft.
| viro wrote:
| says the guy that got paid $2.5 billion.
| inetknght wrote:
| Minecraft has been heavily pirated. Despite that, he still
| ended up getting a massive payout _after_ his claims about
| piracy.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I don't see how that's relevant, he said piracy won't matter
| for the games success and he was able to cash out 2.5BN even
| though this was the stance of Mojang.
|
| If anything, it proves his point.
| [deleted]
| cortesoft wrote:
| Doesn't that support his point? Game was pirated, still made
| bank?
| wassenaar10 wrote:
| He said this in 2011, 3 years before he got paid $2.5 billion
| nickjj wrote:
| I think Minecraft is a pretty unique case based on it being
| incredibly successful and it being a game.
|
| The article was written in 2011 but even back then he had over a
| million individual sales. I forgot how much it cost back then but
| at $20 you're looking at $20 million in its first year. As a solo
| developer I can't imagine a world where I would be upset about
| piracy if I had multi-generational wealth after incrementally
| developing a game for 2 years.
|
| His story is really inspiring tho, it definitely has a ship fast
| mantra about it if you follow the timeline of its first public
| release to 1.0'ing.
|
| But it being a game is also interesting when talking about
| piracy. There's a lot of ancillary value in having more exposure.
| If someone pirates your game but streams it or creates videos
| around it and those videos get millions of views there's millions
| of chances someone will buy the game. It becomes organic
| advertising. Also, the value isn't something you can copy (like a
| book or video course) and reap the rewards from. The value is the
| experience of playing the game.
| franciscop wrote:
| IIRC it was $5 on the alpha, $10 on the beta and $20 on the
| final version. I recall getting sad that I waited too long
| until buying it and it was already out of the alpha.
| wsinks wrote:
| I remember playing it on alpha and I realize that it was one
| of the coolest software phenomenons ever. I bought it early
| and was well rewarded. What a fascinating story, especially
| to all the minecraft clones
| zorked wrote:
| I bought it for $5 on alpha, mostly because I thought Notch
| was being a bit of a fool trying to sell a hugely pixelated
| game that ran on the JVM but I thought that he might need a
| little moral support and that I could be one of the very few
| people who would ever pay to play it.
|
| If only I knew.
| jmiskovic wrote:
| Notch's quote from this article is very relevant: "If you just
| make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright
| infringed would buy it the next week".
|
| This was huge factor for early Minecraft to become such
| success. Pirated sources were always few versions behind and
| fear of missing out was strong.
|
| I find it strange that it didn't inspire more studios to follow
| similar open style of development.
| ssully wrote:
| I am not sure if I would say Minecraft is the impetus, but a
| large (if not a majority) of games that come out these days
| are follow an "early access" style development that Minecraft
| did. Even large AAA games, while not "early access", have
| content release plans and are constantly adding new features.
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting to me how communities form ideas around this. While
| "piracy is not theft", you'll see people talk about how some
| repost "stole my content" with lots of support for the supposed
| victim.
|
| Simultaneously, some people will say that they are contributing
| by using a product and telling their friends while others will
| post on /r/choosingbeggars to mock the exposure argument.
|
| This implies we are somewhat short of universal agreement on this
| subject: perhaps far enough that we cannot determine that just
| because "piracy is not theft", it does not mean it is acceptable.
| [deleted]
| liuliu wrote:
| If you can wrap SQLite as close-source and sell it for a price,
| great, go ahead and do that. Because it is public domain, there
| is no restrictions, and it could be a good thing even it
| doesn't contribute back to the original author.
|
| The other controversy around Fat Fritz 2 and Stockfish is a
| clear cut though. You wrap around Stockfish and sell it, which
| in itself is fine. The argument on why that practice is not OK
| is not about the harm to the original author (Stockfish) but to
| the users.
|
| Fat Fritz 2's practice (of hiding itself as a Stockfish
| variant) stripped the user's right to know there are free-
| alternative.s By depriving that knowledge, their users will not
| make the best choice they can make, and that is a net loss (you
| can make the argument that the price user pay is what the
| market exploits the information asymmetry, therefore, it helps
| to create "efficient" market, but ...).
|
| OTOH, if you can display both the free alternative and the paid
| version, successfully at selling the paid version. Even without
| any of that come back to the original author, it is a net gain
| in exposure. The society at large can also benefit (potentially
| encourage more derived work, and more knowledge sharing besides
| the original authors etc.).
| jcranmer wrote:
| To me, there is a moral distinction between two kinds of
| infringement, and I think most of the community will broadly
| feel the same way.
|
| On the one hand, you have filesharing-esque infringement. This
| is typically indicative either of social norms that are
| prohibited by DRM (e.g., loaning things you own to other
| people), or of demand in a market segment that the copyright
| owner is uninterested in providing (e.g., digital downloads,
| demo software). In either case, it is pretty strictly a matter
| of personal consumption and it often doesn't reflect a lost
| sale (and in many cases, it can create more sales later on).
|
| The other kind is reflected in bootleg copies, or even outright
| plagiarism. In this case, the people making these copies are
| seeking to directly profit off of it (note that this isn't
| restricted to monetary profit), and they are doing so without
| any recompense or sometimes even acknowledgement to the
| original owner. It's fundamentally dishonest.
|
| I see no issue with not calling the first kind of piracy theft
| but referring to the second kind as such.
| vinger wrote:
| A bootleg of a music show done in your city gets created. It
| get's passed on to friends who love it. Someone sells a copy
| to a friend of a friend.
|
| There is profitting off from the bootleg. There is a benefit
| to the orginal band (new fans to buy official releases). The
| world is better off (think of how many bootleg Dylan
| recordings wouldn't exist, lost to time)
|
| Things can start off as #1 and move into #2 but it doesn't
| have to be negative.
| jimz wrote:
| The problem is that both forms are treated identically by
| law, at least in the United States. You can be charged
| additionally for profiting from piracy but not profiting or
| not taking credit and mere distribution does not absolve you
| of the crime. The stakes are always higher when there's a
| literal loss of liberty hanging as a sword of Damocles and
| because the terms of protection tends to be arbitrary and
| punitive in nature, philosophical nuance gives way to
| legalistic absolutism in applying absolute consequences to
| potentially speculative harm. As long as the law exists and
| can be enforced in a way that makes no distinction between
| the two, anyone who may be affected by its reach must at
| least put that interpretation first in doing the cost/benefit
| analysis before more subjective aspects can even be
| discussed.
| maedla wrote:
| Isn't this just plagiarism? No one is downloading Photoshop and
| saying they created it (probably lol).
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think it's important to talk about the difference between
| interpersonal violations ("rudeness") and legal protections
| ("crime").
|
| The former _really is_ whatever people feel it is - notch can
| feel any way he wants about how people get minecraft! He could
| feel it was rude if people didn 't send him extra money. We all
| get to decide for ourselves how we feel about his feelings and
| we can impose whatever social penalties we want on people for
| how they are acting. The legal system doesn't need to come into
| it.
|
| The latter should (imo) be based on a theory of an information
| ecosystem. What rights do creators need in order to be able to
| make fair agreements with others? How do we draw the line
| between new works that are "derivative" v.s. "inspired by"?
| Obviously people will have feelings about these things too! But
| at the end of the day how people feel about the law doesn't
| impact the proper administration of the law as-it-is-currently-
| written, though feelings will probably influence how laws are
| changed in the future (after all, we're talking about how we
| feel about laws right now!).
| snowwrestler wrote:
| When I'm buying a service I want it to cost as little as
| possible. When I'm working for pay, I want to get paid as much
| as I think I'm worth.
|
| How someone feels about the impact of piracy on Taylor Swift,
| and how they feel about getting credit and payment for their
| own intellectual work, might vary similarly. It's not
| inconsistent from their perspective.
| skummetmaelk wrote:
| There's a difference between copying for personal use and
| distributing to others against payment of any type.
| Redistributing against payment implies that the purchaser is
| willing to pay in the first place and of course that payment
| should be made to the original creator / rights holder.
|
| Piracy not being theft only applies if you would have _never_
| bought the product in the first place, had it not been free to
| copy.
|
| If you redistribute some content on youtube you are "stealing"
| eyeballs and ad money from the original creator.
| aequitas wrote:
| > Redistributing against payment implies that the purchaser
| is willing to pay in the first place and of course that
| payment should be made to the original creator / rights
| holder.
|
| This argument can get muddy because of parties that are
| involved between the creator and the consumer, like record
| companies. Where sometimes the original creator does not see
| any money (or an unfair low amount) and all the intermediates
| reap the most profit for basically sitting on an acquired IP
| or copyright.
|
| I'd love to give money to a original creator for their effort
| in creating their art to support them to create more, but I
| hate to fuel an industry that is actively fighting creation
| and innovation by lobbying for extended copyright and
| artificially fragmenting supply and hindering paying users
| with DRM (digital _restrictions_ management).
| Fargren wrote:
| By that argument, libraries and resellers are "stealing".
|
| It's only stealing if the person who's being stolen from no
| longer has something they used to have. Potential things
| can't be stolen.
| tzs wrote:
| The lost sales argument generally only works in isolation.
|
| Imagine if Adobe, say, had come up with a way to do perfect DRM
| so that it was impossible to pirate Photoshop back in the days
| when it cost several hundred dollars.
|
| It's probably true that a huge number of the people who pirated
| it back then would not have bit the bullet and coughed up the
| hundreds of dollars for a license, and so them pirating it did
| not represent a lost sale to Adobe.
|
| But...I doubt most of them would have thrown up their hands and
| said "I can't pirate Photoshop...so I'm just going to give up on
| graphics editing!" or decided to just do their graphics editing
| all in MS Paint.
|
| A lot of them almost certainly would have bought some other
| commercial graphics editor that is much less expensive than
| Photoshop, such as Pixelmator Pro for around $40.
|
| That's where the lost sales from piracy turn up--in the sales of
| the less expensive alternatives that people would have turned to
| had they not been able to pirate what they pirated.
| babypuncher wrote:
| This is purely anecdotal, but my own experience backs this up.
|
| I have known at least a dozen people who pirate software and
| entertainment purely because it's cheaper than paying for it.
| These are other software engineers, they all make plenty of
| money to afford this kind of stuff. I doubt they would stop
| watching TV or playing video games if piracy suddenly stopped
| being an option.
| iso1210 wrote:
| I torrented lower decks when it came out because they refused
| to take my money. It was out in Sep/Oct in the states, but
| not until January in the UK. Exactly the same reason I DCCed
| voyager episodes in the 90s
|
| I've seen american TV, it's unwatchable. If there's no option
| to actually buy the content without pop up adverts for other
| shows, breaks in the narative, squishing of the screen, etc,
| I'll go to a supplier who can do that.
| mam2 wrote:
| Why would you buy it anyway ? It's not like the music /
| cinema industry is in trouble.
|
| If it's only to be the "good guy" then well congrats.. here's
| your medal.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I'm somewhat apathetic regarding the health of the
| music/tv/movie/game industries as a whole. I do care about
| specific shows, artists, and games though, and revenue is
| an important signal that businesses use to decide what to
| make more or less of in the future. if you don't pay for
| anything, you're essentially throwing away your vote. as a
| group, pirates are accepting that they only get to select
| from things that other people are willing to pay for.
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| Mainly my reason for not pirating is legal, but I think it's
| actually cheaper to pay $2-$4 to rent something than spend
| the money on hard drive space and a faster internet
| connection.
| leetcrew wrote:
| probably not. you can just delete the file when you're done
| if you don't want to watch it again. 50 GB is more than
| enough to maintain a queue of a few movies/shows. if you
| have enough bandwidth to stream legally without buffering,
| you have (roughly) enough to do the same with torrents.
| most tv show torrents are just rips from legitimate
| streaming sites anyway.
| njharman wrote:
| Part of the point is perfect DEn costs. Even shotty DRM costs a
| lot. To develop, to maintain and upgrade as it is defeated. On
| top of that is costs to customer frustration and loss of
| utility.
|
| It is better to spend on making your product better, your
| customers happier. Then chase tiny amount hostile users.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> "I can't pirate Photoshop...so I'm just going to give up on
| graphics editing!"
|
| Jasc's Paint Shop Pro was ~ $99, Corel was about half the price
| of PhotoShop...
| dehrmann wrote:
| I wonder if Adobe putting more effort into anti-piracy would
| have made the GIMP better. For a while, I saw their stance on
| piracy as look the other way unless it's a business. Photoshop
| definitely has a learning curve (probably better than the
| GIMP's), and I could see amateur designers having experience
| with Photoshop as an asset.
|
| That said, Photoshop and Minecraft are completely different
| products and markets.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Apparently, Adobe deliberately allowed pirating of photoshop,
| to maintain its status as a standard. Deny oxygen to
| competitors.
|
| Adobe has always struck me as a company that understood
| software economics really well and really early on. They'd make
| money from proprietary stuff, then give it away before it made
| an opportunity for a competitor.
|
| Actually, it's probably less the understanding, than the actual
| _acting_ on it.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| > Apparently, Adobe deliberately allowed pirating of
| photoshop, to maintain its status as a standard. Deny oxygen
| to competitors.
|
| I've often wondered about this claim. I've heard it as well,
| from many different sources. I could never find a source,
| every time I've looked, it's a web of "I've heard".
|
| Obviously Adobe wouldn't issue a press release to this
| effect, but does anyone know where this wisdom originated?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-
| micro...
|
| If you do business, you will study the market, those are
| results of the study.
| boringg wrote:
| That's a good point could be just rumors but it does have a
| strong foundation of truth to it. One of those things that
| seems like we will never know for sure.
| vinger wrote:
| I've seen an interview with the EA guys who say they would
| rather you pirate their product over someone's elses.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > Apparently, Adobe deliberately allowed pirating of
| photoshop, to maintain its status as a standard. Deny oxygen
| to competitors.
|
| I can't confirm whether it's true, but I once read that
| Microsoft takes a similar approach to the unlicensed use of
| Windows in less wealthy nations. Even disregarding that it
| would likely be a losing battle, they'd rather it remain the
| norm than push people to the alternatives.
| boringg wrote:
| Seems very plausible.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| It's not just Adobe & Microsoft either. Lots of large
| companies with "product lines" do the same thing. e.g., an
| office equipment manufacturer might prefer that your entire
| office runs on their machines, even if it means that some
| of their machines have to sell at cost, or as a loss
| leader. If everything from paper printers, to bulk scanners
| to ID card printers are all sold by Acme into the same
| corporation's offices, it makes it much harder for
| AcmeCompetitor to get a foothold.
|
| I used to work for a company that had a couple of "me too"
| products that they barely made any money on, but it was
| worth it to them to block a sale to the competition.
| Kluny wrote:
| So true, and now that it's subscription-only, I only use
| Adobe when I don't have an employer willing to pay for my
| subscription. When I'm in a job that's less graphics-oriented
| or just messing around with personal projects, I use
| Affinity, even though I prefer Photoshop.
| idrios wrote:
| Similar situation. Learned Photoshop in high school for an
| art class, got really good with it in college because my
| school gave it to us for extremely cheap. But now I don't
| have it, it's too expensive to pay for, I'm unwilling to
| pirate, so I've been getting pretty good with Gimp.
| orwin wrote:
| Or more contributors to GIMP.
|
| Let take an art student PoV, one doing MANA in France right now
| (16-17 yo not eligible for free version) or at any study level
| before Adobe did this "free for student" stuff. If he can't
| pirate it, he will use GIMP, probably. Considering my CS school
| had 5% ex-art student (with or without a complete art degree),
| if those had used GIMP instead, i'd dare say GIMP would have
| been close to PS in GUI and ahead in functionalities.
|
| So piracy take contributor away from GNU projects!
| majormajor wrote:
| Former pirate here, I definitely would've shifted some spending
| around to get a few more games if I'd had to.
|
| I probably would've bought fewer DVDs. My money went to movies
| - harder to pirate at DVD quality back in the late 90s! -
| because they were better protected than a lot of the games in
| the late 90s. Or maybe fewer console games, same story there.
| But those we could rent, too...
|
| This wasn't "ecosystem" stuff like Photoshop either, this was
| games we played for a few months and then moved on.
| vmception wrote:
| Doubt.
|
| Obligatory photoshop piracy for an entire generation was the
| single biggest advertisement Adobe could have ever had.
|
| This is the happy meal of the 21st century.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| I was actually of the opinion that Adobe for a long timer
| turned a bit of a blind eye toward piracy because many of the
| people who learned on it once they became professionals became
| paying customers. Almost like an unofficial free trial that
| felt more valuable in a way. They would stamp it out once in a
| while, but often it felt like until they became dominant that
| they were barely trying to do much about it.
| [deleted]
| markdown wrote:
| This was also Microsoft's model with pirate versions of their
| software paving the way for MS to take over the developing
| world.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Now they offer github, vscode, typescript, .net core,
| azure(?) and have a big foothold in webdev ecosystem. And
| Microsoft knows how to monetize it and is well equipped to
| pull it off. We see history repeating before our eyes.
| comprev wrote:
| I learned all my early MS sysadmin skills on a homelab made
| up of eBay HP servers/Cisco switches and pirated
| w2k/sbs2003. It allowed it to gain MCSA and get onto the
| operations career ladder where my employer had legit
| licenses.
|
| I would bet good money the same applies to graphics people
| and Photoshop.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Microsoft _definitely_ had this strategy with early versions
| of Windows and quite a lot of specialist tools that cost
| thousands of dollars per license seem to have something
| similar going.
|
| I can attest that when I was living on a few hundred dollars
| a month as a CS student, I pirated a very early version of
| the IntelliJ IDE. I don't feel bad about this, especially as
| I've been responsible for tens of thousands dollars worth of
| license sales for the same product over the years - if only a
| full-price version of IntelliJ was available, I'd have stuck
| with Netbeans/ Eclipse instead.
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean Jetbrains free offerings are substantial anyway and
| I think just as effective these days. As soon as I found I
| needed remote debugging to just work, the money for an
| Ultimate license for myself was just sensible - I wanted to
| make sure I had the exact tools I needed at work everytime.
| daveidol wrote:
| Interesting theory, although didn't they still make the DRM
| more advanced and harder to crack with each release?
| junon wrote:
| They changed it so as to invalidate old cracks. Whether or
| not it was harder is up for debate.
|
| There were certainly better ways to do DRM at the time
| (even now) that Adobe was well within their monetary limits
| and interests pursuing. But of course, it was still
| cracked.
|
| Also, for a hundred buck fee and some TPB/Demonoid credit,
| it's almost always worth it to a cracker to go after a
| flagship product.
|
| There's also the running theory that Adobe was the one to
| release some of the cracks, namely because new releases of
| the Creative Suite back when it was new would be cracked
| nearly "instantly".
|
| It's speculation, but the above theory would make a lot of
| sense - and, in my opinion, that's _exactly_ what ended up
| happening, and what made Photoshop the industry leader over
| a pretty decent selection of alternatives at the time
| (though admittedly PS had already mostly established itself
| at the time anyway, but it could have probably been
| swayed).
| mayniac wrote:
| I believe all this as well. If they wanted to, Adobe
| could invest heavily in DRM that would take at least a
| few months to crack. But it's far cheaper to stick a
| login wall in front of download pages and support forums,
| monitor for corporate email addresses, and spend the
| money on going after companies that pirate their
| software. e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7948241
| /forever-21-pirati...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| My idea is that people pirating Photoshop were mostly hurting
| PaintShop Pro.
|
| PaintShop Pro has always been Photoshop's little brother. It is
| quite capable though not as much as Photoshop. It is also much
| cheaper. If piracy didn't exist, I would expect a lot more
| people to buy it, but since for a pirate, they are both free,
| there is not much reason not to go with Photoshop. And pros
| will also go with Photoshop because even with the high price,
| it is worth it, especially if they learned on the cracked
| version...
| Skhalar wrote:
| Before I pirated PS I used GIMP.
|
| After years of pirating PS, I ended up paying Adobe for 6+
| years for Adobe CC because PS and Illustrator didn't even
| compare to GIMP/other softwares.
|
| If they had perfected the DRM, and wasn't able to pirate. I
| don't think I would have ever paid for it.
| boringg wrote:
| Do you think the guilt (was there even any guilt) of having
| pirated it for many years also made you guy in? I ask as a
| function of a business strategy they could have let people
| ride for free until at a certain point they might feel some
| kind of obligation. I doubt that was ever part of anyones
| strategy but in hindsight is kind of interesting to riff on.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Non-business users will absolutely continue to pirate for
| as long as possible. Adobe products are basically
| unpiratable at this point, and the $20/mo subscription
| service is expensive, but reasonably affordable compared to
| the $600 or whatever the boxed software ran all those years
| ago.
| tgbugs wrote:
| In my memory Gabe Newell was one of the first to articulate this
| point in the game dev community, however going back to check the
| dates, it seems that it was in October or November of 2011,
| suggesting that Notch may actually have kicked off this thread.
| lloeki wrote:
| 2008 report from 2D Boy: ~90% piracy rate for World of Goo
|
| https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy
|
| It was one of the first reports with halfway solid data. And
| the argument dates from way before that.
| kuschku wrote:
| And the other article it links shows that 1000 pirated copies
| only convert into 1 single legitimate copy.
|
| So if you have a 90% piracy rate, and eliminate all pirates,
| your sales increase by roughly 1%.
| IndySun wrote:
| Does anyone have a working video link to Mr Minecraft saying
| this? The link quoted in the article is dead.
|
| http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-sa...
|
| "Piracy is not theft," he said to those gathered in San
| Francisco. "If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy
| a game, there are simply more of them in the world."
| paxys wrote:
| What he says is true for games with a multiplayer component, lots
| of replayability, very long lifetime, continuous development,
| frequent updates etc. (so - Minecraft). However, a majority of
| single player releases don't fall into this category. The reason
| why DRM like Denuvo is so widespread is that most sales for such
| games happen in the first few weeks of release, and people forget
| about them after 10-20 hours of play time. A $60 single player
| game which can be pirated on day 1 will absolutely lose a large
| chunk of its real sales to piracy.
| xtracto wrote:
| Yes, a couple of days ago there was a story of the guy who made
| the "dark themes" package and how he got to $100k USD. One
| thing that got my attention in his article was the purchases
| chart he showed. When he originally released his product he got
| pretty high sales; he could not reach those levels of sales
| after that.
| [deleted]
| ulucs wrote:
| > most sales for such games happen in the first few weeks of
| release, and people forget about them after 10-20 hours of play
| time.
|
| Hot take: I support piracy because it hurts the firms I want it
| to hurt. The market would be much better if AAA games were
| pirated out of it.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| This viewpoint is myopic.
|
| I actually agree with pirates about IP, copyright, and ownership.
| The problem is, they're arguing for public ownership of these
| things _only for themselves_. They believe the producers of these
| games should provide them for free...yet the producers have costs
| to pay. Sure, at some point, the costs have been repaid, and any
| additional sales are profit, but without that information being
| public the only people who can make that determination are
| insiders.
|
| So they wish the producers to make these things but they don't
| see why they should have to pay for it. In effect, they're
| arguing for communism without knowing they're doing so, and only
| arguing for it in a very limited way (while many of them would
| swear communism off completely).
|
| So what is it: do you want the producers to make things for other
| because they wish to do so, and in return they have their own
| needs met regardless of the _exchange-value_ of the things they
| produce? Or do you want capitalism for everybody except
| yourselves, and for producers to have to suffer your ill-formed
| view of economics?
|
| If you're communists, then great, let's extend this logic to
| _all_ production. If you 're capitalists, then shut the fuck up
| and pay for the things you buy, as is done in the system you
| support.
|
| I've seen the same logic used by lefists: food is post scarcity!
| Well, no, it's not. Food itself might be overproduced such that
| every person could be fed, but the inputs to food are not post-
| scarcity. The same applies here: game developers make things that
| are non-scarce, but in order to do so, they themselves require
| scarce resources. So no, you don't deserve the fruits of their
| labor for free unless you wish this for everyone.
| Orochikaku wrote:
| I've commented this quote from Gabe Newell on HN before, it
| appears this article predates the quote.
|
| "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy.
| Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing
| problem"
| filoleg wrote:
| Not sure how accurate this quote is, and I agree that it is
| mainly a service problem, but a pricing problem is a giant
| chunk of it too. Otherwise Steam wouldn't have such a
| significantly different regional pricing on games.
|
| Pick any AAA game on Steam, and then check its price on SteamDB
| for each region (SteamDB provides a nice table for it, so you
| don't need to bother with VPN and checking it on Steam manually
| yourself). For example, here is one for the recent Yakuza
| game[0]. $59.99 in the US, $27.61 in Russia. I can pretty much
| guarantee that without that kind of regional pricing, the sales
| in Russia for Steam games would be many mani magnitudes lower.
|
| 0. https://steamdb.info/app/1235140/
| Svperstar wrote:
| I'm 40 years old so I quit pirating games years ago, when I was
| 14 and got my first computer I was flat broke so I pirated
| everything.
|
| If somehow it magically became impossible to pirate games when I
| was 14 they wouldn't have made a dime more off of me then they
| did, cant get blood from a stone.
| notapenny wrote:
| It's pretty much the same for me, then again I also didn't have
| a cent to spend on anything at that age. Even if I would've
| gotten a small allowance, I wouldn't have been able to buy the
| volume of stuff I was pirating. And even if money wouldn't have
| been a problem, availability was.
|
| I don't pirate these days, because paying a few bucks for a
| movie rental isn't that much to me, but availability is still a
| problem. For awhile Netflix seemed to be a solution but now
| there are so many streaming services that "Hey, lets watch
| movie X" can be cumbersome. Wouldn't be the first time that
| only some service has it that I can't see in my region.
| dasb wrote:
| Jonathan Blow (Braid & The Witness) on Piracy:
| https://youtu.be/2MIEVvv1QP0
| incrudible wrote:
| > Lost sales don't exist
|
| That's _easily_ disproven. When SWIM was young, he used to pirate
| lots of games, most of which he wouldn 't have bought, but some
| of which he would have bought if there had not been a working day
| zero PDX release. In this manner, SWIM saved some money to invest
| in weed instead.
| Zak wrote:
| There are definitely lost sales when it comes to video content.
| Scenarios like geographic restrictions on streaming certain
| content, or limiting downloads for offline viewing often drive
| people who _are_ paying for streaming services to pirate content
| instead because it 's easier.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Previous discussion with some interesting thoughts on the topic:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283785
| bni wrote:
| Some games surely has lost sales due to piracy.
|
| Recent example: Doom Eternal was shipped with an unencrypted exe
| in a subfolder by mistake. Surely lots of people that would have
| impulse bought the hot new game didn't when it could be torrented
| on launch.
| musingsole wrote:
| Lack of product awareness among consumers is far more of a
| suppressing force to profits than converting every last bit of
| interest in your product to monetary value is a boost to
| profits.
|
| This is likely less true for certain AAA titles, but on the
| whole, most people who buy things are busy and not avidly
| following any one brand in particularly. Fanboys (despite their
| clamor) are rarer than casual purchasers for most everything.
| In an absolute sense, there may be "lost sales" due to piracy,
| but that comparison misses any potential additional sales _due
| to piracy_ helping to spread awareness of a product.
| the_af wrote:
| I think people who _impulse buy_ will impulse buy no matter
| what.
|
| About people downloading illegal copies, in TFA Notch is quoted
| as saying:
|
| > _"If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the
| people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week"_
|
| He also argues that the concept of "lost sales" itself is
| dodgy, or at least used carelessly. Some examples he mentions:
|
| > _"Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship
| date?"_
| abdulmuhaimin wrote:
| I dont understand why its even a debate. If the creator didnt
| allow you to use his software, its theft.
|
| Sure, there are methods to actually mitigate and make good use of
| piracy, but then, it effectively become free-to-use-unless-for-
| business/enterprise model of business. And that should be
| something that the owner decide, not the user.
| bobbean wrote:
| If I sneak into a museum (one you would have to pay for) and
| look at all the art they have on display, but otherwise don't
| leave a trace, am I stealing?
| barnabee wrote:
| No. Stealing implies taking something and depriving its
| oriignal owner of it not copying against the wishes of the
| creator. Whatever piracy is, it isn't theft.
| xtracto wrote:
| The title reminded me of the now old "Copying is not Theft" video
| : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
| loceng wrote:
| I have a strong intuition that if you price things fairly, if
| you're governing well, people will be willing to pay - and that
| piracy ultimately happens because either 1) society isn't
| providing enough foundational resources to the largest cog in the
| wheel of capitalism (consumers), or 2) to my first point: things
| are overpriced, or say - someone paid for a movie ticket - and
| then they feel like they've already contributed enough - but want
| to watch it and download it later, etc.
|
| I also have a growing intuitive that "piracy" being legal is the
| counterpoint to the capitalistic system unfairly
| gouging/extracting excess value from society.
|
| Also an unrelated intuition: ads are a virus related to greed and
| control which bypasses regular, natural trust and growth
| mechanisms, e.g. word of mouth learning/education of
| products/services/communities that normally would warrant
| analysis, curation, by trusted community leaders - and then those
| community leaders would meet and share, that knowledge then
| shared with each community; tribes of people who didn't do this
| well, who didn't have a good sense of trust or this kind of
| hierarchical structure for sharing/learning, would have arguably
| been more easily killed off by other tribes, dis-ease, etc.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| It's easy to have this position once you are already wealthy from
| your product.
| swiley wrote:
| It's a bummer he disappeared though I understand why. He had a
| lot of good stuff to say.
|
| Edit: Oh I guess he's still on twitter.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Did he? His Twitter is still active and his last message was 34
| minutes ago.
| Vetre wrote:
| wasn't he transphobic and racist? I remember seeing a lot of
| news about how bad he was online.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/online-conduct-
| leaves...
|
| Salient paragraph (the article has linked references for
| those who want them):
|
| "Since becoming a billionaire, Persson has earned something
| of a bad reputation. He made such family-friendly tweets as
| 'I'd rather be a fascist cunt than have a feminine dick'
| (though this was subsequently deleted), and he has tweeted
| endorsements of both the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy
| theories. He has propagated the false claim that people face
| fines for 'using the wrong pronouns' to refer to trans
| people. Persson has also tweeted right-wing slogans such as
| 'It's OK to be white,' and he's said that anyone who
| recognizes systemic racial biases and imbalance within
| Western society is racist. In 2017, he tweeted, 'If you're
| against the concept of a #HeterosexualPrideDay, you're a
| complete fucking cunt and deserve to be shot,' though this,
| too, was subsequently deleted."
|
| While I appreciate seph-reed's eloquent reply about cognitive
| shortcomings, hoo boy, there are a lot of shortcomings
| happening there.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Unsure why you are getting downvoted. You've provided the
| factual answer to the parent who was asking, "Didn't he say
| some bad stuff?"
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| That's the way of anything that touches on our current
| culture wars, I think.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Honestly, I'd say he was making the same logical fallacies
| that pretty much every other human on Earth is making. But it
| is the case that the output of his errors were extremely
| socially unacceptable.
|
| This is how I feel about most situations where someone tries
| to claim they are good and the other is bad. To me, it's
| really just that one is lucky and the other is not. Neither
| is substantially more aware of their own cognitive
| shortcomings, and -- even when they are -- that's a form of
| luck as well.
|
| Of all the privileges in life, I think the last I'd be
| willing to trade is sanity. And sanity is basically just more
| or less fallacies per thought.
|
| I'm tired of the words "good" and "bad" being applied amidst
| people who are all running the same OS.
| LocalH wrote:
| >people who are all running the same OS
|
| I don't think we can claim that by any stretch.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Compare it to DogOS or CowOS or even FungiOS.
|
| We are _extremely_ sensitive to our own differences. But
| humans are by and large very, very similar when put in
| perspective of all life.
| LocalH wrote:
| I still disagree on the latter part. Our OS is largely
| cobbled together by our brains on the fly, and so
| everyone's is quite unique and based on their life
| experience.
| onion554 wrote:
| So you are telling me he was based as fuck?
| vernie wrote:
| It's a bummer that he didn't disappear.
| easton_s wrote:
| Customer service is expensive.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I simply _do not_ understand folks that pirate executable code.
| You 're practically begging for malware and viruses. All it takes
| is one piece of malware to keylog your bank details, and it will
| cost you _far_ more than all the software you pirated over your
| lifetime.
| willhinsa wrote:
| And it's rare to get malicious software from official binaries,
| right? You got _less_ exposure to malware by avoiding Sony
| Music CD 's and pirating them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
| newgre wrote:
| Yes, it's rare. could you name other incidents where this
| happens? I feel like this is always brought up in these
| discussions, but it really only is an outlier. There'S not
| much to conclude from this.
| snet0 wrote:
| Feels a bit like an exception proving the rule. If everyone
| is pointing to the same individual example that a rule
| doesn't hold, the rule probably holds for _almost_ all
| cases.
| e2le wrote:
| Here is another example of malicious software from official
| binaries.
|
| https://torrentfreak.com/flight-sim-company-embeds-
| malware-t...
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| > You're practically begging for malware and viruses.
|
| The dark net isn't as "wild" as you make it out to be. Release
| groups (hackers who upload the content) rely on their
| reputation and fame. Tracker sites where "consumers" discover
| content also have reputation systems, where "trusted" uploaders
| have special status visible to all. You _know_ what you 're
| getting and who it's coming from. If you run effective virus
| scanning on top of that, the risk of actual infection falls to
| near zero.
|
| You're more likely to leak your banking details by installing a
| free browser extension.
|
| > All it takes is one piece of malware to keylog your bank
| details, and it will cost you far more than all the software
| you pirated over your lifetime.
|
| A quick web search says the median income worldwide is less
| than $1,000/month. Assuming retail game prices of about $50, a
| person would only have to pirate 20 games to break even, even
| if robbed a single month's income. Over an entire lifetime that
| person might save $10,000 by pirating.
| zeroxfe wrote:
| I agree with the first part about release groups and
| reputations, etc.
|
| But the income comparison is not fair: it's far worse for an
| individual to lose their real savings (no matter how small),
| than for them to lose (e.g.) $10,000 of pirated content. This
| is especially true for people with low income. The former
| pays the bills, the latter is entertainment.
| iso1210 wrote:
| How would keylogging my bank details cost me money?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| There are millions of pirate so you can assume this doesn't
| happen to most people. If the expected return on piracy was
| negative people would not pirate. With trusted uploaders you
| can also reduce the risk further because if they release
| malware their reputation will be ruined. That's not even taking
| into account the fact that people already run non-pirate
| executable code without auditing it from basically anywhere so
| the risk is about even I'd think.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| The phrase 'if you're not the customer, you're the product'
| comes to mind. I could easily see malware being installed
| that flies under the radar, and the type of person that runs
| random executable code willy nilly is not the sort of person
| that would be able to trace malware back to one vector.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I think pretty much all developers run random code willy
| nilly. People don't check the stuff they install through
| their package managers nor the dependencies of those
| packages, except the most anal ones.
| deadmetheny wrote:
| >The phrase 'if you're not the customer, you're the
| product' comes to mind
|
| That doesn't really apply to the warez scene. People aren't
| releasing cracked software for profit, they're doing it for
| the challenge and to say they were the first to do it. It's
| pure ego.
| meepmorp wrote:
| I'm not sure that precludes that cracked software being
| redistributed with added malware.
| snet0 wrote:
| I think that's almost certainly the case for the people
| actually cracking the software, but because a lot of the
| time there isn't like a "Steam Store for Cracked
| Videogames" or similar for software, it can require
| significant effort to find the canonical source.
|
| If you know of some common Adobe patcher tool, or Windows
| activator, and just do a Google search for its name, what
| fraction of those download links will have a matching
| hash to the original release?
|
| You are right that, in the non-repackaged-with-
| additional-malware case, it seems a lot of the guys doing
| the cracking are just puzzle-solvers. Weeks to crack some
| Ubisoft DRM but probably never even touched the game.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > If the expected return on [X] was negative people would not
| [X].
|
| Not that your _conclusion_ happens to be wrong, but you do
| know people buy lottery tickets, right?
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Altium is like $8k or something. Unaffordable for most
| individuals.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Individuals really aren't Altium's target market, though, are
| they? "I can't afford this" isn't a license (no pun intended)
| for copyright violation -- especially when there are cheaper
| or free alternatives. There's free PCB design software out
| there, including Altium's own CircuitMaker.
|
| As an aside, I've always found software at this price level
| to be a bit of a paradox when it comes to piracy -- Altium,
| Autodesk Maya ($1620/year, currently), and similarly priced
| vertical market solutions are big fish in tiny ponds. If
| you're in a business that _needs_ Altium or Maya, you 're
| almost certainly going to pay for it, and conversely, folks
| who pirate software like that almost certainly don't need it.
| If I ran such a software company I don't think I'd bother
| with DRM; your true copy protection dongle is (or at least
| better be!) the level of support you're giving licensed
| customers.
| IndrekR wrote:
| Having bought Altium (then Protel DXP) in 2004, and still
| paying for the licenses and subscription for several seats
| (this is one of our main tools, running a team now) I can
| say:
|
| - I most likely would have not started using Altium if would
| have not been exposed to a pirated copy two years earlier by
| another engineer. Would have used more expensive alternatives
| instead (Cadence/Mentor Graphics/Zuken).
|
| - At <10k and <2k subscription this tool is very well priced.
| (Compared to salaries and prototyping costs). I have also
| used more (10x) expensive tools and can say in many aspects
| those are not better. On the contrary in most cases.
|
| - The hobby needs are quite filled with GPL3 licensed KiCad
| it was not always so. I would still not use KiCad in a
| professional setting as a main tool, but that may change as
| KiCad has made huge progress ever since CERN started using
| it. However, CERN electronics development guidelines still
| have Altium as preferred option. Altium is just much better
| tool for complex electronics.
|
| - Altium has cheaper CircuitStudio now as an option, that was
| a very reasonable compromise last time I looked. Also they
| have free CircuitMaker for tinkering and hobby use, which I
| have not used so can not comment on.
| eznzt wrote:
| That's what virustotal.com is for!
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Definitely not true. I have a "friend" who will buy an ebook if
| he can't find it on LibGen.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Right. Clearly not every pirated copy is a lost sale.
|
| But a lot are. It's easy to say "I'd never pay 60 bucks for
| that" when you just copy as many games as you want for free.
|
| And I'm sure for some art, piracy adds value by creating
| demand. But that's the exception, not the rule.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I'm 10x more likely to buy a print copy of a book if I get a
| hold of a full copy of it in PDF form first.
| Karsteski wrote:
| I'm very much down to buy a book if they provide a free
| electronic copy. What I'm not down to do is buy the physical
| book and then have to pay for the ebook just so that I can
| read on my kindle... It's absurd to me that this isn't
| standard already
| jbarrs wrote:
| I feel like this largely depends on the book. A novel between
| $10 and $20 that you may get multiple reads out of is better
| than a $100 university textbook that you only need for one
| year. The former you can bite the bullet on, the latter becomes
| harder to justify.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I think I had to pay 1 USD to print 10 pages or something.
| "University Physics" at 1600 pages was cheaper to buy then
| print.
|
| Using a laptop to read it would have been doable, but I found
| that distracting and cumbersome.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Pirating novels also, well, should make people feel at least
| a little bad. I think there's this perception -- and,
| candidly, I think it's a perception that sites like
| TorrentFreak (where the linked article is on) push -- that
| Greedy Big Corporate Publishers take all the money and the
| creator doesn't get anything to speak of from an individual
| single sale. I can't speak to all industries, but in fiction
| publishing, this is absolutely, unequivocally not true.
|
| - First, you really do get per-unit royalties, and it's not
| "just a few cents"; even with traditional publishers, ebook
| royalties are 25% or more. (With my publisher, I get 50% if
| you buy directly from them and 35% if you buy on other ebook
| stores.)
|
| - Second, the vast, _vast_ majority of fiction books sell in
| the thousands. Not millions, not even hundreds of thousands,
| and way more often than you think not in the tens of
| thousands. For a small press, a title that sells 5000 copies
| across its lifetime might qualify as a runaway best seller.
|
| - And third, contracts for _future_ books often depend on how
| well _previous_ books sell. A friend of mine published a book
| a few years ago that sold decently and was even nominated for
| a Nebula Award. Its sequel was well-reviewed but didn 't sell
| as well, and even though it was meant as a trilogy, the
| publisher doesn't seem interested in the third book.
|
| So don't use the sales of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or the
| like as a yardstick for how piracy affects fiction writers. A
| few thousand "lost sales" of _Harry Potter and the Goblet of
| Gender Essentialism_ is a rounding error; a few thousand
| "lost sales" of my novel _Kismet_ would literally double the
| title 's revenue if they were converted to real sales.
| ball_of_lint wrote:
| How do you feel about libraries? Should I feel bad about
| the hundreds of unpopular fiction books that I borrowed
| when I was younger?
|
| I believe that writers, video game creators and other
| targets of piracy should be fairly compensated for their
| work. However, for products that require $0 to be
| duplicated (by the creator or not) it doesn't make sense to
| charge per-unit.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I like to borrow ebooks from the library. I could pirate
| them but I'd like to think that the borrowing traffic
| from the library is the least I could do for the author.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Libraries buy copies (and the creators get paid). And the
| copies (on average) circulate a lot less often than you'd
| think.
|
| High volume authors would probably opt out of the library
| system if they could, but the average author probably
| gains from libraries (since they buy a bunch of copies
| that otherwise wouldn't be bought).
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Questions like "how do you feel about libraries" feel
| like they're saying "this is complicated," and, I mean,
| yes. It is! Is copying an ebook for free the same as
| checking it out of the library? There's some
| similarities, but there's also pretty clear differences,
| right?
|
| > For products that require $0 to be duplicated (by the
| creator or not) it doesn't make sense to charge per-unit.
|
| Well, when you buy a physical book, most of the cost is
| _not_ actually in the production. The cost structure
| allows us to use that physical book as a proxy, but as
| the reader, you 're probably not buying that book because
| you care deeply about the paper stock and typography
| choices -- you're buying it because of the words. It's
| the story, the style, the author, the subject matter, the
| genre. Those are the things that ultimately have value to
| you, right? Those are really what you're paying for...
| and they're identical between the physical copy and the
| zero marginal cost ebook.
|
| And none of that really requires a per-unit charge, I
| know. But the question shifts to "okay, then what's the
| alternative?" There are possible answers for that, to be
| sure -- e.g., Patreon-style models where the most
| enthusiastic fans are essentially subsidizing the
| production of the work. Yet for every Patreon success
| story -- and let's loosely define that as "making more
| than they would if they were selling their works in a
| traditional fashion" rather than "making most or all of
| their income this way" -- there's a hundred creators who
| are _just_ making enough to buy a dinner at Chili 's once
| a month. And half of them will have to skip the
| Presidente Margarita.
|
| Going back to the subtext I was reading into your
| question: this is complicated. :)
| snet0 wrote:
| Something I never really thought about until now is that I
| tend to feel okay with pirating "classics", or books by
| authors who have since died. At first, I felt like this was
| probably fine, since it's almost rent-collecting for the
| publisher at that point, but I suppose for more recent
| works, the royalties are still paid to the family of the
| deceased?
|
| Otherwise, I feel like a decent rule is that if the
| majority of your friends haven't heard of it, you probably
| shouldn't be pirating it.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Questions from a mostly-legitimate-but-occasional-eBook-
| pirate[0]:
|
| 1) Do you believe piracy has any legitimacy in cases where
| the publisher simply refuses to release an eBook version in
| your region? Example: try finding "One Hundred Years of
| Solitude" for sale anywhere in the US.
|
| 2) Do you believe there is a moral/ethical way to protest
| perceived price gouging among eBooks from publishers?
|
| Example: A book from a well-known British fantasy author is
| PS2.99 in its own region, but nearly double that price on
| the US store:
|
| https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion-1
|
| https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion
|
| [0] Submitted in _bona fides_ is my catalog of legally-
| purchased e-books:
| http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Aganar
| Bakary wrote:
| A corollary to this is that the neediest and most unpleasant
| clients tend to be the least lucrative. It's an open secret that
| raising prices can get you better business in various
| professions, from escorting to tailors to art commissions.
| Wealthier people are not only attracted to exclusivity but also
| prefer to dump money to save time and hassle.
|
| With video games, raising prices directly will not work well at
| all. Instead it is the indirect realization that trying to
| attract pirates is not a good way to spend time since you won't
| get a lot of money out of those people even in ideal conditions.
| They are also the type of person more likely to complain about
| minute details in games.
|
| With micro-transactions, the case gets muddled further. It
| becomes rational to spend most of your time catering to whales.
| In fact, I suspect most features of games using that methodology
| only exist to attract a large enough audience of normal customers
| that whales can then prey upon with pay to win additions, while
| they are themselves preyed upon by the devs.
| scj wrote:
| There's a difference between a stowaway and taking the ship.
|
| One's infringement, the other is piracy (or theft in the more
| general case).
| contravariant wrote:
| I can't deny that taking the ship counts as piracy, but I think
| that's somewhat different from the kind being discussed here.
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