The hard life of paying customers
12 06 2009There’s constant debate about piracy on forums. It’s hardly moving us forward, but there is an argument worth discussing and it applies not only to software. It’s about how hard it is to get software legaly vs stealing it.
Stealing is always easier option and it doesn’t matter if we talk about software or phisical goods. Suprised? Well, keep in mind that if you want to buy something you need to either earn enough money before you can buy it or you need to worry about your credit score, fill out all the papers, agreements, blah, blah. For some goods like cars you need to wait couple of months before they arrive… and you’re paying customer… wtf? You could just walk out of your house and break in to the car of your choice. That’s just 30s job if you got some experience in it.
Just because thiefs have easier life doesn’t mean you have to steal. I don’t say we should make the life of paying customers harder, but it will always be harder to aquire goods legal way than stealing them.
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I’m also a software developer I intend to sell my products.
Copyright infringement may feel like stealing to us, the producers, but it’s not stealing.
In your car analogy, the thief wouldn’t steal someone’s car, instead he’d recreate his own piece by piece and drive away in this new car. The car owner wouldn’t be hurt, it would be the people who first designed the car losing a potential sale.
Games that require you to have the CD in the bay. DVDs that force adverts and piracy warnings upon you – are these good ideas?
The older copy protection for games I found less intrusive, Monkey Island’s Code Wheel, or looking in the manual for information. The copy protection was tied closely with the game world.
Piracy is stealing. Period.
But that wasn’t a point on my post – my point is that it will always be easier to steal than to obtain goods legal way, so “pro-piracy” argument that we make the life paying customers harder is nonsense… of course I don’t want poeple to use ridiculusly hard antipiracy methods… but lamenting that you need to have the CD in the bay is silly. Do you own a console? I do and it doesn’t bother me that I have to keep DVD in it to play the game.
“Piracy is stealing. Period.”
Whether it’s called stealing or not, it’s still the same crime and it’s still hurting developers. However, I have to agree with Dan on the nature of it, it shouldn’t be considered the direct equivalent of stealing or shoplifting. It’s more along the lines of bringing a replicator to a store.
“but lamenting that you need to have the CD in the bay is silly”
I agree. You can always NoCD if you can’t be bothered to do such a simple task. This was never a problem for me because I just use Steam and Bigfish.
“Games that require you to have the CD in the bay. DVDs that force adverts and piracy warnings upon you – are these good ideas?”
Actually yes. CD checking would stop the less-tech-savvy and the piracy warnings in movies is a good scare-tactic.
I’m fine with some DRM as long as it’s nowhere near my music/movie files and it’s not SecuROM or Starforce.