Keep in mind that the only damage done by piracy is from those who would have bought it otherwise. In the case of a $5 indie game, you may say that more would be inclined to buy it because of its much more appealing price (leaving aside the issue of game quality), but the indie game wouldn't have anywhere near the market exposure that the $60 professional title would have. Piracy helps these small indie games by spreading mindshare of the game, and if the game in question is good, more people will know about it and buy it. If the game developer encourages, accepts or tolerates sharing of the game, that will get them some goodwill from the fans as well.

> Why do you expect people to provide their work to you for free?

This is a bad question.

First of all, you can't make assumptions about my motives. Nowhere in any of my posts have I said that I pirate software. Don't make personal attacks in order to legitimize your own position.

Two, the wording of your question is biased towards copyright holders. I see questions like yours quite a bit, and I just now realized how slanted they are. Your question assumes that a copyright holder has to somehow go out of their way to provide their work for free, as you said, but in most cases of piracy the copyright holder has to do nothing at all except release the original work, which is what happens anyway. The phrasing of your question adds undeserved emotional weight to your position by implying that those evil pirates are forcing the poor artist to proactively do something which benefits only them and screws the artist. It's dishonest.

A better question would have been "Why do you expect to have access to the work of others for free?" but my first point about personal attacks would still apply.

> Of course, we watched gamecopyworld and friends for the first cracks to show up and literally the day the game got cracked, sales dropped like a rock.

You know, I've been following the piracy debate for a while, and I have seen this claim and others like it on the Internet many times. There are just two problems with them. One is that they're never backed up with any sort of data that inconclusively demonstrates that piracy killed sales; readers are forced to take the poster at his word. Two, they always start and stop with individual posts on various forums. If piracy were really a big enough problem that it could massacre sales of a game, information about it would be all over the Internet. As it is, I have -never- seen actual evidence that piracy is anything but an Internet boogeyman, or that it does any substantial harm, or that harsh copyright enforcement measures are justified. I think that the need for actual evidence on the antipirates' side is so great that anything solid at all would quickly become popular and well-known. Since there is nothing solid, I have to assume that claims such as "piracy kills sales" are misleading or just false.

> Read this please
Okay. I don't really have the inclination to read every single post and comment in that large thread, but I read the question and some of the highest-ranked answers. The top-rated answer, by Dana Holt, presents a good argument but there are problems with her post. On a pedantic level she compares copyright infringement to physical theft, which is sure to aggravate anyone in the piracy debate and should be avoided. If she has been debating it for years as she claims, she ought to know that speaking in such a way is just an inflammatory thing to do. Additionally, she says that she was able to produce raw data that connected a keygen with low sales, but I do not see any citations for her claims, or any of the actual data. Plus, how does she know that none of the keys she revoked were legitimate, or used by legitimate customers?

I'm just not sure what you wanted me to come away with from linking me to that. It just demonstrates that there is a wide variety of opinions in the piracy debate, and that none of them can be convincingly substantiated with evidence because of the nature of the problem.

Taking a guess, you must be a game developer. While I'm sure it's nice in a business sense that Sony can tell developers and publishers that their console is invincible to hacking, nothing like that can last forever. Ultimately, everything is cracked; it's just a matter of how much time it takes. Personally I am pleased at the level of enthusiasm the techie community is displaying towards cracking the PS3 because it will, for better or worse, eventually lead to a more open system.

And for the record, if you are a game developer, you shouldn't believe the hyperbole and propaganda that Sony and the major game publishers no doubt tell you about the dangers of piracy. It is a popular scapegoat for big companies that don't sell their media as well as they'd like, or that just want greater control over their products post-sale, but there's never been any solid evidence to connect high piracy rates with low or no sales. Just because the PS3 has been broken doesn't mean that sales of PS3 games are going to drop flat.

> Updates are not forced. If you wish to use every service available on the PS3 that worked before the last update, you can. It is only if you want the new features, the new games, and the new services on PSN that you have to upgrade.

I call BS. My understanding of the matter is that if you want to use the PSN at all, you have to have current firmware. This includes online multiplayer for games you already have. If you refuse to update, you are locked out of playing online.

> The Other OS was only taken down AFTER someone started bragging about the ability to copy $60 PS3 games and play them... Only 5-6 assholes who are too cheap to afford new games but feel deserving of free stuff ruined it for the rest of us.

Another Sony apologist who says the hacking attempt was motivated purely by piracy. Nonsense. If the only people who wanted to crack the PS3 were pirates, then we would have seen a crack much earlier in the console's life, given that it apparently wasn't all that hard. Instead the cracking started after Sony removed OtherOS. Isn't that interesting?

> So yeah, I bought a PS3 to play PS3 games. The fact that it had all these other benefits were just frosting on the cake.

To you. There are also people who bought it largely because of these other benefits. Just because you don't personally care about them doesn't mean Sony is justified in removing an advertised feature after the sale.

Actually, he's got a point. A person who has sex daily will probably value it less than someone who only gets it once a month or so.

Non-intrusive? Maybe they've switched up their advertising model in the last year or two, but the last time I tried Pandora, I got a 30-second video ad playing after EVERY song. That was way, way too much, and I instantly dropped their service.

Let's not forget that the CRIA is facing a six billion dollar lawsuit over commercial copyright infringement of over three hundred thousand songs. Regardless of your position on piracy, these guys have no leg whatsoever to stand on. If they're going to go after individuals for noncommercially sharing music, first they'd better clean up their own mess.

> A reasonably prudent person, upon seeing that someone has created a work and is selling it, will understand that obtaining it for free without the permission of the creator is problematic.

I do not share your opinion (which is what that statement is, your opinion). In today's digital world, music and similar commodities are as common as air, so it's not unreasonable that someone otherwise uneducated on the subject might see no problem with their duplication or their ubiquity. When I was in high school I thought nothing whatsoever of checking out CDs from the library and ripping them to my computer to burn into my own copies or drop onto a digital music player, and I knew nothing whatsoever of copyright. No one was harmed by my doing so, as there's no way I could have bought all those songs. And it felt perfectly fine, which is the point: It's human nature to copy.

When you are used to a digital environment where it's quick, cheap and painless to copy files and transfer them between devices, and someone comes along and tells you that doing these things is illegal and immoral and that you owe them thousands of dollars, odds are you're going to think their rules are arbitrarily set and contrary to reality. Which is a good description of modern copyright law. You're also likely to think that the person doing the demanding is a bully and needs to sod off. Which is a good description of the entertainment industries.

> Too bad though for the person who has pirated 20,000 songs because they still would owe around $60,000.
True, although I should point out that this $60k would be, presumably, spread out over hundreds or thousands of different musicians and at least several record labels, each of which would have to independently file suit to get their piece of the pie.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised to see the RIAA claim ownership of all 20,000 songs without looking at them. After all, if ASCAP demands music licenses from small businesses regardless of whether any of their music is played, what's to stop the RIAA from saying that all of the tracks belong to them?

> I'm asking you to pretend you personally are a major record label or movie-studio executive. What would you do?
Draw upon the years of experience with the market that I would hopefully have as the executive of a major record label or a movie studio and conceive a new business model.

The point being that you really cannot ask someone who doesn't have that experience and knowledge what someone with that experience and knowledge can do.

> How do you even know that such a "new business model" is possible? If it's not possible, then you're being unrealistic.
If it's not possible, the industries need to die. Sorry. Better to have no major movie studios than to have unjust abuses of copyright by said studios.

I think your hypothetical situation carries a few assumptions that aren't warranted. First of all, there's no strong evidence to link lack of sales with high piracy rates. Something does not need zero or insignificant piracy to sell well; additionally, if something is pirated a lot, that doesn't mean it won't be a financial success. This is because the "lost sale" argument is complete crap. There is no way of knowing which downloads were made:
* Instead of a sale, in which case there is a loss to you;
* Alongside or just before a sale, in which case several things are possible, including additional sales due to market share attracted by piracy;
* By someone who could not have bought it in the first place, in which case you have lost nothing whatsoever. Also, the low price doesn't mean that anyone who wants it can buy it, as there are plenty of other factors to consider. Some might live in countries where legally buying the software, even online, is difficult or impossible. Some might not have a credit card. Some might be minors.

So with regards to the success of your hypothetical software, what it comes down to is what it always comes down to: How good it is. If your software is truly revolutionary and incredible and highly desired by everyone, you will likely make a boatload of money off it completely regardless of piracy rates. People reward good creators because people understand that they need to eat too. (It's money-grubbing media corporations that we tend to reserve our fury for.) You shouldn't view the possibility of piracy as a deterrent to creativity. On the contrary, if you publicly accepted, or at least tolerated, distribution of your software, you'd find yourself on the good side of a bunch of Internet geeks, who would go on to recommend your software to their non-nerd friends and family. More sales for you.

Big Content already uses the piracy boogeyman as a scapegoat for decreased sales. I don't want to see individuals and independent developers take the same route.

> I keep reading about "failed business models" and "finding new ones" but nobody ever suggests what such a new business model might actually be and how it would work.
Because it's not my job. If a business is failing, the responsibility for finding a new business model is on them, not the general public. Businesses don't get free rides; if they can't financially succeed, they get to fail.