Comment Re:Intended Reaction? (Score 1) 724
And I've been whizzing through all of your comments, and I can sum them up thus:
- The current 'system' (which you haven't defined), is somehow broken, causing the need for piracy.
- The act of piracy doesn't directly hurt anyone.
- A pirate is the same as someone who doesn't give a developer money anyway.
- Digital media is comparatively cheap to reproduce, so why limit it?
So, in order. To which system are you referring, copyright, or as you seem to be, basic capitalism? The act of paying money for a good or service may have it's flaws, but it's sure as hell the best we have right now. There have been some alternatives tried, they didn't go too well.
Interesting that piracy doesn't apparently hurt anyone. I've long viewed piracy as a sort of trial run - you download a game, then if you decide you like it, you pay up. If not, you probably weren't going to buy it anyway, so nothing lost from either party. This is true that nothing is lost.
Now here's the kicker. What if that pirate then gives his friends free copies, saying "I know you were going to go buy it, but save your money". Now the business HAS lost revenue, there's no question about it - people who were going to buy the game now no longer have to. If you can debate out of that one without using flawed logic you can have an internet cookie.
The idea that 'piracy hurts noone' is flawed, it's only blameless on the very upper tiers of who does it and who it affects. If you start following the chain of events from piracy as a whole, it does do damage. Nowhere near as much as companies would have you believe it does on their own products, but on an INDUSTRY.
A pirate is most certainly not the same as someone who just doesn't buy it in a shop and deprives a shop of a sale. The key difference is the pirate now has no technical reason to even spend the money, as he now has a copy of something he didn't pay for. The non-buyer may still spend the money at a later date, as he doesn't have a copy. The pirate is no longer even a potential customer, and therefore does not deserve to be treated as such.
As best I can tell, your morals regarding people getting something for nothing vary slightly from a large number of people here. You replied to an example of people sneaking into a cinema being okay, provided it wasn't a full house. I'd say that purely from a moral standpoint, that's wrong. It's your opinion however.
I covered digital media up top there, but artificially limiting supply of things is actually a long standing business tactic. Messing with this limiting will reduce market value. It's only possible to mess with the system with digital products, but another real world example is diamonds - they have controlled distribution, thus keeping the prices high.
