Guys, I mean seriously. We all know that slashdot is a place where any pro-piracy argument will be forwarded and treated seriously, no matter how speculative or unlikely. But will you guys just for a millisecond consider this argument:

The writers of this game are in effect removing a feature that could otherwise add to the saleability of the game. Is it REALLY that much of a stretch to think that somebody over there didn't do a bit of sober calculation and realize that, in fact, due to piracy, they can and will sell more copies if they make the multiplayer experience internet only? Some of you guys seem to live in some alternate reality where you think that software piracy has no "chilling effects" on the software business. it sure as hell does, and this is one of the more plausible ones.

I used to read the forums for a game that I liked - Battlestations: Midway. The number of people who had the pirated version and then bought the full version to play multiplayer was very amazing. Most amazing of all, it's actually getting the chronic pirates in eastern europe (ukraine, russia, etc) to actually start buying games. Sure, they get them at MASSIVELY reduced prices (prices below equilibrium non-piracy market values, but nevertheless above the pure pirated prices), but they are starting to buy them, largely because of the draw of multi-player.

I am amazed at the absolute stupidity of some of the posts here who seem to think that a company isn't damaged by piracy if it turns a profit. More to the point, I'm amazed at the basic disconnect between some people here and others' piracy of the games that they purchased. Hey, dinguses! If somebody got something for free that, were it not for the existence of piracy, they would pay for, then the game would be better (or the next game would be better) for you. Pirates should piss YOU off.

If you actually READ THE ARTICLE and still cast the PRS as the bad guy in this, then you really need to put down the crackpipe.

Let's review the situation here:

1. in its "see no evil" way, youtube hosts tens of thousands of music videos which infringe on the copyright of the artists and creators. in doing so, they restrict the ability for those artists to be compensated for these videos via, for example, MTV licensing agreemnts.

2. culture shifts, spurred on by thousands of slashdot piracy rationalists to where the creators of the material now have to come begging to YouTube for a share of the advertising money. YouTube has done nothing useful other than provide distribution at a profit - at absolute best it is the equivalent of the RIAA middleman who plays the regular boogieman here. The only difference here is that youtube, by playing innocent, isnt normally even required to even give money back to the artists.

3. but, the PRS is big eonugh that they manage to secure SOME money back to the artists. PRS claims that what youtube is offering is insufficient compared to what it could have gotten (presumably) via its legitimate licensing contracts (IE MTV). YouTube tells PRS to suck it because it is entitled to its guaranteed profit for the near zero amount that it actually contributes to the creative process besides turning a blind eye to piracy.

and yet, it's PRS, not the youtube mafia, who are the bad guys. typical slashdot logic.

 

Ah "middle management." That eternal boogieman of the arrogant and clueless techie. This "middle manager" figure does nothing but sits and has meetings and runs up expense accounts while making cowardly big-business friendly decisions intended to stymie the noble and heroic poet/renaissance man/systems administrator who, by nature of the fact that maintaining and programming computers requires the use of numbers, is more of an expert on economics and finance than anybody on earth.

If you worked in my company and if i found you replacing our copies of Microsoft Office (cost: about 30 cents per day per employee, or roughly 1/1000 of a new hire's salary, or about 1/3 what it costs to power a PC per day) and replacing it with the less capable, harder to use, and less capable crap that Open Office, I'd first take you aside and politely explain to you the basic economics of why your 'save their countrymen a pile of kronor' doesn't stand up to even the most basic of scrutiny. If you replied back with some pseudophilosophical open source nonsense rant, you'd be well on your way to looking for a job which is more willing to subsidize your myopic fantasies.

There should be some button on slashdot to automatically post the same reply to responses like yours (some slippery slope reductio) , since they are so common, predictable, and wrong. Furthermore, they add to distract from discussion of the real issues.

If you write a computer program, you must encode all of its behaviors and exceptions. So, you have to write code that handles the "laws" of pac man's movements on the board and what happens when he gets eaten by the ghosts. In effect, the Pac Man computer code is the sum of all laws in the pac man universe.

Too many technically knowledgeable slashdotters assume that real-world law should be just like computer code - basically setting the laws for humans-as-pac-men. The problem with that is that the real world is much more complex than the pac man world not just in that the number of objects and their interactions is large, but also because the mechanisms for enforcing such laws are themselves fuzzy - you can pretty much be guaranteed that a computer will run the code that you program it with, but the mere act of writing a law does not in and of itself change the reality of the real world.

Therefore, and this is the part that slashdotters have a real hard time understanding and accepting, real world law, even that written by teams of brilliant experts, is subject to interpretation. And by 'interpretation', I don't necessarily mean the wishy washy kind of moral reletavism that unenlightened people associate with it, but rather a more nuanced and deep understanding of the social and other balances at play.

It's possible to spill a lot of verbage explaining why giving your daughter computer access would not be copyright infringement. Contrived terms like "substantial non-infringing uses" and so forth can be bandied about, as can all sorts of theories about intent, but in the end it comes down to simplicities that are generally not worth the effort to verbalize. A judge would use a lot of tacit knowledge about "what is a PC", "what is a daughter", "what are the likely intended uses of the PC" and so forth to quickly rule that such an action is not unlawful.

There is no mathematical formula - this is why we call them JUDGES and not "excel spreadsheets", but intent matters, extent matters, relationships matter, and so do a lot of things that frustrate computer-scientist-wannabe-lawyers since they are not AND SHOULD NOT be easily quantifiable from the standpoint of law.

Too often on slashdot we see some naive techie who reads somewhere that "sampling 10 seconds of 1 song is fair use" and therefore goes out of his way to program something by which [songlength/10] people each sample 10 seconds and then these 10 second blocks are re-sewn together or some other ludicrous scheme to try to get around some wrongheaded perception of copyright laws. I want to shake those people, give them my best Morbo impression and say very loudly:

LAW DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

It is a pity that these PirateBay guys are getting away with their actions due to poorly conceived swedish copyright law and apparently incompetent prosecutors. whatever you think of the RIAA/MPAA, it is clear that thePirateBay exists solely to facilitate the unauthorized duplication of material that people have worked hard to create. It's further clear that PirateBay is profiting immensely from their activities, if not financially (I have no idea), at least by reputation and similar internet "currency". It's also clear that in any other sphere, they'd be considered an organized criminal enterprise. We should not be cheering their victories.

So, you're saddened by the fact that guilty people are being prosecuted? Come again?

Step back a bit and look at the world of music today. Is the REAL issue extension of copyright some number of years down the line, or is it the far larger problem that generations of youth are being taught that intellectual property is not to be respected, be it 95 minutes or 95 years. While there's always something to be said for the rightsholders occasional overreaches, a sober analysis points to the fact that:

1. piracy is out of control.
2. the current situation amounts to the poor of industrial countries subsidizing the rich / technologically capable in industrialized countries and basically EVERYBODY, rich and poor in certain other countries (China, Russia, etc).
3. no plausible alternate method for intelligent and fair rights management in the digital age has yet been forwarded by those who claim that the current system is out of date - concert tickets and t-shirt aint gonna cut it, folks, so the current system, while flawed in some ways, is the best we have.

Those are the REAL issues.

The physical costs of the creation of a bottle of coke are negligible. All the price of the item are in marketing and distribution. And yet, I'm sure you don't steal soda. Yes, there's something to be said for that near-zero cost for creating a bottle of soda vs the nearer-to-zero cost for replicating music, but, well, it's nowhere near as you'd like to pretend it is in the greater scheme of things.

The banking industry has yet to figure out a way to deal with armed robbers except for guards and bullet proof glass.

If the citizenry is comprised of people who feel an entitlement to copyright infringement, then there's not much to be said now, is there?

I'm confused. Then maybe the new technologies aren't actually that important, but traditional distribution and marketing still, believe it or now, have a hell of a lot of value.

What do you mean "should"? For somebody who likes to pontificate about the free market, you sure do quickly come to a centralized planning approach of how much items "should" cost. Perhaps there should be some scale, such as .001 cents per guitar note, .0005 cents per drum beat, and so forth? Really. Get a clue. This trial isn't a solution and we all know how it's going to end. Work out solutions that really plague the system and piracy will go away.

>I'm saddened by this not because I think the Pirate Bay operators are innocent but because I feel they're an easy target to set precedence on.

No, the proposed software would not. Please stop making completely skewed real world comparisons. Just because you personally have a fond attachment to your PC and its particular arrangement of bits does not in any possible way make changing that arrangement of bits equivalent to beating somebody to death. The two are not even close, and therefore your statement is not a reason to posit that a legal parallel exists.

I'm not being facetious here. We are not based in the USA (where duty of care in most states typically extends, to, say, physical trespassers). In our country, there is no such duty of care to tresspassers (and it's not at all clear that even in the USA that software pirates are the same as virtual tresspassers and would therefore be subject to be given equivalent care).

I have no contract or agreement whatsoever with those 'strangers', and furthermore given the warnings that i said we'd include in our material and the fact that the 'damage' we'd cause is purely virtual, that few judges would view our response as anything but justified. IANAL, but in the country where my country is based, there is a much less pussified view of the rights of criminals, especially here.

this is not shooting a criminal with a shotgun connected to a tripwire - this is just doing something to his PC. there is a big difference, and people (in this thread) who try to equate the two need to step away from the keyboard for a few hours per day. In other words, I strongly suspect that our response would meet the standard of 'proportional and appropriate response', if not in the USA, then at least here.

that also said, i say what i say with the full knowledge that i'd open myself to suits by legitimate customers who might be hurt by such a scheme, and, given the nature of our software and customers, let's say this is a risk i'll happily take. again, i don't want to tell you exactly what we do, but i'll draw a parallel product - highly complex statistical analysis for some back-end accounting. if the instinct of a serious customer of ours' tech guy is to run to a p2p site to download a replacement copy of the software which they get on disc, have the right to access via our secured website, have 24/7 tech support access to, and so forth, then that tech guy's the one who is the idiot. this is not 'EA sports NHL 2009' we're talking about here.

Furthermore (responding to other posts here), i'm actually quite sure that our existing customers would be happy if we included such provisions. what do you call somebody who pays a lot of money for software that others get for free? a sucker. nobody wants to be a sucker - certainly not our customers.

See, in slashdot's fucked-up universe, my post gets branded 'troll' for asking a simple question while yours gets modded as 'insightful' for calling my proposal 'illegal', which it isn't (i can certainly put whatever software that i own the rights to on p2p file sharing networks -- or, at least, what i am proposing here falls well within those bounds). immoral and unethical? Please explain to me how it is. really.. i dont see it at all. To answer some of the other repliers here: 1. yes, i am the boss and owner 2. yes, our software costs $10,000+ furthermore, yes, we do have thousands of legitimate users. those who pirate our stuff tend to be businesses in china and elsewhere who can in theory afford the software. there's absolutely no chance that a legitimate user would go looking for it on a p2p network, since every legitimate user has a rep that he can call, plus 24/7 access to support. and if somebody repackages our malware as linux-iso or somesuch (as you said - again, you failed to read my post), they certainly wouldn't run it three times and makes the mistake. it would be obvious that they were not running linux-iso at that point. at any rate, if somebody does that, any 'immorality' (if you want to call it that) is clearly at that person's feet just as if somebody took a piece of adult material and put it on a children's website.

I'd like somebody to please explain to me why my company should not compile versions of our software for torrent that do horrible and terrible things to the downloaders' PCs after say, the third run. We have no duty of care nor contract with such downloaders and due to the nature of our software, it is 100% certain that those who download pirated versions will never become legitimate customers. Furthermore, because of the way our software is licensed and its data is accessed, we can be 100% sure that none of our legitimate users are using pirated versions. No really. I'd like you guys to tell me why not. it's something I've fantasized about. We'd even put noticed at the beginning of the software telling the user quite explicitly about the horrible things that the software would do, and we would not hold the users "hostage" to purchasing our software in any way. Of course, we could open ourselves up to retribution attacks, but, imagining for a moment if that was not an issue, i'd like to hear some opinions. As you can see by the responses here to this article, many slashdotters have abandoned even the pretense of soome pseudophilosophical justification for their piracy and are just concentrating on the technical tricks involved in being better pirates ("virtual machines, baby", etc.)