Same way you shouldn't get full ownership of a car or a house or an xbox, which also had hours upon hours and heaps of money invested in their development...right?

you shouldn't own the rights to reproduce it using their exact models ie: ruining capitalism

you should own the object in question, not the design

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 29 2011, 9:59 pm by jjf28.

And this is where we get into the trickiness that is 'intellectual property'.

He owns 1 single copy of the game. By owning that copy he does not magically inherit the right to give permission to other people to own copies of the game. He can transfer his copy, that he owns, but he owns a copy, not the game. By transferring ownership of his copy, naturally, he would no longer have a copy of himself though. He cannot transfer ownership of copies which he does not own.

Under your logic here, the complete destruction of selling games would follow. For example, a single developer or whatever creates a game and goes to sell it. One person legitimately buys the game. Maybe ten, maybe a hundred, but thats it, because everyone else knows that one of those ten people will publish the game and then they can download it for free. Then everyone downloads it for free, legally, and the company that just bombed a few million on that game goes under because they made six hundred dollars in sales.



Perhaps you have a point here and would like to clarify, otherwise I'm writing this off as an insult.
As a point of interest though, you can sell something to someone without them actually owning it. Renting an apartment, a car, ect, are all forms of this.

Another point I'd like to make is in the word "copyright." Also known as, the right of copy. Copies... rights... I think someone had this discussion before us. And I think I won in that discussion. Of course, it doesn't mean I'm right, but it's something to think about.

Think of it this way...

A website is hosting an electronic raffle. The website only wants to sell tickets to the first 100 people. A person can buy a ticket for $10.

Let's say Pirate Pete buys an electronic ticket for $10. Then, he copies the ticket and distributes it to 9,999,900 other pirates. The raffle has one million people participating in it, but only 100 of those actually paid for their ticket. When the raffle is drawn, the people who actually paid for their ticket have a lower chance of winning. If a pirate wins, the pirate has gotten something for nothing, even if the prize was a virtual item.

If a website creates a raffle, should that website be be allowed to set the rules for the raffle as long as they obey the government's laws? Yes.

Is it fair if someone breaks the rules of the raffle? No.

Is it fair if a rule-breaker has a chance of winning the prize? No.

Is it fair if a rule-breaker wins the prize? No.

Replace the raffle with a program, and the prize with server time, and you have piracy. And even if you say, "Well, piracy doesn't hurt others, it doesn't harm other people's programs," that is correct. But the main point is the last question: is it fair if a rule-breaker wins the prize? No, it is not fair to get something for nothing.

Whether piracy can be classified as stealing is irrelevant. Piracy is, by definition, taking something (or the rights to use something) without authorization from the proper person.

The question is whether piracy is moral.

If you created a large, time-consuming program that cost thousands of dollars to develop, would you want one person to buy it at full price, and let a million people have it for free? I doubt it.

I have yet to hear a valid justification for piracy.

If the question of whether piracy or moral or not is relevant, then the question of whether its stealing or not is also relevant by way of stealing being immoral.

You're thinking is flawed... If someone made an internet raffle, they generate 100 different keys. They sell those keys to 100 people. If a pirate decides he is stupid enough to share his key, it doesn't make more keys, it's just 9,999,900 copies of the exact same key and now, he knows for sure that if he wins, someone else will claim it before he does. Anyways... Now, when it's time to decide who the winner will be, there are still 100 keys to pick from, and 10,000,000 person waiting to see how it turns out. (Possibly free advertisements)

Also, I found this. I didn't read it all, but it was pretty interesting.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jul 1 2011, 5:50 pm by Apos. Reason: Wow! I keep on making English mistakes!

His thinking isn't flawed, because in his analogy the pirate just copies the online ticket which happens to be the same for everyone. Maybe all the ticket does is let you access a site where you can create an account, then an account is randomly chosen, not a ticket number. The point here is to analyze the concepts that the analogy highlights, not find useless flaws in the analogies we're using to get to the concepts. He's trying to show by analogy that piracy isn't fair to those of us who legitimately pay for our products/services, it really doesn't matter what comparison he uses.

Well said

In that case, the story makes no sense and his conclusion is flawed. (If you make a raffle, you need to have a way to verify the winner really won and not someone else. And there should be a maximum of 100 account anyways...)
The people that paid for the product got the product. Even if there are a lot of pirates, they can still use it the same way as if there were no pirates at all.

Also, it's not useless flaws. If you make an analogy and it has flaws, the conclusion has to be flawed.
Horses eat apples.
I eat apples.
Therefore, I am a horse.
If you say that the point is not the find useless flaws, you are wrong. (...not find useless flaws in the analogies we're using to get to the concepts)

Also, I have read the while essay that I posted above, and it's very well written. It gives some very strong arguments about why everything should be free (For softwares at least).

My point was that the analogy is simply a comparison we use in order to illustrate the concepts we wish to convey. If you think the concepts are flawed, say so, but there's no point knocking down an analogy if we can simply say "piracy isn't fair to those of us who pay for the product," or if we can just come up with another analogy that fits the bill. Perhaps you're right about his particular case, I don't particularly think the analogy was that great either, but I think he still has a point.

As for why all software should be free, in an ideal world I have no doubt that it should be so. However, its likely that all the arguments made are based on the assumption of a socialistic society and not an individualist society, that is, a society in which the participants sacrifice personal freedoms in order for the betterment of the entire society, and not a society in which the individual is respected as a free entity who must sacrifice only those freedoms which would impose upon other individuals.

Edit:
I'd like to clarify, showing that an analogy doesn't show the point you mean it to is perfectly natural in these sorts of discussions, but knocking down an analogy that doesn't affect the logic or point of the matter at hand is useless. Maybe I wasn't being clear about that.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 2 2011, 4:35 am by Vrael.

Exactly. The person who designs the software has the right to put a price tag on it. However, games do come with licencing agreements. These agreements usually give you the right to use the game, but you still do not own it.
You aren't buying the car, you are renting it indefinetly. The owner still has full rights regarding the ownership of it. You can't rent a car, and then give it to a friend as a gift, it doesn't work like that. Sure a game is infinite, and a game is not, but that's not the point. When you buy a game you do not legally own it; you own the disc and the case that it came in, but you do not own the game.

Interesting. That had some actual logic behind it. I read all of it. For those who haven't read it yet, what it comes down to is: "If everyone shared, things would be better."

Under this logic, books should be free, music should be free, pictures should be free, movies should be free, etc. It's like "Communism is great in theory, but terrible in practice." Thus It would be great if all software became free, but unfortunately, it probably won't anytime soon. The current American mindset would not allow this. Society takes time to change.

So a question arises: Is mass piracy the way to make all software free?

Can anyone provide a counter-argument to the points listed in the article? Besides "All software will not become free anytime soon," I can't think of any.

As I predicted, the arguments in the article are all based upon the foundation of benefitting society and not the individual. If you accept that good of society is higher, more important, or above your own personal good, then there are no arguments to refute this paper.

One major thing I'd like to point out however, regardless of any underlying beliefs about society v. the individual, is that the author assumes the lack of having a program to be strictly a negative effect, whereas I would say it is simply "nonpositive."

Theres also one part where he says that signing a license agreement is signing an agreement to deprive your neighbor of the program, which isn't true. You don't have to "deprive" him of it, which is obviously a negative effect, you simply can't give it to him for free. In fact, if you let him come over to your house and use your computer, it could actually be a positive effect, and if you're letting him use your copy, you're clearly not depriving him of it. The point is, by signing the agreement you're not obligated to call the police if you learned he pirated it, you're not obligated to destroy his computer, threaten him, or otherwise forcefully ensure he does not recieve or use a copy of the program. You just can't let him copy yours.

Sorry for the confusion... I had to write my last post within 5 minutes so I didn't have time to format it and work on it. It may have seemed harsh, but I think Vrael has corrected me pretty well in his next post.

Also, about the article: In the bible, it says that "A Worker is Worthy of His Wages" (Luke 10:7). A programmer should not be working for nothing, he has a family to feed. The people that use the program have to support that developer.

You have to see a developer as an investor; he may not get paid right away, but in the long term, he gets his due, just not the same way.

A pirate works for nothing.

You should probably read this then: Hacker/Pirate Interaction in the Computer Underground.

I'm not reading thread, but as I was quoted in OP:

I pirate things not readily available/I'm not going to play, just extract information out of (VNs, korean games, touhou) or games that I'd really like to play but don't want to shell out the money they are asking for it (oblivion was the last game which I play and I pirated).

Rather than pirate, I just don't buy games. Unfortunately that means the exact same thing to the industry.

I also have "borrowed" games from other people and made an image of the CDs and copy down the cdkey, but they are mostly old (doom 3, halo, stalker).

I am a big opponent of intellectual property, as I do not think that a good idea should necessarily be ridiculously lucrative. If the idea is indeed useful, it will be lucrative no matter what, as it will sell, so long as the idea is about a physical object. Software, games, and digital art are a bit different. They do not physically exist, and probably shouldn't be sellable. However, excellent programs for media editing like photoshop and sony vegas are clearly better than their freeware alternatives because the company can afford to pay developers. While I don't use them, I certainly enjoy their benefits, as most of the web was made in photoshop, and a lot of movies were made in sony vegas.

Mainstream games are another problem, since they clearly need to cost money considering the amount of work put into them. Other games which are free to use may rely on donations or cost very little (Minecraft doesn't cost much but it's made heaps and heaps). The problem here is policing the game to make sure people pay. I don't think there's any good way to do this.

Thinking back to GNU...

So, if all software should be free, does that mean the source code for encrypted databases should be made available to the public? If not, where is the boundary drawn?

Free software != open source.