pbiggz, on 29 December 2011 - 10:10 AM, said:
i recall valve CEO Gabe Newell saying a quote something like: "Piracy stems from convenience, not price, if you want to stop piracy, you have to offer the pirates a better service". (i may be paraphrasing). Truer words have never been said.
I wrote this post for the "R.I.P. Demonoid" thread and by the time I finished, it was locked, LOL. So not wanting it to "go to waste", here I am. I talk a bit about my experience with Steam so I decided to quote pbiggs' statement, but I don't want my post to be misinterpreted. I think Steam is pretty good overall, I'm just a lot less likely to use it now.
There's nothing "WRONG" with file sharing, just like there's nothing wrong with sharing anything else. "Right" and "Wrong" are often relative notions anyway but that's beside the point. The war on file sharing is even more futile than the war on drugs. When people don't know how to mind their ******* business, you end up with these waste of time wars over **** you can't stop because no one has any business trying to stop it. You got people getting bigger jail sentences over corporate money horse **** than for things like rape & murder. Just because someone perceives a failure to gain doesn't mean they're right. The one making the claim bears the burden of proving it & even if they could prove it, so what? No one steals anything by copying code. The ease with which it can be reproduced makes it advantageous to both sides. The musician, studio, "artist" etc. can make an infinite number of copies of code to sell for nothing more than the cost of the electricity to produce & electronically distribute the copies. Same with the end user. The more common or easier something is to acquire, the less valuable it is. That's why things like gold & diamonds are expensive, yet water is not (not yet anyway). So there is only one answer that I can see to relieve all the stress that "pirate" hunters put themselves under, and that is to adjust the prices to reflect the value of the things they think they should have infinite control over.
I'm so sick of the word pirate. It's just a tactic used by the greedy to imply that people who are essentially minding their own business, are the bad guys. It's no different than a police officer handing you a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt. You're hurting no one, but there's revenue in it, and it offers a way for the real bad guys to try to make the legalized extortion victim look like the bad guy instead. You get a fine for not wearing a seatbelt 'cuz your government says it's baaaad mmmmmkay? It's "illegal", so that makes it "wrong", but if you want you can jump out've an airplane just for a thrill, pump yourself full of "legalized" heroin because you claim you're in pain, or you can go on over to somewhere like Afghanistan & toss yourself onto a land mine because your government said that's OK, and that means it must be, right?
It is a luxury to be able to produce music, movies, video games, TV shows etc. If all the players in the "show" business game were wiped from the face of the Earth tomorrow, we'd all get on just fine, but if we were to lose people like farmers, builders, doctors, engineers, scientists & anyone else that makes up the "backbone" of society, then we'd have something to complain about. Why don't you worry about things that really are problems, like drunk drivers, obesity & smoking related illnesses, religion, access to education, poverty, violent crime, health care, the oil industry, etc. and get the **** off the backs of people who are minding their own business. If the "pro" file sharing crowd recruited more lobbyists & threw more money at the law makers than the "anti" file sharing crowd, then things would swing the other way. So why isn't it so? Maybe the answer lies in where most of the money is, and always is. Or maybe one crowd is inherently more passive than the other, or maybe something else.
I remember when HL-2 came out on Steam and it was such a cluster **** that UK customers couldn't get their "legal" game, so many of them resorted to a hacked version which worked perfectly fine. I've bought many things off of Steam, because prices & convenience often come well within' the ranges that all other factors require them to be for an exchange to take place. Then Steam got hacked, credit card info got stolen. A couple months ago someone tried to buy something online using my card info. I don't know that the Steam incident is to blame, but I don't know that it isn't either. That's the first place my suspicions are natually gonna go. That or iTunes. I bought a movie off of iTunes recently. I then deleted it for the HDD space, and then when I wanted to download it again I couldn't. It's gone. Either I screwed something up, or I can add that to the list of reasons iTunes and Apple suck big fat dirty monster *****. This is also the reason I opted not to have PGI save my CC info (sorry guys, but I just don't trust that kinda thing now). The point is, to get paid for creating things that are almost infinitely easy to reproduce, and that are absolutely not necessary for survival or even comfort, but that are only entertainment, things have to be done in a way to make it more attractive to a potential buyer. Like maybe Jim Carrey is just gonna have to settle for 5 or 10 million ******* dollars per movie even though he thinks his stupid faces are worth $20 million. Make it attractive for the consumer to pay something and they will, otherwise, in the case of the majority of things that wouldn't have been bought anyway, the consumer does without and so do the profiteers on the other side.
There's also something to be said about advertising. Metallica was all for sharing when they were nobody, now they **** all over it. ******* hypocrites. I don't care if you're in favor of sharing or not. If you don't like it and don't agree with it, just like if you don't agree with doing drugs, or **** sex, then don't do it, but mind your business and leave other people alone. The state of the switches, particles, molecules & atoms inside my hardware that I bought & paid for, are my business, and no one elses. If my neighbor needed a 20mm wrench to fix something on his car & I lend him mine, would Mastercraft have the right to raise a stank? Would they try? What if I had the resources, like a drop forge and a CNC mill (or a cruder system like hammer, anvil & grinder) to make him one using my equipment and my wrench as a guide? So then Mastercraft, or any company that makes wrenches available in the area is gonna try to argue that I cost them a sale and try to have me punished for it if they got wind of it? If he couldn't borrow my wrench, then maybe he would've taken it to a mechanic instead. The only difference with electronic code is that it's so easy to replicate & consequently, it's very common. When code writers/distributors use the ease of replication to their advantage by making it more advantageous to consumers rather than ******** all over how consumers take it upon themselves to exploit that ease, then customers will come. When they make it enticing enough, then they will come. Steam does a pretty good job. They have their problems like anyone, but Gabe had the right vision & adapted, rather than trying to fight a pointless war.
Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If no one's buying what you're selling, then try selling something else. If making music, or video games, or movies isn't profitable, then grab a job growing wheat, or making toilets, or mining copper. Those are what'cha call "REAL" jobs. I'm sure the "creation" of "art" has its frustrations, but it's a luxury to be able to do so. Everyone can't be famous, everyone can't be rich, & everyone can't be paid to "entertain" even if they want to be.
If the entertainment industry gets into real trouble, maybe the governments that decide what's "right" and "wrong" can hand them some big fat bail out dollars by volunteering the public to pay for that which was produced, yet not valued by said public enough for the public to volunteer their money on their own. Just like they did for the banks, and the car companies. How's that for "right" and "wrong"?
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