
Sometimes It's OK To Steal My Games - aaronbrethorst
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/07/sometimes-its-ok-to-steal-my-games.html
======
yason
His last chapter really has the point.

Back in the days when I played new games (maybe late-80's to mid-90's), I
pirated most of the games. Of course. I didn't have the money to buy them and
everyone was doing it so piracy was _the_ distribution channel. I don't feel
guilty about it because if couldn't have bought all those games anyway.
Instead, I feel even cherished because it was piracy that let me get much
enjoyment out of the various titles which in turn made my nerdful youth much
richer and tolerable. The game programmers had their starving families but I
was in no position whatsoever to really make any real difference there.

But the thing is that I always bought _some_ games.

Sometimes I bought one game per year, or maybe it was three per year some
other year, depending on how much money I happened to get for my birthday.
Further, it wasn't so much because I wanted to altruistically feed the
programmer's family but that I saw value in owning an original copy of a
really good game, with the box and the manuals, and I recognized the value of
the programmers' work: the entertainment that came with a really good game.

If I had been the rich kid down the block I could have bought 10 or 30 games a
year. But I wasn't and I was conscientiously happy to pay for what I could and
pirate the rest.

This brings me to the software market as I want to see it.

The market is a pool of games and software, unfortunately priced so that only
some people can buy them. And some people who might buy some, can't legally
copy and try it out before deciding to buy or not. Therefore, I see value in
considering games and software, in the end, more like common goods to which
everyone has _some_ rights. Not perhaps as important rights as to roads and
water, but as something that costs zero to copy software begs for common
copyrights.

And if it is so, the only way to pay for such thing is the pay-what-you-can
model. You can't force people to buy your stuff anyway. I believe that the
market, together with piracy, already exhibits this property quite strongly.

~~~
sonofjanoh
I couldn't have put it better. You described my childhood. Although I have
paid the pirates to get the tapes and later disks I don't feel guilty as they
did some collateral good too by driving me towards IT. You have to get to know
the environment before judging someone. Back in the early 90s there was
absolutely NO software market and you got no access to any information
whatsoever as from a 100$/month/household there is not much money to be made
for a publisher. Now I buy games even if I don't play some but the developer
strikes a chord in me and I just end up liking his/her attitude and the
support I can I will give him. I buy the special games and that extends to
music as well. Thanks to piracy I learned English and opened my eyes and mind
and now I am happy to give back and I'm pretty sure if it wouldn't be for my
savings spent on pirates I couldn't write this and couldn't have gone to see
my favourite bands playing live and I feel I can give back. Just note that
paying for a single pirated Z80 game I paid high prices...but it was worth it.

------
patio11
Unless gamers are even more obnoxious than my mental image of us, isn't this
fairly easily solvable by writing back "I'm sorry you can't afford the game,
$NAME. Tell you what, I keep a few copies around for reviews by magazines and
the like, and would be happy to give you one. Your CD key is... Thanks for
your continued support of indie game companies." You can then go on to mention
non-monetary ways to compensate you, like mentioning your generosity on the
front page of Reddit, which apparently works quite well.

The "I don't want to ask for a handout" factor alone will probably keep people
in line. If you're worried, you can give their requests individualized
attention and weigh the pros and cons of their sob story, but that is almost
certainly not an effective use of your time.

~~~
roc
How many emails do you think he'll get after the kid _does_ write a love-
letter to digg about how awesome Jeff Vogel is? How many from other Indian and
Chinese kids, and how many from scammers and dirtbags?

The unfortunate effect of rewarding a request for a freebie online is that it
attracts dirtbags who will drown out the voices of the people you actually
want to help.

If you think the stigma against begging will keep people in line, let me
congratulate you on your good fortune to date. You clearly have never seen a
good thing ruined by dirtbags or met such a dirtbag and heard them crow about
how they lied/scammed/cheated their way into a share of someone else's
generosity with nary a thought to those crowded out.

~~~
crystalis
You might want to know about these things before disagreeing so vehemently:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492920>

~~~
roc
I guess that kind of marketing approach is something Jeff should consider as
an indy dev, but a possible benefit to him from exposure doesn't seem to have
much to do with whether handing out free CD Keys to every email with a SOB
story is practical or effective at actually helping the people he would like
to help.

------
derefr
> If you like PC games but you usually pirate them, I want you to start
> actually paying for one game a year. Just one. Please

Isn't that practically equivalent to saying "donate $50 to your favorite game
company each year"? It's money they weren't planning to give out, and they'll
receive the same product either way—so it's a donation.

~~~
davidbr02
No more so than it would be a donation to a car dealership if a car thief
bought a car.

~~~
eru
Not really. Copying games doesn't destroy anything.

~~~
maushu
Time.

It destroys the time it took the developer to make the game.

~~~
ajuc
No it doesn't - developer took the time to make a game and no matter what
people will do this time was spent ("destroyed"). We could argue that copying
games destroys industry, but that's just word play (likewise computers
destroyed the industry of abacus makers and it was not theft). Anyway -
pirating is wrong, because you do sth with other peoples work, that they don't
want you to, why should we make it more evil by comparing it to thef I can't
understand.

~~~
nlawalker
>> more evil

Why/how is theft more evil than piracy?

~~~
rictic
ajuc's argument isn't that theft is more evil than piracy, it's that it is
dishonest to call piracy theft.

I would say that piracy is, in general, less evil than theft. Imagine that you
are a master forger, and can make a perfect copy of a work of art. Clearly it
is both a worse, and a different sort of harm for you to steal a painting than
it would be to make a copy of that painting.

This is why the law distinguishes infringement from stealing, and I would
argue that conflating the two is poisoning the well. Just because it is
impractical in most cases to steal digital works doesn't mean that
infringement upon them is stealing.

~~~
nlawalker
I agree that it's dishonest to call piracy theft in the truest sense of the
word, but I feel like the primary reason that most people rail against the
terms being conflated is because theft is a more familiar criminal concept to
most people and thus has a stronger connotation, and pirates would prefer it
if piracy wasn't actually a crime.

I strongly disagree that it is worse to steal something than it is to make a
copy of it (EDIT: when doing so is a violation of someone else's right to sell
it), especially when the "something" in question is digital data. Unlike a
painting, a copy of digital data is functionally equivalent to the master -
neither of them can be called a forgery, nor does one have more or less value
than the other. Additionally, the ability to produce copies of data is not a
talent or a skill. It is available to everyone.

This brings us to the center of the "information is free" argument: digital
data is essentially worthless, because it can be copied infinitely for
essentially no cost. The only way to associate value with it is to make it
artifically scarce, i.e. control copying.

Information may want to be free, but the people who produce it want to be
paid. The people who take the time and expend the effort to arrange or gather
data often do so with the intention of selling copies for money, or with the
intention of keeping one or a very limited number of copies for themselves
(such as the source code for your new startup. If piracy's OK, I hope you
don't mind me grabbing a copy and starting my own business.)

TL;DR: Piracy is theft of the author's ability to sell and protect their work.
Some may argue that works that can be replicated for free should not be able
to be sold, but I disagree. I like commercial software in addition to free
software, and I like being paid to be a software developer.

------
crystalis
"And pirating PC games is wrong because, were it not for that minority of
worthy souls who actually chip in, the industry that makes the games we love
would descend into a shadow realm of tiny ad-supported Flash games and
Farmville."

How does he deny the entire community of free A quality games? Dwarf Fortress,
Cave Story, N, Crawl...? I've got your flash game and your Farmville here, but
I know it's not what he was thinking.

There are plenty of other games in quite a few categories that are and always
have been free. There are worlds of innovation in every Ludum Dare, and for
more particular gamers, there are several amazing games coming out every year
from the different shmup and roguelike competitions. VVVVVV notwithstanding,
the masocore genre has been almost completely contained in the domain of free
indie games.

Note, also, the development of piracy resistant game platforms: League of
Legends, for example, provides their Dota-like and dedicated servers free of
charge, and get money from users from a store that sells cosmetic skins for
in-game characters. There are ways to extract value from players who don't
pay, won't pay, and are going to play. Most pirate copies of games give
incentives to recommend all your friends pirate, not buy, the game.

Do you think anyone who was making games for love and not money would release
Big Rig Racing?

~~~
crystalis
I hate doing this, but I have to ask- what did I do to get downvoted? This
post is a factual correction of his false dichotomy, and even if I show some
of my ideology (i.e., that free indie games have actually done a lot more for
ludology than AAA studios), is that really such an offensive notion that it
deserves an unexplained downvote? Do people deserve to get paid for their work
even if they don't want to get paid, and to the detriment of potential players
that don't pay in the land of mandatory recompense?

I'm just trying to figure out where I fell afoul, because I'm drawing blanks.

Most people on HN seem happy to let newspapers die because old business models
don't deserve to be propped up and live forever. However, some newspapers
actually provide some otherwise difficult to obtain services like entrenched
journalism. The absence of AAA studios in this hypothetical piracy death
situation is not going to lead to any similar dearth of original games.

Or did you really like Big Rig Racing?

Sigh.

~~~
Ardit20
Dude, you play games?

------
mootothemax
_Computers Exist In the Third World

Every so often, I get an e-mail in broken English from some kid in Russia or
southeast Asia or India_

Is Russia really classed as third-world?

~~~
ajuc
Apparently in USA it is, like the rest of Central and Eastern Europe:) Anyway
- in my country 10 years ago everybody was buying computers for their kids, it
was sth like 1000$ then, and it was 2-3 months of earnings for average family.
Software was pirated, almost by everybody. It was priced for companies, not
for normal people, because everybody assumed it will be only bought by
companies who need it, private people would pirate it, and they did. Earnings
are up today, but kids are used to pirating things. Still, when game is sold
with reasonable price (I would say 5-10$) it isn't pirated by normal people,
only jerks who won't buy anything no matter what. I would say in my region
people crossed the line between "piracy is neccesity" to "piracy is easy" in
the last 10 years. Of course mind set of computerized generation (30 years and
younger) is here to stay, so it will take long time before piracy will stop.

~~~
mootothemax
Heh, I moved to Poland last year and was surprised at how it's not only the
computer experts who pass around pirated stuff - basically if you have a
computer, you'll have pirated stuff on it. You've given me a good explanation
for why it's so widespread :)

------
ecaradec
This kind of humble post is the best protection against piracy, jerks never
pay for games anyway. Post like this remind you that if you want to continue
to play you have to give a little of your money. Of course, it's easier to do
when you are a small player that when you are EA but I would like EA to remind
people as nicely as this is why you pay games : so that there will be another
one sometimes... instead of putting insane DRM that get cracked anyway and
annoy real customers.

------
Super_Jambo
The argument made at the start (I did not make it beyond this) is terrible.

I like complex games. Complex games currently require copyright to be funded.
Therefore copyright is a necessity and breaking it is a crime akin to spoiling
the environment.

I'm not saying I disagree that copyright is a way society can provide an
incentive for complex information based goods.

But this issue is vastly more complex than he's making out.

How long does copyright need to exit for to provide the best balance between
incentive to the producers and the public good of old out of copyright media.

Does society really benefit from things like starcraft II or would we all be
just as happy with less complex information based products.

What would we get for entertainment if we didn't have copyright? Given the
complexity of some free Mods out there I'm going to go ahead and guess it's
abit different to the shadowy wasteland of flash games he suggests.

~~~
roc
The article is about the morality of pirating. As the overwhelming majority of
piracy occurs within months of release, length of copyright --or even the
existence of copyright-- is absolutely irrelevant to this discussion.

Perhaps you should restrict yourself to commenting on articles you did read?
How useful would it be if my reply to your post was firstly, and admission to
not having bothered to read it, but then few lines pointing out how complex
patent law and the economic effects are, and how neither the article, nor your
comment, bother addressing the larger issue?

