Phatose on 18/12/2008 at 14:30
Quote Posted by dethtoll
The
point was, just because you make something illegal doesn't mean people will stop doing it. And worse, by criminalizing software piracy, you're just going to make pirates more dangerous. When hardcore pirates start to fear being raided by the po-po, what do you think they'll do? They'll arm themselves. Oh wait, that's illegal too in some places, so I guess nobody will do that either.
You can't force restrictive DRM on people. They won't accept it. They'll either steal it or not buy it. Either way it's a lost sale and no amount of government involvement is going to improve profits until legitimate customers are no longer treated like criminals for the crime of
buying something. The music industry is slowly starting to figure this shit out. Sooner or later, so will the game industry- either that or they'll all run to consoles where the question of piracy is largely moot. Until then the best we can hope for is that the government stays the fuck out of it, because the only thing government can do is fuck everything up.
No wonder I missed the point. It makes no sense. Laws don't need to completely stop the behavior they're outlying to be justified as laws. If we applied those standards to everything, there would simply be no laws, because no law completely stops anything.
And righteous talk about the 'consumer' in a business with piracy numbers like these is laughable.
june gloom on 18/12/2008 at 19:34
It makes perfect sense. Hell, you said it yourself. Of course people aren't going to stop. That was the point!
But the point is also that criminalizing it just makes the problem worse. If you don't think it does then you're deluded.
Zygoptera on 18/12/2008 at 21:56
It isn't so much that it would make the problem worse as it is practically unworkable and, if actually implemented would have immense costs associated with it. More importantly, nobody involved really wants it.
Large scale 'counterfeiting' operations are already able to be dealt with under criminal law.
It is doubtful that a true 'prima facie' case could be established without great expense- the main obvious tool, IP addresses, is known to be deliberately seeded by false positives by sites such as TPB. In many places warrants required to proceed further, such as to investigate ISP records of activity or examine an accused's computer, would not be available if the only evidence is known to be tainted. Inevitably you end up with a situation where either the law is meaningless because it cannot be enforced, or the law requires enforcement to use precious resources, grant the police effective carte blanche to access ISP records and seize computers without hard evidence. And then, you have the difficulty of proving, to a criminal standard, that the person being prosecuted committed the crime, which almost certainly necessitates an expensive forensic examination of their computer, proving that someone else did not do it without the owners knowledge, his machine wasn't zombied by viruses or trojans etc etc etc.
Just look at the difficulty of breaking child porn rings (which I'm sure most would accept as being a good use of resources). Months and months of work by dedicated teams requiring huge amounts of forensic analysis amongst and across various countries. Is that really practical as a means to nab people downloading $50 copies of Crysis?
All that is irrelevant in any case because...
Even the software associations don't really want criminal prosecutions for low level piracy because it could end up with a whole lot of judgements they don't want on the legality of EULA and exactly what property rights you have to software. They far prefer the current system where they can use stand over tactics, their relatively deep pockets, general unavailability of legal aid and the low burden of proof of civil proceeding to more rigorous criminal proceedings where their sloppy methodologies may not gain them the results they desire.
And the absolute last thing they want is judges or juries deciding that things like downloading a game is ok if you own a retail copy- or if the DRM renders your retail copy unusable- that way leads to genuine format swapping rights for consumers, and they really don't want that.
Phatose on 18/12/2008 at 22:13
Right.
So it's impractical for the government to actually protect the content owners rights, so they don't. And the content owners are just OK with that, because they can use DRM to protect themselves.
And yet here we are, giving the creators shit for using technology to protect their investments.
So what the fuck are they supposed to do? Just continue to happily be ripped off?
june gloom on 18/12/2008 at 22:22
How about they use technology that actually works? i.e. doesn't treat the customer like a criminal and isn't easily cracked by pirates?
There you go. Problem solved.
Chade on 18/12/2008 at 22:57
Oh, ok. I'll just go and find a product that actually works and doesn't treat the customer like a criminal and isn't easily cracked by pirates.
...
*Welcome to happy la la land*
Found it!
june gloom on 19/12/2008 at 00:10
Never said it actually existed yet.
Chade on 19/12/2008 at 00:24
Problem not solved?
june gloom on 19/12/2008 at 00:34
god there aren't enough airplanes in the world
You speak ENGLISH, don't you? What is so hard to understand about what I said? When the echnology that properly protects the developer (ie is difficult to crack) while being fair to the customer is invented the problem is solved.
Are you being intentionally dense?
Chade on 19/12/2008 at 00:46
Quote Posted by Phatose
So what the fuck are they supposed to do? Just continue to happily be ripped off?
Quote Posted by dethtoll
How about they use technology that actually works? i.e. doesn't treat the customer like a criminal and isn't easily cracked by pirates?
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Never said it actually existed yet.
Intentionally dense?
