these are dark times for torrenters...

[Dy7SLyTq]

so lets see... silk roads down... tors been not cracked but ruined, and isohunt is going to be shut down. lets just bloat the worth of bitcoins while were at it...

[BHX]

They have been slowly shutting down torrent sites for years now. Saw this coming to be honest.

[EDIT] Fixed typos.

[S6k9GNh0]

Eh, given the nature of torrenting sites... I'm not for some of the laws being passed to prevent p2p data transfer, data monitoring, non-warranted searches and arrests but it's clearly gotten out of hand. While it doesn't affect visual media much, it certainly affects indie artists of games, music, and so on.

I hate DRM but it pains me to see a smaller game get pummeled by people who think its okay to rip it off from a torrenting site.

Of course, I wasn't against sites like underground-gamers which is now down. Some of these sites held very valuable items that can't even be found now adays nor were 99% of it available for commercial purchase anymore.

Anyways, the worlds going to hell as far as digital licensing and such are concerned... just have to wait for it to settle to determine whats going to happen.

[BHX]

@computerquip
I agree, I think it will get worse before it gets better. I think it will ultimately be in favor of media sharing in some form, but that will only happen if and when they can reach an understanding of how it should be shared. Don't get me started on DRM though.

[knn9]

The only site mentioned that I've heard of is isohunt.

Didn't demonoid recently resurface as new site(demonoidv2, with all account info still intact)? There are actually a large number of private torrent sites and trackers.

TPB continues strong even after all the legal troubles so I doubt they will be giving in any time soon.

Torrents are convenient but certainly not the only way to acquire pirated media online.

[BHX]

@knn9
Believe me the media industry's gestapo will go after anyone and everyone just to force their rules on how we can use media and the mediums of media.

[3qX21hU5]

Believe me the media industry's gestapo will go after anyone and everyone just to force their rules on how we can use media and the mediums of media.

And they have a right to. They made the product and if they want to sell it they can. If they want to put measures into place to stop people from stealing it they can.

If people try to download it without paying for it it's stealing plain and simple. It's no different then going to a gas station and filling up your tank and then driving off and not paying. You are getting the product for nothing and the person selling the product is losing money.

Many people don't understand the damage that torrenting paid games or media can do (I hope most people here do since it affects our industry directly). There have been many projects that have gone broke from it and more then likely it is small projects that are just starting out in the industry.

I have asked many people if they think downloading movies or software is bad and they will answer no they don't think so, but when I ask them if they think stealing gas or stuff from stores is bad they mostly will answer yes. I don't get it.

Now don't get me wrong I am all for sharing and what have you but the developers of the projects need to make money. Projects are not cheap and if torrenting keeps on increasing in the rate it has been we will have serious problems and you will see some major changes in products (Most likely not good changes either).

[ResidentBiscuit]

I don't feel bad if music by major record companies get pirated. That whole industry is such a mess anyways. Artists make a small percentage of any profit that is actually made.

The only music I buy anymore is by independent artists. I'm not going to help fund a bunch of greedy publishers.

[Mats]

What about smaller labels?

[BHX]

@Zereo
The problem is that in this age of technology and internet, labels are putting more music and media online as downloads so pirating them takes less effort. I mean I bought a song under my account on amazon.com, downloaded it to my linux laptop, then used the usb port to copy it to my wife's cell phone and MP3 Player.

I understand how pirating hurts them, but that is why they started doing DRM for almost all commercial PC games. The thing I love is when people say, "I pirate them to see if I like them and if I do then I delete that and buy the real game." That may sound nice in practice, but it is utter bull. The percentage that says that and really does it is probably less than 1% of those who pirate things. I blow money on the movies, games, and music I like and I'm not about to give out the things I buy for others to not have to buy it.

[Disch]

I was trying to stay out of the lounge... but it keeps pulling me back in!

Regarding torrent sites going down:

This means nothing. There have been numerous generations of online piracy, and history has shown that shutting them down is extremely difficult, not only because of the enormous userbase, but also because as soon as you shut one down, another one pops up to replace it.

Torrents are especially difficult to stop because the sites themselves don't actually host the data being shared.

And shutting down 4 or 5 torrent sites means nothing to people who know to use a search engine which searches other torrent search engines (ie: torrentz -- which isn't actually a torrent site, but searches 2 dozen other torrent sites)

Regarding DRM

I thought it was abandoned? DRM just encouraged piracy because the copy you steal is "clean" versus the DRM version which you can have taken away whenever they decide to change their policies.

xkcd summed it up well:
http://xkcd.com/488/

Regarding the morality of pirating

I do it all the time and I don't have any reservations about it.

I could come up with reasons why it "really isn't so bad", but they'd be rationalizations.

Quite frankly, I don't care about any of the industries I pirate from. I wouldn't shed a tear if Hollywood shut down... or if the only music available with local/independent music (which will never disappear no matter how bad pirating gets)... or if there isn't a new FPS every month.


To me, it's more an issue of "get with the times or get lost". Pirating has been around for years now. And it's not showing any signs of slowing down. So if you're in an industry that's susceptible to it, you have to work around it. If a company is unable to do that, all that says to me is that company is archaic and unable to keep up with the times.


EDIT:

Mats wrote:

What about smaller labels?

This kind of hits my point. What really is the purpose of a record label? In the old days they existed to actually press and distribute your record. Nowadays, you can just upload your music to the net for free. So they don't really serve a purpose anymore. They're an artifact from a bygone era, and are becoming more and more obsolete.

[chrisname]

I'd really just like to see the publishing industry finally just roll over and die. Publishers cry about how piracy steals from the artist, and then Activision goes and shuts down Troika Games but still wants £5.99 for Vampire: The Masquerade.

p.s. If you're like me and you want to pay the creators of games, but you don't want DRM-addled crap from greedy publishing houses, go to GoG.com - they sell DRM-free games for reasonable prices. They're a subsidiary of the developer of the Witcher games.

[S6k9GNh0]

Disch, sadly, no. Amazon streams are DRM ridden, some AAA games are DRM ridden, so on. Quite an infamous case is from Blizzard's Diablo 3: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/diablo3

I'm not entirely against DRM... e.g. Steam is a type of DRM (although not as restrictive as others by any means). It certainly helps indie games and the service itself makes it convenient to buy games in a centralized place. Offline mode works quite a bit better than what it did back in the day as well.

[BHX]

Yes, DRM can be done right, but sadly everyone seems to follow the wrong way to do it. I agree GoG.com is a great site and use it regularly and use Steam too.

[xismn]

I agree with Disch. Piracy has been around since forever. This means that industries should spend their time figuring out how to stay afloat with piracy, rather than trying to figure out how to get rid of it. I like how Valve handles this. Their policy is to provide a better deal than the pirates can give you.

[BHX]

Oh I agree that piracy has been around forever and will be around forever. I don't agree that the industry should turn a blind eye to it and just figure how to stay afloat. It doesn't take rocket science to realize piracy could cause a company to be shutdown. Since I'm a game programmer I'll use myself as an example.

Obviously I wouldn't bother with DRM or any security, I would just make the game, publish it and hope to profit. Now lets say, hypothetically, I made a simple, but popular RPG with me and about three other people. Let's say I pay them a couple of hundred each out of pocket for their services (music and art, just for argument's sake). I'm out $600 at release time and charge $10 a copy so that 60 copies sold and I break even. Now, let's say I end up selling 90 copies (have to have an ego for this example and think it was popular) so I get my $600 back and $300 profit.

Now wait, I said it was popular and had no anti-piracy catches on it. So let's say I do a search and find that across three torrent sites my rpg has been downloaded by about 300 users each. Thanks to piracy I just lost the equivalent of 900 people buying a copy and making $9000 just disappear into the ether.

This is the exact same scenario the game industry is facing day in and day out. Only catch is they are putting in millions of dollars into making the games so the more that game loses the less likely it is to have a sequel and if it does it will get less money next time so it won't be as good. There are already game companies and houses that are being bought out and closed or closing because they can't get their game off the ground, add piracy to the mix and they may start taking drastic measure to stop piracy and may even result in games costing more than the $50/$60 they do now.

[VitaDev]

So let's say I do a search and find that across three torrent sites my rpg has been downloaded by about 300 users each. Thanks to piracy I just lost the equivalent of 900 people buying a copy and making $9000 just disappear into the ether.

The only problem with this scenario is you have no way of proving that these people would have bought the game if it wasn't available for free through piracy. Many people will pirate a game just because it's easy, but wouldn't have bought the game if that was the only option otherwise.

add piracy to the mix and they may start taking drastic measure to stop piracy and may even result in games costing more than the $50/$60 they do now.

Back in the SNES era, games were much harder to pirate and cost ~$90+. Now games are 60$, because optical media is much easier to mass-produce. PS1 games were notoriously easy to pirate and cost 50$. PS3 games are only 10$ more, but only because BD-Roms cost just a bit more to produce then regular CD-Roms and HD assets cost substantially more to produce (time and manpower) than low-rez/SD ones. PS3 games are *still* cheaper than SNES games and SNES games were practically un-pirateable (and from what I've read it's still extremely hard to pirate PS3 games). This is not even taking inflation into account.

[Disch]

BHXSpecter wrote:

Now wait, I said it was popular and had no anti-piracy catches on it. So let's say I do a search and find that across three torrent sites my rpg has been downloaded by about 300 users each. Thanks to piracy I just lost the equivalent of 900 people buying a copy and making $9000 just disappear into the ether.

You are assuming that everyone who pirated the game would have purchased it if piracy wasn't an option. That is not the case. Most would simply not have purchased/played it.

[BHX]

Disch wrote:

You are assuming that everyone who pirated the game would have purchased it if piracy wasn't an option. That is not the case. Most would simply not have purchased/played it.

Nope, you are assuming that I'm assuming that. In fact I already had thought of that, but it still doesn't erase the fact, if a person pirates it, plays it off and on and beats it that means I'm out the $10 I should have gotten for it. My cousin pirated COD4 and to this day still plays it on PC off and on meaning he took $60 out of the companies pocket even though he goes on about how much the COD series "has always sucked".

The logic behind your argument doesn't fly well though. People usually only pirate things that interest them, and pirate them to avoid having to pay to get what they want. Therefore if they are playing the game, it means they would have bought it, but took the free way out. Just like if a store came out saying "All Pizzas are free" you would have people getting 30+ even though they have pizza once every 3 months or more.

VitaDev wrote:

Now games are 60$, because....

I don't even have to finish that quote. Games are $60 now because the companies can get away with pricing them like that. It has nothing to do with the media format. For example, most PC games are still released on DVDs but are still $50-$60 a pop, while I can go to my local store and buy a box of a 100 blank DVDs to burn to for a little less than $30. Just like with gas, when I started driving gas here was $1.60 a gallon, and the price of the drums has not increased that much and now it is $3 almost $4 a gallon just because the companies are greedy and want more of a profit. I mean come on, PS3 is the Bluray format, the exact same format as movies. Movies (unless they are special editions or something) cost only a couple of bucks more than DVD (for example, I bought Iron Man 3 when it came out the DVD was $19.99, DVD and Digital Copy was $26.99 and Blu-Ray, DVD, and Digital Copy combo pack was $30)

Piracy has been around for centuries and while it has changed with the times, the underlying motive has always been the same. You don't steal/pirate because you need it, you do it because you want it. Piracy will be around forever, but there is nothing good about piracy. I could have paid $50/$60 to get COD4 on PC when it first came out, bought the 100 pack DVDs, burned 100 copies and sold them or even just gave them out to friends and such so we could play together and with others. Doing so would have made the store selling them, the company, devs, and all involved lose their share of the $5000/$6000 I just made them lose with my single action.

Money is coveted too high. People are willing to resort to taking things without paying just to save a few dollars.

[chrisname]

BHXSpecter wrote:

Nope, you are assuming that I'm assuming that. In fact I already had thought of that, but it still doesn't erase the fact, if a person pirates it, plays it off and on and beats it that means I'm out the $10 I should have gotten for it.

No, you actually are assuming that. Your argument is that if a person plays a game without paying for it, then the developer loses out on the cost of the game, but that carries the assumption that the person would have paid for it otherwise. If they wouldn't have paid for it, then what has the developer lost, really? The comparison to theft does not stand up because theft of a physical item removes that physical item, which must then be replaced, whereas illegally copying data does not -- the original copy still exists and can be almost infinitely reproduced at very little cost. At worst, the developer has lost a potential customer, a potential $60: $60 that does not exist. The developer has lost nothing while the pirate has gained something -- how is that the same as theft?

And it's all well and good for the industries to cry "theft!", as they wrap everything with region locks, DRM and cover everything with ads. Maybe if publishing companies and record labels learned not to treat consumers with such contempt and disregard, consumers wouldn't respond by saying "Screw your region locks, DRM and ads; these guys will give me the same service for free and without all the crap". Not only does the publishing industry expect you to accept the crap they shove down your throat, but they expect you to pay for the privilege of having it in the first place, and if you refuse, you're branded a thief and they sue you into oblivion while making themselves out to be the vanguard of the defenceless artists that they exploit left, right and centre. I mean, let's take the music industry for example. An artist spends a few years struggling to get signed. Finally, it happens. They get an advance from the record label. They spend the advance on recording their album. Now they have to pay the advance back in full to the label, often with extra fees, while making nothing off of album sales because the label takes a good 90+% of it (and that's once the advance is paid off - the artist doesn't get anything until then). Then the band goes on tour in support of their new album. They book a venue (read: pay the venue lots of money). The venue sells tickets and keeps about 80% of the ticket sales money, with some going to the retailer and the rest (the minority) going to the artist; so not only does the artist have to pay for the venue, but they don't even get much of the money from the sales. Their actual profit is tiny, and this is for reasonably popular bands (IIRC, the Foo Fighters make something like $2,000 per show and that's before paying their crew and splitting it up between band members) -- smaller bands often make a loss. So how else can they make money? "Merchandise", you say? How does $4 per $20 t-shirt sound?

Why are you supporting this horrible system? It's disgusting, it's exploitation at it's finest, and then they pass the blame onto the consumers and do whatever they can get away with.

if they are playing the game, it means they would have bought it, but took the free way out

No it doesn't. I used to pirate games because I usually didn't have access to money. Now, I pirate tactically because I want to encourage the industry to make games worth buying. Besides that, there are plenty of other reasons people pirate things. There's the reasons I listed above (namely, that the publishing industry is a noxious cesspool of human exploitation passing itself off as knights in shining armour defending the innocent artists from heartless thieves like me; and that the industry doesn't care a wink about its consumers and in fact actively pursues new and innovative means to treat them with ever increasing levels of contempt), but there's also the more obvious reason that some people just can't afford to pay the prices. It's pretty obvious when you look at the demographics of piracy and notice that the areas of the world with the most piracy are regions like eastern Europe and Asia that are wealthy enough to have the technology to play games and DVDs, but don't have the kind of disposable income to drop on $60* games and movies.

* also don't forget that, unlike GoG.com, most places don't charge fair prices around the globe: Steam, for example, operates on a $1 = €1 scheme, which means that a $20 game on Steam costs almost $30 in the EU.

just because the companies are greedy and want more of a profit

Why are you using this statement to back up your conclusion that piracy is wrong? It's like saying "let's not punish murderers because murderers are bloodthirsty and just want to kill people."

Piracy has been around for centuries

I think you may be confusing the different meanings of the word "piracy"... I hope you don't really think the pirates of the 18th century were attacking ships in order to copy their digital media without paying for it...

You don't steal/pirate because you need it, you do it because you want it

Thank you for that salient insight. All this time I had been wondering what motivated me to piracy. Was it the fast cars, the women, the glamorous lifestyle? Was it out of some Robin Hoodian drive to redistribute wealth? No, it was because I wanted things and didn't want to pay for them. Thank you, good doctor, for opening my eyes.

Money is coveted too high. People are willing to resort to taking things without paying just to save a few dollars.

He said, wrapping up his argument about the value of money.