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| Piracy is stealing. Stealing is a crime. I can't think of any exeptions to that syllogism. |
As a reader of video game news sites, I find a disturbing number of people happy to defend pirating copyrighted material. This is just a bit of what I would say to them if I could remember my log in and password to those sites:
To the people arguing piracy is nothing more than "trying before you buy," show me any statistic that piracy leads to a purchase.
The cost of not knowing what a game is like is not knowing what a game is like, not pirating it.
You wouldn't walk into a Best Buy, tuck a game under your shirt, and walk out. How is that any different than downloading a copy of a game or movie you did not purchase? Would you say to the arresting officer "I didn't want to blind-buy?"
And I've heard the excuse "They didn't lose my money because I wouldn't have played/watched it anyway." The price of not seeing something is not seeing something, not finding a way to see it and not pay for it.
And to the people who say it doesn't hurt the industry -- of course it does. A certain segment of the population is stealing instead of paying. That is lost revenue by any measure.
I agree for the most part. But I do pirate occasionally, and I believe in warranted fashion. For example, I hate popping in a disc for my kids to watch and having to skip through all the terrible crap before the movie actually begins. So I buy the movie, sometimes never even open the case, and put a pirated digital copy on my PS3. No fuss, no hassle.
ReplyDeleteSome of the movies have started shipping with digital copies as a bundle, but it's still somewhat rare.