Willy, I was referring to a certain nine judge panel that resides in D.C. and is currently fucking around and leaving us hanging. May the lot of them rot. The lower level rulings have gone both ways and the country is split, that's why the DMCA was passed to start with, EULA's were being tossed in half the country and upheld in the other half.

Will you ever buy a Ferrari? No. Does that justify stealing one? No.



Yes. Many people buy candy. Which will henceforth serve as my example.



Yes, and people will steal candy bars from stores. If caught, guess what? They still have to deal with the law.



That's like saying a candy bar holds no value in a hypothetical sale because it's a sample.



And if somebody likes M&Ms enough when they first steal them, they might buy M&Ms the next time they go into a store. However, I'd like to see a court rule that stealing a candy bar is justified by a potential future sale.

Sorry, theft is theft, future potential sale or not.



And a thief stealing a candy bar might buy gasoline for his car. Who cares?



It simply means reasoning about your actions. It does not mean your actions are always in your best interest. You could possibly act in the interest of others at the expense of yourself.



Blizzard just won a case against a bot designer, successfully suing him for violating their terms of use. The case isn't over yet, but he could be facing some serious punishment. I'd say that's far from head smashing.



If we have no law, we have no way of guaranteeing rights. If we have no guarantee of rights, then people will violate them, that's our nature. What we end up with is total chaos and lots of violence.

We're not pretending that the ideal is reachable. However, that does not mean we give up and let total chaos reign. One extreme is unreachable, but the other extreme is undesirable. So what we do is we move away from the undesirable as much as we can. No, we can't be perfect, but that's not the point. The point is that we do the best we can with what we have. The journey is worth it, even though the goal won't be seen in this life.

Think of it like economics: Does a company ever get exactly the numbers they predict? No, often they will be a bit above or a bit below. Sometimes a lot. Does that mean we give up on economics because our predicted numbers are not perfect to every digit? Of course not. Just because you can't do something perfectly doesn't mean you stop trying altogether. That's silly.



We're not saying Utopia exists. We've figured out ways to deal with it. You just don't like the ways we've chosen to deal with it.

Certain provisions have been tossed, but no court has ruled EULAs are uninforcable in their entirety. The problem with waiting for a Supreme Court ruling is that it often take 10-15 years for a case to work it's way up the system (except in very narrow circumstances). And not all cases warrant higher appeals. If a higher court believes the issue was addressed well enough, they have no need to rehear the case.



I believe his point is that that you don't need to intend to break the law to do so. For instance, it is physically impossible to follow the legal turn signal intervals in some situations, such as turning left immediately after a right turn in under the (insert your state law minimum) feet required for proper signalling.

Yep. And thanks to the mass of sucker non-pirates, I get more games to steal in the future. Even if I don't pay, I get games in the future. Why be one of the payers when it is equally valid to be a pirate?

From a rational indivdual's standpoint, the best action is to be a non-payer.

However when you think about all the hard work that hundreds of people put into making the game and when you think about how you are screwing them all, you feel bad. But you also feel that pirates should be punished.

@cobraA1

what was your point in your post? all you did was reiterate what i said but in a dickhead manner. Taking something of value whether you hold it in your hand or its digital media is stealing.. no ones arguing otherwise. This thread isn't about saying piracy is cool or ok. It's about the use of piracy as a reason to treat anyone who buys a legitimate copy of media, a pirate.

As per your logic if i buy that candy bar they still charge me a fine for picking it up and walking around with it because i "could steal it at any moment!"

perhaps you just wanted to sound cool and talk about how much you love candy? but meh who really knows.

Option 3: Don't get the game. It is after all a luxury, not a necessity.

After all, if you people truly think you're actually being "rational," games wouldn't exist to buy anyways.

Well aside from the glaringly obvious fact that assuming no-one has any emotion is ridiculously implausible, this STILL wouldn't be correct, because 'emotional' reasons are only a few of many as to why you might want to pay for a computer game instead of getting the pirate version for free, as I've already covered. Hence you are still incorrect to say this means people who pay for a game are behaving irrationally.

I'll spell it out to you again: A rational individual will choose the option that gives them the most utility. Not money, utility (go look it up if you still don't understand, I expect wiki and/or some basic dictionaries or basic economics summaries will give you an overview). Utility covers money, but it also covers all the non-monetary issues, such as risk aversion, 'emotional' ones (e.g. your morals), etc.

Perhaps you'd care to explain how I am acting rationally if I choose to spend several hours (which if I was working instead would yield me an income higher than the cost of the game) to get a pirate version which in turn ends up messing up my computer+causing an expensive amount of damage to it, and also has problems with the game itself, along with denying me access to official patches that would fix the game? If you could equate everything monetarily, you're effectively saying that it could be rational for me to pay $300 for something worth just $60 (the inferior/pirated game) to me, instead of paying $60 for something worth $70 (the normal game) to me, to give a few figures for example.

This is utilitarianism, and it's debatable as to whether it is the best rational philosophy. I would say, however, that it's a lot better than the "pure selfishness" philosophies that have been presented thus far.

I would agree that a lot of the philosophies being touted here are questionable reasoning. There is nothing irrational about doing something that would benefit a larger society or group instead of the individual.

I see your knowledge of the world rivals your knowledge of Economics.

Your clearly trying to goad people, or your simply not bright enough to see beyond your own prejudices. I hope for your sake its the former.

Since Sly has agreed that he is saying pretty well anyone who pays for a PC game is acting irrationally, it means that even if only a small number of pirate games can cause problems when obtaining them, and only for a minority of people, the fact that it is a possibility means that such a situation can't be discounted. For the actual calculation itself you'd be weighing up what you perceive the probability of being affected by problems as a result of the pirate copy, and the expected damage caused, but in the case I was given it was fair to assume that this had already happened (since I was looking to provide an example of a contradiction of what Sly was saying).


It is entirely possible for a $300 figure to be achieved, or one much higher than that, as you alluded to yourself; Since we are talking about anyone who plays a PC game here, assuming that they all have a certain degree of knowledge regarding use of computers is unreasonable, and it follows that there will be at least some people who might call in a professional to deal with any problems caused (resulting in a very expensive bill). You also have the situation where important documents might be compromised/damaged that are contained on the computer, and the cost of losing these could be vastly above the $300 figure. You also have plenty of other costs encorporated in that figure, such as the effort cost to obtaining the pirated version.

Ultimately the figures were to just give an(other) example of how it can be perfectly rational to pay for a game that others are getting for free.

I wasn't really trying to invalidate your argument I was just stating, that if you do if fact pirate things you should have a thorough understanding of computers.



This is the real problem nowadays, there is no effort. All you need to do is go to one of the many torrent sites and start downloading to your hearts content. Then it's safe to assume any Joe Schmoe with the rudimentary knowledge of using a bittorrent client can get nearly anything he wants and therefor making your point totally valid that he probably could easily get a virus and quite possibly lose hundreds of theoretical dollars through documents and such. Which only compounds the point I'm trying to make. If you don't know jack about computers don't try to pirate things.




Everyone take note of what kryo just said here, any sale is a good sale. Pirate or not, hes doing the right thing. In my case I DID pirate Sins of a Solar Empire, mainly cause I'd never heard of it and wanted to give it a try.(advertising) But after liking it so much and hearing about Stardocks stance on the whole piracy issue I felt I had to give them the money they rightfully deserve. For treating everyone as a customer and not a criminal.

Yes, I agree with this completely. But people often have selfish and myopic strategies that only make sense because each person realizes that the other is another selfish creature.

Say you and your friend are both charged with murder. The police separate you into two differnt rooms and give you seperate interrogations. You think you two can both get off with 10 years each for a lesser charge if you both deny it. But if only one of you rats out the other, the police promise that person gets off scott free and the other goes to jail for life. Finally, if you both plead guilty and rat each other out, the police will give you both 25 years, the minimum sentence. What do you do?

You should both deny it. You could both be out in 10 years and on the streets causing new trouble. But if both of you are smart, you both rat each other out, even though that makes no sense. You do it because you don't know if the other person is going to cheat you.

That was just a sample. Here's another one closer to home:

You are playing a game with 30 other people. It costs $50 to play. For every dollar that plays, the house returns the money and 25cents. But each player can choose to withhold his money. If he does so, that player splits the pot equally with all the other players. What do you do?

If everyone plays, then everyone makes $12.50. But if I don't play, I get almost that much, plus a lot more because I didn't invest $50 in the first place. What should I do?

See, that's how humans think. We are all out for ourselves, and we suspect the same of others. In an ideal world, everyone would buy the game and further the industry. But the problem with that is the temptation to steal. The best decison to make would be to steal everytime. You get almost everything you would have gotten, and you get what you get for free.

The reason that doesn't happen is that humans and many other animals have evolved emotions like remorse and anger.

. . . all the more reason to stand up for morality and altruism. Isn't it time we started moving in the right direction, and started encouraging people to act morally?



Of course, just because a company treats you like a criminal does not mean you have to act like one and prove them right. You're only adding more fuel to the fire that way.