Howard said:
I'm not missing the point at all. It's wrong. Period. Using any kind of
analysis to "justify" a wrong action is irrelevant. It's still wrong. It's
theft, according to law (and according to any reasonable ethic, as far as
I'm concerned). You are free to argue what the actual *cost* of a specific
instance of piracy is to a given company, but the fact is that software
piracy does cost the sotware industry a vast amount of money.
A serious problem with your analogy is that when everyone else sees you
sneaking your friend into the drive-in, they do it, too. It has little to
do with inability to pay, it's a matter of thinking "why bother paying if I
can get it free"? So you see all your friends copying music or software for
free, and you do it, too. It multiplies over time.
It's illegal. And it most definitely reduces sales.
Well, yes and no. A fella might have two friends who played games. I - I
mean He - might like puzzle games, while his friend might like flight
simulators, and the other one like FPS. Each wouldn't buy the game the
others' liked, but might like to try out Red Baron or Dragonstrike for a
few missions just to keep one's hand in, so to speak. I - I mean He -
probably didn't play the game any more than a demo would allow,
especially since Dragonstrike was probably too advanced for his system
at the time. And perhaps he didn't play Duke Nukem more than a level or
two, but cause him to buy Shadow Warrior (coool game!) by the same
company.
It's like downloading (stealing?) music. Music is free. I can listen to
all the new songs I want from the radio for free. I can even tape record
them. If I download a song now from some band I would never have heard
of otherwise (Maroon 5 comes to mind), perhaps I will go ahead and buy
it to hear more, or the next one to hear their new effort without
waiting for a download. Or maybe I'll go to a concert because I liked
the downloaded song. It's called advertising.
I have a 30GB hard disk full of songs I got from a friend sitting in a
drawer. I listened to some of it once, but it's all rap and hip hop and
not "my thing". Does the fact that I have music I hate sitting in a
drawer, not connected to a computer constitute a crime? Am I stealing
from Big Ditty Shaka or whomever?! I think not.
All that said, I write software. If you have a color Palm you can
download my free Ishido game here:
http://www.sitenook.com/
You have to know how to play, because there's no help (Google will tell
you how), but I have a newer version with more features, but I don't
know how to make any money from it, since anyone who loads it on their
Palm can "beam" it to anyone else. I would like a token amount, like
$3-$10, but I can't see any way to "make / force" people to pay me.
It's a tough issue, and I have no solution, but I can't conclude that
every copy of any media is a theft of actual monetary value.
