Software is far too expensive. I'm not saying the products themselves aren't worth it, but all of the restrictions and DRM that comes with software these days has put me off buying software for good. (Note: I'm not a pirate, just a FOSS user.) The exception that I'll make is a game that I know I like and that I know will work. This usually equates to a second-hand 360 game, occasionally a pc game too. I take strong issue with the 'piracy = loss of sale' argument. Hands up who here has an illegal copy of Photoshop? Maya? Lightwave? Truth is, if these people couldn't pirate these programs, they just wouldn't have them. There's no way anyone will pay £500 to touch up holiday pics in photoshop, they just wouldn;t touch them up at all. Something like Win7 though, I bet you'd buy that if you couldn't pirate it. On a personal note, I'm in an unsigned band and we encourage people to share our music. You can buy a £5 CD if you want it all nice in lossless format, in a case, with a label and our signatures on it. Or, you can ask me to shoot you the mp3s for free. We regularly slip things into CD cases like gig tickets, USB pens packed with photos and unreleased tracks, tshirt vouchers, etc etc. That way, people buy the CDs. You think anyone would buy them if they were £15 and just had the same music on them that they could torrent for free? Music (and software) needs more people like Trent Reznor, Radiohead and (I'd like to think) us.
For every (expensive) application you listed there, there are freeware or cheaper alternatives available. This is a pet hate of mine. You are looking at the pricing of professional tools from the perspective of a home user, and then trying to rationalise the prices, which is both unfair and shortsighted. Queue maybe flawed analogy: I'm a home DIY fan, I need a drill to put some shelves up. So I could: A: Go to B&Q, and pick up a 12v bog standard drill, with no particular branding. It would drill holes and do the usual stuff a drill does. Cheap, cheerful and getting the job done is the order of the day. OR B: I could go to a specialist industrial drill supplier, pick up a 24v drill, with a trade respected & recognised name. It's overkill and pricey as hell, but sod it. Now the same logic (in my opinion) applies with touching photos up. You don't need Photoshop to be able to work with the holiday snaps, and the price of said application is NO justification for pirating it. If you don't like the price, find an alternative!! Also, there are also freeware apps (such as GIMP) which do a perfectly reasonable job for someone who wants to touch their photos up.
Oh, you don't have to tell me. Like I said I'm a very happy FOSS user. I use GIMP on a regular basis and 5 mins on Google would get me alternatives for the others if I needed to find them. My first and second paragraphs that you quoted are really two separate points. But that's not the point. People want Photoshop. They cant afford it, so they pirate it. I agree with you that what they should do is get GIMP, Pixel (not free but cheap), kview, gThumb or any number of alternatives. But if they did this they still wouldn't have bought Photoshop. My argument was 'people pirating (certain) software does not necessarily equal a loss of that sale'. Whether they pirate Photoshop or get GIMP, either way Adobe were never going to get their money.
I don't have the money to buy a Ferrari either, but I bloody well want one. Does that mean it's OK to steal it too, even though there are much cheaper alternative methods of transport?
arguing software pricing vs piracy is quite silly, and rubs me up all wrong, TBH. The way I see it, a game (like SC2, for a good example) cost 100 Million USD to make. Another 60 Million USD to market. While this is an extreme example (for the gaming world - rest assured that making an OS of Photoshop costs more), the maths remain: How many copies do you need to sell before you make a profit? Can you realistically sell that many in a reasonable timeframe? Let's assume that a copy of SC2 costs 40USD. That means they need to sell 4 Million copies before cutting even. If they thing they can sell 4 million copies quickly, that's no problem. If they think they'll max out at 2 million copies in 3 years, this becomes a serious issue, and the price will move up. As for Photoshop: Adobe has done some VERY clever marketing work there, by not going after private pirates. It's because of that (and the fact that they very much know how to make good graphics packages) that people want to work with Photoshop (familiarity counts, after all). Adobe then prices hard for the corporates, that make money out of it. Hell. "photoshop" has essentially become a verb... In the light of all of that, Piracy is WRONG. Companies like Adobe may be smart to have utilised it as part of their indirect marketing strategy, but that doesn't make it RIGHT. That just makes Adobe smarter than the "f*ck you, system" Pirate.
Seriously, analogies abouts stealing some physical item don't work so stop trying to use them. Piracy and theft are too different matters and as much as you might want to you can't just mix them together in an argument about either one.
I never said that piracy was ok, and I certainly don't condone it.* I just said that piracy does not always lead to a loss of a sale. I know people with pirated Windows (why, oh why?) and if they couldn't pirate they probably would have bought it. Microsoft have indeed lost a sale in this case. One of these people does games design at uni and has a few pieces of pirated software that cost many hundreds of pounds and get used maybe once a year. If he couldn't have pirated them, he would go into uni and use their software. Either way, he would not have bought them and so nobody has lost a sale. * Edit: Except in certain cases. Please pirate my band's music.
And as much as you want to deny they aren't different, you're hardly the authority on such matters. The analogy is perfectly fine from my point of view. Both are things I can't afford and so would never normally buy, and, by the logic of some people, that makes it OK to take without paying for, even though it is explicitly illegal to do so. The difference is just in the name - one is called theft, one is called piracy - but the concept is exactly the same. If you want to get hung up on the fact that one is a physical item and one is a digital copy of a companies' intellectual property then fine, but that's not the important point here and it certainly doesn't change the law.
I find it somewhat ironic you talk about the law not being changed when you are the one trying to do just that by claiming theft of a physical object and copyright infringement are the same thing. The law is quite clear in that they are completely different offences dealing with completely different issues. Not to mention that copyright infringement, when talking about one person downloadin one copy of a program for their own use, is unlawful rather than illegal. As for your analogy, it may be fine from your point of view but it still doesn't work for the simple reason that taking a ferrari is not the same thing as making a copy of photoshop. If you'd said 'i can't afford a ferrari, does that make it ok for me to make a flawless replica of the one i want?' then your analogy would at least fit to the topic in hand.
Piracy is a grey area for sure, for the small guy it's helpful to an extent, for the big guy it hurts. Personally I see piracy as what people who wouldn't have paid in the first place resort to. That or for some reason they deem it okay to pirate just because they don't want to spend money.
Yes, I do realise they are completely different offences - but they are both offences. You just seem to have the ingrained opinion that one is a trivial matter that might as well be ignored by everyone, whereas the other is a much more serious offence.
In the eyes of the law one is more serious than the other. Theft is a criminal offence, copyright infringement on the other hand is a civil matter (in the case of people at home downloading things for their own use anyway). As for my opinion I fail to see how you've reached that conclusion from my desire to see people actually discuss the topic using the correct definitions and by not equating it to a completely different area of law. Yes i think piracy is an issue and not something that should be ignored. I don't however agree that it's as much an issue as some commentators would like us to think and do feel that businesses who still have their business model stuck in the 80s/90s and would like to pretend the internet doesn't exist aren't helping themselves in either the way they try to combat piracty or their refusal to embrace the internet as a sales tool.
I love it how people can proudly proclaim that piracy is WRONG and all-capital letters, without realizing that the definition of 'piracy' differs per country. For example, downloading a copyrighted audio or video file in the US is piracy, whereas in the Netherlands it's perfectly legal. What happened to the 'wrong' here?
Elledan - You raise a very valid point there, actually (and I know that I spelled it in all caps). However, there is something that bugs me about legalising downloads like that. It's a moral dillemma that I also have with AdBlock, for example. Mind, I am not familiar with the laws in the netherlands in this regard, so let me not get into a huge debate about it.
And that's the problem with the digital era. We had the capabilities to be able to pirate BEFORE our government's started taking it seriously as an issue (after lobbying from the media giants). They are now caught in a situation where they are trying to provide solutions to an existing problem that they neither fully understand and are able to provide workable solutions to. I personally think that piracy should be made a criminal offense. Let's clear the confusion over what is acceptable and what is not, get rid of conflicting advice/ opinions and set down clear and defined rules. If someone is happy with their digital material being downloaded and copied, then let them. If someone isn't happy, then they should be accorded some protection (by law). This is what the different forms of copyright licensing are for. I consider piracy of copyrighted materials to be absolutely NO different to theft, and in the same breath, I have committed piracy and therefore theft, so I am not trying to be holier than thou here. It's partly due to the confusion that surrounds piracy that has allowed it to become so rampant. It doesn't matter that the price is too high, or that the game/ tune/ app is crap, if it is protected by copyright then the law should be utilised to protect that copyright. It is also worth mentioning that large scale piracy CAN result in criminal proceedings being taken against the offender. Large scale could be as small as some geek knocking out hooky CD's/ DVD's to his pals, for the extra cash. At the end of the day, if you can't afford something in life, then you don't have the right to obtain it dishonestly just because the means to do so are available to you. Doing so makes you a thief, there simply is no way to sugar coat that (my opinion anyways). As I have mentioned here before, I have been guilty myself, so that would make me a thief too, when I did pirate stuff. The thing is though, I started to realise I placed more value on going out and buying stuff that I worked hard for, than getting some dodgy freebies. That was my own personal choice though, and I don't expect anyone to think the same.
stuartpb - good on you for treating this as a thread for a discussion and not as a preaching platform, and so giving your opinion and then leaving it at that. Well done for not trying to force others to agree with you. I respect that.
I'll just put in my two cents. If a person entered my home, say while I was working, and decided he or she wanted to make a copy of my movie, not just grab my copy and run, but create a new copy of the movie. Then left my apartment quietly, leaving everything in place. Would I know or care? Or how about a shoe maker sees a pair of shoes in the store. He really likes the design and decides to take a few pictures of them. Later that night he's looking at those pictures and thinks to himself, I'm a shoe maker! I can make shoes that look exactly like that, and with my own materials to boot! (pun intended) That's copyright infringement. Piracy is infringement, not theft. At least in my book.
In my book piracy is theft and is one of the main reasons why software and games are so expensive companies that develop them have to recoop the money lost from sales due to piracy therefore driving up the cost to the customer Piracy stinks and is a dishonest practice in my book
No the second hand sales market does not do exactly the same thing, as the original publisher has received a sales purchase on the original item. The two issues cannot be compared directly.
