Piracy avoidance

General
141

Sorry, that’s just not how it works. Something like “constantly estimating the demand for their assets” costs money. Some companies may do it, but many won’t.
So stuff just gets lost and unless you find some die-hard fans fighting to get something back it just won’t happen.

Just because they maybe(!) won’t destroy something actively doesn’t mean they really care, especially if they don’t really know what they have actually got. Stuff gets lost!

No! (Unless you are talking about people in the companies.) Games get shutdown because companies do so. They do it because sales aren’t enough, but this doesn’t mean there are customers who bought the game and still want to play it!

Also it doesn’t mean there aren’t some people who would want to buy it in the future. It’s just a business decision that maintaining the servers plus additional overhead costs more than the game is bringing in. So the company kicks the game into the bin.

It has to be devastating for the people who have worked on such a game. A game which was released, was successful for some time, which isn’t a bad game by any means, but then suddenly it won’t be available anymore and no one ever will be able to play and properly experience the game in the future. Only thing left is stuff like screenshot and gameplay videos.

What - the - heck.
Does this mean you think Wagner is art and worth to be preserved and some games are not worth it? Replaced by something better? How do you replace art with better art?

Imagine the following: Assume TWP is a much better game than MM, Zak and even MI1 and MI2.
Now should we delete all those games and purge them from history because TWP happens to be better?

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142

Monkey Island…Flying Dutchman…no difference!

Besides everyone knows Wagner has long since been replaced by Eddie Van Halen.

So suck it up you pompous saxonian antisemite!

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Is this concept art for Maniac Mansion?

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Why yes! In this early version Dr Fred wasn´t aided by tentacles but by voluptuous women with horned helmets and giant breastplates.

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145

I mean that there is a difference between Wagner’s music and “an online game that has been taken offline”. Even today, after 150 years, people pay money for Wagner’s tickets, and these people are enough to repay the costs (the training of singers, players, directors, and violin makers).

For the online game, this is not true. There are not enough people to repay the costs. (I assume this is because a better substitute of these games has been created, so it makes no longer sense to play it.)

This is like saying that Wagner’s music is worth to the world more than it costs, and therefore it “should” exist; whereas the online game, if it was kept alive, would provide a net loss to the world. Whether or not it is “art”.

But this logic can’t be carried too far: it can be applied to Wagner and online games because, in both cases, the only way to enjoy them is to pay. (=there are no perfect free substitutes). But it can’t be applied to games like Monkey Island, which you can play without paying. For those games, the fact that they don’t produce constant revenues does not mean that people don’t value them. Monkey Island today does not produce constant revenues only because it can be copied, not because it has been obsoleted by something better.

And now, some really boring issues which are of interest only to myself: :slight_smile:

This is another way to say that the game costs more than it’s worth to people. But then we fall back to what was said before (it “should” not be produced, because people would need to give up things that are more important.)

I agree.

I am not an expert, but are these games not sold on a monthly fee? What does it mean “bought the game” then?

Ok, but what’s the alternative? To keep alive a game that costs more than it’s worth? this means giving up things that are more important. Sorry to repeat myself, but the word “cost” means something…

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Yes, there are differences with something like Wagner’s music.
Games are not something which can be easily taken and interpreted by other artists and sell “concerts”, like you can do with music.
It’s another kind of art, but IMHO art nonetheless worth keeping.

But recordings of Wagner’s music are available for purchase on physical mediums like records, CDs etc. I could listen to it all day for years without paying additional money.
I can’t do this with online-only games, even when talking about singleplayer experience only. And there is no technical reason behind it, even when companies insist on this.

There are different models, e.g.:

  • you can have a monthly subscription fee (like WoW)
  • or a one time payment (you “buy” the game), like Darkspore (you can watch Ross’ video to see someone who cares about an old game)
  • Don’t force online-only in the first place, especially for single player experience!
  • If you don’t care about your product anymore release the server part and possible server-side assets into public domain (that’s not something companies want to do, but the sad result is that it will rot and disappears)

    e.g. the reason that Double Fine found a lot of those original assets during remastering of Lucas Arts games was that previous employees took harddisks etc. with all kind of data with them when they left the company, because they cared about their work; of course this was not legal but I’m glad they did
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147

I’m not sure what point you’re making there, but contract or not, A, B, and C are all subject to copyright law. Copyright law will undoubtedly vary from country to country, but at least in the US, if C makes an unauthorized copy of a book, then C is guilty of a crime.

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No, they’re not. Most opera houses offer a variety of productions. If they focused only on Wagner they’d all go bankrupt. The only exception I found is the Bayreuther Festspiele, which makes sense considering Wagner himself had commissioned its construction. Even then, some cursory research indicates that the performers work in other productions during the off-season, since the schedule for the Bayreuther Festspiel points to performances taking place during only one month out of the year. If performances of Wagner’s works had to be made available on-demand worldwide, Wagner’s operas would be just as dead as any defunct online game.

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The point I am making is: how do you justify copyright law itself? If you steal my apple, I can’t consume it (or sell it). If you copy my apple, I can still consume it or sell it. Usually private property is justified by the fact that goods are “scarce”: if A consumes them, B cannot do it. But this condition does not hold for goods that can be copied. So this justification falls. Then maybe the justification could be that C agreed contractually not to copy stuff written by A. But this is not true either. Only B did.

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In order for Wagner to be profitable, it does not need to repay a whole theatre on its own. It only needs to repay part of it. It only needs to produce more revenues than costs to theatre owners, singers, players, on those nights where it is programmed. And it does. So it survives.

I made the example of Bayreuth which is slightly different. This theatre survives only on Wagner (unless it is subsidized, I don’t know. Considering the queues to book are 5 years long, they could easily make the tickets 5 times as high anyway). Assuming it survives only on Wagner, it is open a month each year. And this is exactly what I think would happen if software could not be copied and was only online-streaming. Every year, or every couple of years, you would have a reissue of Monkey Island, which people would pay to play. Monkey Island would provide constant revenue, unlike today. (Of course one could say that it’s better now that anybody can play it any time for free. Yes, but the cost of all this are “forgone games”: far fewer adventure games are produced.)

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I’m sure there is a misunderstanding.

You cited a piece of a paragraph from the “Main conclusions” section of that document:

“In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements.”

I just cited how that same text (which appears only in that section of that document) continues and what’s around it:

In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.

I would like to sum up the actual results of that document. It contains an executive summary about the results and several detailed sections about specific aspects of the study.

Executive summary (results about all media):

The executive summary provides final statements that apply to all media, including games. The paragraph that both you and me cited comes from this executive summary:

In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.

This paragraph means that the method used to measure the effects of piracy has provided results that are not sufficiently reliable. Again, this applies to games as well.

If you read the study, you’ll also find why the results cannot be considered reliable, because each section of the document explains which kind of data was collected, how much the acquired information can be considered reliable, which features suggest that some data might be not reliable, in which way this fact affects the results of the methodology chosen by the authors, and so on…

Displacement rates

This section provides, among other things, two main results:

  1. estimations on how much legal transactions are affected by illegal transactions

  2. how much the estimations probably match with reality.

About the estimations (point 1):

These effects are significant at even the 1 per cent level and are similar for illegal downloads/streams and games played on chipped consoles: 34 and 38 extra legal downloads per 100 illegally accessed games, and 60 and 63 extra cloud games played per 100 illegally accessed games.
[…]
The overall conclusion is that for games, illegal online transactions induce more legal transactions.
[…]
[About all kind of games] Games: out of every 100 online copyright infringements, 24 induce an extra legal transaction.

About how much the estimations match reality (point 2):

It is striking that all coefficients are insignificant. This raises the question to what extent estimates suffer from problems of respondents to recall exact numbers of transactions, an issue that also applies for individual channels discussed earlier. This means that estimates are only most likely effects given the data, but with no certainty that the true displacement rate is close to the estimate. Therefore the conclusion is that not too much significance should be attached to the estimates.

In other words, the authors of the study are telling that we might be in the presence of of a very famous phenomenon. This is the reason why in the executive summary, the overall conclusion (which applies to games as well) is “That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.”.

Why some articles report the result of the study as if it was a reliable one?

I’m not referring to the article cited by you, which I have not read, but about other articles that I’ve spotted online. They don’t report the part of the study that states that the results are not reliable. Why?

Now, trust me on the following statements, because fighting misinformation is part of my daily job: if my objective is to make the reader think something that I would like him to think, I can selectively extract specific sentences from a scientific study that have an higher chance to reinforce a belief or to satisfy a hope.

As a consequence, I (writer of a news website) have decided to report the sentences that states that the results “do not show robust statistical evidence” and that “out of every 100 online copyright infringements, 24 induce an extra legal transaction” but I also decided 1) to avoid to explain to the reader what that means/implies and 2) to avoid to cite the part of the study that states that the methodology didn’t provide reliable results, which is a very very important part of the story.

This behaviour is an extremely common example of how scientific results are usually manipulated so that they can become a tool to support a political agenda. Sometimes the subject that reports an information is in good faith and he/she just jumps to a conclusion because he/she is biased or because he/she didn’t actually read carefully the document or because he/she is not competent enough to interpret correctly the scientific results of a study. Other times the manipulation (of both the information and of the reader’s beliefs) is intentional. In any case, the final effect is the same: the reader blindly reports a false or misleading or wrong information somewhere else.

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152

That’s a completely separate question. Whether you accept it, like it, or not, copyright is the law and a principle in most civil societies.

I appreciate the fact that it has been co-opted and subverted by commercial interests, and that much in the current system is of questionable value to our society (that being precisely the overarching purpose of it); but it is the law and it exists. If you disagree with it, you should contact your elected official representatives (or the equivalent in your country) and have them change the law – but you don’t just say “I can’t justify it, so I won’t follow it.”

As for the whole Wagner vs. video games as art debacle, first, they are different media, so it’s not useful to compare them. Wagner works would be similar to today’s films: a creative work which is performed for an audience (ignoring video sales for the moment).

Second, these are also protected under copyright so they can only be performed under strict licensing conditions – until their copyright expires and they enter into the public domain.

Third, although I appreciate the sentiment of wanting to preserve video games as art for the future, how do you balance that against the active copyrights of the creators?

Copyright endows the creator (or owner of the property) with the exclusive rights of copy and use of the work. That means that if Wagner we’re alive today, wrote a master opera, and then decided to destroy all copies of it in a selfish bout – he would have been perfectly within his rights. He would have been an *beep*hole, and the world would probably remember him differently, but he could have.

Electronic media allows for such an event, which was perhaps impractical or impossible to do before. This may not be morally right, and it definitely is of dubious value to society, but that’s how things are.

We have absolutely no claim of access or performance over an online video which has been disabled by the owner. None. We can appeal to their corporate sensibilities of “public relations” and “market good will,” but we have no right to make claims. It is right there in the license agreement we so thoughtlessly click through!

Or we can refrain from purchase altogether and hit them where it hurts: in their balance sheet.

It is indeed a sad state of affairs in most cases. However, if we don’t like it we must have the law changed. It is a very complicated matter, though.

To me, the ideal result would be for people to realize this unfortunate state of affairs and reject such business models. If it is more profitable to sell than to rent, they will do so instead.

However, we’ve all fallen into the “convenience” trap of downloading everything on demand, streaming, micro-payments, etc., and have devalued actual sales and ownership. To me that is the saddest part.

Wow, I’ve written more than I intended. Sorry for the rant, it wasn’t really directed at any of you. I just have strong opinions on both sides of this debacle – both as a creator and as a consumer.

Cheers!
dZ.

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There is another model: A monthly subscription like Spotify or Adobe where you get access to all games from one publisher. Publisher like this model, but if you - the player - can’t afford the subscription fee, you can’t play a game.

@seguso: I agree with @Nor_Treblig, so I won’t comment the older posts. Just one note to this one:

No, it doesn’t. At least in Germany all opera houses and thus all opera performances are subsidy by the state or the cities (there are only a very few exceptions). If there wouldn’t be the monetary help from the state a lot of operas had to close down.

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What you say is perfectly reasonable. However, there are philosophers who argue that it is immoral to obey unjust laws. If you find this counterintuitive, just think of the nazist laws about jews. [Edit: this example is only meant to show that there can be laws that it’s ok to disobey. It is not meant to compare the copyright law with nazism in any way.] It can be argued it is immoral to follow them, and there is a duty to disobey them. So these philosophers have prima facie a strong argument.

More in general: the argument “the law must be followed just because it is law, whether or not it is just” implicitely assumes that the State has something called “political authority”. The problem is that the existence of political authority must be proved, it can’t be just assumed. Because, if the State does not have political authority, this argument is fallacious. Now, during history, many philosophers have of course tried to prove that political authority indeed exists. (Most famously, Hobbes and Locke, with the famous “social contract” theory). There is a very good book, “the problem of Political Authority”, by Michael Huemer, that analyzes all the most common attempts to prove the existence of political authority, and discusses if these arguments hold water. And the surprising conclusion is that Guybrush is indeed LeChuck’s brother.

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to be fair I had already replied to this. (it’s perfectly fine to reply without reading everything. I do this all the time!). basically, even if Bayreuth is subsidized, the tickets for Bayreuth are sold below market, as demonstrated by the fact that in order to book a ticket you have to book 5 years in advance. So if they wanted they could increase the ticket price a lot and still be always full. This is prima facie evidence that, without subsidies, they would still be profitable.

But even if they are not, this does not prove anything important. Wagner’s music does not need Bayreuth to survive: it is profitable everywhere in the world. Not popular enough to be performed everyday, but enough to survive.

And lastly: let’s assume the worst case, i.e. that Wagner’s music would not be profitable without subsidies, and therefore would not survive without subsisides (which I don’t believe for a moment). Now, even if it this were true, it would only be so because Wagner’s music can be copied. Let’s not forget that Wagner’s opera tickets have imperfect substitutes: audio mp3, which can be downloaded and listened for free. These are not perfect substitutes (and this is the only reason why Wagner’s tickets are still profitable). But they are close substitutes. But if it was impossible to copy Wagner’s music, then it would certainly be profitable, and therefore would survive.

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Did you just compare software piracy with nazism and the holocaust? :scream:

I am not saying that “the law must be followed, whether it is just or not.” I am saying that the argument of not following the law just because you don’t like it or because it is inconvenient, or because it prevents you from doing something that wish to do, is specious.

Let’s be clear, there is a distinction between preservation of works of art, and just pirating a game because you feel you are entitled to play it, even though you don’t own it. :wink:

Anyway, as far as “onerous” laws go, copyright is pretty darn tame. Sometimes you just don’t get to do what you want, and disagreeing with that doesn’t automatically grant you the moral high ground.

Like I said, I have opinions from both sides of the argument, but I do have a very strong position on the side of intellectual property – though I may not agree completely with the way it has been handled by powerful corporate interests.

dZ.

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That´s the second most outrageous thing I read this week.

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Wait a second, DZ-Jay, this is not a fair way to argue. You make it look like I compared the gravity of these two laws (copyright law and nazist laws). As if I said that these two laws are equally unjust. Sorry, but I need to say this is not a fair way to argue. What I did is find a counterexample to your statement. You made a general statement:

you can’t just say "It is unjust, so I won’t follow it

So, if can find a single case of a law, any law, where I can legitimately say “it is unjust, so I won’t follow it”, then your statement is disproved. All I need is one example of a law of this kind. And such a law happens to be the nazi laws. It fits the requirements: it is a law such that I am entitled to say “it’s unjust, so I won’t follow it”. So it’s a valid counterexample. But this does not mean in any way that I am comparing the gravity of the two laws, or the amount of invasiveness.

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I counter that your argument is a strawman. I never said that my statement applied on every case and suggesting so with such a remarkably tone-deaf and extreme comparison deserves to be pointed out.

We are talking about specifically copyright law, not totalitarian and destructive regimes enforcing their hatred upon a populace. Have some perspective. :roll_eyes:

Or do you disagree in principle that things of different measures could be measured differently?

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So you meant to say that “sometimes unjust laws must not be obeyed, sometimes they must”?

If so: how is this compatible with your other statement: “it is the law and it exists. If you disagree with it, you should contact your elected official representatives…” ? This to me implies “in no case you are entitled to disobey it”.