Sometimes It's OK To Steal My Games | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes It's OK To Steal My Games

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

His last chapter really has the point.

Back in the days when I played new games (maybe late-80's to mid-90's), I pirated most of the games. Of course. I didn't have the money to buy them and everyone was doing it so piracy was the distribution channel. I don't feel guilty about it because if couldn't have bought all those games anyway. Instead, I feel even cherished because it was piracy that let me get much enjoyment out of the various titles which in turn made my nerdful youth much richer and tolerable. The game programmers had their starving families but I was in no position whatsoever to really make any real difference there.

But the thing is that I always bought some games.

Sometimes I bought one game per year, or maybe it was three per year some other year, depending on how much money I happened to get for my birthday. Further, it wasn't so much because I wanted to altruistically feed the programmer's family but that I saw value in owning an original copy of a really good game, with the box and the manuals, and I recognized the value of the programmers' work: the entertainment that came with a really good game.

If I had been the rich kid down the block I could have bought 10 or 30 games a year. But I wasn't and I was conscientiously happy to pay for what I could and pirate the rest.

This brings me to the software market as I want to see it.

The market is a pool of games and software, unfortunately priced so that only some people can buy them. And some people who might buy some, can't legally copy and try it out before deciding to buy or not. Therefore, I see value in considering games and software, in the end, more like common goods to which everyone has some rights. Not perhaps as important rights as to roads and water, but as something that costs zero to copy software begs for common copyrights.

And if it is so, the only way to pay for such thing is the pay-what-you-can model. You can't force people to buy your stuff anyway. I believe that the market, together with piracy, already exhibits this property quite strongly.

The biggest issue is making sure resources are allocated to the best developers. If some games are easy to steal and others are not, it may end up just rewarding those that make the games hard to steal. I don't know what the solution is.

I couldn't have put it better. You described my childhood. Although I have paid the pirates to get the tapes and later disks I don't feel guilty as they did some collateral good too by driving me towards IT. You have to get to know the environment before judging someone. Back in the early 90s there was absolutely NO software market and you got no access to any information whatsoever as from a 100$/month/household there is not much money to be made for a publisher. Now I buy games even if I don't play some but the developer strikes a chord in me and I just end up liking his/her attitude and the support I can I will give him. I buy the special games and that extends to music as well. Thanks to piracy I learned English and opened my eyes and mind and now I am happy to give back and I'm pretty sure if it wouldn't be for my savings spent on pirates I couldn't write this and couldn't have gone to see my favourite bands playing live and I feel I can give back. Just note that paying for a single pirated Z80 game I paid high prices...but it was worth it.

Unless gamers are even more obnoxious than my mental image of us, isn't this fairly easily solvable by writing back "I'm sorry you can't afford the game, $NAME. Tell you what, I keep a few copies around for reviews by magazines and the like, and would be happy to give you one. Your CD key is... Thanks for your continued support of indie game companies." You can then go on to mention non-monetary ways to compensate you, like mentioning your generosity on the front page of Reddit, which apparently works quite well.

The "I don't want to ask for a handout" factor alone will probably keep people in line. If you're worried, you can give their requests individualized attention and weigh the pros and cons of their sob story, but that is almost certainly not an effective use of your time.

How many emails do you think he'll get after the kid does write a love-letter to digg about how awesome Jeff Vogel is? How many from other Indian and Chinese kids, and how many from scammers and dirtbags?

The unfortunate effect of rewarding a request for a freebie online is that it attracts dirtbags who will drown out the voices of the people you actually want to help.

If you think the stigma against begging will keep people in line, let me congratulate you on your good fortune to date. You clearly have never seen a good thing ruined by dirtbags or met such a dirtbag and heard them crow about how they lied/scammed/cheated their way into a share of someone else's generosity with nary a thought to those crowded out.

You might want to know about these things before disagreeing so vehemently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492920

I guess that kind of marketing approach is something Jeff should consider as an indy dev, but a possible benefit to him from exposure doesn't seem to have much to do with whether handing out free CD Keys to every email with a SOB story is practical or effective at actually helping the people he would like to help.

> If you like PC games but you usually pirate them, I want you to start actually paying for one game a year. Just one. Please

Isn't that practically equivalent to saying "donate $50 to your favorite game company each year"? It's money they weren't planning to give out, and they'll receive the same product either way—so it's a donation.

No more so than it would be a donation to a car dealership if a car thief bought a car.

Not really. Copying games doesn't destroy anything.

Time.

It destroys the time it took the developer to make the game.

No it doesn't - developer took the time to make a game and no matter what people will do this time was spent ("destroyed"). We could argue that copying games destroys industry, but that's just word play (likewise computers destroyed the industry of abacus makers and it was not theft). Anyway - pirating is wrong, because you do sth with other peoples work, that they don't want you to, why should we make it more evil by comparing it to thef I can't understand.

Yes. Illegal copying is as much murder as it is theft -- i.e. not at all.

>> more evil

Why/how is theft more evil than piracy?

ajuc's argument isn't that theft is more evil than piracy, it's that it is dishonest to call piracy theft.

I would say that piracy is, in general, less evil than theft. Imagine that you are a master forger, and can make a perfect copy of a work of art. Clearly it is both a worse, and a different sort of harm for you to steal a painting than it would be to make a copy of that painting.

This is why the law distinguishes infringement from stealing, and I would argue that conflating the two is poisoning the well. Just because it is impractical in most cases to steal digital works doesn't mean that infringement upon them is stealing.

I agree that it's dishonest to call piracy theft in the truest sense of the word, but I feel like the primary reason that most people rail against the terms being conflated is because theft is a more familiar criminal concept to most people and thus has a stronger connotation, and pirates would prefer it if piracy wasn't actually a crime.

I strongly disagree that it is worse to steal something than it is to make a copy of it (EDIT: when doing so is a violation of someone else's right to sell it), especially when the "something" in question is digital data. Unlike a painting, a copy of digital data is functionally equivalent to the master - neither of them can be called a forgery, nor does one have more or less value than the other. Additionally, the ability to produce copies of data is not a talent or a skill. It is available to everyone.

This brings us to the center of the "information is free" argument: digital data is essentially worthless, because it can be copied infinitely for essentially no cost. The only way to associate value with it is to make it artifically scarce, i.e. control copying.

Information may want to be free, but the people who produce it want to be paid. The people who take the time and expend the effort to arrange or gather data often do so with the intention of selling copies for money, or with the intention of keeping one or a very limited number of copies for themselves (such as the source code for your new startup. If piracy's OK, I hope you don't mind me grabbing a copy and starting my own business.)

TL;DR: Piracy is theft of the author's ability to sell and protect their work. Some may argue that works that can be replicated for free should not be able to be sold, but I disagree. I like commercial software in addition to free software, and I like being paid to be a software developer.

"And pirating PC games is wrong because, were it not for that minority of worthy souls who actually chip in, the industry that makes the games we love would descend into a shadow realm of tiny ad-supported Flash games and Farmville."

How does he deny the entire community of free A quality games? Dwarf Fortress, Cave Story, N, Crawl...? I've got your flash game and your Farmville here, but I know it's not what he was thinking.

There are plenty of other games in quite a few categories that are and always have been free. There are worlds of innovation in every Ludum Dare, and for more particular gamers, there are several amazing games coming out every year from the different shmup and roguelike competitions. VVVVVV notwithstanding, the masocore genre has been almost completely contained in the domain of free indie games.

Note, also, the development of piracy resistant game platforms: League of Legends, for example, provides their Dota-like and dedicated servers free of charge, and get money from users from a store that sells cosmetic skins for in-game characters. There are ways to extract value from players who don't pay, won't pay, and are going to play. Most pirate copies of games give incentives to recommend all your friends pirate, not buy, the game.

Do you think anyone who was making games for love and not money would release Big Rig Racing?

I hate doing this, but I have to ask- what did I do to get downvoted? This post is a factual correction of his false dichotomy, and even if I show some of my ideology (i.e., that free indie games have actually done a lot more for ludology than AAA studios), is that really such an offensive notion that it deserves an unexplained downvote? Do people deserve to get paid for their work even if they don't want to get paid, and to the detriment of potential players that don't pay in the land of mandatory recompense?

I'm just trying to figure out where I fell afoul, because I'm drawing blanks.

Most people on HN seem happy to let newspapers die because old business models don't deserve to be propped up and live forever. However, some newspapers actually provide some otherwise difficult to obtain services like entrenched journalism. The absence of AAA studios in this hypothetical piracy death situation is not going to lead to any similar dearth of original games.

Or did you really like Big Rig Racing?

Sigh.

Dude, you play games?

Computers Exist In the Third World

Every so often, I get an e-mail in broken English from some kid in Russia or southeast Asia or India

Is Russia really classed as third-world?

Apparently in USA it is, like the rest of Central and Eastern Europe:) Anyway - in my country 10 years ago everybody was buying computers for their kids, it was sth like 1000$ then, and it was 2-3 months of earnings for average family. Software was pirated, almost by everybody. It was priced for companies, not for normal people, because everybody assumed it will be only bought by companies who need it, private people would pirate it, and they did. Earnings are up today, but kids are used to pirating things. Still, when game is sold with reasonable price (I would say 5-10$) it isn't pirated by normal people, only jerks who won't buy anything no matter what. I would say in my region people crossed the line between "piracy is neccesity" to "piracy is easy" in the last 10 years. Of course mind set of computerized generation (30 years and younger) is here to stay, so it will take long time before piracy will stop.

Heh, I moved to Poland last year and was surprised at how it's not only the computer experts who pass around pirated stuff - basically if you have a computer, you'll have pirated stuff on it. You've given me a good explanation for why it's so widespread :)

It is Second World, pretty much by definition:

* First world: countries aligned with the USA during the cold war;

* Second world: countries aligned with former Soviet Union;

* Third world: nonaligned nations.

This kind of humble post is the best protection against piracy, jerks never pay for games anyway. Post like this remind you that if you want to continue to play you have to give a little of your money. Of course, it's easier to do when you are a small player that when you are EA but I would like EA to remind people as nicely as this is why you pay games : so that there will be another one sometimes... instead of putting insane DRM that get cracked anyway and annoy real customers.

The argument made at the start (I did not make it beyond this) is terrible.

I like complex games. Complex games currently require copyright to be funded. Therefore copyright is a necessity and breaking it is a crime akin to spoiling the environment.

I'm not saying I disagree that copyright is a way society can provide an incentive for complex information based goods.

But this issue is vastly more complex than he's making out.

How long does copyright need to exit for to provide the best balance between incentive to the producers and the public good of old out of copyright media.

Does society really benefit from things like starcraft II or would we all be just as happy with less complex information based products.

What would we get for entertainment if we didn't have copyright? Given the complexity of some free Mods out there I'm going to go ahead and guess it's abit different to the shadowy wasteland of flash games he suggests.

The article is about the morality of pirating. As the overwhelming majority of piracy occurs within months of release, length of copyright --or even the existence of copyright-- is absolutely irrelevant to this discussion.

Perhaps you should restrict yourself to commenting on articles you did read? How useful would it be if my reply to your post was firstly, and admission to not having bothered to read it, but then few lines pointing out how complex patent law and the economic effects are, and how neither the article, nor your comment, bother addressing the larger issue?

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