Stealing requires loss of property.
Not really. Ever heard of theft of services, or theft of intellectual property? Property isn't always tangible.
If I take a high-res picture of a painting in a museum, have I stolen that painting?
Actually, yes, in some cases. Depends on the owner and whether or not they give you permission to take the photograph of private property.
Sure, it's pedantic, but piracy =/= stealing.
Then please, define piracy if it is not theft of some sort of goods or services.
Similarly, target market =/= all the people that want your product.
Target market = all the people that want, can afford and would eventually buy your product.
Ignoring those last two conditions is what results in these ridiculous articles, as well as some of the bullcrap lawsuits that RIAA are pulling off.
Not really. The RIAA has every right to go after those who would illegally obtain copyrighted works of which the copyright owners have the final say over how, when, and to whom their products are distributed.
The problem with the RIAA and their cohorts was that they initially refused to accept social change that came with the advent of the world wide web. While that makes them idiots, it still does not change the fact that pirating music is illegal. Same goes for software.
That said, though, we have to consider that piracy of the Indie Bundle is quite a bit different than normal piracy.
First of all, the site said "name your price", which could easily be read as "I can pay nothing" by certain people.
This I can understand, but this...
Second, there are people that were excluded by regional restrictions. Yes, they are pirating, but their reasoning is not the same as your typical pirate.
Should not matter if your region is excluded from sales or distribution of a product, the copyright owner has final say in the matter.
Third, the statistical analysis understandably cannot account for people who downloaded the products from multiple IP addresses. I know that I personally would have been viewed as three separate IPs despite all three downloads being legitimate.
Fourth, the analysis fails to account for people who downloaded each game multiple times (to get each of the clients).
As a final point, yes. People pirated the bundle. But saying it was 25% is probably a vast overexaggeration and just spreads more FUD about how serious the piracy problem is.
Hard to say what the real number was, I guess, but the fact goes to show that people are lazy, greedy and uncaring about others. I know, it's a shocker.
My opinion is, no matter what you do your products will be pirated. So how about servicing your legitimate paying customers first and THEN worry about the people stealing? The ones paying might keep paying, unless you throw them under the bus. The ones stealing won't even notice you're there.
I could not agree more. DRM and other such crap as Star...whatever it was that killed three of my hard drives, does little to nothing to thwart pirating, but it does a great disservice to legitimate customers.
Capps is just up to his old tricks, making excuses now so that when Gears 3 PC doesn't happen, nobody will be shocked. The problem is, there are companies making a decent amount of money on PC development. Modern Warfare 2 sold a boatload of units. I'm sure every Valve game has raked it in on PC, as well. If you make an awesome game, with a superb launch, great long term support, and don't talk to your customers like they are idiots, you're bound to have success on PC. Who cares what the pirates do? Epic does pretty well at interfacing with the community (in general) and they have great long term support for all of their games, but releasing something in the state UT3 was in at launch is seriously beneath them. I just hope that they have figured that out at this point. It sure seems like they have.
While I'm with you on the state of UT3 when it was released, I am not convinced that was fully Epic's fault or doing. On the other part, whether Mike was doing some advanced "damage control" or not, Gears is pretty much a solid franchise. Could Epic bungle the release? Sure, but odds are they won't. And with Microsoft backing the effort and paying for ads, etc., it will sell well on the 360.
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