This rule only holds if there is fair market competition though.
As soon as monopolists or behemoths turn up in the game, the rules no longer apply (Adobe, Autodesk, Apple) as they have the financial power to bend the rules to their needs whereever they need by buying out competitor to crush “payable alternatives” or as apple does it, buy out the vast majority of the global production of tablet touch displays drying out the competition by brute force at the time.
If normal economy rules and the normally laws would apply, the USA and EU had to step in due to the monopol missuse in case of Apple for example, as Apple uses money generated from iTunes and Appstore to push the hardware as far as they want, which according the Microsoft Ruling some years ago is not legal.
Yes good point Dreamora, some companies really do not help customers to trust in market’s “honesty”. It’s even more valid as we can see that the most common justification of people who pirate is “The big majors/studios already have enough money, they don’t care if we don’t pay for one unit”.
Yeah, lets subject every luxury product and service to an honor system where we will give it away for free, tell everyone they only have to pay if they liked it, and trust them to tell the truth. That’ll work.
Sure, we might be a bit overly litigious in the US, but that’s not really what I was referring to. Suppose the punishment for stealing was simply to give back the items or compensate monetarily the value of what you stole. Regardless of how much faith you have in humankind, you’d be kidding yourself if you didn’t think crime rates would skyrocket. Deterrence factor.
Thats true but for “fearing them off”, jail was inventend.
The idea is not to do so with unrealistic out of scale monetary punishments as thats only helping one side and thats the greedy guys that started the problem at first, it will not scare of anyone as nobody will ever be able to pay it anyway so people switch to a “lick my ass morron” attitude instead of really fearing it. 5 years in jail are much more terrifying especially after you had your time in pre court jail which for digital thiefs is already more than quite some of them can bear with
Social control methods are an entirely different argument. And the reasons for most of the warnings about becoming a leader in all religious texts. DO YOU want to be responsible for the crimes against humanity that are control over other humans thoughts, ideals, ideas and lives?
It’s a much bigger conversation than the “piracy” of ‘intellectual property’.
I’d suggest everyone take the time to read this, on the subject of copyright…
I will say that I know of a lot of industry professionals that work at companies that are considered “dream jobs” in both games and in film that use pirated copies of 3D Studio MAX or Maya at home. And when I say, “dream jobs”, I’m not saying, “Oh, I’ve heard of that company. They’re cool.” I’m saying, Joe Shmoe who doesn’t pay attention to anything knows of the companies and thinks they are cool.
In the beginning, I was a little shocked. Then I saw more and more and more, and the shock wore off.
And to be honest, it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. These guys normally pirate because they have to keep up with the latest versions of the software to keep their knowledge current. But they can’t buy new software for every iteration just so they could try out a new feature. This often turns into sales for Autodesk because they become proponents of the new features and “sell” those features to their employers as reasons to upgrade.
And just about everyone I know that ends up doing any contract work where they expect to use the software for a job ends up buying it. I’m not saying that’s the case with everyone out there. But I’d say that most professionals that use the software to make money probably buy it.
When it comes to pirating games, that’s a different story. The purpose of games is for entertainment. So when you use a game, you are already using it for it’s prime purpose. There really isn’t a “just learning…” thing with games.
In terms of gaming, I support piracy of old console games run in emulation, instead of getting them from Nintendo’s Virtual Console, for example. If you want to sell the game, you’ve got to offer the best experience, e.g. save states, customizable controls, and high resolution. The same goes for movies; going to see a movie in a theater has been a terrible deal since DVD came about. If you can’t sell the movie in a downloadable form on release day, you deserve for it to be pirated.
Force adaptation by voting with your wallet. For example, I’ll buy apps, but there’s no way I’m buying music from iTunes, if I can’t re-download it as much as necessary, as with apps.
The problem with this model is that it ignores a very fundamental requirement of the legal punishment system: To convince you that it’s just not worth doing the crime in the first place. Ignoring any aspects of what “punishment as revenge for society or the victim” might add on to the total punishment, the base punishment has to be designed around the idea of reducing crime by making the crime just not worth committing for the majority of people.
As someone mentioned above, if the only punishment is giving back what was taken, where is there reason for not just taking it? If the worst that can happen to me if I take a $20 DVD is that I have to pay $20, there’s no reason for me not to try and steal anything I was going to buy rather than buying it. If I don’t get caught, I have the DVD. If I get caught, I pay the $20 and have the DVD, which is exactly what would happen if I’d bought the DVD. In neither case am I worse off than if I had just bought the DVD. (You could argue that I’m out a little time for the legal process, but when the punishment becomes that little I can streamline that by just pleading guilty and paying the $20 immediately.)
If when I take a $20 DVD I may have to spend a few months in jail, the possible costs for stealing take a whole new meaning. Add into that the fact that previous convictions can lead to a higher punishment for a new crime. Suddenly you’re looking at a whole lot of reason not to do the crime in the first place because it’s just not worth it for a $20 DVD.
I do recognize that some people will just have the “moral fiber” to not steal something. These aren’t the people we’re talking about when we talk about crime and punishment. Their own moral compass will stop this person; they never need to be worrying about what the legal system will do to them. Crime and punishment is about the people who don’t have that overriding moral compass to stop them in the first place; people who need a nudge or full-on controls in place to keep them on the straight and narrow.
Of course, punishment can go too far. You probably don’t want to execute people for shoplifting. The trick is to find a balance where the punishment stops the maximum number of people from doing the crime without going so far as to be unacceptable to current societal norms. (Though based on some of the folks I’ve seen in criminal cases, there are certainly those people who would keep right on shoplifting even if it was an execution punishment. Some can’t grasp the idea that they could get caught, some just don’t care what happens, and some just don’t have the judgment skills to understand what could happen.)
Ultimately I believe that going with the suggestion of just paying $20 for the $20 DVD you stole, with no additional possible consequences, would result in a massive rise in the crime rate to the point where the price of everything we buy would be negatively affected.
Heh, It will never be $20 because all those courts and lawyers have fees that cost many time more than the crime itself. Once upon a time I was a game pirate, only for personal use. Mostly because I had a limited income and most games were rubbish and couldn’t be trusted.
Later on I became a developer and started to see how come all those rubbish games were getting such good reviews. Publishers would offer perks to publishers and reviewers of big name magazines. In our games case trip to an aircraft carrier and a couple of lucky guys got a ride in an F15. We got a super positive 4 page exclusive in PC gamer for that, though the review didn’t do half as well lol.
These days I don’t pirate games, but I don’t really play them anymore. partly because being grown up I don’t have time, but also 98% of games just aren’t that good when you have played games for about 3 decades it’s not easy to find something new that presses any buttons that make me want to play.
Oh I also had a pirate copy of 3ds max through college. Back then they didn’t have student copies. The closest would be to pay my university $1600 and they could loan me a educational copy. Over the years I’ve worked for a couple of game devs and one I converted from lightwave to 3ds max purchasing 16 copies of max in one sweep and from talking to people there, they still use it today. So I think Autodesk got paid back pretty well.
I can’t see how any indie developer could support software piracy. Unless they use pirated software?
In my opinion its wrong to do and I will take no part, even if just to “learn”.
Better idea I should just go download a free copy of unity pro, zbrush, oh and maybe ill pick out some new modeling software. I Just gota remember to send a few quick IOUs (when I make some money).
I don’t like it.
But hey just my opinion.
Because its not designed to stop piracy of 3DSMax. It’s designed to be licensed to be distributed with games as a viable mod tool for making levels in realtime games. It cannot render, or do half of what 3DSMax does, and nor will it teach you how to use 3DSMax. It is a mod tool that most developers have completely ignored.
