I'm really fuckin' lollin' at the idea that the PC platform died from piracy because
it was suddenly easy to pirate games in the mid-2000s or something. I mean, definitely there wasn't unbelievably rampant piracy going on when the PC gaming platform was born in the 1980s, and I definitely didn't know anyone who played pirated games when PC gaming was at its absolute creative and commercial apex in the late 90s. Right?
gofreak said:
I am anti-theft, simple as that. Piracy is theft.
Theft is something specific. Copyright infringement is a
completely different thing that is
also illegal.
Copying Is Not Theft, and in fact even the
underlying reasons that the two acts are criminalized are different -- theft is criminal because of the direct harm of loss it causes to the victim, while copyright infringement is illegal (originally) because of the aggregate disincentive it creates for all artists.
When people use this rhetorical device, it's like saying that having your house burgled is
actually being raped because you had your privacy disregarded and violated -- it's an inflammatory analogy that does not hold up to even fairly superficial scrutiny and it certainly should not be used as the basis for actual legal reasoning. If you want to argue why copyright infringement is wrong, there are plenty of very good reasons that do not involve fundamentally misrepresenting the action being performed.
This is also
why personal copyright infringement continues to be a major issue despite the efforts to brand it as a different crime -- people intuitively understand that it isn't comparable to theft, typically make their first moral judgment on whether it's acceptable based on that knowledge, and so arguments that are
obviously inaccurate do little to sway public opinion. (It's like hyperbolic anti-drug ads -- it's good to encourage kids not to use illegal drugs, but many of these ads actually undermine their own purpose by being so obviously full of shit that people disregard their message.)
SapientWolf said:
You're right. Even a decent 4 year old card would allow you to play every PC game out there. The problem is that the mainstream hasn't embraced PC upgrades. You can't just walk into a Wal-Mart or Gamestop and buy an 8800GT.
More specifically, the way PC hardware evolved, off-the-shelf department-store PCs became dramatically worse gaming systems than they had been in the past. In 1994, any sufficiently new off-the-shelf Dell or HP box would play 100% of PC games. In 1999, an off-the-shelf box wouldn't play things as nicely as would be ideal, but at least they'd still play with software rendering. The rise of integrated graphics cards that literally could not be used to play even older games was one of the big factors that killed the casual gaming market and created the false appearance that a gaming PC was inherently a huge investment.
ymmv said:
Once again, the "piracy is a victimless crime" argument.
No, simply a statement of facts.
The fact that piracy
exists, is widespread, and cannot ever be meaningfully stopped does indeed have victims: the full class of all creators of copyrighted artistic works, who suffer from the uncertainty and the loss of control over their work's distribution that piracy results in; and paying users, who get stuck paying money for something that other people are getting an equal (or even worse, better) experience from after downloading illicitly.
However, in
practice, the impact of piracy on the sales of
any individual work is much smaller than other factors. BF:BC2's huge piracy numbers have not affected its also huge actual sales numbers; the 360 still sells more software than the PS3 despite the former being completely piratable and the latter being completely not. When someone tries to count torrent downloads and imagine that if that torrent weren't present each of those -- or even any significant number -- would have become a sale is simply delusional.