I would agree with your opinion if a vast majority of people who have computers and Internet connections could not afford another $20. But what if there was no pirated version of this game available? I think you'd find that, if it's not too inconvenient, more people would actually buy the game.

For example, console games don't suffer as much from pirating, but what if hypothetically it was as easy to pirate a game for your Wii or 360 as it was for your PC? I very much doubt that people would continue to buy the games.

So basically, the very presence of pirated games available for free is taking sales away from the game makers, people are simply choosing the free option.

You seem to be overlooking the scarceness issue. It's not about Just Another $20. It's about Just Another $20, And Another. And Another.

You are saying that it would be wrong for me to download something, even if the very act of doing so does not make anyone lose any money, take the food from anyone's mouth (etc etc)?

I think that misses the point.

Suppose someone is selling clay pottery. They bought a machine to help them make it, but the clay itself is freely available. They just go down to the riverbed and grab a heap of clay. You could go get the very same clay. It's free; it's a public resource. We'll even say there is infinite clay.

Now then. The producer is using a totally free resource to produce clay pots. It takes a few hours to make each one, and they are very nice. But the only material in the product is a free resource. If you were to steal the pots without paying for them, the producer isn't out anything, because the producer can just go get more clay; no big deal. You've taken no money, you've taken no food. All you've taken is a clay pot, made out of a substance of which the producer has an infinite supply.

Is it okay to steal the pot?

his time, effort, and skill DO have a value, so no.

That's exactly what I was trying to get across. I thought an analogy might help, albeit an imperfect one.

To replicate a computer game is trivial, but when buying a computer game, one is not so much paying for the replicated copy of the software as one is paying for the time and expenses that went into producing it in the first place.

A lot of people do give software away for free, but that's their choice.

I have to be clear that I do not use unlicensed software. I also think that people should not use the software, if they can't afford it.

But I don't agree that all pirated copies are lost sales. Some of them might be of course, but you can't expect that each copy is a lost sale.

Let's use MS Office as an example. Here there is a free alternative (Open Office) that does most of what normal users needs. But the piracy level is very high. This is (originally) a product made for businesses, that most home users certainly don't need. You don't think that most homes would spend $399 on MS Office if MS made it more difficult to copy?

The reason why schools expects reports to be delivered as Word-documents is because it is implied that parents will have a copy of MS Office. This can only work because software can be pirated. If the parents had to spend $399, all schools would accept ODF documents, because there is usually at least one person connected to the school who knows that a free alternative is available.

BTW: "Piracy" is a word that the companies used (probably advised by a PR company), so that it will seem worse. It has worked out very well for them, even the "pirates" use that word. Perhaps I should use a similar strategy against the things I dislike... I will from this day forward interpret DRM as "Digital Rape Model" :-) Copying software is not stealing. It is not legal or (in most cases) ethical, it is it's own form of crime. It may be difficult to define, but calling it "stealing" is not right,

You might as well say that I will steal a potential sale, if I write a false negative fact about a product. It is wrong, but I doubt you can call it stealing.

Yea, I got what you meant and thought it was pretty obvious personally.

What some of these guys don't seem to get is when you buy something physical you pay for the whole thing, production costs and all, right in one go (or if it's too expensive for that you make payments). When you buy media of most any kind you don't because few could afford to pay what it cost to produce. Instead the total cost is kind shared between lots of people. We all sort of pay a percentage. So just like in brick & morter stores: when someone starts stealing product they push price up for everyone else.

> To replicate a computer game is trivial, but when buying a computer game, one is not so much paying for the replicated copy of the software as one is paying for the time and expenses that went into producing it in the first place.

Y'know, I always thought it would be interesting to sell the first X copies of software for a $Y, where $XY is cost of expenses and time you needed to put into it, plus a Z% profit. Any additional feature requests/etc. to that particular software would be developed and sold using the same model.

As always, this kind analogy doesn't apply to digital copies. For the analogy to work each digital copy would need to be recoded from scratch by the original developer.

No. Because the producer isn't, once he's made his Clay Pot 1.0, simply using a replicator to run off infinite copies of it.

But if he WAS, then yeah, it'd be fine, providing you had no way to getting the pots yourself.

Yes, believe it or not, that seems to be what he's saying: that if someone demands $20 for something that costs them $0 marginally to provide you, it is in fact still wrong for you to take it without paying $20.

Even if you don't have $20? And it costs them EXACTLY $0 to provide you?

"And it costs them EXACTLY $0 to provide you?"

Stupid question. What kind of game have you ever downloaded that cost the developers EXACTLY $0 in time and effort to provide that game?

You probably meant "$0 to them for me to download or copy the bits." But I don't see the point in ignoring the very real costs incurred by the developer in the honest hope of compensation for that labor.

I also get irritated by people (not just you, but others in this thread and legion on the internet) that consider the right to pirate software and entertainment a great human right worthy of moral outrage. I might understand someone tempted to steal health care through some sort of fraud if they can't afford it legally, or justify stealing food or shelter or some basic necessity of human life. But defending the right to steal entertainment (most of it pretty low artistic quality to begin with) is just kind of pathetic and not worth the time expended. You must feel some sort of need to justify your own moral misgivings if you're taking time out to rationalize the virtues of pirating content, when you could be spending that time more productively in finding other content to pirate.

Again, this is not aimed at you, specifically, but also all of the people on Reddit, Slashdot, and Digg who spend so much time coming up with these rationalizations. I have more respect for the people who just pirate and don't claim it as some moral crusade against the Evil RIAA and Friends.

Then don't take something until you have $20 to support them. I'm not perfect when it come to piracy but I do feel guilty enjoying something for free when I know someone put a lot of effort into it expecting compensation.

$20 is cheap too. If you can't afford $20, get a better job. Or spend the time you would have devoted to playing World of Goo teaching yourself the skills to get a better job. Again I'm not perfect but I can't justify stealing a $20 game from an independent developer. Stealing a tv show or $2000 software might be a gray area, but World of Goo deserves support.

Sorry, but this argument is a strawman. Most people who are downloading games free aren't spending all their dollars on games and then downloading the rest once they run out of money.

But is it OK for someone to benefit from something they aren't willing to pay for? What is the difference between someone who decides to go without because they don't or can't pay and someone who says I can't/won't pay so I'll just copy it from someone else? Is it morals or economics?

"But is it OK for someone to benefit from something they aren't willing to pay for? "

It happens all the time. For example, I benefited from your comment, but I wouldn't have paid to read it.

The currency on HN is karma points. I can only hope you will do the right thing ;^).

You cannot really use morals in an example where you aren't depriving anyone of anything.

The people who choose not to copy the game without paying are depriving themselves of the benefit of the game even though they don't have to vs. the people who decide its ok to play the game even though they can't or won't pay. So what is the difference between the two people? The economics is factored out (neither person pays) so the difference would seem to be one of personal morals.

I thought you were talking about depriving OTHERS. Which is what matters, is it not?

I certainly don't have all the answers to this one and I certainly can't claim sainthood when it comes to software piracy. I have copied more than my fair share of programs, but, like Jeff, this was mainly done in my younger days. Now I don't. You can argue that when I did copy things it was in my younger days when I didn't have any money and so I justified it by saying it was OK because I wasn't hurting anyone, and now I don't because I have more money and can afford it. That is the argument that Jeff makes to explain why he doesn't pirate software anymore. But I think the "now I'm older" may have more to do with it than he realizes. I could logically say that I'm not depriving someone of a sale, but emotionally I could not reconcile getting value from something without reciprocating. So in some sense I feel I would be depriving the creators of realizing the value they have created for me. For me, the moral/emotional balance sheet wouldn't add up somehow. From a pure economic standpoint there should be no reason for me to pay for something when I can get it for free. However these arguments are complicated by the fact that I am a programmer by trade so perhaps I feel more of a need to reciprocate to my own kind than I would otherwise.

Thank you for depriving me of a great deal of software that would otherwise not demand per-seat registration and kernel module license monitors. Thank you for depriving me of a great deal of software that would not cost $600 retail if it wasn't so hard to keep users from circulating it.

Nonsense. The vendors set the price to maximise the profit from those people who buy their product. This is the same whether some people pirate or not.

That's arguable, but it's not arguable that all these horribly inconvenient seat licenses, keys, DVD zone codes, etc., are a result of pirating.

Depriving how, exactly? I'm talking about non-sales. I am talking about people who literally DO NOT HAVE ANY MORE MONEY. If they download something, how can you count that as a 'lost sale' or a 'loss to piracy'?

You just can't. That's making something from nothing.

Most of the people who pirate Illustrator do not "literally have no money". They simply choose not to spend it on Illustrator. So they take it, and let people like me pay extra to make up for it.

Or maybe these people don't have the $600 for it either.

And maybe the small fraction of people who literally don't have $600 should spend $30 on Lineform, or help out with Inkscape, instead of just taking the $600 piece of software and pretending that the rest of the market doesn't exist.

I think his point is that the software probably wouldn't cost $600 if they weren't figuring in theft. Things in retail brick & morter stores also cost more due to "shrinkage".

Stealing has a price whether we chose to "logic" it away or not. Think of it this way: if everyone just did as you suggested and took all games for free, wouldn't most companies just stop producing games?

Stealing does NOT always have a price. And using shrinkage is a fallacious argument. Physical goods in store have an actual production cost. What's the cost of dragging and dropping a file to make a copy of it?

A few cents for your time, maybe fifty cents to a dollar for storage costs? It's not equivalent to a an actual physical good which could have a material cost of anywhere from a few cents, to hundreds (thousands) of dollars.

Of course it does. Shrinkage isn't fallacious, companies look at how much they lost to theft and adjust their prices accordingly.

What do you think companies do when they see that their product has an 82% piracy rate? They think "we only made 18% of what we should have on this!!!". What they do after that depends on a lot of things, but some people stop making things, some jack up the price to their real customers and some implement ridiculous things like DRM that even terrorize their customers. But all these things have a price and most of us pay it one way or another.

This is rubbish. Companies set their prices to maximise their returns. If they could make more money out of you by raising their prices they would, piracy or not.

Nobody is saying companies would lower their prices just to be nice; they're saying that if the market for a piece of software was broader, because it included the people pirating it, prices would come down naturally as the vendor addressed the market to maximize their return.

As it stands, there is no point to making Photoshop cheaper, because even if it cost $200 instead of $500, a huge portion of home users would still just steal it.

Sure, companies are in business to make money. But do you truly believe that piracy has no cost? It should be an extremely simple logical exercise to prove it does: just imagine if everyone always did it in every situation.

I don't think it causes an increase in the price of goods, although I don't doubt that an increase in piracy leads to a decreasing number of products being developed.

You don't see how it could increase the price? Think about all the money (e.g. developer/researcher time) being spent on trying to stop piracy. These are costs that are passed directly onto the customers.

That's complete nonsense. A software company will always choose the price they believe will generate the most revenue.

If they are acting rationally they would choose exactly the same price regardless of whether the software cost $100 to produce or $100 million.

You are suggesting that there is some other consideration involved, which necessarily means that the company will act against their own interests and price their software irrationally.

If 3x as many people will buy your product at 1/2 the price, it's rational to cut your price in half. However, if the 1/2 price targets a market segment 90% populated by software pirates, everyone gets to pay 2x as much, including the 10% of honest people downmarket.

So what you advocate is the ajkirwin planned economy, where things cost what ajkirwin thinks they should cost. Games: fifty cents to maybe a dollar of storage costs. Can I lobby you on prescription drugs? The marginal cost of a pill is like $0.05.

I spend money on movies and games and don't pirate software, but...

There is a finite patent of prescription drugs so over time they go to their marginal cost. Anyway, I see little advantage to extending copy write on games over 7 years. The idea that you can make money selling copy's of something who's author died 65 years ago seems stupid. Society decided to extended copy write protection to promote people making things, pretending it has value beyond that is silly.

PS: I hereby copy write every number from 1 to (12345 ^ 12345)^ 12345 converted to binary, which covers every software that is ever going to be produced until the end of time. Now pay me money.

Copyright doesn't preclude independent invention, so your evil scheme is neither effective nor particularly persuasive.

Copyright give the copyright holder the right to prevent others from copying their ideas even if they have independent origin. Just like patents.

PS: Having already listed your above comment I clam copyright over it and insist that you delete it. (kidding.)

The last I checked we don't live in some kind of bizarre socialist society where you can have things just because you can't afford them.

Why should someone who can't afford to have a house not be allowed to have it? Oh wait....

That's an interesting question too, but not really related to what I was asking and probably off-topic for this thread.

I'm serious.

If somebody has no money and wants to use some expensive commercial software, what is the cost to the copyright owner of letting them use of that software for free?

None at all? Maybe even less than that?

Now what is the benefit to that person and to society in general?

I'm sorry, but the cost of a piece of software has nothing to do with the cost of delivery of that software. The point of selling software is for a company to make money and survive. Just because there is 0 cost involved to deliver a piece of software doesn't mean that there is no value associated with a pirated license. Frankly, the cost to the company should have absolutely nothing to do with the cost the consumer pays, other than the fact that the consumer should pay more than the cost to the company.

The idea that people have that just because something costs a company a small amount or nothing to deliver somehow gives them the right to steal it is mind boggling. It doesn't matter how much it costs the company, it's none of your business. What is of import is what the company says the item costs.

Taking that for free without paying is stealing, no matter how you attempt to justify it.

Well, this is the problem. There is the cost and the perceived cost. And, right or wrong, the perceived cost ends up costing a lot of people. Usually the ones who are actually paying for the product (that useless country code thing on DVDs has got to be one of the most asinine wastes of time ever).

I don't know what the answer is. Personally if the software does what I need but is more then I can/am willing pay I seek a free alternative. If that didn't exist, I'm not sure what I would do since as far as I remember that situation hasn't happened to me yet.

What you say is true, but what percentage of people are not paying because they can't afford it vs. the one's who just don't want to pay for it?

While it is true that someone downloading a game that they couldn't have paid for doesn't deprive the maker of money, it's quite a slippery slope.

It's not even true if you can't afford it. You have $500 to spend on "frivolity" this year. You choose not to spend $20 of it on World of Goo. Now you're not going to spend the money next year, either: you already took it. You might as well not spend the $500. Give it to charity, and just take everything you want. See, now you're Robin Hood!

You don't know how many people would prioritize this game over other spending if they couldn't get it for free. Only things that you can pirate can you choose to get for free so it gets prioritized lower than it deserves.

they might have bought it next year.