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Major Copyright Judgement

Gate2501 said:
What? Who thinks they are hardcore for being able to download and execute a program??? This just seems like a bunk analogy between these 2 groups(those who lack real hacking cred and think themselves uber hackers for using premade scripts, and pirates) made to cast insult. I certainly don't fancy myself to be hardcore for being able to download a torrent and apply the proper fixes to the DRM, and neither does anyone I have ever met who pirates games/movies/music.
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Oh noes, DRM!!! I will have to spend 5 extra minutes configuring my virtual drive cloak or downloading a crack. THE HORROR.

This is the problem with DRM. It does absolutely nothing to pirates, except possibly giving us the lulz when we see legit customers having issues with it. I have one friend who refuses to even download cracked .exe files for his games which aren't on Steam. It is hilarious to see him looking around for his discs every time he would like to play Crysis.

DRM, yeah... Epic Fail.
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My bad, quoting you and everything :rolleyes:
Good point on Starforce, but your other examples are a bit out of the context of our discussion.
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Oh noes, DRM is out of context on a discussion on cracking... DRM. And yet you referred to DRM on music in just your post before this.

Out of context... except when it's not.


Valve did it right. Was anyone here calling valve's DRM "nightmare DRM"? Are you trying to cast an analogy between the way Steam does things and DRM which requires you be online 100% of the time you play a single player game which may or may not come with all the benefits of the system Steam uses? If this is indeed what you are doing, this is just another false analogy.

I actually like the way Steam works, the DRM doesn't make me do extra work, and in fact saves me time when I format and would like to reinstall some games right away. I have no gripe with their system.
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Not really. It's value-added DRM. There's several advantages to what they're doing, including infinite save game backups. It's an interesting take on value-added DRM, and honestly, neither of us knows how it works. Period. You're writing that the sky is falling when the game isn't even out yet.

If it does stop piracy for a few months or longer, I think you'll see quite a few people use it in the future.
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GreyICE said:
The first is that I don't really like piracy. At all. It's been killing the video game industry for years
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Has it ? Seems to be doing fine to me. (And no, I'm not saying piracy isn't bad. I said so right in my previous post. But it doesn't seem to hurt the industry so much; not that this is the point, anyway. It's a matter of ownership.)
 
Belz... said:
Has it ? Seems to be doing fine to me. (And no, I'm not saying piracy isn't bad. I said so right in my previous post. But it doesn't seem to hurt the industry so much; not that this is the point, anyway. It's a matter of ownership.)
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The PC industry, where piracy is rampant, is damn near dead in certain respects.

Take a look at this:
http://origin.arstechnica.com/news.media/video-game-sales-1.png

Industry tripled. PC halved. Also noteworthy is the fact that World of Warcraft is in that graph. Care to wager on how much they make?
 
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WildCat said:
How is this due to piracy? Console games are pirated too.
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At nothing resembling the rates of PC games. First, to pirate games on a console, you must physically modify your console. Welding a pirate chip onto the board is necessary for XBox or Playstation mods. Purchasing a physically altered console or modifying your console by hand is quite a barrier to entry as compared to installing Daemon Tools and knowing where to find torrents (www.google.com).

Second, there are constant updates of firmware with new games. So if you purchase a game, it tends to update the pirate firmware, occasionally 'bricking' the illegal console. So you are forced to wait for the hacked version.

Third, online play is impossible with a hacked console. Will not happen. Both the XBox and the PS3 have games with large online components.

Piracy on a console is an ignorable joke compared to piracy on a computer. It is not a matter of downloading a few programs, it's a matter of buying a chip and getting a soldering iron. If you just try to burn a DVD and stick it in your console, well... heh. Good luck. You can't copy the disks, and that's that.

The hacked versions of Halo 3 from the dev thing bricked a few hundred consoles and in general saw almost no distribution. The hacked version of Assassin's Creed for the Computer had 700,000 downloads before the game was released. It's millions now.
 
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GreyICE said:
My bad, quoting you and everything :rolleyes:
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How on earth does that imply that I feel I am hardcore for pirating??? I was saying it is hilarious that people think DRM adversely affects pirates.

It is hilarious, because most DRM is absurd. It only hurts the group of people who it is not meant to hurt. This is why I was being lulzy, not because I think I am awesome for being able to "download and execute a program". You made a silly false analogy to slip in an insult, it's really no big deal until you try to pretend that isn't what you were doing.

ETA: and yes, my original post in this thread was meant to be insulting to DRM advocates. Which is why it is perfectly fair play for you to poke back, I would just rather you do it without assigning false motives and characterizing me as a moron who thinks he is elite for his being able to use bit torrent.

Oh noes, DRM is out of context on a discussion on cracking... DRM. And yet you referred to DRM on music in just your post before this.

Out of context... except when it's not.
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Well, we were talking about DRM on software, more specifically PC games. I brought up downloading games for modded systems or flash carts as well. I wasn't talking about how hard it may be to mod the system itself and have that mod survive system updates(like PS3 or 360).

I honestly don't know much about kindles DRM, I wasn't talking about that at all. I thought the context of your "lasts up to 3 months" statement to which I replied, was games... I wonder why?

GreyICE said:
Actually plenty of it lasts up to 3 months after the game's release. The first 3 months are the most important sales period for a game, so there's quite a few that are reasonably hard to break.
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Yeah, and I even said you had a point with Starforce 3.
 
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Consoles have killed PC gaming because they are a much more convenient platform for most folks, imo. Consoles obviously make it more difficult to pirate games, but I wouldn't say this is the primary reason for their having such fantastic sales numbers. How many people out there do you think own a gaming PC capable of playing new releases, vs. those who own consoles?

There are a lot of other factors at work here outside of piracy.
 
Gate2501 said:
How on earth does that imply that I feel I am hardcore for pirating??? I was saying it is hilarious that people think DRM adversely affects pirates.

It is hilarious, because most DRM is absurd. It only hurts the group of people who it is not meant to hurt. This is why I was being lulzy, not because I think I am awesome for being able to "download and execute a program". You made a silly false analogy to slip in an insult, it's really no big deal until you try to pretend that isn't what you were doing.

ETA: and yes, my original post in this thread was meant to be insulting to DRM advocates. Which is why it is perfectly fair play for you to poke back, I would just rather you do it without assigning false motives and characterizing me as a moron who thinks he is elite for his being able to use bit torrent.
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"Fire up your virtual drive and change your cloak settings?" Really? In other words open daemon tools and play with an easily accessible submenu? I find it hard to believe that wasn't meant to sound 'cool.'

I generally have a very low opinion of pirates, and they always try and make what they're doing sound 'cool,' 'sophisticated,' or 'elite.' 'Cloaking' your 'virtual drive.' Really? You're dicking with a few settings on your piracy software. And it can and does come back to bite you - from everything I've seen, one of the reasons piracy generates so many calls to tech support is that the game software doesn't work exactly right half the time under those conditions.

Well, we were talking about DRM on software, more specifically PC games. I brought up downloading games for modded systems or flash carts as well. I wasn't talking about how hard it may be to mod the system itself and have that mod survive system updates(like PS3 or 360).

I honestly don't know much about kindles DRM, I wasn't talking about that at all. I thought the context of your "lasts up to 3 months" statement to which I replied, was games... I wonder why?
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Those were high profile successes. There's been smaller ones here and there, including the 'Starforce' cracks that made people take their CD drive out of their computer to pirate the game.
 
Belz... said:
No. Taking something that doesn't belong to you is by definition, theft.
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Wrong. Theft is taking something away from someone else. If you don't remove it from anyone, that's copying, not stealing. There's a difference between having something you're not supposed to have (unjust enrichment), and making it so that someone else doesn't have what they're supposed to have (conversion). Theft requires both; copying only does one.
Copying isn't theft.
 
Gate2501 said:
Consoles have killed PC gaming because they are a much more convenient platform for most folks, imo. Consoles obviously make it more difficult to pirate games, but I wouldn't say this is the primary reason for their having such fantastic sales numbers. How many people out there do you think own a gaming PC capable of playing new releases, vs. those who own consoles?

There are a lot of other factors at work here outside of piracy.
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Oh come on. The PC ownerbase is probably over 200 million in the US. Even if only 1/4th of those are capable of playing new games, the user base is plenty fine. It was a statistic hyped back in the early days of the XBox, when PC gaming was really starting to die, but if you check the graph, even then the industry was starting to die. The PC games market began to die in 2002. Bittorrent was released April, 2001.

There were a lot of factors, but a few hundred thousand extras sales on each PC game would have made a large, large difference.
 
GreyICE said:
"Fire up your virtual drive and change your cloak settings?" Really? In other words open daemon tools and play with an easily accessible submenu? I find it hard to believe that wasn't meant to sound 'cool.'
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I didn't talk about "firing up" anything. I said "configuring my virtual drive cloak". What else should I call it? This is the terminology everyone uses. It isn't my fault that the word "cloak" also sounds cool to you.

I generally have a very low opinion of pirates...
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Really!? You don't say!

..., and they always try and make what they're doing sound 'cool,' 'sophisticated,' or 'elite.' 'Cloaking' your 'virtual drive.' Really?
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Yes, really. This is really the terminology that everyone uses when they talk about cloaking your virtual drive to avoid detection by programs like SecuRom. The programs that you download are literally called "virtual drive cloaks", if you need one that doesn't come built in to most of the more modern builds of programs like Daemontools or Alcohol.

I'm sorry that you find the common terminology used for these programs so cool, sophisticated, and elite. With quotations of course. :rolleyes:
 
GreyICE said:
At nothing resembling the rates of PC games. First, to pirate games on a console, you must physically modify your console. Welding a pirate chip onto the board is necessary for XBox or Playstation mods. Purchasing a physically altered console or modifying your console by hand is quite a barrier to entry as compared to installing Daemon Tools and knowing where to find torrents (www.google.com).
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Or you could game dump. This was reported just weeks after the release of the PS3.

Third, online play is impossible with a hacked console. Will not happen. Both the XBox and the PS3 have games with large online components.
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Actually in the case of the XBox 360 it seems you could until 2007, when Microsoft finally did something about it.

Piracy on a console is an ignorable joke compared to piracy on a computer.
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If it was then why do Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo produce updates that deliberately target hacked consoles (Last year one update also affected unmodified consoles)?

It's clearly not an ignorable joke.

The hacked version of Assassin's Creed for the Computer had 700,000 downloads before the game was released. It's millions now.
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And it took the hackers 7 months to issue fixes.
 
The word 'compared' exists... nevermind. Why I'm arguing with someone who can't even read a complete sentence :rolleyes:
 
GreyICE said:
The word 'compared' exists... nevermind. Why I'm arguing with someone who can't even read a complete sentence :rolleyes:
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I do like to think that I can read a complete sentence, but I really have no idea what you are trying to say here. :boggled:

ETA: did you write that as an incomplete sentence for humorous effect? Like "Why I'm arguing with someone who can't even read a complete sentence is beyond me!" would be the complete form? I must not get this joke...
 
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Gate2501 said:
I do like to think that I can read a complete sentence, but I really have no idea what you are trying to say here. :boggled:
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GreyICE didn't say that console piracy was ignorable. He said it was ignorable when compared with PC piracy. His point was that you only read the first half of the sentence, as if proving that console piracy is addressed by the console companies disproves his point that the scale of PC piracy is much, much larger.
 
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