No, a theft doesn’t automatically imply a loss of something, less something material. In essence, you’re profiting from the fruit of the time and hardwork of the developers, thus stealing that time, hard work and the money that was due to them. It’s similar to “hiring” a maid to do your housework, then refuse to pay her --or just according to your whim-- despite how she worked to be remunerated: you profit from her time, effort, and work. In that sense, it’s more similar to slavery than theft (though slavery implies theft, in the broad sense): profiting from someone’s time, effort, and work and only rewarding him according to your whim, despite him having worked to see the people beneficing his work to pay him. OTOH, I understand that some people consider slavery as being their right and a moral thing to do so let’s just say I, for my part, don’t agree and stop here.
What Narg said. In the land where pirates mangle language regularly (a mere visit on pirate sites can tell how much most people who pirate master the English language) and especially as far as erogames are concerned (misnaming of “dating-sim”, misuse of “visual novels”, “otaku”, “moe”, “tsundere”, “yandere”, etc.), they OTOH would fight about the meaning and, according to them, misuse of the word “theft”?
Software piracy can be much worse than jumping on an empty train. It can be shouting “Hey, everybody look at these empty trains!” and thus more and more people leave the ticket booth and now jump on the not so empty trains. Then perhaps the ticket booth manager who worked out of his garage to get the trains working, finds out that they have taken his trains and cannot pay for the booth…
Many people don’t discriminate when they pirate, in fact they tell their friends. Sure, this spreads the word about the software right? Free advertising some claim? Depends on the situation and the results. To the indie developer who gets pirated or the fledgling company producing translations while still in the red: Perhaps the first game that gets pirated could be looked on as advertising… but what of the next? and the next? and the next? oops company goes under…
The problem is not so much the pirate, but the spread of piracy that one promotes.
Here are some recent comments I have seen on my youtube videos :
I appreciate ‘freedom of information’, but I wonder how younger generations are being affected by this ‘freedom’. It would be interesting to poll age groups of similar interests to confirm a currently unfounded suspicion I have that generations that are growing up using the internet have a noticeably increasing upward trend to pirate rather than purchase over time…
[futurerant]
It seems like we can’t count on the masses to come to their senses, and after a certain age; pay to play. The only obvious recourse lies in the advancement of restrictions and penalties for technology. Online random searches like you’d find at an airport, or a scanning program that checks your computer upon access to a certain area… SPOTLIGHT technology! And if you don’t submit correctly to the computer automated search, you get a Denial of Service/Restricted Service. Unregistered commercial software will ticket you… or worse…
I foresee it! Google-like bots will be crawling through your nay, Our computers soon enough… Privacy? Don’t connect to the internet.
[/futurerant]
Seems the discussion managed to remain civil somehow…
As others have touched on, the real problem with piracy is its tendency to proliferate and feed on itself. Logging on to a p2p network, for example, to download a game doesn’t just result in user A getting a copy of the game. He’s simultaneously distributing the game to many other users. In the long run, the more users are downloading, the longer lived the download and thus the easier it is for people to continue pirating the game. Similarly, the more widespread piracy is, the more accessible it becomes, because more users are uploading the games and more users are keeping them active for longer periods–resulting in a wider variety of more stable downloads available. And of course, once a website becomes popular, it becomes easier to stumble across during web searches. This is the real problem with piracy. If piracy was self limiting (say, each copy could only be transmitted to 100 users–after that someone has to rip the game from scratch), then it wouldn’t be a concern. Lastly, piracy has developed a community around it that promotes itself and its ideals. This tends to make someone who’s not a pirate into a pirate, and once a pirate these people are likely to pirate games more often instead of buying them.
In summary, piracy is self-promoting, both from an availability/accessibility as well as a sociological point of view. Thus when a person downloads a game over p2p, it’s not only his purchase that is at stake. He’s endangering many other potential purchases, and that’s why piracy is so insidious–because it’s easy to only think about your individual situation and excuse yourself by saying “I wasn’t going to buy that game anyway.” That may be right, but the damage you cause goes beyond yourself.
I purposely left out specifics to avoid riling the moderators, but for this market at least, I think there’s one main distribution method that accounts for most illegitimate copies distributed, and it falls squarely in the “insidious” decentralized category. In a market this niche, the typical pirate isn’t going to be able to locate and access the download unless the link is widespread. But we really shouldn’t belabor this point.
Back on topic. The only partnership I see feasable right now is that of licensing. For example, mangagamer(or the japanese companies running it) would like to get more games available for sale, but exhausted their current localization/distribution resources so they arrange jast to localize 1 or 2 of their games in exchange for jast to be able to sell them. This seems somewhat unlikely but hey, it can happen.
I seriously don’t see what PP has to gain in such a partnership, except associating their name as a partner to MG for the release of titles. PP is already a household name among Western erogers, so they’ve got exposure and what have you. This is a business after all: unless PP is getting a cut from the sales or unrestricted access to the potential games MG can get from Japan, it’s just another burden for them since anything that goes wrong, could also become associated to them. As the saying goes: a double edged sword.
I see what MG could get out of this, but what does PP get out of it?
If they work with MG, isn’t it possible that they would then have possible access to companies they work with? Even if it’s just talking to the companies, should MG go out of business in the future, PP could make important contacts with those companies and they could decide to continue releasing titles in English with PP.
Rising tide lifts all boats. Making PP a one-stop shop for everything makes it more attractive a destination, and the more people come here, the more likely they are to buy things other than MG titles. Furthermore, anything that improves the rate at which new customers are pulled into the market is useful.
Whether that is enough to make it worthwhile, or even possible, is a seperate issue, but there ARE reasons why it would be a good idea.
