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hardcore_gamer

US federal authorities shut down 9 pirate sites

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Aliotroph? said:
But they're measuring the worth of things in hours of entertainment. Even expensive games are very often a good deal by that kind of metric. For gamers to act like they're entitled to a certain price range because duplicating the data costs next to nothing is still stupid.

That's a speculative judgment. I mean a measure economically, practically or materially. In the sense of those forces "the market" creates, not some moral imperative. It doesn't help that we're talking about entertainment, which can be created from next to nothing, and not something essential. People pay by demand, but that demand is diluted by this ease of reproducibility and by other cheap or free alternatives to have fun.

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TL;DR version of this and other piracy threads: bits are bits and when physical/logical access restrictions are impractical, legal ones step in.

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I was just going after the sense of entitlement gamers have. If I can't afford a game I can copy it or not. The methods to prevent that and the punishments shouldn't be any worse than if I go downgrab a Harry Potter book.

Games are also interesting in that their price usually falls off a cliff very quickly -- sometimes within weeks. It's easy to get games cheaply, just as it is with books, movies and music. Then you have some games that just keep selling for years. It's scary how you can still buy Diablo in mainstream stores.

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Aliotroph? said:
I was just going after the sense of entitlement gamers have.

You still talk as if that were something that can be defined as an object. If anything, that "sense of entitlement" is rhetoric labeling the avoidance of, or opposition to, the idea of "intellectual property" as immoral or wrong. A "pirate" may as well think the industry has a "sense of entitlement," considering that the links between business and creation or merit can be rather vague, especially for a person who is isolated from the productive process.

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myk said:
You still talk as if that were something that can be defined as an object. If anything, that "sense of entitlement" is rhetoric labeling the avoidance of, or opposition to, the idea of "intellectual property" as immoral or wrong. A "pirate" may as well think the industry has a "sense of entitlement," considering that the links between business and creation or merit can be rather vague, especially for a person who is isolated from the productive process.


How is a "sense of entitlement" in any way limited to objects? A lot of the comments I have heard about piracy recently boil down to people saying that they want the game, but only on their terms. If they have to pay more than what they feel is necessary, if the oppose even an uninvasive DRM, or even if they just don't think they will like the game enough to give any money for it (but will somehow like it enough to play it...), piracy, or whatever term you would prefer to use for it, becomes a viable option for them. Disagreeing with intellectual property right goes right into that. So just because something is intangible that means someone is entitled to a copy of it regardless of how much it cost to create the orginal, or how much the creating entity wants for it?

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EllipsusD said:
So just because something is intangible that means someone is entitled to a copy of it regardless of how much it cost to create the orginal, or how much the creating entity wants for it?

I was saying that the "sense of entitlement" is not an object, when Aliotroph took it for granted in gamers. Assuming that gamers have an inflated sense of entitlement is not the same as noting critics or the industry feel gamers have an inflated sense of entitlement.

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myk said:
I was saying that the "sense of entitlement" is not an object, when Aliotroph took it for granted in gamers. Assuming that gamers have an inflated sense of entitlement is not the same as noting critics or the industry feel gamers have an inflated sense of entitlement.


Ah, I think I see what you're getting at. We may just be interpreting that statement differently.

Aliotroph? said:
I was just going after the sense of entitlement gamers have.


"Sense of entitlement" here seems to refer more to a characteristic than an object. I'm not entirely sure (if) why it is being interprested as representing an object in this discussion, but whatever.

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Copyright laws need to be neutered or butchered and rewritten from the ground up WITHOUT corporate lobbyist interference.

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Mr. Chris said:

Copyright laws need to be neutered or butchered and rewritten from the ground up WITHOUT corporate lobbyist interference.

Yes. It used to be that a couple decades after the author of something died, then it would become free to the public. It makes sense because the person who came up with it has the right to make money off of it, and it allows their families to live off of it for a while after the person dies. These days, the expiration date on copyrights is ridiculous, pushing the limit back to being LONG after the person dies (I think it's at 75 years now), just so that corporations can take it and make money off of the poor dead person's work. This is mostly Disney's fault because they don't want to ever give up their copyright on Mickey Mouse. Every time that specific IP is about to expire, gee look, the copyright limit just got pushed back another couple of decades.

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Danarchy said:

Yes. It used to be that a couple decades after the author of something died, then it would become free to the public. It makes sense because the person who came up with it has the right to make money off of it, and it allows their families to live off of it for a while after the person dies. These days, the expiration date on copyrights is ridiculous, pushing the limit back to being LONG after the person dies (I think it's at 75 years now), just so that corporations can take it and make money off of the poor dead person's work. This is mostly Disney's fault because they don't want to ever give up their copyright on Mickey Mouse. Every time that specific IP is about to expire, gee look, the copyright limit just got pushed back another couple of decades.


You can blame Sonny Bono for that...

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