Ex-EMI Boss Says Fighting Piracy is Useless

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sacre

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Although I really dislike the fact that people pirate, he has a point. Our generation are piraters. Millions and millions of people pirate and you CAN'T stop it. The only solution is to find better solutions to making games harder to "Crack" and distribute.
 

BMFM

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Making movies, music and games harder to crack is pointless. Our short history of pirating has proven anti-piracy measurements are nothing more than a small nuisance for those who practice it.

On the other hand I’ve never seen a developer or a publisher crack down the numbers behind their product line pricing, and say they believe they should or deserve or have to charge so much for a product because of this or that reason. All of what people get are generic reasons and arguments for it. If there is proof of otherwise I you like to know.

No matter if you are a pirate or a paying customer, a lot of people feel they are being ripped off on the pricing of movies, music or software. And that’s a point that leads some to pirating.
 

greenskye

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It's precisely because of "anti-crack" measures that many people first consider the idea of piracy in the first place. When you pay $50 for a game and can only install it on 3 machines (or 3 times on the same machine due to hardware upgrades) Many people get so frustrated that they commit piracy.

If consumers are satisfied, many will not resort to such crude tactics as piracy. I know that I personally am in the market for the best that I can get. If I can get an unlocked version that runs better (or more conveniently) why would I PAY for a sub-par product?

Yes people will still pirate, yes people will download illegally with no good reason, but I believe the numbers will be reduced and complaints on the behalf on the Media Industry will be better received if they just focus on making better products rather than defending against pirates.
 

timaahhh

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Valve's Steam anyone? Steam seems to work quite well against pirates. All the people I know that pirate have a lot less sucess against Steam.
 

A Stoner

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It is not only useless, it is wrong. All of the anti piracy schemes have the net effect of taking digital rights away from the purchaser. It has devalued the product that the compay is trying to make money on. The pirates actually add value back into many games. I know for a fact there are at least 25 titles in my closet that if the crack community did not crack the game I would have never purchased. I also have three programs that are installed using cracks that I have purchased which wouldhave been sent back for a refund otherwise. Adobe Acrobat is one because of it's personal information snooping and call back mechanism. It would not be welcome on my machine unless it got rid of that mechanism. $469 purchase which would have been returned if I was not able to get rid of that DRM part of it. I am pretty convinced though that the retail box in my storage would protect me from any lawsuit adobe wants to bring against me for supposedly pirating it's software that I paid for.

Timaahhh,
I do not like steam, it's products are never compatible with regular patches, it is frequently not included in free upgrades to games, and when patches do come out for a game, steam usually takes weeks more to get the same patch out for it's version. I bought one game from them and I will never go to them again. They failed to deliver a product worth paying for.
 

Silluete

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there is almost no pirated ps3 game in market(since price of blueray is atronomical) maybe be sony have find the most good ways against piracy put the product in special media(blueray) that only can play on special player(ps3) and u got a anti piracy media, well maybe there already pirated ps3 games out there i don't know
 

NuclearShadow

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If his statement of this generation being people who break copyrights then this only means that the laws have yet to catch up to recent times. Laws must adapt and change to the times.

Perhaps the best way to combat piracy would be to stop it from being piracy in the first place. People realize that they can get all forms of media for free and at their convenience. So I say let them have it and find sources of income through advertisements. Its what the non cable TV channels have been doing for a long time and it works for them in fact they are some of the most watched channels. What this would cause is higher prices to advertise so the media companies would still make profits while the advertisers would have to raise prices of their products and its not possible to download a bottle of Coke so I think they will be safe.

As for things like DRM its a waste of money and only causes headaches. The companies waste their money to put programs like Securom on their product only to have it cracked within no time. While such DRM only causes problems and confusion for the legit buyer and perhaps even a higher price for the product itself. The only winner here is those who make the useless DRM offering a false protection and profiting from it.
 

A Stoner

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[citation][nom]silluete[/nom]there is almost no pirated ps3 game in market(since price of blueray is atronomical) maybe be sony have find the most good ways against piracy put the product in special media(blueray) that only can play on special player(ps3) and u got a anti piracy media, well maybe there already pirated ps3 games out there i don't know[/citation]
Interesting idea, Sony does that often with it's products, and I never buy Sony products because of it, whether it is locked as you say or open, simply because I refuse to support their business model of proprietary everything. I am sure people want to buy products that are locked into single devices like you say. I mean, I sure would want to buy a music album in 5 different formats that are locked down as opposed to being able to buy one album and port it to the devices I want it on.
PS3 gets cracked all the time. People hack the PS3 itself, add in a larger hard drive and play games that have been hacked. There is no way to make an item pirate proof, every method takes the rights of the consumer away, thus reducing the value of the product, thereby making pirating more appealing to more and more people.
The reason these companies are losing money is not piracy, it is a shrinking target market. They all want to get that specific age group male/female, completely ignoring the rest of the population. Because the sell less, they blame piracy, but piracy today is no worse than it was back in the 8-track days. To these companies all forms of fair use is piracy. I record a radio station broadcast, PIRACY. I copy my CD into MP3, PIRACY. I record telivision broadcast, PIRACY. I take my VHS collection and turn it into a DVD collection, PIRACY. I duplicate my DVD's and store the originals, PIRACY. I want to duplicate my game CD/DVD and store the original, PIRACY. Every last practice I am talking about is ligitimate fair use of the product according to the supreme court and the law of the land. Every peice of DRM and anti piracy is nothing more than Digital Rights Theft by the companies.
 

grieve

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The only way to stop people from pirating would be to catch individuals, a lot of people… random people… like you and me. Unfortunately unless you are a “big fish” you have no worries of being caught.

I go to blockbuster rent a movie and copy it… If there was a way for me, a single person to get caught… even a 10% chance I would never burn a DVD, it is not worth the risk to me.

The world needs copyright infringement consequences.

We don’t walk into a store and steal merchandise because there are consequences. We rip of Music and Movies daily because there is simply no way to get caught. This practice is so widespread now that many of us don’t even consider it stealing anymore… I for one don’t think twice when I burn a DVD. The truth is, there is no difference between ripping off a movie from the store… then renting it and burning it @ home.

I am a thief. :(
 

bf2gameplaya

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If it can be read, it can be written. This proves copy-protection is impossible.

Losing customers is an economic issue, not a technical one. And economy is based on trade, and trade endures when it is free and fair.

DRM violates free and fair trade, has no technical underpinning and therefore will by necessity fade out due its utter lack of utility.
 

RahnThundercaller

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All they have to do to stop piracy is to create a new media format which is large enough that people won't be imaging the media on their hard drive unless they have a massive array, like holographic optical discs when they come out one of these years. And they need to intentionally keep the recordable media prices high because if you can buy a recordable media for $0.50, even if the burner is $1,000, people will buy the burner and then mass produce the pirated media to make back their investment and more. Even when hard drives hit 10 terrabytes and people could start mounting images of HODs nobody is going to be torrenting a 2 terrabyte game, at least not in america with our current internet speeds and 50 gig a month download limits from most isps.

Heck back in the early days of CD there was no copy protection on game CDs because the burners costed $5,000 and the media was $10 a disc and CDs held as much as most hard drives. Then came along $500 burners and 67cent discs and 100 gig hard drives and bang we had pirating.
 

wildwestgoh

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Pirating happens even the price of the media is expensive, back to those days where the sold pirated games (which I didn't even know that's pirated stuff) are much cheaper than buying CD-R.

End consumer will always look for cheaper solution, so if seller provide a original copy and a pirated copy with the same quality, consumer will go for the cheaper solution knowning they'll get the same result out of it.

I don't think we can stop pirating, ever. If the media can be obtain easily and can maintain at a competitive price against pirated copy, I can assure it can minimize the pirating to a very low level. Note that you can't stop them totally, you can only minimize them, that's the balance of living -- what I think that could be what the Ex-EMI Boss wanted to express.
 

etrnl_frost

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You know, I kind of wonder what would happen if all the game makers of the world suddenly saw this situation, turned to each other, and just declared a strike until consumers started acting responsibly? I know it sounds horrible, but look what happened to TV when the writers strike happened. Could you imagine if a TV network strike occurred? I think it would get the message across. But I am old-fashioned like that.
 
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[citation][nom]etrnl_frost[/nom]You know, I kind of wonder what would happen if all the game makers of the world suddenly saw this situation, turned to each other, and just declared a strike until consumers started acting responsibly? I know it sounds horrible, but look what happened to TV when the writers strike happened. Could you imagine if a TV network strike occurred? I think it would get the message across. But I am old-fashioned like that.[/citation]

Yeah. I'm sure Tv networks lost tons of money when that happened, but Tv networks have tons more money to come up with half-assed reality shows that take the place of the shows that require writing. Game companies do not. If they went on strike for the same duration, they'd probably have to file for bankruptcy.
 
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