I'm just a little surprised that people are saying that movies/music/games produced by people who put time and money into shouldn't be protected. I guess I don't get it.
No one is saying they shouldn't have some protections, but frankly, there are only really two things in the long run they can protect. The ability to claim the item in question as their own creative works, and the ability to then sell those items in the market. No one should be able to claim they sang a Kanye West song, and then sell it on ebay without ever buying it themselves. There have always been great protections for those things I just mentioned, the likelihood of me selling Photoshop in the US is nearly non-existent outside of maybe trying to sell off some old CDs I bought, and I surely can't claim I am the director of Thor.
Here is the biggest rub. "Piracy" itself and the actual, real consequence of it have always been negligible. It's usually smoke.
Let me try to explain it the best I can, let us say we have five hundred people living in a small town. A new game has just come out for $60 called Super Death Kill Squad (SDKS). Now 250 of the people are "OMG the new game I must have it yes!" and go out, throwing all the money down on the game, or the collectors, or such and such, without question. The other 250 are pretty much just "Meh, looks stupid" and lets for arguement, say they instead pirated it.
The issue here is that the company that published SDKS see that as 250
sales that
would have happened should piracy have not existed, that to them is money lost. The issue, is that many of those people had no intention to purchase it, and the piracy was more because "Hey, it's free, maybe I can give it a try".
Now moving further, lets say that after playing the game, 150 of them decided "You know, SDKS is actually pretty fun, but I sure would like an easier time getting it later and have updates, I guess I can put down some money on it for that". That is 150 sales you had that, very likely, you never would have had at all because they never would have tried it. Demos these days never ever give enough of a taste of the real game, only a tutorial half the time, and that is not interesting.
I will be honest here, I am one of these people. I have little money, and so I have to be very picky about my games. I don't buy console games nearly ever because outside of rental fees, I have no way to easily try a game before I decide it sucks or not. When Fallout 3 came out, I was unsure if the game was going to live up to what I wanted it to be, so I downloaded it, and played it like crazy. I loved the game so much that I bought it, and it's right now sitting as one of the few games marked as a favorite on Steam. I have done this a lot with games.
If a company, whether gaming, music, movies, etc... gain my trust through quality product (Example, Blizzard and Valve) I will buy the Collectors Edition on day one, because I trust them and know they will give me an experience. You can't get that everywhere though.
Again, it comes down to the men in suits seeing numbers next to numbers, and assuming that because numbers over here are people that got the game free, that they would automatically be numbers on the other side should they have not gotten it free. It's not that simple, it's NEVER been that simple, and they know it, considering even with the piracy demon hanging over them, they still record thriving, record profits every year.
P.S. If copyright holders can find out some magical way to remove piracy, I will be all for it,
as long as they don't destroy what makes the internet great in order to do it. As a secondary consequence, I would likely not purchase as much games as I used to, but that would be on me.
). I'm just ok with minor changes that don't destroy the internet as we know it.
