Campaign Creations

Mucky wrote:

Lavarinth wrote:Pirating is stealing.

Define 'stealing'.

Stealing: to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, especially secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch.
Pirating: a person who uses or reproduces the work or invention of another without authorization.

With stealing there is an implication that you are taking physical property, and most laws regarding theft use language that makes reference to that. Furthermore theft generally results in depriving someone of something they had.

Piracy is making a copy of something and doesn't deprive anyone of anything as there is no guarantee that the person who pirated would have bought the product despite industry claims. The majority of piracy is occurring in East Europe, Asia and the Middle East and it's primarily due to accessibility problems. Those problems break down into two large categories, the first being that publishers are greedy shitbags and price gouge, the second being that they just don't offer the product in that region. Hell even Australia gets gouged for prices, it wasn't uncommon to see games on Steam being sold for 90 dollarydoos as recently as last year.

Lavarinth wrote:Pirating is stealing.

Not according to the Supreme Court case of Dowling v. United States. It is regarded as copyright infringement.

Equivocating pirating to stealing is silly, even downright manipulative. We already have a word for pirating, it's pirating. Same goes for plagiarism. You might loosely refer to plagiarism as "stealing another's idea", but to straight up call it stealing is misleading. We have a word for plagiarism, it's plagiarism. It means to pass off another's idea as your own. Pirating means to make an unauthorized copy of a product. Stealing means to feloniously take something, removing it from the owner's possession. It's important for language to have words with clear meanings, so we can communicate with minimal confusion and cross-word baggage.

Though they all present degrees of harm, of stealing, pirating, and plagiarism, stealing can cause the greatest harm. Ad campaigns spouting, "Pirating is stealing!" try to capitalize on this fact through equivocation, to channel the emotional impact of real theft to this pseudo-theft, but it is misleading at best.

Hypothetical degrees of harm

• Pirating
  • Tame: You download a song you liked on the radio and don't buy their CD. A financial loss of one CD sale, but only if you would have purchased it otherwise.
  • Severe: Everyone who would have bought a game pirates it instead, depriving necessary income from its creator. A financial loss that results in the company's bankruptcy.
  Plagiarism
  • Tame: You pull a sentence from an article for your High School English paper. You get an A. A financial loss of -- no, no one lost anything here, this is just an ethics problem.
  • Severe: You knew JK Rowling before she was famous, and she totally ripped off Harry Potter from you. A financial loss in the billions, along with an unquantifiable level of fame.
  Stealing
  • Tame: While visiting a friend, you take a ziplock bag without asking. Now they have one less ziplock to use in the future, and will have to go to the store sooner. A financial loss in cents, and an inconvenience. While at work, they might even have to go a day without a homemade PB&J sandwich for lunch.
  • Severe: You take a child's asthma inhaler. Without it, they have a serious asthma attack and die. A financial loss of -- WTF you just killed a kid! You monster!

Pirating and stealing are totally the same thing... right?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU[/youtube]

That's what the people behind this commercial would have you believe, anyway.

Now, I don't support pirating any more than I support plagiarism or stealing. However, I must object to the manipulation at play in those "PSA" ads. They are not the same, nor should they be. Plagiarism goes to civil court, stealing goes to criminal court, and big money from the media industry has pushed laws into place that has warped pirating from a civil case to a criminal one that can result in up to 10 years in prison (more than child pornography).

Capitol (RIAA) v. Thomas has finally made its way up to the Supreme Court. The last appeal found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa, with a $9,250 fine per song ($220,000 total). The music industry wants her to serve as an example, a deterrent, but when I think about how the average speeding ticket is $150, something that actually endangers people's lives, I wonder where our priorities are.

kazaa? I remember kazaa when I was still in school. Didn't think it still existed in all these years.

To be fair the Kazaa trial started in 2005.

IskatuMesk wrote:kazaa? I remember kazaa when I was still in school. Didn't think it still existed in all these years.

Her first trial concluded in October of 2007. It takes time and a lot of appeals to reach the Supreme Court, if they'll even hear your case.

Wow. 2005? Kazaa should have been dead by then. Just like how Napster killed itself right before.

Kazaa Lite was originally created by random nut, Rocko, and Paul. It was shut down by Sharman Networks on December 7, 2003. The final version is v2.4.3.

Once Klite showed up there was no reason to use the default client. By then, torrents and file lockers were much more mainstream, and usenet has always been an effective if annoying to use resource.

How the hell does it take that long to run a trial? What the hell is wrong with these systems where I have to wait a year+ to have a 10 minute interview with a doctor and law takes a half-decade to do anything?

If it's because there is so many cases, I can't see any competent judge giving a MAFIAA case any more than a passing glance before throwing it out and moving onto actual trials of value. Lobbying should be treated in the US like it is in EU at the very least.

Lavarinth wrote: Regional restrictions? That's so old school. These aren't DVDs, console games, or YouTube. Here: http://bit.ly/11CAWxX

Regional restrictions here might be the wrong word. Maybe the fact that nobody knows how to use a credit card (credit cards here are like a rich kid's luxury, no one could even afford them.) or have any conception what's or ever about copyrights might be better put. Simply said, if you are Vietnamese, getting a legit copy of anything is a night impossible challenge...

I don't see how being born in "the wrong side of the world" has affected you relative to PC gaming, though maybe I'm just out of the loop as to how you are restricted with digital downloads.

Do remember that everything works very differently here in a developing country like Vietnam. For instance, credit card is something still very alien and distant to us, no one ever deals businesses or payments with credit cards, so the whole "online shopping" thing just doesn't exist in Vietnam at all. My family doesn't have a credit card, so online purchases are out of the window. Besides, I'm on 56k, I'm not that good at waiting for 42 hours to download a game...

To me, as someone who has grown up with the freedom and neutrality of the world wide web, region restrictions are utter shit. Fuck nanny states, fuck price gouging, and fuck staggered releases.

Welcome to the wonderful, wonderful world of communism, fellow capitalist!

Though they all present degrees of harm, of stealing, pirating, and plagiarism, stealing can cause the greatest harm. Ad campaigns spouting, "Pirating is stealing!" try to capitalize on this fact through equivocation, to channel the emotional impact of real theft to this pseudo-theft, but it is misleading at best.

They should come to Vietnam. Everyone here are either a bootlegger, a pirate, or a plagiarist here... :3

Almost any game I pirated that I enjoyed I ended up buying out of respect for the developers.

That's the kind of luxury I don't really have... Too bad...

On the topic of region locking, I come across some videos on the new Neverwinter MMO. I'm curious enough to check it out, so I go to their website with the intention to download the client. What do I get?

Perfect World registration page wrote:

Disabled Region

Our sincerest apologies, we cannot provide service to players in your region or to players using open proxies.
Please contact support at customerservice@perfectworld.com to resolve this issue.

Doing a deeper search, I find "more" information here.

Fuck you, Perfect World. Fuck. You.

If I really wanted to check this shit out, I could get a VPN, I suppose, but I'm not going to beg any company to play their goddamn game.

To be fair, I also wouldn't want to spend thousands or millions in funds to suit a country's requirements for media.

Makes you wonder why anyone bothers doing anything in America anymore.

Lavarinth wrote:To be fair, I also wouldn't want to spend thousands or millions in funds to suit a country's requirements for media.

There's a difference between operating in the country and blocking them because you can. Most of the time it's generally something even more idiotic like regional publisher deals.

It didn't used to be idiotic when the cost of entry into any new country was huge but now, it's not a major distribution cost at all to make a port for your game in say, Thailand.

DrumsofWar wrote:It didn't used to be idiotic when the cost of entry into any new country was huge but now, it's not a major distribution cost at all to make a port for your game in say, Thailand.

I'm not talking about a game that isn't being marketed or sold specifically to a region. If you got your hands on it you would still be able to play it freely. What I am talking about banning is regions from playing your game for arbitrary bullshit reasons.

It would be like Blizzard telling you that can't play WoW because you live in Kuwait or you have to play on the Kuwait-only servers under a different publisher. Perfect World is also largely F2P MMO's. Regional restrictions have no legitimate reason for being there.