5 ms·

As someone who 1) works in the web/software industry and 2) actually paid for Photoshop, how do you (the collective you) see this playing out? Will we have this

by lbotos 12y ago

As someone who 1) works in the web/software industry and 2) actually paid for Photoshop, how do you (the collective you) see this playing out? Will we have this cat and mouse game ad infinium?

Phlarp 12y ago
This game is hardly cat and mouse. Pirate Bay went down and all the traffic went to Kickass, now Pirate Bay is back up and chugging before "they" can get Kickass down. I bet Kickass is back up before the next one goes down, seems a bit more like Road Runner and Wile E Coyote.
rhino369 12y ago
Yes. The common sentiment from pirates is that they'll always been one step ahead and then you break up one site two take its place. Well that is sort of true. But that makes it harder to keep up with if you aren't tech savy / into the pirate scene. The media companies just don't another Napster situation where everyone and their mom knew how to get all the songs they wanted.
agumonkey 12y ago
Historically, it seemed easier to set up a torrent website than seizing one. But if the authorities allow for faster take-downs I don't think mice will be able to reproduce.
dshacker 12y ago
I pay for photoshop now, but back when I was starting I couldn't afford it. I wouldn't be able to have a job now, if I hadn't had used photoshop in its trial edition. Not even their education pricing was affordable for a student.
lettergram 12y ago
When getting new software is as easy as finding a friend to hit "copy" > "paste", it will always be like this. Further, even when they make it difficult with keys and what not, there is almost always a way to break it. If that fails, there is always an alternative. If we look at morals... I always enjoyed the story in the bible where Jesus broke several loaves bread and a few fish and shared it with a massive crowd. No one cared about the poor fishermen or farmers. Why then is it morally objectionable to share software in the same manner? In other words, unless people fine it morally reprehensible we will always have something like this going on.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  To be fair, in the parable of the loaves and fishes, Jesus was providing the largest value added, not the farmers/bakers or fishermen, since only he was able to multiply those things; as the marginal producer of the wealth, it's not unreasonable to assign that property right to him.
- radisb 12y ago
  Jesus didn't steal anything, he copied something that he originally had created, something that he had donated to the fishermen in the first place. He created (well, his father) the fish on the 5th (or 6th I dont remember) day of the creation, remember?
  - passwordreset 12y ago
    That sure sounds like bread and fish piracy to me. We better lock this guy up. You say his name is Jesus. Is he Mexican, or is that an alias? (BTW, Jesus is dead, his father was some schmuck who knocked up some girl that we now call "Mary" for some reason, and there is no God.)
- walru 12y ago
  You mean something like little Johnny Gamedesigner who decides to break free and go independent after 10 years of AAA studio life? His first game is featured all over, but released to a 95% piracy rate. Pulling in barely $20k after 6 months of work his dev team quits. He tries to stick with it, developing things on his own, but large software projects take multiple disciplines and his projects suffer. Not able to stick by him in his defeats, his girlfriend leaves, takes his corgi. Less than two years later, when no developers are willing to bring Johnny on staff because he's now 36 and has been nuked, he goes homeless. There will never be a parable that makes people care about piracy.
  - zanny 12y ago
    If you can't profit off a business model then you picked the wrong business model. Today there really is no excuse. If you are a game dev looking to break into the industry, you do need a lead - something good to show off what you can do - but really all you need is a demo of your capabilities, and with something like Unity you can get something out the door really quick. You just need to demonstrate competency. And you should probably give that one away. Then if you actually intend to make a legitimate project, of scale, with huge developer costs et al, go kickstart it. If you don't have the finances to gamble on if or if not enough people will voluntarily give you an arbitrary amount of money effectively as a donation for making the game after the fact, find out if they are willing to give you a fraction of it beforehand. If not, your game would not have sold anyway. And if you say something along the lines of "they have no audience, how can they kickstart?" then I ask you how they can sell their game in the first place, if they have no audience. For better or worse most digital media sales are not about quality or effort but are about publicity and consistency. Fundamentally piracy does not mean you would have or not had a succesful launch - the pirates are just users who mostly would not have paid at all, and you won't get an order of magnitude more sales from somehow making it so you cannot transmit data online freely anymore.
wereHamster 12y ago
You lucky pal. You were actually able to legaly get the tools you need. I on the other hand have no legal way to pay for some of the TV shows I'm watching. Even if I wanted. And I want. I have a netflix subscription. But even netflix doens't have all the shows / movies. So how will this play out? The companies will figure out, sooner or later, that if they provide a reasonable service then people will pay for it. Until then, TPB / bittorrent will remain the only source for a rather large group of people.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "You were actually able to legaly get the tools you need. I on the other hand have no legal way to pay for some of the TV shows I'm watching." I'm probably going to get down voted for this but when your excuse for piracy is you can't watch some TV shows your excuse is weak. Not being able to see those shows is going to have very little impact on your life. Certainly not enough of an impact to justify theft or copying without permission. TV shows are not a 'tool you need'. I'm fortunately in a country where most stuff is available. There is still a lot that is not though and occasionally I may turn to piracy (until it is available at which stage I buy it). I don't try to justify this though as it is a poor justification for piracy.
  - ojii 12y ago
    But if I have two options: 1) Not watch a Movie/TV Show or 2) Pirate it (there's no option to buy it, which is true for most of the world besides the US), isn't piracy a "victimless" crime as in the producers of the content don't lose sales, because there was no way to do a sale in the first place?
    - k-mcgrady 12y ago
      >> "isn't piracy a "victimless" crime as in the producers of the content don't lose sales" I don't know. Maybe the creator didn't want people in a certain country to view the material. Maybe it hurts their feelings that it's being pirated. Maybe they have a release planned 6 months from now in a certain country and their sales will be down for that. There's no way to know for certain you won't be causing harm.
skrowl 12y ago
I see it working out roughly as well as the extremely costly "war on drugs". HINT: drugs won.
- lbotos 12y ago
  What does it look like in a world where "piracy" won? I'm generally curious, do you think all software will just be "free" or people will charge drastically less for their software?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    People are already charging drastically less for their software. Upgrading to the next version of Windows will actually be free! How likely would that be ten years ago? That's why everyone is busy writing SaaS apps instead; they're harder to pirate.
  - tomp 12y ago
    I would support a world where IP is free for non-commercial use (so cinemas and corporations must still pay for movies/software they use, but home viewers/users don't need to), as well as 14 year default copyright term (as most economic value seems to be generated by then).
  - anon4 12y ago
    You're looking at it. It's this world. Piracy of everything is rampant and getting more and more widely accepted. When I pay for software, I don't do it because it's illegal to pirate or out of some moral obligation, I do it because money have to change hands for the economy to function. If it costs too much for me, I try to get it on a sale, or just pirate. I sleep very well at night.
- zanny 12y ago
  If only I could look forward to a noip future. I guess in the same way "drugs r bad" and "piracy r bad" can lead to strong ethics and morals (freedom of property for the former, freedom of information for the later) they both have huge cultural slanders across them, architected or not.
walru 12y ago
What is the pertinence of your first sentence? Most of this site works in software development.
qeorge 12y ago
I think for some segment of the population it will continue forever. But I think most people grow out of piracy eventually. In my experience, adults generally don't steal things, even if no one is going to catch them and even if they really want it. And consequently most people grow out of piracy. Not everyone of course, but enough for me to believe there's still a future in selling IP.
- the_af 12y ago
  I think stealing is only part of it. A lot of it is actually availability: the mainstream industry simply can't or won't compete on availability and convenience, which explains why piracy is rampant. If you could pay a fee and get whatever show/movie you wanted, whenever you wanted, without region restrictions, and in the original language, I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy. Some people will download pirated movies just because, of course, but I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy if paid content was just more convenient. In other word, distributors need to shape up. Of course, it's easier to blame consumers and try to enforce stricter DRM instead of improving the quality of service...
  - pyre 12y ago
    There are exceptions to your rule though. You can't always get streaming service out in the boonies, or other remote locations.
  - emsy 12y ago
    Unfortunately, this argument doesn't get the attention it deserves. A clickhoster account can cost more than a Netflix account, yet people are willing to pay for it, even though they might not end up using it to its extent. In Europe many people would gladly pay to watch GoT when it's released. Customers don't care for marketing rights, they just want to watch the show when it's released.
  - qeorge 12y ago
    I don't disagree that a lot of people would stop pirating if there was a legal alternative. However, in my experience, most adults will simply chose an alternative rather than resort to piracy (which is probably watching a different show, but it could also be simply not watching TV). I'm in that camp, now. I'll just pick another show which is available on Hulu/Netflix/Amazon, or I'll play my Xbox, or I'll take a walk. Not a big deal.
anonymousab 12y ago
It will play out like that until the internet is effectively balkanized and under full control and censorship. Otherwise the back and forth aspect is both politically beneficial for copyright holders and economically beneficial for those doing the shutdowns.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  How is it economically beneficial to those doing the shutdowns? Didn't they just lose a customer?
venomsnake 12y ago
As long as there are large populations unable to afford there will be piracy. Also pirated products are genuinely better - games can be modded, no activation. Tv shows are simultaneously released and so on ... Of course we have some attempts at cloudwashing software, but I doubt they will be successful. The benefits of cloud are tiny compared to the freedom of having code run on hardware you control.
- amelius 12y ago
  > As long as there are large populations unable to afford there will be piracy. The question is: is that a bad thing? Because in that case, a download does not equal a loss of sale.
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    A download is rarely a lost sale - for us to count it as one (talking about games) you need to download it, install it and play trough it. I know people with 5-6 TB of music on their drives. Or books - that is more that a person could consume, ever. So counting them as lost sales is absurd. I have pirated a lot, but with steam available I both rebuilt my pirated catalog - their sales helped a lot, and rarely bother with piracy lately - my backlog is so big, that I can literally wait a couple of years for the game to come to 90% off.
tomp 12y ago
I see thing the opposite way from qeorge; I think that people are literally growing into piracy - for the younger generations, it's natural to have content available for downloading, so when they become old and get bigger say in the government (not just via democracy, but also via leadership positions), the copyright monopoly will loose its position and will be forced to withdraw. For example, I'm 26 years old (so one of the younger generations), and I think it's absolutely immoral that copyright terms prevent me from using art that was produced more than 50 years ago. I strongly oppose any copyright term longer than 28 years; and I'm only open to one longer than 14 years if a strong economic (statistical) case for it can be made.

by lbotos 12y ago

As someone who 1) works in the web/software industry and 2) actually paid for Photoshop, how do you (the collective you) see this playing out? Will we have this cat and mouse game ad infinium?

Phlarp 12y ago

This game is hardly cat and mouse. Pirate Bay went down and all the traffic went to Kickass, now Pirate Bay is back up and chugging before "they" can get Kickass down. I bet Kickass is back up before the next one goes down, seems a bit more like Road Runner and Wile E Coyote.

rhino369 12y ago

Yes. The common sentiment from pirates is that they'll always been one step ahead and then you break up one site two take its place. Well that is sort of true. But that makes it harder to keep up with if you aren't tech savy / into the pirate scene. The media companies just don't another Napster situation where everyone and their mom knew how to get all the songs they wanted.

agumonkey 12y ago

Historically, it seemed easier to set up a torrent website than seizing one. But if the authorities allow for faster take-downs I don't think mice will be able to reproduce.

dshacker 12y ago

I pay for photoshop now, but back when I was starting I couldn't afford it. I wouldn't be able to have a job now, if I hadn't had used photoshop in its trial edition. Not even their education pricing was affordable for a student.

lettergram 12y ago

When getting new software is as easy as finding a friend to hit "copy" > "paste", it will always be like this. Further, even when they make it difficult with keys and what not, there is almost always a way to break it. If that fails, there is always an alternative. If we look at morals... I always enjoyed the story in the bible where Jesus broke several loaves bread and a few fish and shared it with a massive crowd. No one cared about the poor fishermen or farmers. Why then is it morally objectionable to share software in the same manner? In other words, unless people fine it morally reprehensible we will always have something like this going on.

x1798DE 12y ago
To be fair, in the parable of the loaves and fishes, Jesus was providing the largest value added, not the farmers/bakers or fishermen, since only he was able to multiply those things; as the marginal producer of the wealth, it's not unreasonable to assign that property right to him.
radisb 12y ago
Jesus didn't steal anything, he copied something that he originally had created, something that he had donated to the fishermen in the first place. He created (well, his father) the fish on the 5th (or 6th I dont remember) day of the creation, remember?
- passwordreset 12y ago
  That sure sounds like bread and fish piracy to me. We better lock this guy up. You say his name is Jesus. Is he Mexican, or is that an alias? (BTW, Jesus is dead, his father was some schmuck who knocked up some girl that we now call "Mary" for some reason, and there is no God.)
walru 12y ago
You mean something like little Johnny Gamedesigner who decides to break free and go independent after 10 years of AAA studio life? His first game is featured all over, but released to a 95% piracy rate. Pulling in barely $20k after 6 months of work his dev team quits. He tries to stick with it, developing things on his own, but large software projects take multiple disciplines and his projects suffer. Not able to stick by him in his defeats, his girlfriend leaves, takes his corgi. Less than two years later, when no developers are willing to bring Johnny on staff because he's now 36 and has been nuked, he goes homeless. There will never be a parable that makes people care about piracy.
- zanny 12y ago
  If you can't profit off a business model then you picked the wrong business model. Today there really is no excuse. If you are a game dev looking to break into the industry, you do need a lead - something good to show off what you can do - but really all you need is a demo of your capabilities, and with something like Unity you can get something out the door really quick. You just need to demonstrate competency. And you should probably give that one away. Then if you actually intend to make a legitimate project, of scale, with huge developer costs et al, go kickstart it. If you don't have the finances to gamble on if or if not enough people will voluntarily give you an arbitrary amount of money effectively as a donation for making the game after the fact, find out if they are willing to give you a fraction of it beforehand. If not, your game would not have sold anyway. And if you say something along the lines of "they have no audience, how can they kickstart?" then I ask you how they can sell their game in the first place, if they have no audience. For better or worse most digital media sales are not about quality or effort but are about publicity and consistency. Fundamentally piracy does not mean you would have or not had a succesful launch - the pirates are just users who mostly would not have paid at all, and you won't get an order of magnitude more sales from somehow making it so you cannot transmit data online freely anymore.

wereHamster 12y ago

You lucky pal. You were actually able to legaly get the tools you need. I on the other hand have no legal way to pay for some of the TV shows I'm watching. Even if I wanted. And I want. I have a netflix subscription. But even netflix doens't have all the shows / movies. So how will this play out? The companies will figure out, sooner or later, that if they provide a reasonable service then people will pay for it. Until then, TPB / bittorrent will remain the only source for a rather large group of people.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "You were actually able to legaly get the tools you need. I on the other hand have no legal way to pay for some of the TV shows I'm watching." I'm probably going to get down voted for this but when your excuse for piracy is you can't watch some TV shows your excuse is weak. Not being able to see those shows is going to have very little impact on your life. Certainly not enough of an impact to justify theft or copying without permission. TV shows are not a 'tool you need'. I'm fortunately in a country where most stuff is available. There is still a lot that is not though and occasionally I may turn to piracy (until it is available at which stage I buy it). I don't try to justify this though as it is a poor justification for piracy.
- ojii 12y ago
  But if I have two options: 1) Not watch a Movie/TV Show or 2) Pirate it (there's no option to buy it, which is true for most of the world besides the US), isn't piracy a "victimless" crime as in the producers of the content don't lose sales, because there was no way to do a sale in the first place?
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    >> "isn't piracy a "victimless" crime as in the producers of the content don't lose sales" I don't know. Maybe the creator didn't want people in a certain country to view the material. Maybe it hurts their feelings that it's being pirated. Maybe they have a release planned 6 months from now in a certain country and their sales will be down for that. There's no way to know for certain you won't be causing harm.

skrowl 12y ago

I see it working out roughly as well as the extremely costly "war on drugs". HINT: drugs won.

lbotos 12y ago
What does it look like in a world where "piracy" won? I'm generally curious, do you think all software will just be "free" or people will charge drastically less for their software?
- icebraining 12y ago
  People are already charging drastically less for their software. Upgrading to the next version of Windows will actually be free! How likely would that be ten years ago? That's why everyone is busy writing SaaS apps instead; they're harder to pirate.
- tomp 12y ago
  I would support a world where IP is free for non-commercial use (so cinemas and corporations must still pay for movies/software they use, but home viewers/users don't need to), as well as 14 year default copyright term (as most economic value seems to be generated by then).
- anon4 12y ago
  You're looking at it. It's this world. Piracy of everything is rampant and getting more and more widely accepted. When I pay for software, I don't do it because it's illegal to pirate or out of some moral obligation, I do it because money have to change hands for the economy to function. If it costs too much for me, I try to get it on a sale, or just pirate. I sleep very well at night.
zanny 12y ago
If only I could look forward to a noip future. I guess in the same way "drugs r bad" and "piracy r bad" can lead to strong ethics and morals (freedom of property for the former, freedom of information for the later) they both have huge cultural slanders across them, architected or not.

walru 12y ago

What is the pertinence of your first sentence? Most of this site works in software development.

qeorge 12y ago

I think for some segment of the population it will continue forever. But I think most people grow out of piracy eventually. In my experience, adults generally don't steal things, even if no one is going to catch them and even if they really want it. And consequently most people grow out of piracy. Not everyone of course, but enough for me to believe there's still a future in selling IP.

the_af 12y ago
I think stealing is only part of it. A lot of it is actually availability: the mainstream industry simply can't or won't compete on availability and convenience, which explains why piracy is rampant. If you could pay a fee and get whatever show/movie you wanted, whenever you wanted, without region restrictions, and in the original language, I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy. Some people will download pirated movies just because, of course, but I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy if paid content was just more convenient. In other word, distributors need to shape up. Of course, it's easier to blame consumers and try to enforce stricter DRM instead of improving the quality of service...
- pyre 12y ago
  There are exceptions to your rule though. You can't always get streaming service out in the boonies, or other remote locations.
- emsy 12y ago
  Unfortunately, this argument doesn't get the attention it deserves. A clickhoster account can cost more than a Netflix account, yet people are willing to pay for it, even though they might not end up using it to its extent. In Europe many people would gladly pay to watch GoT when it's released. Customers don't care for marketing rights, they just want to watch the show when it's released.
- qeorge 12y ago
  I don't disagree that a lot of people would stop pirating if there was a legal alternative. However, in my experience, most adults will simply chose an alternative rather than resort to piracy (which is probably watching a different show, but it could also be simply not watching TV). I'm in that camp, now. I'll just pick another show which is available on Hulu/Netflix/Amazon, or I'll play my Xbox, or I'll take a walk. Not a big deal.

anonymousab 12y ago

It will play out like that until the internet is effectively balkanized and under full control and censorship. Otherwise the back and forth aspect is both politically beneficial for copyright holders and economically beneficial for those doing the shutdowns.

jsprogrammer 12y ago
How is it economically beneficial to those doing the shutdowns? Didn't they just lose a customer?

venomsnake 12y ago

As long as there are large populations unable to afford there will be piracy. Also pirated products are genuinely better - games can be modded, no activation. Tv shows are simultaneously released and so on ... Of course we have some attempts at cloudwashing software, but I doubt they will be successful. The benefits of cloud are tiny compared to the freedom of having code run on hardware you control.

amelius 12y ago
> As long as there are large populations unable to afford there will be piracy. The question is: is that a bad thing? Because in that case, a download does not equal a loss of sale.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  A download is rarely a lost sale - for us to count it as one (talking about games) you need to download it, install it and play trough it. I know people with 5-6 TB of music on their drives. Or books - that is more that a person could consume, ever. So counting them as lost sales is absurd. I have pirated a lot, but with steam available I both rebuilt my pirated catalog - their sales helped a lot, and rarely bother with piracy lately - my backlog is so big, that I can literally wait a couple of years for the game to come to 90% off.

tomp 12y ago

I see thing the opposite way from qeorge; I think that people are literally growing into piracy - for the younger generations, it's natural to have content available for downloading, so when they become old and get bigger say in the government (not just via democracy, but also via leadership positions), the copyright monopoly will loose its position and will be forced to withdraw. For example, I'm 26 years old (so one of the younger generations), and I think it's absolutely immoral that copyright terms prevent me from using art that was produced more than 50 years ago. I strongly oppose any copyright term longer than 28 years; and I'm only open to one longer than 14 years if a strong economic (statistical) case for it can be made.