Piracy, How much money is being lost, and what percent of them would have bought it?

I have Warezed at least a hundred games.

I would have bought maybe 5 at full price and maybe 10 more at discount prices. I probably would have got ripped off at least half those times, getting sucked in to pay for Doom3 would choke me. You know I have played probably less than 20% of them.


I dont care what anyone thinks about it either. Its not a real crime where I live, its a grey area.

Colonsus, "well if I cant afford cable is ok to have pirate cards?" lol. I would in a heart beat. I personally cant wait for Nov 17, that's the release date of Half Life 2, well... at least where I do my shopping.

I believe the amount of people truly believe its completely wrong are in the minority. I have not had anyone say to me personally "No i dont want a free copy of XPpro with SP2 integrated. Norton 2005. Myst 4...etc

I would not compare it to theft (though it is) I would consider it more like sharing, like a library :)

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Originally posted by talldude
I've lived in asia...in Thailand and Japan specifically. I can say for a fact that in Thailand it's much harder to find a legal copy of a game/program than a pirated one. In Japan it's the other way around.

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totally ignoring the fact that in thailand/china the average household income is Sheite.

Once apon a time I was huge into the Warez scene. It was something fun to do when I was in high school/college. As with most other college kids I had little to no cash so free games/programs were a huge help.

Being a working man now with ample money I rarely resort to Warez or cracks with only one exception. I can not stand severly over priced software. One of my favorite examples is Nero burning rom. Nero costs between $70 and $100, which is insane. If I can buy a great DVD burner for $70 why would I ever pay the same price or more for the software to use it? This also applies to various peices of business class software that should have a license fee suited for home users: Photoshop, DVD authoring software (all though some are affordable), MS Office, and so on.

I'm realistic I want to pay for what I get, but if the price of the tool is more than the tool would be worth to me I have a problem with it.

Let's go back to the porche example used earlier. Basically it doesn't work in this case. A porche is a physical piece of property. It's real it has recognizable value. Porches are both rare and exotic which is why they are valued above other regular cars. People realize it would be wrong to steal it because we know exactly the value of what we would be taking. Now, flip to software. Software is intelectual property that somone has arbitrarily placed a price tag on. Now the cost of development is obviously a factor, but not the primary factor in most cases.

Lets take photoshop for example walk down the street and ask the everyday joe if photoshop, a digial editing program is worth the $700 dollar price tag? Wonder what his answer would be? And oh yeah tell the guy that $700 dollars spent is only going to be worth using for a couple years till a new version of the probram comes out and the one he bought isn't supported. You can always buy parts for a classic porche, try finding current plugins for photoshop 2... there is a difference.

Sorry for being long winded but this is definately a soft spot with me.

It would be interesting to see an actual scientific study done to try to determine what percentage of pirated software/music/etc actually represents a loss of money to the companies who own it. That is, what percentage of the people who are pirating would have actually paid money if pirating wasn't possible for them.

The industries like to pretend that it's 100%, which of course is ridiculous, and results in silly news stories saying things like, "Pirating costs the music industry $100 billion per year", as if every person who ever downloaded an mp3 would have bought every album the song originally came on.

There are plenty of college students sitting there with 5000 mp3's on their hard drives, representing songs that originally might have come from 20,000 different albums. Would these students have bought 20,000 albums if mp3 downloading wasn't available? Clearly not.

Probably the study would have to look at, say, music enthusiasts who download mp3's without paying for them, and also those who don't (for moral reasons, or becuase they don't have a computer perhaps) and look at how much money the two groups spend buying cd's each year, and you could derive some statistics from this.

The bottom line is that there is a cost associated with the development and production of any piece of software. It's not up to you to determine that its okay to steel it because its too expensive. That is what economics will do on its own. If the price is too high, don't buy it and seek other alternatives. If a product is no longer selling at a given price, market forces will adjust it to where the price comes down, or the developer goes out of business.

As to the car analogy, it's not that much different. IP is purely an idea. Until some one actually makes it physical, it doesn't exist except as an idea. Software has physical presence, and I'm not talking about the disk, and in this case is more liken to stealing the car than being IP.

Patenting the idea for a software program is IP, when the code is written, it takes on physical presence and using that software, whether you would have purchased it or not, is stealing and has an economic impact.

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Originally posted by Slirp
Let's go back to the porche example used earlier. Basically it doesn't work in this case. A porche is a physical piece of property. It's real it has recognizable value. Porches are both rare and exotic which is why they are valued above other regular cars. People realize it would be wrong to steal it because we know exactly the value of what we would be taking. Now, flip to software. Software is intelectual property that somone has arbitrarily placed a price tag on. Now the cost of development is obviously a factor, but not the primary factor in most cases.

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Wow, so you don't think the time and R&D the developers of Nero put into the software are worth $100, but you think a porsche, consisting of physical parts costing not much more than say $20K is worth $70-130K?

Most *everything* is something some company has arbitrarily placed some price tag on. Porsches don't exactly have $70K in parts in them you know. The come off an assembly line in Germany. The only thing that keeps them "rare" is that more people can't afford a $70K+ car. If a billion people could afford them they would no longer be rare.

-MrD

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Originally posted by MrDigital
Wow, so you don't think the time and R&D the developers of Nero put into the software are worth $100, but you think a porsche, consisting of physical parts costing not much more than say $20K is worth $70-130K?

Most *everything* is something some company has arbitrarily placed some price tag on. Porsches don't exactly have $70K in parts in them you know. The come off an assembly line in Germany. The only thing that keeps them "rare" is that more people can't afford a $70K+ car. If a billion people could afford them they would no longer be rare.

-MrD

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Well, if they left them lying around with the keys in the ignition, and car theft was a minor crime that many ppl commit, and a grey area in many countries (if not out right leagal). Then in your hypothetical little world, I would take one out for a spin.

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Originally posted by Freddy_Kruger
Well, if they left them lying around with the keys in the ignition, and car theft was a minor crime that many ppl commit, and a grey area in many countries (if not out right leagal). Then in your hypothetical little world, I would take one out for a spin.

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That really has nothing to do with what you quoted, but it was nice of you to inform us that you'd be a criminal.

-MrD

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Originally posted by rhettro
there are so many free demos availible to people

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My big issue is that companies are putting out a lot less demos these days. It's often hard to find a demo of an upcoming game that I want to try before I buy. It seems the only way to try a game is to be selected for beta testing, which doesn't exactly happen every day.

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Originally posted by MrDigital
That really has nothing to do with what you quoted, but it was nice of you to inform us that you'd be a criminal.

-MrD

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Read the title of the thread, and the progression of the posts. You have no clue what I'm talking about? lol.

How would you even begin to figure out how much is lost? Manufacturers don't know how much of their product will sell, especially software items. These numbers are probably made using "best case scenerios" of how much they think it will sell. No one knows who would buy what program and who would download a free alternative, pirate the original program, or simply go without it. You also can't track how many people have downloaded it as warez, or how many have burned it to CD and given it to someone.

Just seems like it would be statistically impossible to figure out monetary loss.

Not to take sides with anyone but comparing porsches and software IS like comparing apples and oranges. Freddy Kreuger's analogy is a great one but I'm sure there are so many other factors that exclude it from being comparied to software directly (althought he does get it as close as possible). At the sametime, Mr. Digital hit the point that by the time R&D is done with it and the costs to recover and the profits that are to be made, both porsches and software prices will be extra-ordinarily high. The bottom line is are you going to pay for the product? Yes or no? If no, are you going to obtain it illegally meaning without buying a liscense/cd key THUS cut into the company/developers profits? If people can get something they want/desire with a small risk of getting caught, people WILL take advantage of it. Does it make them right if millions of other people do it? Absolutely not. Its human nature. Your not obtaining the product legally.

As far as how much money is being lost, its hard to tell. I'm willing to bet you that most if not all of these companies are going to inflate their "stolen profits" so that they can get the proper authorities or the public to feel sympathetic for them.


edit* just saw mr. cherry's post and he actually answers the question of the thread. Good job ace!:D

http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbat...46&tid=1525866

^^^
Someone at M$ likes to use warez. lol :D

Let's look at this from an economics point of view:

The price of software is dependant on supply and demand. Pirating for personal use directly affects the supply for the product - the pirate is essentially making the company produce more than what they're producing. Higher production = surplus at the original price, and price or quantity produced will have to come down if the company wants to maximise profit. This screws over the company since its average costs per unit might be higher than the new price/quantity combo will cover. It also screws up economic efficiency and stifles innovation (what's the incentive to produce a good if people are not going to pay for it?).

So yes, any time you pirate software, even if you think "it makes no difference," from an economics point of view, and to the company it DOES make a difference. The individual saves $10, the company loses MILLIONS.

nm, i have to re-read stuff