Taking something that doesn't belong to you is stealing. What would you call piracy then? Borrowing? Bloody idiot

You don't "take" anything when you pirate, you copy it illegally. It's an entirely different crime. Clothes, purses and such are also pirated, in the sense that people make illegal replicas of them and sell them.

My opinion about it? Pirates gonna pirate. Trying to stop it is futile. No measure towards it can be taken, because it will only hurt the actual customers. Though you might limit it somewhat towards those who are impatient. But that usually happens with horrible DRM solutions.

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
I make of that : "If you don't want to be ripped off, don't rip off others."

Beyond any religious connotations, it's simple common sense in a gregarious context (living in a society).

If people don't get that, it's sad, for them, because they have more to loose than the ones that they steal from.

Also, I feel good knowing that I don't parasite other people ^.^

Wait ... what? Where i said everyone? I was talking about piracy veterans also, go read suprbay forum to see how they think. /eot

I have several Gaming friends. They have PS3 and buy every game for it, as soon as a PC game comes out they pirate. If they could not pirate they would buy, they would not stop gaming. I keep trying to convince to buy the witcher, but they simply dont care. I feel bad for guys like CD Project who make a great RPG, for people to rip it off like they do. PC piracy is bad.

I told him how good TW2 was, and it was worth a buy, what did he do?pirate, cause he can. If he had no choice he would buy it. So this " A game pirated is not a lsot sale" argument is BS, not all are, but some surely are, quite a few.
its still stealing, dopesn't have to be a physical crime to be stealing.

It's just like stealing a car to find out if you like it. If you don't then you just dump the car, and if you do you go to the dealership to buy it. Do you really think the salesman would be sympathetic that you want to buy it, but you stole it first? No..it's still a crime.

Piracy is similar so there is no excuse to pirate a game. If you want to try it first? That's what demos are for. That is why when you buy a car you can give it a test drive first.

I'll preface this by saying I don't pirate games, never have, and I believe pirating them is wrong. However:

This is a horrible analogy. For one thing, many games don't have demos. When they do, many features are locked out/disabled or the demo is so short you don't get a real taste of what the game will be like (See the DA2 demo for a prime example). Finally, in order for your analogy to fit, you'd have to be able to make a perfect copy of the car, which means you don't actually steal it, you copied it. Then, if you go buy it, the dealer has no say about it at all, since you stole nothing from him. All his cars are still on the lot.

Again, I think piracy is wrong, but using analogies like yours doesn't help our case in pointing out why.

Ok, so the programmers get paid in advance...from the company they work for...which has -eventually- taken a credit from its bank to do so (cause, even for software developement companys, money doesn`t grow on trees).
So the programmers are well out then...just to the point, where the (always well-founded) piracy sets in...`cause now the company the programmers work for, gets no (or not enough) money back from the sales...so the company cannot pay back the credit...so the company gets no further credit (which is needed, cause the lack of incoming money)...cannot pay the programmers in advance again to work on the next game...so the company goes bust...the programmers lost their job (but,...hey...that`s no problem, cause they did a good work, so another company will employ them)...and history repeats itself.

Oh, this is new...
If a company busts, it has absolutely nothing do do with the fact, that piracy reduces the income - they just didn't make their work well enough. (which, as we all know, is to give us their products for free -cause it`s a real insult, to claim money for such faulty programs)

Its not stealing by law its "copyright infringement" or something like that so you dont need to do any thinking and make up a new term for it.

No its not like stealing a car its more like you copy one. Its still breaking a law but there is no car missing. "Piracy" have been around since forever and ever since laws / rights over creation began. People have copied what others have done for a very long time. Its just super easy to do it with digital stuff.

No i dont think piracy is bad overall. The industry is overall making more money every year. If someone pirate something i only have one thing to say to them "If you like it buy it... That way the devs can make more games for you".

Pirates in general download EVERYTHING. If you removed piracy in some magical world with pink clouds and purple unicorns. The sales would still not go up to the pirated copies download numbers. I could go on but yeah. Piracy is not that big of a problem.

LOL. That's about the same I reply when someone compares downloading IMAGE files and filesharing with "stealing a car". Some just can't see the difference and it's not because they are blind, it is just because they refuse to open their eyes!

The Golden Rule assumes that everybody wants the same thing. Which is completely untrue. Did you really think spitting out the Golden Rule was going to amount to anything?

Dear archaven

I was just curious, if I am alone with my opinion about piracy or there are more such as I am.
As far as I see, I am not alone :)
Best regards.

Sincerely

When I was 10, we got a Commodore 64. That began my obsession with computer gaming. I probably had ~200 games and about 99% of them were "pirated". Why? Because it was easy to do and my parents, while occasionally buying a game for me, would certainly *not* have bought two hundred+ games. I was young and I didn't see it as doing anything wrong. I just knew that I wanted to play all these games and programs like Fast Hack'em made that possible (and really easy to do).

As I grew up, I eventually came to realize that the people making these cool games weren't just doing it for fun but in many cases, it was their livelihood. But even though I had started to get the feeling that what I was doing was wrong, I still justified it based on the fact that I was just a kid and I didn't have any money to buy these games anyway. And since I didn't have the money, it wasn't like the people who were selling these games were actually losing out on anything.

By the time I was in high school, I had a part time job and I'd buy the occasional game but I also still pirated games, too. By this time, computer gaming had become a lot bigger than it used to be. There were lots of games out now that I wanted to play but I certainly couldn't afford to buy all of them. My parents made me pay for my car insurance (not cheap, of course) and naturally, a teenage boy needs money to spend on girls! I still wanted to "try out" all the new games and a lot of my friends were into gaming, so I had access to the games. Why should I deny myself what I want to do just because I don't have enough money? Life is tough!

Then I went to college. I'd always had an interest in computers since that Commodore 64 (and the Atari 2600 and Intellivision before that). What could be a better career than computer programming? So I started working on my computer science degree. Between classes, girls, friends, and a part time job, was still my desire to play all the *amazing* computer games that were being released. The Internet was still in it's infancy at that time but BITNET provided access to that Wolfenstein 3D demo and, a few days later, the full pirated version of the game! At some point, I "needed" a copy of Microsoft Office. Do you know how much that costs?!?!? OMG!!! I don't have that kind of money. Wait, now I need this Visual Studio thing for a programming class? Holy crap! I thought Office was expensive! Fortunately, I "knew some people who knew some people" and presto! A copy (literally) of Office and Visual Studio. Yeah, I knew it was "wrong" to have an unlicensed (pirated) copy of that software but I *needed* it. And Microsoft shouldn't charge so much for their software!

I finally finished that degree and I was very fortunate to get a good paying job as a software engineer at a major commercial software developer/publisher. For the first time in my life, I was finally earning a good salary. I worked a lot more hours than I thought I would, especially around crunch time. When the first product I worked on was shipped and became available in retail stores, I was pretty proud of that because it represented a lot of hard work on the part of a lot of people. By now, the Internet was really exploding and with it, the availability of pirated software. Usenet was laden with pirated software (and porn). To no surprise, the software that I'd put so much time into was also out there freely available for anyone to download. I knew it would be but seeing it was frustrating. Knowing that I (and a lot of other people) had put so much hard work into this product that sold for ~ $50 but could now be stolen and used by anyone for free really changed my perspective on software piracy. If people could take that product and use it without paying for it, then my employer wouldn't be earning money from sales and I (or someone else) might end up losing a job because of it.

I can honestly say that since that time, I haven't pirated software. Period. I've read so many justifications that people offer up for why they do it, why it's ok to do it and why it's not the same as stealing. For the most part, I think it boils down to people not being willing to deny themselves of something that they want when they're presented with the opportunity to get it for free. And if you read this whole thing, you know that that's something I could relate to for a large part of my life.

Today, my primary hobby is still computer gaming and I buy quite a few games. I have a couple of games that are six months old sitting on my bookshelf that I have yet to even open. Do I buy every game I want? No. I can't afford it. So I have to make choices about what I want the most. I'm sure that all of those games that I'd like to play but don't own are available right now through Torrent, Usenet, FTP, etc. But I feel like if I'm going to play a game, I should be paying the people who made it because that's how they earn their living.

I don't know how you manage to infer that "everybody wants the same thing" from the "rule" that I quoted. It's the contrary, and I was the first to admit that I somewhat interpreted the "rule", thanks to some reverse logic :

Do unto others... -> Do not do unto others...

Do you want someone to steal what would rightfully be considered your belongings ?
I doubt that anyone sane in their mind would, it just seems common sense to me.

I might be misunderstanding your writing of course, in which case I apologize.