pouët.net

although as some folks already mentions gpl can be more restrictive then permissive to innovation in some aspects. i prefer the mit license myself.

Thanks!

lugoober makes so many points and has the balls to use himself as the case study. really good post.

but all this ranting on the warezscene? Why? Are warezgroups sampling/stealing/borrowing/inspiring stuff from games to their own made games and spreading them under other names? No, thats right. They don't. So whats the point bringing that up?

When people buy my music, rip it from CDs to a CRC checked VBR mp3 in good quality, follow scene qualityrules and spreads it on the net, I dont call that copyright breach, I call that awesome and free distribution and noone is as happy as I.

So why does demosceners, as soon as they start working for software companies, start to sound like outdated 1990s boys band members on major labels complaining about music-piracy and internet when their solo-career ain't working out?

Just asking...

Because we're all clearly CORPORATE DINOSAURS clinging on to OUTDATED NOTIONS of how to make money and pay rent and not starve and that sort of shit, whereas the warezscene is a FLUFFY UTOPIA of morals and fair credit and not at all a cynical way of GETTING SHIT FOR FREE, and we should all be grateful for them enforcing their business model upon us!!!!!1

no dude, the warezscene is a small subculture of people competing in being the first who remove a copyprotection and get a working version of the game without it on an FTPserver with their grouptag on it. There is no ideology, mentality or moral to it. Maybe you mixed up the warezscene with kids leeching free shit of p2p?

one leads to the other...
yay for free shit at my p2p sites btw ;)

Because they grow up, start seeing the big picture and realize that there's more to life than 0day warez and free as in stolen beer software when their momma doesn't pay the bills anymore? I saw the piracy numbers for our latest game, I saw the server logs populated with pirated clients and I visited the forums where the said pirates lurked and talked among themselves. At that point I lost all faith in any kind of justification for it.

I can only speak for myself, but to elaborate on my point:
By actively participating in the scene, you* are (in one way or another) contributing to infringing intellectual property rights. Regardless of the motivation behind it, that is what the scene actually does.
To then be pissed that someone else is doing exactly that to you is just a huge logical disconnect. In principle it's not any different from what I'm doing, but the irony just becomes so blatantly obvious to me.

It's not a general attack on the scene (or pirates in general for that matter), just a small reminder of the old "live by the sword, die by the sword" saying.
If you can justify being a pirate, own it. Don't act like you think there should be one set of rules for you (and your fellow scene buddies), and one for the rest of the world.


*) "you" used as a general term, not aimed at anyone in particular.

the way I see it is that the "warez" scene boosts recognition of commercial releases and also is a big help when it comes to preserving content for the future generation.

what I really do not like is when ppl earn money w/ cracked prodz. Double standards my a§§.

Ha - all this time we've been pissing around with advertising and websites and reviews and trade shows to try and achieve that, when all we had to do was give our work away to some self-important geeks! How foolish of us...

Once again: so nice of the warezscene to impose your wonderful enlightened business model upon us, that just coincidentally happens to involve you getting shit for free.

glad to see gasman getting pissed off, that's rare.

one word: Students.

(+in my youth we copied disks by a dozen. could I have afforded all those progs? sure not. I was mostly amazed by the intros, anyways.)

(nowadays all my SW is free/GPL btw. just saying)

(p.s.: my point still stands: "warez" do boost popularity.)

just because you say "my point still stands" doesn't mean you've proven it.

tbh i dont think pirates hurt the industry as much as you like to think.
sure, theres games with >95% piracy rate, but what does that tell you?
it tells you that either you made a really big hit and amongst the 5 million buyers are 60 million pirates because you managed to hype your production.
or if its just a few sales it means that your production just isnt good enough to be considered paying for.

what am i saying? i guess that piracy was there since the home computers came into existence and still the games industry is bigger now than it ever was.

people ARE willing to pay for stuff they love, they just want to check out the other stuff as well.

would there be more sales without piracy? yes i gues there would be, but not in any case or as much as your usual CEO makes you think since piracy is also free advertising.

i dobt believe there would be as much gamers as there are now if they didnt pirate a game or two (or twenty) in their childhood.

stop blaming those who set information free, start adding stuff that people are willing to pay for.

Warez *can* be effective marketing - I've actually heard of cases where apps or games have sold more copies after being cracked + distributed. This is rare though, it's much more common for sales to go down because people want shit for free. It's a valid point, but the other side of the coin is a whole lot more valid.

Personally I think piracy is somewhat ok if it's limited. Back in the tape days, you couldn't make many copies before quality got too bad, so a certain percentage of users had to buy the product. Even in the disk days, you had to know somebody who knew somebody else, and you had to spend some money and physically swap some disks. Now you just need an internet connection, which pretty much everyone has, and you go to certain sites and pretty much everything is available and easy to get. It's simply too easy.

Besides that, it just comes down to having some respect and some self control. Respect in that if some guy (or company, which is just a bunch of guys working together) made some cool product you want and is selling it, it means they're trying to make a living and maybe you should give them some money in return for the product. And self control as in realising that you don't actually need every single game ever made, one decent one now and then is actually plenty - and you can probably afford that ;)

If people can decide between an uncrippled version and a version with DRM, constant internet access required etc. they will probably always go for the former - and while they probably say "but I'll buy the game later to support the authors", many of them probably forget about that, because they already got the comfortable cracked version - why still pay for the real product?

In the end, all of this justification of piracy is irrelevant. Even if you genuinely believe you're doing the author a favour by pirating their stuff and giving it greater exposure, the fact remains that you're reproducing their work in a way that contravenes their wishes. That's what this topic is about: Do you accept that the author of a work should have the right to decide the conditions under which their work is distributed (such as: requiring a fair credit, requiring payment, requiring the source code to be distributed with it, or even deciding that it shouldn't be distributed at all and burning the whole thing instead)?

If your answer is yes, but you support software piracy, then you're a hypocrite (because you're undermining their right to be paid).
If your answer is no, but you complain about ripping, then you're a hypocrite too (because the rippers aren't doing anything wrong if the original author has no veto over how their work is used).

Apparently some of you think that the right to be credited is more sacred than the right to be paid... if so, why?

here's a fun little thought experiment for you: what if a demo explicitly forbids the creation / distribution / sharing of itself in video form? sure as hell people would still capture and youtube it, and the author would of course ask youtube to take them down, and your account would lose standing, and you'd be pissed about something you shouldnt have done in the first place.

I gotta get to work so haven't had chance to read everything in this thread.... Anyhow, this is an interesting whatch an rather on-topic..

[url]http://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix.html[\url]

gasman>I'd say a piece of art has more moral value than some money. Maybe everyone hash is own scale.
Of course, warez guys complaining about ripping is ironic, BUT as bas as cracking/distributing illegally stuff is, it's not the same moral fault as ripping.

However:

THAT is ironic.
It was probably true 15 years agao, but now there are so many leaks from the (ftp) scene to p2p that when a group pre something they perfectly know it will be on thousands of semi-public and publics sources a couple of minute later (and yes it's interesting how it works as a distribution network but what gasman said about BM).
They could perfectly protect more the release place/ release it elsewhere, but I guess they don't because of fame: having your grouptag everywhere on the Internet is cool.
So maybe there is still the technical challenge, but please no "the lame p2p kids distributed our uberprivate crack to millions of people against our will".

With stories such as the itunes story where children cannot inherit the itunes digital collection from their mother, I have more sympathy for piracy than ever.

Intellectual property? What kind of moralism is this?
Fuck you. We do it for free. We do it for fun.
Please, take out that iPhones from your sore assholes and make a demo about it.

gargaj: it'll be the same with all movie/tvshow rippings. People will do it anyway and trade it illegally :)

Although it seems like a silly thought that demosceners will start illegally swapping videos of demos, captured by warez-groups with logos of artists who are against ripping. It would be even better if the message of the demo would be "ripping is totally cool and fine - EXCEPT FOR THIS DEMO, DON'T DO IT OR ELSE...!"

Lol, people find so many dumb ways to excuse "I just want this shit for free" for themselves.