I gotta love this stance. If the wall doesn't work, build a bigger wall. Always works right?
No. What I am saying is that the distributors will not be left with any other choice unless the laws are changed. I didn't say it was the answer, just that it was inevitable. They have a right to protect their product and to use the law to do it. Instead of a person whining about their how rights are violated, change the fucking laws. Help find a way to put an end to the pirating that uses and abuses the your argument just for the sake of breaking the law and getting what they want. Educate the ignorant who don't get that pirating for the sake of getting it free is wrong.
The numbers of illegal torrents speak to this. Look at the sites and the comments left by the people stealing the stuff. I have NEVER seen one that said 'Thanks. I scratched my original disc and feel I have the right to acquire another copy without having to pay.' Instead they bitch about the cracks not working or bitch at the seeder that he needs to seed a more recent version and so on. Hell, even when they are getting it for free they bitch and whine. I wouldn't be surprised to see one of these yo-yo's turn around and sue a poster one day cause they infected their computer with some Trojan. I see the difference between your argument and those that just feel entitled to take it because they can. (I don't have to agree with either) The ones that have never bought a license or original copy. But the latter are the ones that are the large..VERY large majority of people breaking the law. Until THEY are dealt with or until YOU change the laws...the rights you value and feel are being violated will continue to be and it will get worse. I'm not saying it's right just that they had the right to pursue protection of their product.
The problem is I can't convince people to bend over to get screwed. This doesn't surprise me at all. I don't know why it surpises other people. How convincing of an argument is to tell someon that they are better giving companies money for their hard earned work who have proven, time and time again, they have absolutely no interest in supporting their paying customer base. The entire industry is built around these dumb-ass EULA's that nobody reads because they are twenty pages long, written in legalese and my favorite part, are subject to change without notice or agreement. That's why I say generally I follow EULA's. My life finite. I am not going spend it reading every overwritten unfair EULA that comes my way. I am just not going to do it. I don't think it's reasonable to ask me to. If they want to sum it up in a page, then I might read them, but that wouldn't change the fact that they can change it any damn time they want. The industry demands that. I think it is an unreasonable stance, and I think while it may not "cause" piracy, it fuels it.
I think the scratched CD is an excellent example of the problem this industry has as well. Do you know there a several places I can go to get a copy of Windows 7 if something were to happen to my legal disc. Do you know there a dozen households I can go to to get that disc or the download files if something were to happen to the physical media I use. All I need is that key, the physical media doesn't matter. I have purchased a license to use Windows 7, and if something happens to that disc, I don't have to worry about it. I just get to install my OS again, connect to the server, and the server will see its a legit copy because it IS a legit copy. But you want industry to start targetting me for doing that? I paid for it. Me acquiring another disc didn't cost Microsoft a darn thing. I got it elsewhere, off their network. I think they should provide it on their network to paying customers, at a small cost if need be to cover the cost of hosting the files, but if they won't do it, I can go somwhere else.
Do you know what gaming industry stance is. Messed up your disc, fk you. This is their response to a paying customer. Somone who opened up their wallet, whipped out their credit card, or just clicked a button to actually pay for their hard work. FK you. Do you know that a pirate doesn't have to worry about their discs getting scratched, or whether or not some server is going to be yanked just about a year later to save money or push everyone into the sequel. They don't have to worry about multiplayer servers requiring logins, they don't even have to worry about any of this shit paying customers do. All they have to worry about is this miniscule percentage chance of being caught.
Consumers are dealing with a industry that says pay us for unfinished products, and if you don't like it, too bad. Pay us for utilities that don't work, if you don't like it, too bad. If you do a chargeback on us, we'll ban you for life. If you say something we don't like, we'll take your library of games away forever. Refunds are not an option in software industry land (majority of cases). If you want customer service, pay out the nose for phone service, e-mail service or expect customers service tickets to take two weeks or longer to give you some cookie cutter answers that doesn't fix your problem. We're dealing with an industry that say's its okay to sell a lifetime subscription to an MMO one day and then two weeks later declare the game is F2P and tell that consuers, too bad. Boy weren't you a sucker to actually give us money. We're dealing with an industry that points to piracy as a reason and justification to treat their paying customers like theives and shit on the bottom of their shoes. We're dealing with publisher who think it's okay to print misinformation on their retail boxes and just shrug when someone says hey, this content isn't as advertised. We're dealing an industry that is so confident in their DRM schemes, most the time they won't even say what is.
I hear all the time about the complaints that pirates have this ridiculous sense of entitlement that they use to justify being thieves. Well guess what, the industry has it's own sense of entitlement. I mean just look at the what the publishers are doing now, while piracy rates are skyrocketing (in some countries actually go down in countries like the USA and Japan), while there are too many people to count stealing their products, they want to target the secondary market which consist of people who are generally are not pirates! If you are buying your games used, you are still trying to be legit. It would be just as easy for someone who buys a used copy of a game to go steal it as it is for someone who buys it new to steal it.
The industry needs to police itself, but they don't give a shit. How on earth do you think we're supposed to convert pirates into paying customers when the industry continues as it is. They spout the same mantra yea after year, trying to convince everyone that the best solution is just to take that swiss cheese wall of theirs and stack some more layers on it.
Just a few years ago, i would pay 50-60 dollars for my games, a bit less for my utilities and eagerly await for my product to arrive and begin play as soon as that puppy was released. Now, I almost never pay retail price. I wait until dozens of people post on forums to see how bad the DRM is, see if the product is even close to what they said it is. I paid just under twenty dollars for Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 with one of EA's sale. You know what my reward is for that? 1 out 3 times I load up dragon age, it tells me my profile doesn't have the DLC in the saved game I am loading so i can't play it. Then it throws me back into the menu, and i try again and it works. So pretty much every week i get a reminder from EA that one day, my game is not going to fuction properly when they yank their servers, and EA loves yanking their servers. Meanwhile, when that happens, some pirate who paid zero dollars is going to have their game run smoothly. But hey, I guess I am out of place. After all, I'm the "bad guy" right, the consumer who pays for her products but at the same times say you know what, this sucks.