• Zoolander@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Not in the US. The content of my courses (I had a total of 9 years of undergraduate study lol, in 2 different universities, in both science and engineering) was all in the lecture slides/notes.

    Ok, so as I suspected. If your classes weren’t lecture based, you’d probably be in a similar situation then. That’s not really a refutation of the point, though.

    However, that doesn’t mean you have suffered a loss

    This is the entire crux of my argument, though. If they’re playing the game, then you have suffered a loss because, otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to play the game. The alternative is that the game has to be DRM’d or somehow otherwise inconvenienced and that’s just bullshit. Why is it so hard to just admit that you shouldn’t be able to play something that you haven’t paid for and that, if you do, you’re stealing? There’s no judgement on that. I don’t care if that’s what you want to do. I just think people should be honest and admit that that’s what they’re doing.

    The middle man kills good business far more than any pirate. I’m sure Google and Apple made a satisfactory profit off your apps, even if you suffered a loss.

    Agree with this and everything above that you wrote. I feel like that explicitly disproves your argument, though, that piracy is only a service/quality issue. I’m very familiar with what Gabe has said and mostly agree with his position but that’s an entirely different argument, yet again, than what I’ve been making. Gabe doesn’t pretend that people pirating games aren’t stealing them. He’s just arguing that there are service reasons for why people might pirate them that have nothing to do with just the cost of the game.

    The movie is good, so fewer people pirate it, because they’re also happy to pay for it.

    Again, if this were true and this simple, no good movies would be pirated. And yet they are.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      If your classes weren’t lecture based, you’d probably be in a similar situation then.

      Lol if my classes weren’t lecture based I’d have an Arts degree, not Science and Engineering degrees. Said degrees have far more scheduled hours, rather than relying on “reading time”.

      I wasn’t refuting any points, I was subtly pointing out how the US university system seems to be corrupt such that the people running courses require you to buy their books. None of the textbooks that were recommended in my courses were written by the people teaching them - and yet, the courses were among the top in the UK.

      If they’re playing the game, then you have suffered a loss because, otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to play the game.

      That is simply not true. Them playing the game is not you suffering a loss.

      Let’s make a fair use example. Let’s say their friend bought the game, and described it to the “infringer” in explicit detail. There’s nothing wrong with that.

      Then let’s say this person took that description and wrote their own game. Said person happened to be the Shakespearian monkey with a typewriter who wrote an identical game to yours. So long as they don’t publish or distribute the game, they’re not infringing on your copyright. They’ve never even seen nor experienced your game, so they can’t be “stealing it” either. They made their own unique creation, which, by chance, is the same as yours.

      They played the game, but they did not pay you for it. Why should they? They don’t know who you are, they don’t know what you’re selling, they just enjoyed the fruits of their own labour - which by pure chance happens to be the same as yours.

      Are you entitled to money from them? No. That would be ridiculous. That principle was established before you were born.

      Again, if this were true and this simple, no good movies would be pirated.

      There will always be some level of piracy. There always has been. Copying computer data is so trivially easy that prohibiting it is only a losing battle.

      Your statement that “no good movies would be pirated” is thus completely false. You can only measure the amount of piracy and correlate that with the quality of the work. On the whole, good quality work is pirated less than poor quality work.

      The fact that you experienced rampant piracy is perhaps a better indicator of the quality of your work, more than anything else.