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- QLD
It is incredible how naive people can be. The arguments that support piracy are most often made by people who have informed themselves from blogs and articles posted on the internet. People who defend piracy usually only acknowledge the points (right or wrong) that support their argument and do not want to acknowledge anything else.
The music industry is the best example of the effect of piracy that we have. Todays music industry represents the outcome of piracy. Today the most profitable music is pop music because it is low quality music that is cheap to produce, cheap to deliver (because it is of such low quality there is no discernible difference between low quality compressed formats and HD formats) and because there is enough of a market who is still willing to pay for digital downloads through places such as iTunes.
The number of artists that get signed at all today is very small in comparison to the past and in most cases the artists who get signed today get a poor deal in comparison to the past. Artists that do not create synthesised pop music have very little chance of even making a modest living from their music with very few notable exceptions.
There are a number of different ways music is pirated today ranging from P2P to people buying a CD from eBay and reselling it after they have ripped it but in each case neither the artist or publisher are receiving any income from pirated music. The reduced income from pirated music means less money can be spent on the production of music and artists do not make as much from their music if they make anything at all. The final result is the listener suffers.
No argument put forward defending piracy has shown how they are not responsible for the state of todays music industry and practically every argument from those that defend piracy who say they support the artists in other ways has been refuted by artists. As for the arguments that piracy doesn't always result in a lost sale, overall piracy has resulted in lost sales.
There is no reason to suspect the outcome to mainstream piracy in gaming will have a different result. Piracy will not result in an increase of revenue for the gaming industry and will only result in reduced revenue as there will always be a large number of people who take advantage of their ability to get something for nothing. Those that continue to spend their allocated budget on purchasing games and only use piracy for purposes they think are legitimate or argue support the industry will not magically have more money in their budget to allocate to gaming so these will not make up the short fall and many of these will still have games for which they have never contributed to the developers and publishers. Less revenue means less games and reduced production budgets which means less quality. This is the opposite of what we want. Today as technology is constantly improving we want games that take advantage of that technology and these games cost more to produce.
I do not support piracy, I do not share or download shared music unless I have been given it by the artist, I can say the same about other media but among people I talk to both online and in the real world I have established that people like me are the minority. I have my own small music forum and I was in the past a moderator on a large music forum, I am a member of a few music forums including the one I moderated. Through these I have come to know many artists including some notable artists and discussed piracy with thousands of people over the years. From these discussions it is clear to me that the majority of people who share music listen to and enjoy much more music than they have contributed to the artists for and they keep the majority of music they have downloaded even if they have never contributed a cent to the artist. The majority of the artists I talk to are struggling, those that have been able to make a living are often not doing as well as they have or would have in the past. Although a number of artists have begun to adapt and look to new ways to make the most of the current situation and accept piracy as part of the industry that they now have to use to their advantage not one artist has said to me they prefer it like this or said they are better off now. At best those that have day jobs have said at least they can appreciate more people are enjoying their music but I can guarantee what the answer will be if you ask them if they would prefer to earn a living from their music or if they would prefer to be able to have a large recording budget.
oops sorry for the off-topic but
Amiga's owned!!
