"Lawless" & "criminals" were placed in quotation marks because 1) they were direct quotations 2) I do not wish to claim responsibility for your usage of these terms to describe the majority of the Transcendence community. As such, I believe that constitutes a reasonable use of quotation marks.Atarlost wrote:Copyright infringement is absolutely a crime and I find your use of scare quotes demonstrates precisely the sort of flagrant disregard for the law that is described by the term lawless.
Otherwise, there's a specific distinction between civil and criminal law, and copyright infringement is categorized under the former in most first-world jurisdictions. This is important, because in civil cases, the burden of proof falls on the claimant to demonstrate and quantify irreversible (economic, physical, psychological, etc.) harm caused by the illegal actions (unauthorized redistribution here) of another legal entity. The difficulty of due process in these cases led to the SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and the lesser known CISPA, all which were defeated by majority public backlash.
Perhaps the average person cannot relate his/her youtube downloads to violent robbery and hostage-taking on the high seas, and so will continue on his/her merry way until the authorities deem it something like "CyberTerrorism" in the future.
I'm sorry, but businesses and economies are not sustained by honesty nor the honor system, but rather greed, coercion, and the thing that makes people believe the internet is just a series of tubes.Atarlost wrote:False. Software does sell even when cracked versions are available because honest people still exist.
This current system is broken and cannot last for much longer, the software development companies have realized that. The current trend is towards Software as a Service (SaaS), which is the Free2Play model in the video games business. So far it has been massively successful, especially in markets usually afflicted with high piracy rates, it turns out that people may not be willing to pay to play, but they are willing to pay to win. Also, did you know that Starcraft II requires a monthly subscription fee in South Korea (and all of Asia-Pacific)?
I personally do not wish Transcendence to go down this path, and become inseparable from Multiverse – This is why I've proposed an alternate development model.
So you want to try a demo before you buy? Well, the pledge system can do one better - it can offer you the full game to try for free, forever, and to share with all your friends and even your friends' friends. If (any of) you decide you like it and want more, you can choose to fund and direct the development of the game in ways YOU want via pledging money for new features and extensions that YOU want, to be made by whichever developer YOU want.Bruno wrote:Free core game is must so guys like me (yay) can find and try it. I wouldn't even know about this pledge business, but I know how to buy a great game.
Perhaps they do so because doing otherwise threatens the continued existence of their source of supplies?Atarlost wrote:Every day billions of people living near stores with imperfect security refrain from shoplifting. Most of them do so not because of fear, but because the people working at the store are not faceless corporations.
That would be an interesting social experiment, though I wouldn't count on its effectiveness.Atarlost wrote:The best anti-theft mechanism is probably to put a thumbnail photo of George next to his name in the title credits and maybe have him narrate the expansion title cards.
