Don't Worry About Copy Write Protection!

[Saber Cherry]

Wow. That's pretty bad. Grossly bad, in fact. "I've been obsessing over you since we were in elementary school. You never noticed me, I sat behind you. Now pay me $450 for hiring a detective stalk you, cuz I have nothing better do do with my time than read his reports."

[Xrati]

Nice point!

Getting back to the original topic. All the countries in the world have jails, penal facilities and other such places for people who break the law. You are on your honor to follow laws put in place, to form a line that's not to be crossed. When/If you cross it, you violate that trust and these facilities are there as punishment. ANYONE know of an empty facility (not closed down but EMPTY). The point is there will always be someone who will cross the line. Not everyone will and certainly never would ‘no one ever cross it!' Society is here to raise a better generation then the one before. WE are regressing as a society and rules and laws mean nothing, to more people, on a daily basis then ever before. Are our children learning something by watching what society is teaching them. As we continue this path, less and less people will be willing to put out product that they cannot recover their costs to market. We will put an end to the industries and companies that produce products (Software and Recording mostly, but there are others). We have a choice to follow the rules/laws or to ignore them. IT IS AN INDIVIDUAL CHOICE that we all must make.

[Slick]

The ultimate solution (which publishers will never adopt) is to lower the prices of the games to 'reasonable' levels. If you could pick up the latest games at $19.95 would you? I would. If the answer is yes for the vast majority of game players then THAT would make a difference. What the publishers lost in single unit sales would be gained in volume of sales.

The true answer finally comes out.

[Suicide Junkie]

Its so much nicer in Europe.
It wouldn't be 19.95 over there... it would be a flat 20. Tax included.

Cheap psycological tricks, treating us like we're complete morons over here.
Plus it means we have to make change for everything.

And when making change, we have a lame set of coins compared to the Euro. $0.20 coins rule. And the two-cent coins are pretty cool too.

[Fyron]

Xrati said:
We will put an end to the industries and companies that produce products (Software and Recording mostly, but there are others).

Actually, an end to the music recording industry would be a great boon to society. Its pretty cheap to record an album in a studio these days. The bulk of the cost is in getting the music on retail shelves and supporting the losses from the huge number of bands that fail to sell enough albums to be profitable for the publisher. As digital distribution grows, it is eliminating much of the need for a big publisher. I don't know the exact figures, but it doesn't really cost much at all to get your music on Itunes and its ilk. It costs Apple virtually nothing to host a song. That song being downloaded is where there is some cost, and that is passed on to the consumer.

As the cost to enter the music market drops drastically, there will be more and more artists that can churn a profit off of there music, even at vastly reduced volume of sales. No longer will there be a need for dry, repetitive pop bands being manufactured to sell as much as possible just so the colossal publishers can afford to take a risk on new, innovative acts. Those new, innovative acts can much more easily just self-publish digitally, or join a small "publisher" that is pretty much a group of artists, as it should be.

In the retail world, your music won't be prominently featured (or carried at all) if you are not signed with a big publisher. In a digital store, there is little difference between a title published by Sony-BMG and Jqhn Doe, precisely because there is no concept of shelf space. In retail, shelf space costs money (either in terms of charging the publisher money or in terms of customers not seeing other, potentially more profitable albums). In the digital world, nada.

The other big hurdle is advertising. But really, when is the last time you bought music based on an ad, or seeing some random artist whoring themselves out in a Pepsi ad? After hearing it on the radio or seeing it on MTV/VH1/CMTV/etc. (when they deign to play music), sure. But they will in time look to digital sales as well as retail sales figures to see what is popular, so any self-published artist that sells well will still be able to get radio and TV exposure.

The same will happen to the game industry at some point, though it will take longer since it takes more bandwidth to quickly download 3 GBs of game instead of 50 MBs of album. Companies like Shrapnel, Matrix, and Valve are on the forefront of this.