Why Not Digitial Distribution?

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

Im amazed that anyone thinks "its pirated so why bother" works as an argument. Thats like "thieves get in so why lock your doors"

The lock argument is equally flawed. You lock your doors so it takes longer for them to break in or it makes more noise so they are more easy to detect. It also depends on other social values. A locked door in a large busy city is good anti theft prevention. In the middle of nowhere a lock will not prevent thieves. The locks are only part of the security.

But of course you know that you shouldn't compare locks to copy protection. Pirates (or the better term would be hackers/crackers) have all the time of the world to work on a crack. They can do it from their home. No chance of detection. So in the end they will crack it.

I don't know if you have noticed the recent GTA debacle? They had some very advanced and nasty copy protection in the newest GTA. With a lot of stealth copy protection, after a few hours the controls would freeze, or act wierd. And a lot of other different things. But the game is also very buggy, I'm not saying that these bugs are related to the DRM. But it would have been better to spend the money that was now spend on the DRM, on improving the game. It took the pirates a week to crack this new copy protection.

But there is no doubt that piracy costs sales. I only wonder if copy protection really helps to prevent this. If cp is cost effective. I personally don't think so. BUT, I'm an industry outsider. And I have no data to back up my claims. And I don't really trust the piracy numbers that some companies use as an anti-piracy argument. (The music industry piracy losses are so high, that piracy caused the current recession)

More ontopic, of course the position of shrapnel on digital distribution has been clear. And they used the best arguments possible, imho. They did the math, it would not be profitable. They used science! Science, it works *****ez! I think this could be more clear in the FAQ.

I like the hat colour quote, Gandalf. My experience with youth and younger adults (>30) differs. Most either pirate, or use open source products. The crack site line, does not really exist here. But that is of course my experience. A lot of people still like to pay for stuff that they use. And I know a lot of people who donate money to open source products, help with open source products, and buy stuff they pirated before because it is that good. Of course, my experience is mostly university students and graduates. So I guess your hat really gets whiter when you grow older. (And as long as I still am a student of my university, I can use a lot of different software packages for free).

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

A locked door in a large busy city is good anti theft prevention. In the middle of nowhere a lock will not prevent thieves. The locks are only part of the security.

I have personal experience from living in the middle of nowhere, and I can say that a lock will do a great deal to prevent unwanted visitors. They COULD break in when no one is home, no problem, but only people who can think "I'm going to break in and take a look" do that. Most people don't want to think of themselves as burglars, so they won't do that. Going in to "see if anybody's home" and "I thought nobody would miss this" isn't an actual "theft", it's just, well, something that happened.

As Gandalf was saying, locks and copy-protection might only slow down a professional law-breaker, but for the common man, it both marks the difference between legal and illegal and forces them to take their time and think if they really want to break the law.