Hi tom.
another crytical issue I find with piracy is actually who! gets the money.
if I buy a Cd for say ten pounds, only about a pound of that will go to the
actual musicians, and that is even assuming the musicians in question earn a
royalty on individual cd sales and weren't given a fixed amount by the
publishers. Therefore, if you copy a Cd, the prophets you most affect are
those of the distributors, promoters and publishers, not of the musicians,
indeed I've heard various professional musicians say they make more sales
through people copying cds from their friends and then wanting to buy the
next one themselves than they do through standard adverts.
Same with books, indeed even more so, you don't pay the author, but the
publisher.
One reason I think people often pirate games, is that people do not realize
there is! no large distribution company involved, just one or two people
working themselves, since as you pointed out, activision, E games are huge
coorporations with massive markup, who pay their programmers a fixed income
while the prophit goes either into developing more prophit or into the
pockets of the management, indeed I am told by someone who worked at one
point for E games, that as programming jobs they are deeply unsatisfying
since you basically get no creative leeway anymore, since all of the design
is done long before the game is programmed, and the rpogrammers are
basically just geach given a very menial individual task to do, (the days
when someone like Inafune could design Mega man in his spare time are long
gone).
Generally blind people are not treated well by coorporations (the tale of
myself and trying to obtain accessible scifi books despite Uk copywrite law
and the publishing industry is a long and unpleasant one), not to mention
all those massive multinational chains that do much at all for access even
in a small way, heck, do mcdonalds have braille menues?
I'm not condoning the actions of people who pirate games, I'm just thinking
that perhaps one major motivating factor is that they do not realize that
they are pirating games made by individuals, not! by massive companies.
One suggestion i have therefore would be to include in the manual of any
game basically a short mini bbio about the developers, why they made the
game, what they did, what they do in their spare time etc.
Yes, many people will skip this, and yes, there are likely to be some
scumbags out there, but equally if a person reads a story of an actual real
other person who makes games, it puts them in a much worse position morally,
since then it shows them whome! they are actually pirating games from, and
it is possible that people will then come back and offer the money, or
perhaps pay for the next title.
Beware the Grue!
dark.
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