on the topic of piracy, the music side of things now. Have i got this wrong but i read somewhere that part of the price you pay on either buying blank cd's or the music cd itself (i cant remember which) that you are allowed to make a backup copy of your legally bought music cd.

No thats just a common misconseption even in the law its a gray area and often not pursued but technically you arent allowed, with games they used to say you can make a backup copy and still in a number of EULA's they still do, but the thing is with the DRM you often cant without copying tools with which the game wont work because the DRM detects the tools and refuses to play."Just buying a copy of a book, CD, video, computer program, etc. does not necessarily give you the right to make further copies (even for private use) or play or show them in public. The right to do these things will generally remain with the copyright owner, whose permission you would need. You should note that photocopying a work, scanning a work to produce an electronic copy and downloading a copy of a work which is in an electronic form (eg. on a CD-ROM or an on-line database) all involve copying the work so that permission to copy is generally needed."

Well as far as I'm concerned if you can get it for free then go for it.We pay tax tax and more tax , sky high interest rates, soaring fuel costs, rates, mortgages. My 2% pay rise doesn't seem to cover everything else going up.So if i can get something for free then i will go for it. I haven't bought a CD for years and i don't know anyone that has, or a DVD come to think of it.Must admit though, i don't have any copied games. I like playing online and i like my cd key to work thank you very much.

all i can say is im incappacited from work due to a health problem thats severe but not life threatening but i have never once used a pirated piece of games software and never will . theres no excuse for stealing another parties hard work and effort the consquences for doing so are dire for what its my fav past time ,playing games . metaboli is a god send to me to enjoy a wide variety of games without a huge out put of cash and if i download something that dosent quite suit me i havent wasted my tight budget .what im trying to say is if somone as tight on cash as me can stay firmly on the right side of the law anyone can .hecter

heres my 2 pennies.first off, theft from ordinary people is wrong, but laws against piracy exist for one reason only, to protect big business, infact most laws exist to protect big business, who do you think has the biggest influence on the government? tax slaves, or big business, who practically dont pay tax, and practically own the governments, or us?you got it right, its big business who run the show, most financial based laws are designed to protect money not us or what is right and wrong, take a look at the myriad of stupid business based laws and you will see most of them are not in our interest never mind 'morally right'i neither condone nor condemn piracy, you do what you have to to survive in this world, we all do.but whining self righteous poster boys for corporate rule, really should take a look at what they are actually standing for here, is it morality or big buisness propoganda.if you genuinley think it is nipping at the breadcrumbs falling off big business' giant napkin as they stuff their fat faces with our money. your probably right, if you think you are stealing and committing some kind of sin, then fine, your probably right too, but big business is using us as cattle, i think that is far worse.

In the past all games were written by small companies of a few individuals, even just individuals in their bedrooms. Over time that has been changing as big business realised the profit to be made from the massive games audience.But there are still games made by independent, small companies. There are also small games companies that are effectively owned by big business.Do pirates, casual or otherwise, check if a game is being made by a small outfit who would directly suffer by their actions or by a massive organisation who wont notice. I seriously doubt it.Moving up the scale to the small business owned by a corporation. Who do you think will suffer if profits fall on the games made by the small company they own - it wont be the corporation - no they will ditch the small company in such a way that they probably end up in profit whilst the small guys lose their homes.Even those games made "directly" by corporations employ teams of staff to make those games and it will be those teams that suffer - not the corporation.So, if you think you are "sticking to the man" by pirating then think again. Same is true even more directly with music - the labels aren't going to take a hit - they'll pass it directly to the artists.Your right in that big business is ruling the roost and the laws are there to protect them - but stuff that, there are real people at the bottom of the hill and shit flows downhill in corporatation land.We live in a commercial world, like it or not, and currently the only way to reward the games developers for doing a good job is to pay them. Many have demos so you can try-before-you-buy but for those that don't - it's your choice - take the risk and pay up front - or don't play.I really don't think that who ultimately owns the company is a factor. It is a real problem for lots of reasons - but I think it is irrelevant to the piracy "debate".Unfortunately, due to the high production quality (I mean chrome here) expected of games today, it is hard to see how we could get back to the small independent company/team model of game development.

P.S. Again - services like Metaboli offer a way out of part of this dilemma - the developers get paid for what gets played and the gamers have a fixed known cost with enough choice to know that there will (hopefully) be something worth the outlay.

you pointed out its the small publisher owned by the big man that loses out, a perfect example of how the law protects the big boys and not the small man, in this case the small games company.where this could be helped as already suggested on these forums, is companies like Metaboli, acting as a platform for lesser known or independent publishers. Metaboli is the equivalent of the way artists are recovering losses in the music industry by doing live shows and merchandise.big business is killing the games industry, it has by its own success created the very problems it is complaining about.its a fact people will always pirate if they can, they always have done, but its also a fact that the ordinary man might not even think about it, if they were getting value for money whether that be cheaper games, or a better service like Metaboli.

I think what people forget is that big business is essentially run by 'ordinary'(don't like that phase) people. The fact is that if big businesses didn't make any money on things they made, then many more 'ordinary' people would loose there jobs. Big business doesnÂ’t suffer simply because Big Business isnÂ’t a conscious entity, its the employees of the owner of that business who are (mostly) simply trying to get there job done so they can live.

Quote: you do what you have to to survive in this world, we all do.

So that means you should take everything you can to live yourself without helping or thinking about its effects on anyone else?There a lot of things wrong in this world, maybe in a ideal world it wouldn't be like this. But its not just big businesses that make this a less than ordinary world, its peoples attitudes towards other people and all that this argument boils down to is peoples attitudes against other people. The owner of big businesses want to make the most money possible for the games there employees make by selling them at stupidly high prices and people want everything either free or at a stupidly low price. Who's right and who's wrong?Well human nature says you are right and your opponent is wrong...

vitaeMecha,In a sense I think we are basically agreeing here - big business is a bad thing for the games industry as it removes originality and innovation in favour of easy-money crowd pleasers.Big business is also self-protecting - both in legal terms with anti-piracy laws and in how they structure themselves to protect themselves from failures and internal corruption.All I am saying is that piracy is not in any way a valid response to that problem - it just doesn't do anything - let alone help.

Quote: its a fact people will always pirate if they can

This is the "guy down the pub with the VCR off the back of a lorry" syndrome. People are lazy and selfish and always out for the easy cheap option. Agreed again. That don't make it right. Also as I pointed out earlier (I think it was in this thread but maybe elsewhere - it's getting too long to check) it is the casual ease with which it can happen with digital distribution which worries me - a hell of a lot of people do it without even realising they are doing anything wrong.And again we agree that services like Metaboli give us a possible way out of some of the problems. If Metaboli pay the companies in direct proportion to how much their games are played (and I think I was something from Metafil which suggested they do) then only good quality games will win through. Also, since the player pays the same no matter which game they play - it is, in theory at least, a level playing field for the small company and the big company.