well i never bought pirat games or music.

But what abotu this example - you listen to your radio hear a good piece and tape it. then you share the tape/CD with your friend. offocurse that makes you a thief. however this good music might spread good word on the band acting like advertising. and thenmaybe you and your friend buy the CD which if oyu never knew about this song wuldn't have done it.

I "shared" a few games. and i also have to say that when i found the game good i bought it. that's why i have perfectly good Half life that i got for free from my friend. and i also have one that i bough it. and i really, really don't feel like i stole anything. :ph34r:

That's a point I forgot to add in my last post.

Around here in North America, piracy is seen as a way to get goods free. There is a world of difference between buying pirated goods and getting them for free, much like Abandonware if you like.

Buying pirated goods is just like resell and is really seen as illegal around here by about anybody. Get it for free tough and it really lessen the "bad" feeling about it. It's seen more as a "share" attitude that way I guess.

I know that there is other places in the world where piracy is synonym of buying good instead of getting them for free. I would never understand how someone could accept that without associating this to thief immediatly...

this picture has been made some time ago, and suits the theme of this thread very well:

Software piracy?normal?Of course it's normal! A list of what i have "normal"...
My windows XP
Windows milenium on a cd.
Windows comander
ACDSEE
a lot of my games (actualy...99% are "normal")
7 gb of music and stiil growing.
So..don't you think that piracy is NORMAL!!! :sneaky: ...of course it iz....just look in my CD's and you'll get the point... :bannana:

by the way...an average salary in Romania is about 2000$ monthly.maybe i ma Xagerating...
Half of it goes on food...a quarter on day to day expenses and maintainence and stufff.
Yes i exagerated with the slalry.1000$ is the salaty ....think :crazy: ...
anyway the point is that in Romania pc games and music CD's are VERY expensive for normal humans.... :wall: ....so the way to do it is piracy...why..even my informatics teacher gave me a CD with DepecheMode,thei'tre newest album...so keep piracing! :ok: (hope no one involved in antipiracy groups dead this) :bannana:

If thats the minimum then think, how do people survive with the minimum wage here being 130$? :blink:
I have been buying games for years but the chance to get them for free changed that - about half a month ago.

I don't believe that. As far as I can see, the only way the artist will be directly affected by piracy is if he either published the game (or cd or book or whatever) himself, or if he's getting royalties. To my knowledge both of these are very rare in the gaming industry, and even in the music industry royalties deals are no longer that common. Most musicians today make only a fragment of the big stars of the last decades, but this isn't due to piracy, it's due to the fact that they're offered crappy contracts.

I suppose there is an indirect effect on the people who make the games, though. If the company they work for go belly up, partly due to piracy, the people who work there will obviously lose their jobs. It's a bit difficult to blame this on piracy, since there are bound to be a lot of what if's when a company goes bankrupt.

But saying that a programmer at Bethesda is directly hurt by piracy is like saying that an engineer at Ford is hurt every time a car gets stolen, IMO.

I do believe that the companies are hurt by it, though. [/b][/quote]
I second that, it doesn't make it right though. Stealing is stealing, this is just a lesser form of stealing.

What about the moral implications and the fact that you're stealing, albeit from corporations? - pirating software etc rather than buying them causes the prices to go up for the rest of us who don't have a problem supporting the creators.

I'd say the main problem is that with this form of stealing, people often don't see that there are any moral implications. It just doesn't feel like stealing.

Actually, MadMarius's pirating does not drive the prices up as he wouldn't have bought the games if he couldn't get them for free. What drives up prices is people who would have bought the game, getting it for free.

I remember buying moonstone for about 350 kr 10-12 years ago. Strangely enough the prices are pretty much the same today, although pirating has exploded. Does anyone here really believe that the prices would fall if pirating completely stopped?

And has anyone considered that abandonia is, in fact, dedicated to pirating games? Abandonware is (for the most part) just a subcategory of warez. Granted, there is much stronger moral ground when defending abandonware, but in the eyes of the law there is no difference.