Is there an optimal piracy rate?

Is capturing rain water the same as stealing from your utility company? Well, the comparison is a bit misleading, but you produce the same amount of waste water - so you actually steal from your utility company. So again, is capturing rain water to steal water?

@Tony: not even CLOSE to the same thing - the utility company doesn’t own rain water, and therefore capturing rain water isn’t stealing anything from anyone - it’s free as in beer. Same with air, sunlight, the wind, etc.

I’m much like Jeff: pirated when I didn’t have the money, pay now that I have the money. There’s one time I don’t pay, though: when I feel like punishing a company for fucking up my day with their bullshit DRM. What I’m thinking of is how I happily bought KOTOR, and pirated KOTOR 2 specifically because I considered the money saved a partial and inadequate payment for all the times KOTOR’s DVD checks locked up my machine.

I Pirate. I have to or I do without, and I prefer to be with. The why on this later. I am completely upfront about it too–right to the people I pirate from. Often, but not always, they provide me with the right (license–in the form of a legit key) to use their software legitimately. To these folks, my hat is off, and if I could stand, I would additionally provide a deep and courteous bow. To the rest of you squats, including and foremost Microsoft and Symantec. I would never hope you get get what I have so you will understand, but Gawd, jerks, what does it take?

You see, I am a disabled old man. I sit and suffer continually attempting that razor edged balance between too much pain and not enough morphine–or too much morphine for the pain. Anyone who lives on my moon can well understand this strange balance that is somehow never correct. And the rest of you please keep your comment holes closed. No, you DON’T know. And I hope you remain that inept. You deserve a fine and active life.

I’m a cancer survivor that wonders if such a thing was the right move. Many of us do, and I think we all support Dr. Kevorkian. I can walk, but not far, and I tend not to sleep. Three hours a night (day) is my best. So what do I do? There is a mental limit to staring at the wall or scratching at the warts on the back of your hands. Some of us old geezers are far more intelligent than many of you young rascalians might realize. Our mental activities are not limited to old movies and watching old Three Stooges reruns. We can and must be mentally active. That means software and the internet as few other outlets are available to us.

I’m too old to enjoy (about 70) all the games, but I like some of them (Doom series) and I have become reasonably decent with Photoshop CS3 and some of the math applications. All of which (including the OS they run on) are pirated. In fact, if it runs on my PC, it IS pirated. And I will absolutely grab anything I can get to run without my own nickle in the slot.

You see, I couldn’t buy software even if it was the price of a blank, unformatted DVD withOUT a label. I live on our governments contribution to the poor, or disability. We call it FEEP ‘Federally Enforced Extreme Poverty’. As example, I get $791 a month and from that, claiming to keep costs down, Humana is inhuman enough to demand $96 right off the top. The rest lets me pay my house payment, utilities, insurance gas, car, clothes, food, taxes, and medicine. Notice that the cost of software and the machine was not in that list.

Piracy shouldn’t be completely impossible. If it were, a lot of folks like me would suffer even more than the condition promises and the government enforces.

I told Microsoft of my condition, and that I became this way primarily because of a psychopath masquerading as a doctor, and they absolutely refused to acknowledge me. They would NOT return any comment, answers, etc. I was a pirate first last and always–even though I was honest in telling them and asking for assistance to NOT be one.

So, on behalf of the approximately half a million of us suffering this way, I would beseech those who publish software to supply some free licenses for folks to whom watching grass grow is really not all that bad. Real, completely legit current software would seriously (and I mean SERIOUSLY) brighten our day.

Have a heart. We couldn’t buy it if it were three bucks a copy. Remember, you aren’t loosing what you could never get. Please, think about that.

No matter how much I sympathize with software developers I just can’t grasp restricting usage on software YOU PURCHASE.

I don’t pirate SHAREWARE. When I was in college in only two years I spent over 2,000 in software WITH student discounts. How the hell, even as a professional, am supposed to purchase any copy of, for example, the Adobe CS which costs that much for one piece of software?

I ALWAYS purchase software from indie companies (TextMate, TaskPaper, TextExpander, CoverSutra, MacJournal, and Transmit are all bought and running right now) because they understand that if I buy it I should be able to use it on my two macs and make copies in case I loose it.

My favorite example is this:
I went to the store to buy Vista to dual boot from my Mac. Fred Meyers COVERED the UPDATE on the box, so I get home open it and realize this. Bring it back and offer to give them MORE money. They refuse because of their copyright policy. I go home, rip XP, install XP, crack XP, install the Vista update and sit back and laugh at Fred Meyers and M$ who lost money just because of their piracy policies. I would have never went and paid another $300 for the SAME software.

WTF is wrong with these companies. I think that Apple does it 100% right.

Leopard for the Mac = $130, no serial, no different upgraded versions and no copyright on it. Yeah, they did kinda fuck up on DRM though…

You might be interested in knowing that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was finally cracked towards the beginning of last year (Splinter.Cell.Chaos.Theory-RELOADED).

StarForce’s protection is so good, it doesn’t work on every computer; reports of problems with StarForce are not at all uncommon. Daemon Tools (a CD/DVD emulator) plus an additional IDE Jammer (which is supposedly built-in to the coming version) punctures StarForce’s protection. You have to have an ISO loaded onto your drive so technically there’s no no-CD crack. Also technically, there’s nothing stopping pirates from playing the game (aside from the fre gigs of HD space to leave an image that they can mount). Another forum I read talked about Starforce and its impact on racing games a bit - http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/39309975/m/659001117731/p/1 and the thesis of the first post (before it devolved into Yet Another Argument Over Piracy) was that the reason that 1nsane was (and is) such a successful racing game while Cross Racing Championship, a game with more hype and by the same developer, was a flop was that CRC had Starforce.
I understand the desire to make sure that there’s no shrinkage (horrible accounting term, that) but I also think there’s something wrong when your paying customers have a lesser experience than the people pirating your software (hi, early versions of Morrowind) and this normally seems to be the case. At any rate, god bless the hackers pumping out no-CD cracks so I don’t have to dig through sleeves of game discs every time the bug bites.

History repeats itself – Denuvo anti-piracy DRM (on Just Cause 3) is good enough to cause serious delays.

The group even said

current anti-piracy technology is becoming so good that in two years there might not be pirated games anymore.