The Booty/paysite content for free isn't a taboo subject here (you can link to it, recommend it if someone does a WCIF, etc.) but tbh, I think the whole paysite debate thing was done to death (we still have an archive about it on the old Sims Community) and kinda off-topic for this thread. Let's stick to the actual topic of the debate, please.

I'm not totally sure what you're saying, but... I *think* the major difference between pirating a game and lending out a purchased game is that multiple copies that no one paid for appear at the same time, and they're all usable at the same time. In my experience, only one person at a time has been able to play a lent-out game. So even though multiple copies of that game exist at the same time, only of them is actually usable.

But that leaves a lot of gray areas. Is it theft if you lend your friend a game, they install an expansion pack, and then return your game to you? Because they can use your game without a disk now, and they haven't paid for it. I have no idea.

I'm not sure if maybe what you meant is that this works differently with games that you've purchased and downloaded, but I really wouldn't have any idea because I have yet to actually do that.

I think you might have gotten what I was saying lol I wasn't exactly talking about lending, just the act of letting a friend use your discs to install the game. One doesn't exactly need a disk to play a game anymore with no-cd's and the like running rampant(in the case of TS3, AwesomeMod).

The whole area of intellectual property has gotten out of control, particularly in the United States. The underlying concept is that we give the creator of certain items a limited monopoly on that item for a period of time. However, there are a lot of "ifs, ands and buts."

It also appears to be a matter of local law. By local, I mean the country in which you live. For example, former communist countries, like China and Russia, really don't give much respect to copyrights and patents. These are not concepts which were part of a Marxist-Leninist legal system -- the whole notion of private property was rejected. Thus, it really is not part of their legal cultures. It's also why you can download songs from a Russian site for 10 cents per song, but the same song would cost $1.00 on I-Tunes.

The United States has gone to the other extreme, where people assert intellectual property claims to things to which it should not apply. Years ago, Lotus 1-2-3 had made all sorts of claims about the look and feel of their spreadsheet software -- and these claims persist.

The essential features of the Macintosh were taken directly from the Xerox PARC project. Now Steve Jobs is filing lawsuits for people taking the look and feel of Apple products. Now if that isn't irony, I don't know what is.

It also has the effect of stifling new products. This runs contrary to the whole policy of intellectual property law, which is designed to encourage innovation by allowing innovators to have a limited monopoly.

We certainly see these constraints on this site, where the claim "no custom content used," as if this were a good thing. What the creator is really saying is "I am uploading a substandard and deficient item because I don't want to offend some @$$hole who doesn't want other to actually use his custom content."

Terms like "theft" are terms of art. Is downloading copyrighted software theft? Probably not. It is certainly not malum in se (bad in itself), but may be malum prohibitum (something which is prohibited.) It may be a violation of public policy designed to protect intellectual property. But then again, it may not.

The real problem is the people who upload these items and give others access to them. To the extent, if any, there is a legal violation, these are the ones who should be held accountable.

EA certainly has a stronger claim to its software than someone who claims a copyright to custom content. After all, EA's copyright does cover all works derived from its software, and custom content almost certainly is derivative of the Sims games. Thus anyone claiming some sort of copyright on custom content probably is making a claim they are not entitled to make, and one which has no legal validity.

This isn't a discussion about the Sims or the Sims Store - it's a discussion about pirating software online vs. stealing disks from brick and mortar electronics stores. TS2/TS3 paysites are off topic, as I said a few posts ago - let's stick to the actual topic, please. Thanks.

I'm really interested in how someone would be taking their time and effort? You are speaking very abstractly. If I were to download any game right now, this would remain forever unknown to the game's creator and in fact, I may be the only person who ever knows about it.



Not necessarily. It is replicating = copying = reproducing. It's the right word because this is what is taking place. But okay, we'll obviously never agree so it doesn't matter.



Perhaps this is broadening the topic but... I have to LOL when people use "capitalism" and "fair" in the same sentence. Any society that allows for some people to be swimming in diamonds and champagne, whiping their asses with $100 bills, while other people, who may be hard-working citizens, are struggling to make ends meet and keep a roof above their heads is a society where something is very wrong and imbalanced. This is another argument altogether and one that I don't want to get into. But in my opinion, it doesn't "work", as you say, at least not in practice and especially not in the USA.

And the lending your friend a computer game part - well that would be wrong too, if you consider piracy wrong. Because you are going with the whole idea of how sacred intellectual property is. And that rule dictates that even though you bought the game - it still isn't yours, because you still can't just do whatever you want with it.

I think the point is that you have no right to have that game. You don't deserve it, so why should you have it? It's the sense of entitlement that some people have to it that IMO is sort of the core of the issue (and I think someone mentioned this above).

Sure, okay, you may not be actually taking anything -away- from someone with intellectual property theft. You may not be even removing the potential profit from them because you never would have bought it in the first place. But what right do you have to play that game without giving anything in return for it? It's not yours and just because it exists and might be fun doesn't mean you have to have it.

Y'know, I may tend to sort of argue for both sides here because I can see the argument for both sides - I personally don't think piracy is really -that- bad as it's entirely possible it doesn't take anything from the IP creator so they're not out anything. But at the same time, I think a lot of people hide behind that defense and delude themselves that it's perfectly fine. It doesn't mean it's right, it's just... not -as- wrong as other things you could do, in the grand scheme of things, but it is extremely selfish in any case.

(Note: use of "you" is not at jooxis but a more general "you" in the the way "one" was used in the sort of archaic sounding "One may not be even removing the potential profit from them because one never would have bought it in the first place.")

I was mostly using the phrase "capitalist mentality" because you had brought it up first (thus the quotation marks). I'm not trying to argue that capitalism doesn't have flaws (it certainly does--just like any other economic system), but that's neither here nor there. The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to expect to be reimbursed for whatever it is that they're producing. Internet piracy seems to hint at a sense of entitlement, and I just don't see how anyone can reasonably argue that they deserve to be able to download and play a game without bothering to pay for it. You don't just automatically have a right to use something because you want it.



I'm not sure how "sacred" I think intellectual property is, I just remain unconvinced that pirating a movie or computer game is a-ok. I think you're missing the point of my lending example... no one is pirating anything if only one person can use the game at a time. And since only one copy of the game was purchased between those people, I don't really see a problem.

To go back to what HP said... stealing from a brick and mortar electronics store and pirating a game clearly aren't the same thing. I understand that. If I were a corporation, I would totally prefer a few isolated instances of piracy to a few isolated instances of in-store theft, because there would be fewer costs to absorb. But... they're still both wrong. One of those options may be less wrong in the sense that it's a less damaging to the company, but... that still doesn't make it right.

In that case, all of capitalism is based on piracy. I'll use retail as a concrete example, as mass consumerisim is one of the base building blocks of capitalism.

At the company I worked for, there were bonuses for achieving sales goals; monthly, quarterly, and yearly. For the store manager only. There were no incentives below the store manager level. However, the District Manager, Regional Manager, etc. on up to the CEO all recieved bonuses based on sales performance. At the end of each quarter the bulk of the profits were payed out to stockholders, who didn't necessairly even work for the company. You could argue the point that company management and stockholders were pirating the money that should have been paid to the people that actually did the work, the salespeople, who recieved zero compensation (above a minimal paycheck). And, if you think that the minimal paycheck is adequate compensation, come work at $7.25 an hour (minimum wage), and see if you can live off that amount.

I use the past tense, because the company is no longer in business, due to bad management. The company had a Canadian division, which got sold off and is still in operation, and which still employs the people who worked in corporate management, including the people who made the decisions that caused the company to fail. Over 4,000 sales people were laid off, at a time when the economy was taking a nose-dive, many without any kind of severance package.

So, basically Capitalism=Piracy

Edit: For those who want to make the claim that upper management is somehow more important, and thus more deserving of more and better compensation than the lower level employees, try running a business without them, and see how long it lasts. If people were truely being "reimbursed for whatever it is that they're producing", salespeople would be making just as much, if not more than the CEO.

Man, THAT´s exactly what I hate when the big companies/studios/whatever come forward to complain about their losses to piracy, they act as if every single person there had a share and each one would be getting more if piracy didn´t exist, which definitely is not the reality out there.

I think that piracy isn't as bad as theft, but it is still wrong. As has been pointed out, it does not deprive the owner of a physical object, but it deprives them of the rewards that would otherwise be had of their labor. It also comes of a sense of entitlement, which has also been stated before.

Everything comes of some kind of labor. People who make artistic works or other works of intellectual property have labored, and are deserving of something in return. Those who did not make that work, but choose to pirate it, have not labored and are therefore not deserving of it. It is possible for someone to make something and then choose to offer it freely, but that is not a choice that can ethically be forced on the creator.

I do think that some intellectual property holders are ridiculous in their prices and policies, but that has no direct correlation with whether I deserve to have whatever it is that they have made. There is no logical connection that says that I deserve something just because the publisher/manufacturer charges too much.

Further, if people choose to simply not buy something when the price is too high, the price will lower. The Sims games are a good example. I bought one of those expansion packs packaged with two stuff packs for Sims 2 recently and it only cost me $20. I think that that is a far more reasonable price than the $70 or so it would have cost me if I had rushed out and got them individually right when they were released. If the stores can't sell enough copies of whatever the item is when it is at a high price, the publisher/manufacturer then has to lower their price so that they can sell more items. The market is tailored around what the majority is willing to spend. Companies that price gouge cannot keep their prices and remain in business unless people let them.



To reverse your example, see how long the store would last without management. When you try to run things with everyone being exactly equal and no one having the power to make decisions affecting the rest, it becomes highly inefficient when there are more than a handful of people. That's why most countries calling themselves Democracies are generally actually Republics. But that is off-topic.

The truth is, the managers do the work that requires more intelligent decision-making. The managers aren't alway the most qualified or intelligent, but they nonetheless do the work requiring the most intelligence. At least in the corporate world, jobs requiring a conscious human being tend to be rewarded better. Maybe you disagree with that position, but there are plenty of other career paths that reward other talents: athletics, Hollywood, reality tv (in which case a lack of talent is generally rewarded :P), art (whether creativity is linked with intelligence is another topic), etc. Intelligence is a very useful quality, and I happen to think that rewarding employees possessing and using it is the most beneficial route for any company.

Stockholders are useful because they contribute money. I happen to think that it is a rather weak definition of usefulness, but it is necessary for a company to have money to function, so rewarding people in the long run for helping them out is beneficial to the company.

The employees aren't useless, but they do the labor that requires little skill. Most minimum wage jobs attract high schoolers to fill them. Nearly anyone can do it, so they can find people willing to do it cheaply because the competition would be higher for jobs requiring little skill. People who work hard and get an education generally aren't forced to live off of minimum wage. Having an education means that a person has more specialized skills, which are useful and in-demand in the job market. This is why they get jobs that pay more than minimum wage.

All of this is a rather roundabout way of saying that capitalism rewards hard work and intelligence. This is good because people who are intelligent and hard-working contribute more to society, thus are deserving of the rewards they are given. Nothing exists in a vacuum. There has to be something with which to reward someone in order to reward someone for their work, so there has to be a larger economy based on the hard work of others.

Maybe this sounds harsh, but it is a very logical system, which is why it has been more successful than other economic systems.

Actually, yes, I have. Many times in fact. Not only have I seen them at work, I've been part of the process. However, the camera crew dosen't own the rights to a movie, a studio or a producer usually does. Sometimes the author holds the rights. The bulk of the profits usually goes to the studio, the director, the producer(s) and the principal actors. The camera crew is usually paid a set daily or weekly wage, sometimes with a bonus schedule, mostly not. If they aren't union, it's usually a lesser amount.

The Director of Photography usually gets $300-$400 a day. The Assistant Camera, Camera Operators, and Film Loaders will recieve between $150-$250 a day. Considering that a SAG actor gets a minimum of about $680 a day, they are fairly low on the totem-pole.

The worst paying job is the Production Assistant job; usually the PA is an intern working for free, to gain experience. The next lowest are the "Grips" and the "Electricians"; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grip_(job) .



You mean, like the US? "And to the Republic for which it stands".

I wasn't trying to say that everyone should be exactly equal (although, isn't that what Democracy is all about?), I'm just saying that most people in higher positions feel that those in lower positions are not deserving of the same kind of benefits and/or recognition of service. As "good" as capitalism is, it still has flaws. I'm saying that one way of fixing some of those flaws is to recognise the efforts of the "lowly", include them in the pay-off; and stop "pirating" off their efforts.



Yes, and when they f-up, they still seem to get that bonus, look at all the Wall Street BS just a year after we gave them a multi-trillion dollar bail-out, at taxpayers expense. I'd say they are doing/did a very good job of "pirating" of pretty much everyone else.



Only at the initial offering. After that, the money for the stock itself goes between one owner of the stock and the next. The stock dividends go from the company to the stockholder, and no more money goes to the company. There is a constant demand for greater profits, thus greater dividends. This forces companies to cut jobs, pay lower salaries, cut back on benefits, etc.





So, basically you are saying because someone isn't educated, they aren't deserving of fair compensation of their labor. That others are entitled to "pirate" off them because of things like disadvantaged social status, or mental handicap that prevent them from getting a higher education.

Come to parts of the Bronx, and Harlem in NYC, the south(?) side of Detroit, Compton CA, New Orleans' Ninth Ward, etc. and explain that to the people who live there. I'd like to see the results.

As for the "other career paths" you chose, many sucessfull athletes don't make that much money; just talk with many of our Olympic athletes. Same with actors and artists. For each "sucessfull" one I'll show you a hundred, still waiting tables, working in retail, typing in the steno-pool, etc.

At the risk of sound belabored, try asking a few unemployed college graduates right now what job they would take. I would be willing to be they'd grab any job, anywhere. There's a recession on, you know.
Just because you have a college degree does not guarantee you a job. It makes it more likely that you'll get one, but it does not mean you're automatically in a job that pays well.

As I see it, the capitalist system is divided into two parts: the producers and the consumers. The producers do have the right to profit from what they produce, and the consumers have the right to purchase those goods for fair value.

I agree with everything Kattenjin and FranH said and would like to add that I don't think he was suggesting equal position but a fairer salary overall. The difference between communism and socialism, I believe. I do think the difference between the working class and the multi-billionaires is ridiculous. Replace the clothes in this picture with the modern equivalent and you can see not much had changed since Marx first came up with socialism. It's sad that such a system cannot work with the kind of mindset we possess in this day and age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P...list_System.png

But we can certainly implement some of the concepts if they work. :D

I didn't say that they aren't deserving of fair compensation; I said that fair compensation for them is lower than it is for other jobs.

As to the other career paths, the number of people struggling to get by in those fields is, I would say, partly due to the excessive number of people trying to make it in those fields and partly due to the fact that they don't contribute as much to society as one working in another field would. I'm not saying that entertainment is useless, but there is a lesser need for entertainers than there is for laborers and managers.



I know that having a college degree doesn't mean you automatically get a job. I'm a college student and several of my graduating friends are going into grad school now simply to have something to do until they can find a job, as well as to make themselves more competitive in the job market.

Whether you can find a job depends on how competitive you are. Those who put forth the most effort generally are the most successful. There is something to be said for natural talents, but a talented person who puts forth no effort isn't likely to find a job. Getting an education shows businesses that you are willing to put forth an effort and stick to your guns. So those who get one or more degrees generally have an easier time finding jobs. Currently, there is simply a shortage of jobs, so the job market is more competitive. In general, people who have more education are still more likely to find the best jobs, there just aren't as many jobs opening up.

I'm not trying to claim that capitalism is perfect; that would be insane. I'm simply pointing out why it makes sense and why it works so well, comparatively speaking.

And we ended on usa employment/career customs?

I do think its stealing either way...
Somehow I get repulsed by those that claim "its only from the big companies..and they steal from us with the prices they take".

Because I can se the chain of companies, the little beads of working people that comes together into a product for the final company. Its never the end chain that gets cut out, its the beginning.
Sure from the stolen product they would have been paid, but what about future?

What also generally is repulsive is that (in sweden at least) those claiming "everything should be free! at least I shall have free stuff!" are mostly middle class and higher that dont have a problem afford the stuff, they just want to spend (or save) their money on other things.
They are spoiled and do not want to choose, or wait.

And trust me. Not many people really struggle for money here. Many say they do, but if you look closer its not true in most cases.

WOW! I had no idea that people would be so in to discussing this and debating it so well. Whatever your oppnion is I am glad that you took the time to post it. Great debate guys!

It seems that we've covered the most straightforward examples of piracy, but I'm wondering what you guys think about less clear examples.

What if you have paid for a song/album in one format (ie. CD) and you want it in another format (ie. MP3)? If the record companies had their way, you would have to pay for the song twice. I believe there has even been a lawsuit or two where the record companies said that ripping a CD to a computer was "unauthorized" and therefore equivalent to piracy. I'm inclined to think that this is not piracy, however, because you would have already paid the record company for the song. It doesn't make sense to have to pay them twice for the same song.

In another case, what if a game is "out of print"? If there were an older game from the 90's, for example, that you never owned, but cannot buy anywhere because the company no longer makes that game, is it okay to pirate it? The company would not have made money off of you anyway, but you are not entitled to own the game, either.

What do you guys think?

Many companies seem to be moving to an aditude that you don't actually buy their product, just the license to use it. Modern DRM seems to be aimed more at the re-sale market than to actual piracy. Publishers aren't stupid. They know that DRM doesn't work against piracy.What they're trying to do is stop people from going to GameStop to buy $50 games for $35, none of which goes into the publishers' pockets. If DRM permits only a few installs, that minimizes the number of times a game can be resold. The same with music CDs.

Then there is the first sale doctrine:


So, going by both of these, your examples are both piracy, as you cannot keep/own the original/copy and give it away at the same time. However, your right to give anything you own to anyone else remains true.

Do you think that this holds the same moral weight that more direct forms of piracy hold? In the latter case, I would agree that it is piracy because one isn't entitled to pirate the game regardless of whether one can get it legally. In the former case, however, it seems to be more a matter of the greed of the companies determining the law, than of a moral point one way or another. If you pay for the CD, for example, I think that you should be able to legally make use of it in any format, so long as you don't give away digital copies of it to others.

In a legal context, piracy is NOT stealing. Because stealing is taking property from another. Piracy is not that. Piracy is copying of a product. Let's say you download a movie, you aren't stealing the movie from a video store, you are copying a file that was uploaded, that is a copy itself of an original source.

Now you can argue right v. wrong from there, but internet piracy v. stealing must be differentiated, I think, because they are technically different.

No, I don't think selling-on a game you no longer enjoy or making mutiple copies of a song for your own personal use is piracy, I was just pointing out the rationale that many developers are using concerning the sale of software, that you aren't actually buying the software itself, just the license to use a copy of it. This is what they are using in court to defend their actions. Personally, I think this is just as wrong as the pirates. As many cases are still pending, we will se how it holds up in court. I think a lot of the additudes of many corporations, and how they are treating piracy actually harm the paying customer more, and are more likely to drive people who would never normaly pirate to do so. Take Spore as an example; between the release date of Sept 2 2008 to Dec 4 2008 it had been downloaded 1,700,000 times on BitTorrent alone, eclipsing The Sims 2 which took 4 years to reach 1,150,000 downloads.

In Sri Lanka where I am now, most stores sell pirated copies of Sims games,it is difficult to get an original copy and then it would be more expensive than the pirated which is sold for RS250 which is about $2.It is illigal in the country to sell pirated Sri Lankan song/movie CDs but CDs such as games are sold pirated.Most people earn about $100 per month so they would not be really intrested to buy an original for $35.
In this case stealing from the shop or downloading from the internet-there are not many people intrested in Sims in Sri Lanka so the shop would not really lose allot of money anyway since they get the CDs pirated from the internet and sell them,if you get from the internet yourself I guess you have to wait a long time loading and there are internet bills.