http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/pirat ... nt-to-jail

Brings the whole subject to light.

I suspect Pirate Bay is some torrenting app / site?

An easy way to fix piracy would be to activate your serial number over the phone, right?

that doesn't work because the game is tricked to believing its legit.

The industry is battling a downhill battle. Getting cracked games is so easy, all the money spend on copy protection is wasted and just hampers the real customer, who nicely pays for his product and in turn is treated like a possible criminal. Great business model.

The fight against piracy is a lost cause. Software companies that want to be successful need to learn how to entice customers to purchase their products rather than pirate it. The way is by providing benefits that pirated software would never get.

Stuff like content updates, live online content, software updates, network storage, basically anything that they can control directly and is hard to impossible to pirate. A content update might be pirated... but it would take awhile for a copy to leak out, get cracked, get packaged and get distributed. Other benefits could be a forum for legit serial number holders only with tons of free advice and tuts, for instance. Build a community around your product and piracy doesn't mean anything.

On the other hand, if you make your product hard to use because of cumbersome DRM, then where's the advantage of buying it versus pirating it? There isn't one... DRM doesn't work. But these guys just don't get it.

Anyway, sorry, it's a personal thing of mine. Regarding the pirate bay trial, it'll go to appeal. Sounds like the entertainment people had their way and justice wasn't served. After all, TPB didn't host any illegal content...they were just a search engine for content hosted elsewhere, much of it which was illegal but some that wasn't. Google has links to torrents in its search engine, too.

Of course, in the US, intent is a big part of breaking the law. And it's hard to argue that their intent was not to infringe copyright. With a name like The Pirate Bay and all. I don't know about Swedish law, though that country likes to steal personal rights almost as much as the UK does.

Derf, The Pirate Bay is the biggest torrent tracker on the intarwebz.

http://thepiratebay.org/

Basically they don't host any content but host the trackers to find the (often illegal) content online. You can see how the legal question gets asked from there.

I agree that they (the industry) are just fighting symptoms and not the disease. Sure, TPB are facilitators of theft - regardless of any legal implications that should be clear. But does that make them guilty? I don't think so. It's like if you have a room full of lockers with people's stuff in them, and open all the lockers (or give the keys to others) and shit gets stolen from them by others. Does that make you a thief? Hardly. Reponsible in a moral sense, definitely. But legally? Not sure...probably only if you said beforehand that you'd keep stuff safe, as a sort of service. Which I'm guessing TPB never did (say to the industry that they're keeping the torrents up to protect copyrights I mean).

I still believe that above all, the one thing that will make your game succesful (apart from marketing) is quality. You can't turn a turd into a diamond. And I also believe that people will reward quality in the long run.

In the end the question stays the same: how many people who pirate a game would have actually bought that game if it wasn't piratable? I'm willing to bet it's a small minority. Which means that the majority of 'sales lost to piracy' are sales that wouldn't have been made in the first place.

There are a few companies out there that stay afloat and even flourish by making games that have no copy protection at all. You'd think that'd be enough of an indication that the problem isn't all that simple. Meh. Bet the next copy protection is gonna be even lamer regardless. *visions of The Company sending someone to sit next to you as you install the game*