Oh? That's how it seemed. You were being subtle, I was being direct.
There is a huge difference between being 'direct' and being rude to others, but there are also some misguided people who confuse one with the other.
Cracking a software package to make it usable or less restricting is not a crime, it is a right, protected by several laws.
Oh cool. Please name which laws protect such an action.
When you pay for a software package you are not renting or leasing it, you are buying it. And that copy of the software becomes the ethical, legal and moral property of the purchaser.
That copy of the software 'as is'. You are not allowed to modify, re-sell or distribute it. That is the agreement you accepted when you purchased the software.
Try modifying a work of software and then passing it as your own work to see how well that goes - you'll be sued for copyright infringement. So the 'intellectual property' is NOT yours to do as you please, as you seem to be implying. Only the medium in which that intellectual property is expressed is yours.
That perspective is supported by dozens of examples of legal code and case law.
Name a few.
Only when such a "crack" is used to pirate a software package does it become a crime, but then the only crime is the stealing of the software. The crack itself is not unlawful. Using it to steal is. Comprehend the difference?
LOL. No wait, please explain it to me like I'm 5 years old, will you, daddy?
Cut the crap, you can be better than that. Now, getting back to the point in question:
You're trying to hang on to technicalities when you know very well that cracking software and then making that crack available to others is AT THE VERY LEAST immoral. But you are also wrong about it not being illegal (as I said, laws are slowly catching up to the new technologies):
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes the act of circumventing access control a crime whether or not a copyright violation has occurred. It doesn’t actually matter whether you are the one who did the actual cracking or not… installing it on your pc when the software should have access control is enough.
Yes, and what good has it done? Has piracy disappeared? No, it hasn't worsened either.
Do you even understand how wrong it is what you are saying? By the same reasoning, we shouldn't have law enforcement or put criminals in prison because doing so has not made crime disappear.
Crime, like software piracy, will never go away. All you can do is try to make sure it stays on controlled levels.
DRM is pointless as it does little to stop thieves. What it does is make life difficult and unpleasant for everyone else, you know, the honest folks. There is not a single argument that can conclusively prove the DRM has had an overall positive benefit to the world. None.
Yeah, game developers are stupid people who take a secret and sadistic pleasure from inconveniencing legit users. They even pay Denuvo and others like them thousands of dollars for technologies that don't work.
OF COURSE IT WORKS. It won't work forever, but it does work and every day without a crack is money in the bank. If DRM didn't work, nobody would be using it by now.
What terrible and misguided analogy! Software devs are not homeowners defending a home. They are producers of a product for sale attempting to stop thieves from stealing. They will never succeed. Thieves will always find a way. And again, there are better schools of thought and ideals..
Yes, the old ideology vs. the real world. Problem being that the real world trumps ideology every single time.
So because they will never succeed entirely they should stop trying? Despite the fact that DRM does help sales?
Look, just go read that article already, it also discusses arguments such as yours:
"Many people will blurt out what they believe is the ultimate argument against copy protection and DRM: "It doesn't work!". This claim is borne out of the misconception that the games industry is using copy protection or DRM measures to completely eliminate piracy, which is absurd. It's common knowledge both within the gaming industry and outside it that piracy cannot be stopped completely. If properly motivated, and given enough time, pirates can and will break through virtually any software or hardware-based defence mechanism. The rationale behind the use of copy protection and DRM is much the same as the rationale behind the use of physical locks: to increase the complexity, time, effort and risk involved in attempting to overcome the protection, in the hopes of discouraging 'casual' pirates and thieves. In other words whether a physical lock or a digital lock, the aim is essentially to
keep honest people honest, not to present an impenetrable barrier. "
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html
That assumes that the thieves in question would otherwise pay for the software they steal. Most would not. So how many potential sales have they actually lost? Hmm? Your argument is without merit because it is without logic. It is also without precedent.
Wait, you rephrase exactly what I wrote and admit that SOME WOULD and then you say that my argument is without logic?! lol
It is EXACTLY as I said: some would, the problem is quantifying how many.
It does not matter, what matters is that *some* would (even by your own admission) so money is effectively being stolen from the legit content creators.
Well, GOG kinda proves DRM isn't a result of piracy. It's just greed. Besides, gotta love the "pirated copy automatically means lost revenue". Reality is, most pirates wouldn't have bought it anyway, meaning you're literally not losing anything. However, these people talking about it may such people into buying a game who they weren't even aware of, making these pirates a free PR. But god forbid anyone ever even dares thinking in such direction...
Look, just go read that article I already mentioned here several times, it is unbiased, very well written, covers all these arguments and it analyses the issue with facts, figures and examples:
"Economic Loss
The argument is straightforward and both intuitively and logically sound: for every pirated copy of a product, there is
some potential loss of income to the producer of that product. This is
not the same as saying that every pirated copy is a lost sale. What it actually means is that firstly some proportion of the people who are pirating a game would have bought it in the absence of piracy. Equally as important however is the fact that even those who would never have paid the full purchase price for one reason or another may still have paid
some lower amount to purchase and play the game which they pirated. This is because by the very act of obtaining and playing a game, they've clearly demonstrated that they place
some value on that game. After all, if something is truly 'worthless', consumers won't bother to obtain or use it in the first place, regardless of whether it's free or not. Even if a game only gives the pirate a few hours of enjoyment, that's still worth something. In the absence of piracy they may have purchased the game at a discount several months after its release, or bought it second-hand for example. So the existence of piracy results in some loss of income to PC game developers, publishers, retailers and even other consumers.
Pure economic loss is actually very difficult to calculate in precise terms because it's largely hypothetical - there's no way of knowing exactly how many more units of a particular product would have sold if piracy did not exist, or how much money various people would have paid over time to buy discounted or second-hand copies in the absence of piracy for example. However examination of piracy figures combined with sales figures for similar products which are less affected by piracy does provide some indication of the scale of loss."
....
"
Piracy & Marketing
One of the economic arguments in support of piracy is that it imparts benefits to the producers because the mass distribution of pirated copies of a product effectively provides valuable free publicity and marketing via word of mouth. This can be particularly useful for low budget releases which don't have large marketing budgets. For example if a hesitant purchaser obtains a pirated copy of a little-known game and then loves it, there's no doubt they're much more likely to encourage their friends to get that game. This argument is logically sound, in that there is indeed a great deal of power in the way in which widespread positive word of mouth can influence the perceptions and decisions of the general public, and propel an otherwise unknown or underrated game to greater popularity.
However the argument deliberately ignores one fundamental problem: there's no evidence to suggest that positive word of mouth from pirates results in anything other than more people
pirating a particularly popular game. After all, if a person can tell others about a pirated game he likes, he can just as easily tell them how and where to obtain it illegally, or give them a copy for example. So it's unclear as to how much this additional positive word of mouth due to piracy actually results in
increased sales rather than simply
increased piracy. Looking at the data in the next two sections, we can see that the more popular a game, the significantly higher the number of people pirating it, though sales may also benefit as well. So the net effect of this claim is unclear."
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_3.html
