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Games

Pirates as a Marketplace 214

John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, made some revealing comments in an interview with Kotaku about how the company's attitudes are shifting with regard to software piracy. Quoting: "Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA. But around that cloud Riccitiello identified a silver lining: 'There's a sizable pirate market and a sizable second sale market and we want to try to generate revenue in that marketplace,' he said, pointing to DLC as a way to do it. The EA boss would prefer people bought their games, of course. 'I don't think anybody should pirate anything,' he said. 'I believe in the artistry of the people who build [the games industry.] I profoundly believe that. And when you steal from us, you steal from them. Having said that, there's a lot of people who do.' So encourage those pirates to pay for something, he figures. Riccitiello explained that EA's download services aren't perfect at distinguishing between used copies of games and pirated copies. As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer."

Comment Re:No way... (Score 1) 361

Yeah, that's something I'd vote for, and am campaigning for...

I'd settle for some kind of sensible reform to bring "intellectual rights" back into some kind of sane bargain with society for a limited-term monopoly privilege, not a "property right" asserted to be both a natural entitlement and effectively perpetual. That's also, I believe, the normal kind of platform asserted by a typical "Pirate Party".

Given the current state of play, however, I've become an abolitionist outright, on the basis that would be preferable to what we have now. It makes me very angry that to all practical purposes almost the entire cultural heritage of the 20th century, new AND old, is locked away from use by me for creative purposes by effectively perpetual "intellectual property rights", where works produced before my birth will NEVER be out of copyright in my lifetime - it wasn't supposed to work like that, the next generation was SUPPOSED to be able to freely build on and develop from the creativity of the previous generation, and in their turn benefit from a LIMITED period of monopoly rights.

Copyright law isn't working, not for me, and not for many others. It's being overturned, de-facto, by the available technology and the widespread contempt for the unjust law; doubtful if it will be overturned de-jure as you describe, I'd have thought, though maybe in 50 years time this will all look bizarre to the society of that day, and people will be trying to imagine how anyone could ever think in terms of "intellectual property rights"...?

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