Ethical p2p client question

eest: No it's not. In fact, that analogy is invalid because Halo is still being sold - didn't it just come out for PC? Besides, wouldn't you have to pay Kinkos money to make all those copies?

Enoki: Agreed, if one person downloads twenty dollars worth of music, the company is only losing $20. But if one million people do that exact same thing, then the company is losing twenty million dollars. That IS a lot of money. Besides, there are several services out there that allow you to download one song from an album, usually for a buck a song.

TG Cid: Yes, my version of Windows is legit, and I have nothing downloaded onto my computer (music, videos, ROMs, etc) which I do not legally own in physical form. My avatar was one of the avatars I could choose from this site, and I use it under the impression that this site has the permission to use it. If I'm at fault for copyrighting an image, so is eyesonff.com.

Square is not selling pictures of CG Cid with a smoke in his mouth. Nor are you or eyeson trying to make money off of it.

Suggesting that that's illegal is god damn stupid.

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Originally posted by Thunder God Cid
Only millions of people are doing it. That doesnt mean its right, but still. Single me out why don't you. You can say you have never downloaded anything illegal? your windows is liget? you have no downloaded music? you have no downloaded videos? your computer is 100% free of copyrighted things, even such as small things like immages. You know i could report you for your avatar, because the screenshots you took them were property of Squaresoft.

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Just because millions of people are doing it doesnt make it right, and furhtermore you just prooved a point. Its only fifty dollars for you, so its no big deal. Then times fifty by one million and you have the amount of money that company just lost because of imulators. And some people dont download music. I know I dont. I bought my copy of windows at market value, and images are taken from google. Its not illegal to copy images from the web. They are free, and the company looses no profit from it. In fact, they actually gain profit from it because people come to their sites to get stuff and increace advertising values.


Downloading un-ethical? Why because the companies producing the music/games are losing a little money. Heres my view on the downloading of music at least. Lets say I want the song "still frame" by Trapt, and thats the only song I want. Whos the bigger thief? Me for downloading this one song, or the record company for forcing me to pay $19.99 for this one song plus 14 or 15 other songs I didnt want in the first place?- enoki

Well, what you just did was wrong. The company made it that way so you had to buy their cd. If you dont like the price they put it at, you dont have to buy it. You can just go without untuil you get over it and decide to go buy it with money you earned. And furthermore, isnt it un-ethical that you get payed for working? I mean, you get paid 5 dollars minimum per hour, so after 4 hours you have enough to buy that cd. Its not that hard to go get a job unless your under 16. THen just do housework. Making money isnt a hard task.

Hrmm. My point. You say that getting a job and getting that money isn't hard. I say, getting online and downloading it from a bit torrent site isn't hard either.

Yes, but it's illegal.

It's easier to kill a person than to reason with him. It's also easy to beat your girlfriend up instead of being rational about the unplanned pregnancy. I can go on.

Just because it's easier doesn't make it right, or sane.

But the company who makes this crap don't support nor make it anymore. They can't resell it nor make money off of it anymore so downloading it is about as leagal as finding a workable copy of the same title lying on the sidewalk.

see, abandonware as you call it is where my analogy applies. If it's out of print, you just need to find a used copy. If you are concered with ethics, that is. You could also figure out who was the lead designer of the game and mail him $10, perhaps, if you must download it.

But still the person you buy it from makes profit, and denying them of that profit eventually leads to decline in buisness and if this happens enough, than that company can go out of business. When everybody used Napster and Kazaa, they thought it wouldnt matter because it was only a few songs they downloaded. But their songs coupled with 2 billion other people creates a huge decline in record sales that majorly effected their business.

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Originally posted by eestlinc
see, abandonware as you call it is where my analogy applies. If it's out of print, you just need to find a used copy. If you are concered with ethics, that is. You could also figure out who was the lead designer of the game and mail him $10, perhaps, if you must download it.

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If it's truely abandonware though, the used copy is on the server you found and download it from - either that, or that copy came from elsewhere that eventually leads to a used copy - it must come from somewhere after all :p

yea, but there is a difference between buying a Suikoden PS disc on eBay and downloading a ROM of it to play on your playstation emulator.

Is Suikoden under Abandonware though? If it is, and once it is, then I don't think there's a big difference between getting only the bits of the product you want how you want, and getting a complete physical copy with manual etc. which one might not be interested in. Yes, you're creating a new copy of part of the product, but again, if it's abandonware, even if it's not legal, I don't see a problem ethically or morally in doing so since it's of no interest to the original makers.

If anything, I think buying a used copy would be morally worse since the person selling it to you would be the one getting paid for it and making money off an abandonware product, and probably at a higher price than the maker might have originally sold it due to the product's rarity.

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Originally posted by Enoki
Downloading un-ethical? Why because the companies producing the music/games are losing a little money. Heres my view on the downloading of music at least. Lets say I want the song "still frame" by Trapt, and thats the only song I want. Whos the bigger thief? Me for downloading this one song, or the record company for forcing me to pay $19.99 for this one song plus 14 or 15 other songs I didnt want in the first place?

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Unluckly I do think your wrong there now as you can buy the track seperatly from hundreds of different sites, legagly. Because you can now pay for downloads, example, cokemusic.com

So from an ethical stance that comment is no longer valid as you don't have to pay for a whole CD for one track.

Hmm.

If a program gets made by a company, you have the developers and the publishers. If both developer and publisher no longer exist, it's abandonware unless the game was moved to a different company or something. If there's nobody around to pay that $10 to, what do you do? Just not get the game because of the fact that they went bust before you wanted to get the game?

Or maybe if a company and publisher go bust like that, then it's automatically considered freeware? I don't know.

A perfect example of abandonware would be X-COM: UFO Defense (if anyone's ever heard of it), or perhaps even FF3j. Neither game is being produced or sold by the original company.