Last week we reported that the four founding fathers of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay have each been jailed for one year.
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were all found guilty of breaking copyright law.
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has since stepped up and applauded the conviction. "Piracy is the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software that consumers demand and enjoy. It's a job killer in an economy that needs millions more jobs, not less," said Michael Gallagher, CEO of the ESA.
"This decision confirms that the harm being inflicted on creators of digital works by BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay will not be tolerated, and that such actions are subject to criminal sanctions."
"Piracy is the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software that consumers demand and enjoy. It's a job killer in an economy that needs millions more jobs, not less,"
Well, if any development company did a decent and good game every once in a while I might bother myself to buy it.
All developers want is shorter development time so that they can make money faster. Thing is people work hard to earn their money and they won't spend €60 some repetitive piece of junk.
I really hope they can curb all this pirateing and copying i appluad the conviction of these guys and hope many more convictions follow. I feel very negative towards piracey as it destroys the industrys and as a person who goes out and buys the products instead of downloading i am quite happy to read about this
I just love how the spokesman tries to put on a patriotic "Support the ailing economy" spin while claiming this will help keep the industry alive. Fair do, but if they are so damned concerned about staying alive then STOP attacking your paying customers with crap malware that doesn't stop the pirates in the first place! THAT crap is doing far more harm and it's got long term effects. Idiots.
Oh, and ESA can dance all they want; the joke's on them as The Pirate Bay servers are still operating and the four founders are going to appeal. This case has turned into a full-blown furor in Sweden and the appeals court may end up overturning the verdict. To make matters even more chaotic some politicians may get involved as it seems large segments of the Swedish population find the verdict extreme, and politicians often don't like to be seen doing the unpopular thing....
this is the press decision. it will be appealed and the conviction quashed as they've been convicted of piracy when their servers doesn't have a shred of illegal content, hence incorrect conviction which will be seen by the higher court of appeal (or watever they call it there).
Its also amazing to read the comments of these "pirates" when they very strongly promote users to buy the game if they enjoy it. Piracy may be very dangerous to the industry when it concerns mediocre games/devs but good games always sell. same thing for movies. make something worth buying and people will buy it, make sh1t and we wont.
I really hope they can curb all this pirateing and copying i appluad the conviction of these guys and hope many more convictions follow. I feel very negative towards piracey as it destroys the industrys and as a person who goes out and buys the products instead of downloading i am quite happy to read about this
I can agree to that. However, it's a two-edged sword and I h-a-t-e the companies that are destroying my customer experience by crippling the legal products I purchase to support their asses! The door swings both ways so I've got zero sympathy for some of the big publishers. They've got it coming.
Notice how Google has got away undetected, since they point users to a site where a torrent is available, rather than fetching the torrent directly. They should be given a much bigger penalty than the Pirate Bay. I still think they've got the wrong people though. The Pirate Bay is a key site in maintaining the torrent infrastructure. Torrent file sharing is genius, since the data is allowed to flow between systems seamlessly, without the need for expensive servers. They aren't criminals, they're pioneers.
Is piracy good or bad? A friend went out and purchased a copy of “Saints Row” I think it was for the PC. He installed it but couldn’t play it until he downloaded the updates via Steam. Steam stopped working twice but worked the third time (good job there was no install limit). So after about 4 hours of trying to download the updates the game finally connected to the steam servers and activated only to be told that the game was “unavailable” for play at this time. So he was unable to play a game he purchased legitimately because a server was down? Eventually after 2 days of waiting it finally worked but would this have been a problem if he just pirated the game?
DRM doesn’t stop pirates. The only thing DRM and online activation does is stop legitimate people playing games they’ve paid for.
I don’t know why the Government or some watchdog doesn’t bring out a licence for such things. Maybe pay a few Ł100 for a licence a year and allow people to download what they want. Then all these copyright DRM happy people can take what they want from the licence fee. Or integrate it into the ISP subscription.
ESA's applauding to the conviction of TPB is also an applaud to its awful performance in recent years. Actually even if I would be a pirated-edtion-player, I'd rather not play a dump like NFSUC than download a pirated copy to waste my bandwidth and time. You see, ESA sucks.
The ESA is a pretty crap organisation backed by some large publishers. They get paid to hunt down sites and users and sue them so no wonder they have this s**tty attitude.
The truth is that, in times of crisis, people only buy things they feel are worth buying and games lately haven't been worth s**t so what do you expect? The simple reason the ratio "buy/pirate" is so high is because people just don't see any incentive to actually buy the crap. It's not because someone pirates a game they would have bought it or that they even played it for more than an hour or two!!!
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