How much pirated Amiga software did you have?

[Karlos]

At least these days, free software is sufficiently evolved that you can pretty much do anything you need to without spending a penny on software if for whatever reason you feel aggrieved in doing so. The only real exception to that is gaming, and frankly, I don't really mind paying for that. After all, it's a luxury rather than a necessity.

[KThunder]

What all this means is that an individual has no chance to make a living at software or music on their own. They need a large powerful company with tight controls to protect them and get the money. And large companies have to fight for everything they can in court and with their software and music controls.

Yeah that sounds great for all of us.

Artists and programmers have as much right to profit from their creation, as we have to use them. But the thing is there are probably 1000 consumers to every producer. And with digital copying a cd or movie or game can be leaked and out and around the world before the creator has any chance of making any money. We complain about large companies but we make them all the more necissary by what we are doing.

[takemehomegrandma]

"How much pirated Amiga software did you have?"

When it comes to games - almost 100% in my collection was pirated. (With a few exceptions)

When it comes to various creativity apps, the few I had back then, most of them were actually bought (at the "hefty" price they asked).

I'm not making excuses. Had no money back then, and nobody really lost any sales anyway, since I wouldn't have bought any of those games no matter what. So no, it wasn't "stealing", since nobody lost anything.

Today I'm still downloading various pirate copies (apps/games on the PC, music, movie's, etc). But these days I actually buy the stuff *I really want*. There are benefits in doing that. And the shit I download but don't want, that shit I wouldn't have bought anyway. So there is still no "stealing".

IMHO.

Of course.

[KThunder]

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=499114>1=28101

this is going to become commonplace...

Most copyright holders don't usually go after individuals, but there is no reason they can't. It's all a matter of incentive, and we are giving them lots of incentive. If they actually lost money or not, you enjoyed their creation without them benefitting. That is what they are in the business for after all, it's not like freeware or open source. These people are trying to make a living, not just enjoying a hobby.

[EvilGuy]

If they actually lost money or not, you enjoyed their creation without them benefitting. That is what they are in the business for after all, it's not like freeware or open source. These people are trying to make a living, not just enjoying a hobby.

You're right. BUT, if an individual downloads your application and uses it because they cannot afford to buy it then its probably a fair bet that suing them isn't going to get you anywhere either. It just runs up costs for lawyers and chokes the legal system.

The way to attack the problem is to go after those who distribute copies of software on a commercial scale; stop the supply of these products. Then make home use/educational/... versions of your applications available at a reasonable price. For games, go to an electronic distribution mechanism and lower your prices significantly - charging 10% less for downloadable versions when a significant chunk of the cost of software is in the box, delivery and artwork is offensive.

[Pentad]

While we're on this subject I wanted to share another item with you all that you don't hear about from the RIAA or the MPAA.

Stephen King was hit by a car (his neighbor if I recall correctly) and was in bed for a long time.  Apple actually sent him a PowerBook so he could write, surf the 'net, whatever...

King, like any good author, wrote on his new computer.  The finished product was called "The Plant".  When his publisher asked what he wanted to do with the story he said he didn't want to go all out and sell it but he would like to release it to his fans.  He felt it wasn't his best work so it didn't deserve the whole hoopla, hardback edition, press event, etc...kind of treatment.

The publisher suggested he sell it for $1 on some Internet sites (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc..)   You know it went on to be his best selling book?  I think it grossed more than any other book he wrote.

Why?   Was it the best book people ever read?  No, I think the price made people want to buy it.   Even if they didn't like it, it was something they could afford to try.

Imagine if Microsoft took one day and told consumers (not businesses) but consumers that for that one day Office 2010 Professional would be $50.00.   I bet Microsoft would make a great deal of money because people who would normally pirate it or use something else (OO for example) would buy it.

I think Microsoft would make more money in that one day than all the money they spend trying to stop piracy.

I sincerely mean this.  I think price has everything to do with piracy.   Office and Windows are the most pirated pieces of software for Microsoft.   I think they would be embarrassed at the money they would gain by doing some type of 'Coupon Day'.  Its the reason you will never see them do it and why they fight so hard that price has nothing to do with piracy.

-P

[Drummerboy]

The Question here may be "Who not have Pîrated Amiga Software?, becouse you know  unfortunately or happy  the piracy in C = 64/128 /  Amiga is part of the idiosyncrasy.. Do you remember the groups?, Swaps events?, Great Intros?..  
I think in this days many Amigans are paying more by the Software than 80s and 90s..
I know many people bought WHDLoad, Ibrowse, and more soft..
Anyway, in this plattaforms C=64/128 and Amiga was and are very common the Software Piracy, maybe this situation help to kill the plattaform... but was the sreal situation ..

[stefcep2]

If I had to pay for all the software I ever used, I'd be bankrupt today.

No you wouldn't: you just would not have had that software.  Your quality of life may have not been the same. But thats life.

Oh, never.  But it's a big difference between copying and stealing: keep in mind that I'm not actually taking money away from someone, I'm just not giving them money.  And if I couldn't copy it, I wouldn't buy it either.  It's just a convenience issue for me.

Ok so i go to my local white good store and I want to buy a washing machine.  Its $1000.  I say its too much, I'll pay $300, I might haggle a bit, but in the end if I can't afford it I walk out.  I don't come back at 3.00 AM in the morning, back a truck through the front door, take the washing machine, and pay nothing.

Or like all those who have argued that IF the software was $25 they'd buy it, I don't leave $300 behind because thats what I want to pay for the washing machine.  

Or all those "too poor" to pay wouldn't have bought anyway so its no loss: well I'm too poor to purchase a Mercedes Sports, I don't steal it and say well its no loss to Mercedes because I wouldn't have bought it anyway..  And no this is not different just because its tangible property, as there is a lot of intellectual property that goes into building that Mercedes to make it the car that it is , is in addition to the material costs, which are a minor part of the overall cost.

Ultimately, you are using something that someone has spent a great deal of time and talent firstly learning how to create, and then, actually create it, in the hope that they can earn a living.

I spent 5 years earning a professional degree during which I sacrificed earning a living and was supported by my parents. I now charge for my time when someone needs my expertise, and the service I offer lets that client have things and do things they otherwise couldn't.  If my clinet doesn't pay, i don't do the work and they don't get what they want.  I am not a programmer, but I don't see how they are different to me.  Why should you not pay them?

Following your logic, my local pizza shop should sue me for making my own pizza at home?

If you can create from raw ingredients and tools ie an SDK and a PC, another version of Crysis or an Office suite or an OS, then no-one will deny you that right (as long a you don't COPY most of it).  But thats not what you are doing:  you are simple using something with commercial value that you haven't paid for.

this thread confirms what I've suspected: the vast majority of Amigans were pirates, and if you think that didn't play a major part in the platforming failing, you're kidding yourself.

[stefcep2]

so if copying (piracy is when you steal shit on the high seas) killed the amiga, why didn't it kill the PC ?

I am still not buying it.

Simply scale.

Where is the PC gaming scene today?

In decline.  Big time.  The only growth are is those massive rpg's or whatever they're called, where.  From being the dominant platform, its now shunned by developers, often resulting in cancelled projects or lower quality ports.

[dreamcast270mhz]

The whole "make a living" thing may make sense for devs on subsistence, but for MS, the piracy is barely noticeable in Billy's wallet. I have probably $7k of software right now, all pirated but from the big companies. They aren't starving because of it, and most was no longer sold by the time I acquired it. Rule of thumb: If its no longer sold in any form, its probably safe. Would Nintendo sue me if I made a pirate donkey kong  arcade cabinet set? Maybe, but they wouldn't have a case in America because I could argue its no longer sold.

[Amiga_Nut]

All good opinions, especially about the hardware not keeping up, but fact is software drives hardware.  

A 50 mhz '030 will play Doom on an AGA machine just fine.  But where was id's port of Doom for Amiga to push people to buy that '030?  And the more people that bought one to play that 3D game, the cheaper it would be to upgrade the hardware further: next step an 060, and 3d cards for Zorro machines, and so on.  

Instead pirated software consumers stuck with their stock 1 meg A500's beacsue they were too tight to upgrade, I mean hell their games were for free, they weren't gonna pay to  upgrade, until developer after developer left.

At its height the Amiga was the most pirated platform there was.  Make no mistake. I went to the Amiga user groups (AFTER C= went broke in 94) where we would get 250 plus people, all happily copying anything and everything, but no-one would say so in the open.  You think losing 90% of their sales due to piracy would have no impact on a software developer's decision to look elsewhere?  As software sales dwindle, less software is made, and software is a platform's lifeblood.

Of course the other side of the coin is...

1. Launch price of stock A1200 + 50mhz 030 + extra RAM + slow slow 2.5" IDE drive = more than cost of Doom capable PC. Commodore should have shipped an A1200+ with 28mhz 020 (practically identical performance to a 28mhz 030 but a lot cheaper) and made sure it had 1mb of fast ram to ensure 100% speed of operation AND AGA should have had Akiko functionality in there already. This was required as a distinct machine out of the box on store shelves software companies at least could see official sales figures and put in an "A1200+" option. The problem was high street chains, the forerunners of places like PC World, had nothing to sell that would just work out of the box....mass market PC purchasers did not tinker with their machines, it's unreasonable to expect people to buy an A1200 in a regular well known shop, look in magazines for 030 accelerators and then make a mail order purchase and wait. Alarm bells should have been ringing.  Instead we got the OTT A4000/030 which was too expensive and not suitable as a mass market replacement for the next generation of Amiga gamers(which in turn was due to the overpriced 4000/040).

Why did they need to do this? OK well imagine you bought a Ford Escort in 1992 (EU not USA type), a basic model that couldn't pull the skin off a custard, for erm £9,999. Now you spend £30,000 adding a turbo charger and 4 wheel drive and beefier gearbox and wild bodykit etc creating something as fast as a Group C rally car. Guess what? it's worth only 110% of the used price of a standard unmodified Escort and at best 20% of the value of the Escort Cosworth you just replicated with your £40,000. People knew full well that adding this and that was a waste of money when it came to selling gear later. It's all down to bad decisions at Commodore in just having the A1200 -/+ hard drive, there was no such thing as a machine for every regular person, clearly the A1200 set the bar too low (well they were trying to make huge profits again 1991 A500 style) and they paid the price because people looking in regular shop windows with PCs only saw this strange keyboard with no CD, only 2mb of RAM and only 14mhz. The hard drives were twice the price of PC 3.5" drives and half the speed for no good reason...why did we need 2.5" drives in a desktop machine? Stupid idea, and probably extreme penny pinching on the side of the power supply. I'm talking about sales to the general public in regular high street stores where PCs were also sold not the Amiga faithful.

2. Commodore could have quite easily offered ID or anyone else a sum of money to make sure Doom made it onto a suitable Amiga (14mhz A1200 with 2mb chip is not suitable). Doesn't have to be Doom, the outcome would have been things like Gloom and AB 3D would have had a suitable platform and not artificially dated the look of Amiga games to potential new 1st time purchasers. To add insult to injury Commodore added Akiko chunky<>planar converter to CD32 BUT made it impossible to add the required fast ram to a CD32 to get full CPU speed as opposed to 50%....how much would it have cost that idiot Medhi Ali to approve a single SIMM slot for 1/2mb capability? Exactly. Commodore were totally clueless at this time and the only good outcome we could have hoped for would have been the management buyout of Commodore UK (who were all making the same arguments as me and had similar plans). Why cripple the CD32 to chip ram only but spend 100,000s on Akiko development to fix a problem that AGA overlooked in the first place (stupid 8 bitplane 256 colour mode not byte/pixel). The whole point of Akiko was to help Doom type games...and those games need maximum CPU and nothing else (which the PC had in abundance)

I do not have any bad feeling about pirating stuff, for me it was a case of try before you buy. Because if you bought a turkey like Outrun or Chase HQ that was 25 bucks down the toilet as no shop would take it back no matter how bad it was, that was a stupid law. And when magazines said they were quite good/acceptable when I wouldn't even use them for a doorstop it meant your only choice was to check it out before investing a penny. 95% of the stuff I had was wiped within minutes because it was such a lame piece of coding.

If a game was good I did buy it, like I said for me Cinemaware ALWAYS got my money no questions asked...and look what happened to them...they invested in the wrong console and went bankrupt (CD Turbo-Grafx). In fact there is only one Cinemaware game produced that I don't own, TV Sports Boxing. I have all the others even to this day, and all are full priced editions bar Sinbad. That's a lot of investment for a pirate like me, so clearly the issue was crap output from 95% of software houses in the UK. Think of the poor Japanese companies who did flawless conversions of games on the Sharp x68000 and still had to deal with piracy.

Put it this way, if legally I could take back any rubbish game from Ocean/US Gold/Activision etc for a full refund AND the software company not the shop had to foot the bill then if nobody pirated I bet you a million bucks those companies selling pure dross like that would have made just as few sales and even more of a loss to dispose of returned stock. The impact on the industry in real terms is nothing like the Oceans/US Golds make out. We got screwed as Amiga users, we hardly ever got quality conversions anything like the Amiga was capable of, and even some games were never coded like Nemesis/Gradius or Lifeforce/Salamander etc. Why? Greed is why!

And why did we all have to have stupid disk formats meaning you couldn't run the games from a multitasking wonder computer like Amiga but all PC games came on a standard DOS format and all were hard disk installable (manual or otherwise). PC piracy was just as rife and all this did was annoy people by treating Amigans differently to the snotty PC users of the 80s/90s. It's the same argument today with the MPAA and RIAA mouthing off about theft and piracy, and they fail to notice it is they who are in the wrong and they who have caused the problem by treating their customers with ill-regard (MP3 DRM, overpriced Blu-Ray/DVD...forced zoning of movies....forced wait for people who don't wish to go to some twittering fool infested cinema for the 'ultimate experience' etc). Fact is they all got stung for incompetence and lack of value for money...hence all the scaremongering and laws to punish people.

[stefcep2]

You're right. BUT, if an individual downloads your application and uses it because they cannot afford to buy it then its probably a fair bet that suing them isn't going to get you anywhere either. It just runs up costs for lawyers and chokes the legal system.

If you can afford the PC, modem and internet connection, you can afford to pay for your movie or music.  If you can't, your parents can, and should be held responsible because if a responsible parent would say "Hey Jonnie, where did you get that new bike that I didn't buy for you" then the same parent can say "where did you get that game/move/music you're playing/watching/listening that I didn't buy for you"
Not a kid but no money?  They might make you pay month by month from your dole check.  Do it to enough people, publicise it and people think twice.

The way to attack the problem is to go after those who distribute copies of software on a commercial scale; stop the supply of these products.

Software pircay is not an addiction that the end user can't control, its a choice.  Both the supplier and the end user are equally guilty, both should be pursued.

Then make home use/educational/... versions of your applications available at a reasonable price.

Most big application software has home/academic versions that are a tenth of the price of professional versions.  But people want he Pro versions, for free.

For games, go to an electronic distribution mechanism and lower your prices significantly - charging 10% less for downloadable versions when a significant chunk of the cost of software is in the box, delivery and artwork is offensive.

The value is in the time, effort and talent that went into making the software.  Have a look at the credits at the end of the game.  Look at all the names credited with making that game:  Programmers, texture artists, modellers, musicians, orchestras, directors, actors, engineers.  Hundreds of them.  All have spent years learning to do what they do, and doing it better than most.  They all deserve to earn a living.

Most consumers STILL prefer bricks and mortar game stores, and to have a tangible product in their hands.  It costs money (rent, staff, marketing, insurance, power, retirement money, taxes) to provide that.  Games publishers have to support the retailer, because if they don't they know they will lose those retail sales.

[stefcep2]

The whole "make a living" thing may make sense for devs on subsistence, but for MS, the piracy is barely noticeable in Billy's wallet. I have probably $7k of software right now, all pirated but from the big companies. They aren't starving because of it, and most was no longer sold by the time I acquired it. Rule of thumb: If its no longer sold in any form, its probably safe. Would Nintendo sue me if I made a pirate donkey kong  arcade cabinet set? Maybe, but they wouldn't have a case in America because I could argue its no longer sold.

OPfcourse you could say if less people pirated Windows and Office, then they might need to charge what they do, which IMO is cheap nowdays.

[Ral-Clan]

Stealing is just SO COOL,until you steal from the thief.

I gotta admit this is so true.  It goes for software and music downloads.  It's the cool thing to do, but if you could go to the pirates house and pick anything from it to just take, they'd have another thing to say.

I would bet that 90% of the people who think pirating is totally okay don't actually create anything like art, music, photography, writing, reports, programs. etc.  They are consumers.  If they actually created something intangible for which they based their livelihood on, or even placed value for their time upon, they might have another opinion.

[Einstein]

I gotta admit this is so true.  It goes for software and music downloads.  It's the cool thing to do, but if you could go to the pirates house and pick anything from it to just take, they'd have another thing to say.

Go to a house ? Take things ?! what are you speaking ?

[B00tDisk]

Go to a house ? Take things ?! what are you speaking ?