How much pirated Amiga software did you have?

[B00tDisk]

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

[Marcb]

I think we all need to accept that piracy existed within the Amiga community as evidenced by the poll results.
 
If we are going to argue about whether it was wrong or not, the morality of software piracy is a no-brainer, stealing is stealing, the mitigating circumstances are our respective ages and level of immaturity when we did it anything else is just an excuse.

[stefcep2]

I think we all need to accept that piracy existed within the Amiga community as evidenced by the poll results.
 
If we are going to argue about whether it was wrong or not, the morality of software piracy is a no-brainer, stealing is stealing, the mitigating circumstances are our respective ages and level of immaturity when we did it anything else is just an excuse.

I've heard all the "arguments" in favour of piracy.  I've not found ONE to be justified.

[Amiga_Nut]

I'm not arguing for piracy, neither am I championing civil liberties infringing laws forced onto ISPs/Governments by OTT media moguls. Neither am I championing unfair non return policies on games. All three have to change, and using the stick/stick approach isn't going to solve anything. Quadrupling the price of petrol and pocketing the tax will not make an environmentally conscious person out of a muscle car driver, ditto with all the fuss and draconian nazi like laws introduced to try and prevent downloads.

Funny thing is when I owned a C64 I had 99% originals, and the copies I did have were Turbotape64 dumps of slow load games, maybe 5 or 6 and 100+ original games. So I don't think age has anything to do with it. It's all down to ease of access.

Legality aside, Microsoft doesn't deserve a penny of my money EVER and if you disagree you are in the wrong forum brother, Microsoft ruined home computing for everyone in the world with that pathetic OS and their less than legal tactics. Argue with me all you like about movies/games/music but M$ are not getting a penny of my money and it's a damn shame the whole world doesn't pirate their stuff so they will just die and GTFO of my face.

The fact is though that pirates have done more to put everything you love into the digital age and into digital formats than all the media and games companies combined for the last 10 years. If it weren't for people like AXXO and FXG and Secretmyth spending years perfecting the coding process we would probably still be on blocky first generation Mpeg2 transcodes of rubbish sources. Music industry still hasn't got a clue what the problem is, ie nobody wants all the fake talentless crap shoved in our faces via American Idol except a few gormless twats. Album is a dead concept, charging the same for 10 MP3s as a physical product that costs 3x as much to produce/distribute is also bordering on insanity. Most of these big companies are bastards and they have screwed you for decades, now that they lost control they want to fix it so they can screw you again. MKV is more impressive than Blu-Ray, that is a simple fact, you don't need Quadcore CPUs or 40gb discs to watch something at 1080p, but if the public realised what a con the entire industry is and all the non-essential 'upgrades' of tech forced onto you as 'essential purchases' they might see it differently.

Yes it is a stolen product, but it is not comparable to stealing a car or causing physical damage to break into a house and rob someone. Neither does it fund terrorism. Aren't you people bored of all the bullshit these governments throw at you, first knock off cigarettes funded human trafficking and terrorism, now it's little John using bittorrent to watch some movies for free who is going to cause the end of the world apparently. People really believe this crap too I bet.

That is all I really have to say on the subject. Judge as you will, but at the time it was right for the reasons I have given, and it is still right today especially when the US supreme court refuses to grow a pair and M$ are still unpunished for 20 years of their mafia tactics. Nor am I going to mend my ways until the media companies fix the problems they have created from their own ignorance and inability to embrace the digital age even now as I type this. Watching TV shows in super shitty Flash-blur-o-vision is a load of crap. Nobody wants it after half a decade of pristine AVI rips at ridiculously low CPU requirements and compact file sizes being the norm.

Enjoy the rest of your day everyone, and peace. Everyone has their own opinion, laws are only rules approved by government, none of which has the interests of the ordinary man at heart in a capitalist world. A law is just a thought written on a piece of paper, given the right amount of arm twisting anything can become law even if the majority of the voting public disagree with it 100%. Think on that issue for the rest of the day while your emails are being read without your consent.

[clusteruk]

Whilst I have been caught on the side of losing money to pirates I will say this, not in support of them, but as a consequence. All of the wonderful software that was written by truly talented Amiga coders would have been lost if they had not be cracked and saved in a small number of archives.

However, what we are getting in the Amiga community is a number of ports of software from other platforms instead of original and exciting software development because it is less work.

In the near future all we will get is software that is supporting hardware gadgets, and software from people willing to work for free.

As usual this subject is not black or white.

[takemehomegrandma]

Originally Posted by recidivist  
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.

Excuse me, but WTF are you saying here? Go to a house and take stuff?!? Oh, man...

1. When you download something, you aren't removing any objects. You don't even remove the digitalized information. It's all still there, you aren't taking away anything. No-one will wake up and say "hey, where is the TV?"

2. What may be lost is a sales opportunity, but only if you download it for free instead of buying it. OTOH, if you would never have bought it anyway, not even the sales opportunity is lost.

There are many reasons to *why we don't buy* stuff, like for example that we don't really want it, or we simply can't afford it.

Have you looked at what Adobe is asking for their Master Collection CS5? I'll tell you: US$2,599!

There is *no way* I could possibly pay that kind of money for some software even if I wanted to. I know that, they know that, I'm simply not in their target market (which probably is various media producing corporations).

Still I'm using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Acrobat, etc (all from the Master Collection CS5) on an almost daily basis. And you know what? Adobe has lost exactly $0 on me. They haven't lost anything at all, since there is no chance in this world that I would have bought their product anyway. There never were any sales opportunity for them to lose!

If I OTOH would go to Adobes office, smash a window, and grab a monitor from a nearby desk, then they would obviously have lost something.

Do you see the difference?

[zurt]

Hi, I actually have more than 3000 DD disks of pirated Amiga stuff (most of them totally unusable due to their age).

I belonged to a "Amiga pirate" club here in my city, this club worked in a "token ring"-basis. The "token" was about 50-70 diskettes per month. "Club" members only knew the existence of the previous and next member. The "club" consisted of an undetermined number of people who paid a quote to the previous member, and in exchange this member gave you "the token". Once you had copied "the token" you can pass it on to the next member.

One of the members (I did not know him personally) were the responsible of establishing business with the "pirate providers" who were totally unknown for the members of the "club".

So I've got a bunch of disks. I registered several software (Amiga E, Spot, MailManager, Trapdoor(?), MakeCD, etc.) Never bought a boxed Amiga program apart from Amithlon, PageStream and AmigaOS3.5, 3.9, 4.

[jj]

Well to be honest when I did nearly all of my disk copying I was teenager, and like most teeneagers didn't even think about it.   Was not even aware it was piracy if you know what I mean. It was just something that everyone in school who had  an Amiga did.
 
I remember that a shop near my school getting raided and prosecuted because they sold copied disks for 50p a disk and had thousands.
 
Its very easy to be moralistic and judgemental with hindsight.  Piracy did not kill the Amiga.  No one single thing did.
 
I suspect that you will find that most people who used to do this , in later life have spent thousands on hardware and software.  I certainly do not pirate software anymore.  Well very rarely anyway.

[EvilGuy]

All have spent years learning to do what they do, and doing it better than most.  They all deserve to earn a living.

Selling more, make more money, more money to developers. I sell software, I've seen the fat that people put into software sales. Cut some of the fat and you'll get more sales.

But its very easy to blame "piracy" for poor sales. And its even easier to claim "suing people" will fix the problem. Like it has with music file-sharing. 8/ I suppose backwards, stupid ideas don't die easily.

[skurk]

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.

Yes I would: if I had to pay for them all, which is what I said.

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.

And neither do I.  Did you read what I wrote at all?

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.

Let's say you wrote a killer app/game/whatever, and charge $1000 for it.  I'm certainly not buying it, but if I come across it on piratebay or something, I might download it.

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?

First of all, it depends on the price.  If you charged $1000 an hour, I wouldn't request your services in the first place.

I don't know where you got the picture that I don't pay for anything, but maybe I gave the wrong impression at first, because I do.

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.

Then how come the PC platform isn't failing?  Do you have any idea how much piracy is going on there?

And I know the pizza analogy was bad, since you provide the ingredients yourself.  But how about this one:

Let's say I need a tool for photo manipulation, and I find Photoshop.  Looks great, but is too expensive.  So I download Gimp instead, which is a free alternative.

Adobe doesn't get my money, and I get the job done.  If Gimp didn't exist I would either have to buy Photoshop, or download it illegally.

[coldfish]

While I dont think wholesale piracy is a "good" thing, ( based on nothing more than the flimsy moral premis that if someone is getting something for nothing. then someone else must be missing out).

Comparing digital duplication to vehicle (or whatever physical object you choose) theft is just dumb.

I see it more like taking a photograph of a painting rather than getting the ladder out a ripping the painting of the wall.

The original is still there, piracy is an act of duplication not removal.

To all those on their moral high horse, who of you have never taped a TV program for later viewing or borrowed books from the library?

[marcfrick2112]

Man, I bet I'll regret replying to this thread... I had a great deal of pirated software. But, way back when, if I found original games for sale, I usually bought them. (Turrican, The Plague, Killing Game Show....SOTB 3... I even ordered Theatre of Death by phone directly from Psygnosis, 'cause I couldn't find it anywhere else.... )
      So, why pirate? Well, I bought Worms CD32, it wouldn't work on any of my Amiga's. Darkseed only worked on my A1200T, and poorly at that....  Years ago, there was an Amiga game rental store, I rented Turrican3, enjoyed it.... sent it back, and found that I couldn't buy it anywhere... I tried calling the rental place, they were gone.... So, yeah, I pirated the game....

I really loathe the idea of spending $$$ on software that may or may not work. If it works, and I like it, I'll buy it... If I don't, I'll delete it from my HD (and yes, I really do delete it, I need the space )

sigh.....

[Marcb]

@Amiganut

The problem is that when one sets out to hurt MS by pirating their software, MS passes the loss on down the line by reducing its costs to retain a profit margin, so rather than waking up to their corporate and community responsibilities they just have a round of redundancies and its Johnny programmer that gets it in the neck. That's how corporations work.

(I applaud your passion though)

[zurt]

I remember that a shop near my school getting raided and prosecuted because they sold copied disks for 50p a disk and had thousands.

I also remember when I was visiting Glasgow in Aug, 1995 a flea market called The Barras at which there was a lot of people selling Amiga pirated software. I bought there WordWorth 5, Directory Opus 5, and several more software.

I liked Glasgow a lot in an Amigan way: It was very nice to find such as beautiful scene (flea market full of A500's running X-Copy ) as well as a Virgin Store with Amigas running Scala IC and selling Amiga mice!

[Jon Hare]

The only pirate copy I owned was Giana Sisters. From day 1 on I've bought my games in original...spending all my available pocket money for it. I even worked as 14 year old boy to earn money for original Amiga games :afro: And I still own them btw

[Buzzfuzz]

With music artists you should look at the percentage they actually get, it's almost :angryfire: what they get, it's like 1-10%, the rest is all going to organisers, retailers, copyrighters and a little bit to the record company e.t.c.
 
I do not say that copying isn't stealing, because it is, but if they were really honest and didn't make price agreements then some software would be a lot less cheaper.
They are all going for the big $$$$ and the easy money, the more profit they make of it, the better, again I think the actual percentage that goes to the developer is less than 10%, unless it's a big company / they are completely in control themselves.
 
It's the same as products in a store, go for big margins and sell less / nothing or make it as low as possible and sell a lot, it's up to them.