Wow, you convinced me. Denying people's arguments but not offering up any counter-explanations is the best way to debate effectively.
In order to have a debate, you have to have two positions. My position was that there was no human rights argument to be made in favor of game piracy. Taltamir spent four paragraphs rambling on about how human rights applied to piracy of knowledge and technology specifically excluding entertainment.
If he's not going to stake out a position that's at all different from mine, then where's the debate?
You latched on to part of what I said, completely ignored the rest, and proclaimed it a victory... A debate works best when every tries to learn and not "win"...
The key issues that are human rights are:
1. Legally there is no differentiation between fantasy entertainment and knowledge.
2. There are a variety of legitimate reasons to "pirate" a game (lost the CD, making a backup copy, no demo, etc... those are all legally piracy!)
3. The human right against excessive punishment towards a very VERY minor crime.
The wonderful thing about stardock is that it eliminates all the legitimate reasons to pirate. But stardock is the ONLY publisher that does so.
Nobody in their right mind thinks its their human right to play a game they enjoy like sins of a solar empire without ever paying for it. They might do it anyways, but not consider it as a "human right"... there are other human rights involved directly in game piracy that I did mention that you pretended did not exist. I was not talking ONLY about knowledge... There are a variety of cases where people should be able to download it. To test a game that has no demo, to replace a lost/damaged CD for a game they legitimately purchased, to bypass annoying copy protection on a game they legitimately purchased.
I specifically explained that its not a human right to steal entertainment, but that that copy protection inadvertently violates human rights. The thing is that the law makes no distinctions between information and entertainment, IT SHOULD, but it doesn't.
There are human rights that regard
punishment vs crime relationship. If someone steals a game he should receive a modest fine, no cruel and unusual punishments which have no relationship to the size of the crime.
While its not a human right, there is the issue of value. People oftentimes pirate music because its overpriced and they WANT to hurt the record industry. I know a guy who DJs for a big radio station here in dallas, and he told me that their contract with the record industries is that they may ONLY play songs by artists who have signed on with an approved label... and signing on with such a label means signing away practically all profits from CDs and the like... the artists really only make money from concerts... OR if an inordinate amount of CDs are sold then the tiny fraction they receive from the sales adds up.
I for example will NOT buy any game published by EA. They are evil and they hate me personally (that is, they hate their customers)... Whenever I can I buy good games directly, not second hand, not from a store (where part of that 50$ goes to the store, to delivery, to stamping out disks, etc).. I love direct download because that means more of the 50$ goes to the actual people who made the game...
PS. And keep in mind that I downloaded before I bought Sins because there is no demo... When there is no demo false advertising is often risked, where the game does not deliver on its claims... for most games even if there IS a demo, the demo is version 1 and the game vastly changed since, so its not an accurate representation... Many games are extremely buggy, to the point where they are completely unplayable. Titan quest, Hellgate london, etc... By downloading the full game and updating to the latest version you can first see if the game even WORKS. and if it does, pay for it. There is no consumer protection law saying that you should be refunded the 50$ if your shiny new game blue screens ever 10 minutes and has a chance to delete your progress when it does... So people make their own consumer rights through piracy.
