Pirating Survey, is piracy a real problem?

i doubt you'll get many respondents , at least none who will admit to piracy here on toms hardware , i'm sure such admissions result in immidate bans ...

Rest assured a great many of tom's hardware form memebers and readers fall into the "stero typical brackets " of likely priates ..( male ,tech savvy )

interesting that you'd be bothering to waste your time with suveys to compile data on piracy .. by this time EVERYONE here in the US knows just how wide spread it's become ...

You know what i hate most about pirates in general ? Too many of them smugly deny that their actions are wrong ... i don't really much care that people pirate , i simply expect that people be honest to themselves and others about the "right or wrong " about what they do ...

Far far too often i've read thread after thread where they try to come up with complex B/S to justify their actions ... geez it's nothing horrible to say that because you can get something for free , that you do ... at least not in my book ..

Here's the situation as it stands now ... in little under 20 something days the US congress will in all likelyhood pass SOPA , after it goes into effect you can kiss all the file sharing webcites , ADIOS .... alot of people can figure out how things are going to go down , and i'm betting right now as we speak anyone who knows how to pirate is downloading like crazy up until the lights go out ...

Right off the bat with the loss of the easily accessible file sharing networks i'm betting at LEAST 75% of so called pirates will be cut off from the free stuff ( because it's easy to get too ) ... the remaning 25% may not have as easy a time as they think contining to download , because after SOPA is passed i'm sure the government will move faster than most people think .

In the end this will be good for all of the industries that have been getting their guts ripped out ...They say that a pirate isn't a lost sale , LOL .. we will see how true that is after the only recourse left is to pay for things you want ...

don't take me as someone preaching from on high , i'm just sharing with you some real observations ...

Stupid poll is broken anyways, but I find pirating only 15% offensive. Generally around 40% will buy, 25% delete the games and never buy. 35% keep the games and never buy. With that being said it's a problem but not as bad as you may think. SOPA will probably kill sales more than anything. Not to mention how much SOPA will kill the internet as a whole Because it just makes intellectual property a reason to Blacklist you from the internet. Gratz, good by MSN you Intelectual Property stealing news site. Good by MicrosoftTech.net Thanks to SOPA you won't be around much longer. How nice right?

Why would people respond and get themselves banned for promoting piracy?

after 30+ years i cant say im entirely innocent. but as i got older i found less need to pirate games for 2 reasons.
1) the games arnt worth pirating when you cant fully play them
2) if i have enough money to afford a higher end system then its a bit ritch claiming i cant afford to buy games. in the last 5 years i have downloaded maybe 8-10 titles all of which lasted about an hour b4 i either deleted them and bought the game or just got ridd of em because they wernt worth playing.
the sour fact of the matter is there are not enough playable demos released, so people cant test the games b4 i buy, to make sure they run... (this is more important to newbies as they often over expect from the pc's they have)

my only beef at the minute is that legit players are having to put up with intrusive DRM that wont allow you to play unless you are permanently connected to the web. end result if the server goes down. you cant play, while the pirates are playing and laughing at you for buying it in the first place.

I strongly dislike piracy, and dislike the people who pirate evan more.

I am proud to say that I pay for all of my games, films and music.

What gets me is all the BS about a fairly large percentage of pirates who "go on to buy the game after they have pirated it for free"......ermm, yeah right.

Why would they pay for something they already have for free?

Thats like a bloke saying "Well this car isn't available to test drive so I'm going to steal one and take it for a joy ride, If I dont like it I'll just dump it somewere, If I like it I'll go straight to the dealership and buy myself one right away, instead of keeping this one I just stole"

It wasn't really necessary to start a poll (that's not even working) to find out if people are pirating or not; they are. All of them did it (myself included) at one point or another, more or less. Ones who claim they NEVER did it? Laughable, at best. Whatever.

The point is made clear by HEXiT though, you will pirate a game and you will almost never get a fully working product, no updates, no fixes, no real tech support of any kind, or the fact that you cannot go online to use the multiplayer features in most cases. At the end of the day, one will realize it wasn't really worth it; unless you can deal with a broken product, that is.

I have never pirated in the last 20 years. Early on in the 80's and maybe up to 1992, I did get a few copies of games, back when you just had to do a copy command to new disk. I never even thought about it like pirating at the time as there was no anti piracy techniques used yet.

I have never pirated and dislike all that do. Even if you live in confined areas (Barracks, Droms, etc) it doesnt mean you have to give movies and games out to everyone. I am happy to say that all media and software I own is legit and if I have a digital copy (movies and stuff) I made it myself from discs that I bought with software I bought.

I find a lot of it a case of "everyone else is doing it so why can't I".

I recently found out my brother was pirating some software and that was his response.

After much debate he wouldn't drop the line "all my mates do it and they haven't been caught".

I'm currently in the process of blocking the access to any torrent or file sharing site on his PC.

The last time I pirated was a game called Arctic Fox in 1986. My friend next door got it and made a copy for me.

Am I going to get banned now? In my defense I was still a minor at the time.  

I can't say I've never done it (haven't done so in a few years). I'm in Canada (where Internet service providers enforces a CAP on download now) and pirating simply isn't worth it anymore. Reasons?

Reason #1: Ethics. I've realized the consequences are far greater than what the "free" games were worth.

Reason #2: I can get the full retail for 10-15$ for big games on Steam (if I wait long enough). For me, paying this amount for a full retail game (with patches and no viruses) at high DL speed makes better sense from a consumer level. PS: I love you Steam. I do pay the full 60$ when I don't feel like waiting (i.e. usually BF series, MW series). I can't wait for Skyrim to go down to the 30$ range...

Reason #3: I don't pirate so I don't get banned from TH's forums  

To a point I would agree with that. I tend to believe most people pirate because they dont have the disposable income to purchase. By no means makes it right. Whatever dumb rationalization a pirate "consumer" may give I am willing to bet it comes down to the fact they can't afford to buy all the games they want. So in essence, if they couldn't pirate it, they wouldn't be buying it anyway.

with all said above, I'd like to mention that situation outside US/Canada is severely different.

I moved to US from little country called Belarus. I haven't gone back for quite a while, but I doubt the situation has changed much. The games that you could buy legally in the store were pirated versions of the english games. Most often you bought the game for $1-5. There was no other way to get games legally.

and the funny thing I'll bet you my ass that the games were coming from pirated download sites and such. Because guess what, nobody from Belarus would bother to call all the way to USA for technical support. The international charges alone would cost more than the game's worth.

So, my friends, while USA is all giddy and jolly about this new SOPA bill, the rest of the world will just shrug and point finger at the "silly americans"

(I understand that probably no such statistic exists, but I'm sure that these companies that are pushing for SOPA lost the most sales to piracy OUTSIDE of US. So passing a bill that will only apply inside USA is just simply not making sense to me)

Well. that is true.. Here in India, back in 2005 when i was in high school, i used to get games from a shop for $1. They were disks which had pirated games in them. I dint even know that it was illegal and piracy. I thought thats the proper way to get a game. After i realised, after 2 years i have never done it :-) I get digital downloads from steam

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