While many people pirate applications, it still doesn’t seem to be as socially acceptable as p2p filesharing of music and video. Perhaps this is because people perceive applications as requiring more effort on the part of the companies that produces and distributes them.

The perception may be that content producing companies like Time-Warner are simply packaging the effort of artists, while game development requires a huge affort on the part of a multitude of artists and programmers.

Of course, this logic fails in many respects. Just ask the thousands of people who were involved in making The Lord of the Rings movies.

I don’t buy the argument that DRM pushed consumers into pirating music. Distribution of ripped MP3s was not a reaction to DRM, it was a reaction to high prices and an outdated distribution model. Perhaps it was also a manifestation of the belief that in cyberspace, laws don’t (and shouldn’t) apply.

While many people pirate applications, it still doesn’t seem to be as socially acceptable as p2p filesharing of music and video. Perhaps this is because people perceive applications as requiring more effort on the part of the companies that produces and distributes them.

The perception may be that content producing companies like Time-Warner are simply packaging the effort of artists, while game development requires a huge affort on the part of a multitude of artists and programmers.

Of course, this logic fails in many respects. Just ask the thousands of people who were involved in making The Lord of the Rings movies.

I don’t buy the argument that DRM pushed consumers into pirating music. Distribution of ripped MP3s was not a reaction to DRM, it was a reaction to high prices and an outdated distribution model. Perhaps it was also a manifestation of the belief that in cyberspace, laws don’t (and shouldn’t) apply.

Both use DRM/Copy protection on their merchandise, but movie/music drm restricts use to a much higher degree than copy protection on games, and requires a lot more hazzle to circumvent.

Execept for at few exeptions that either makes your games unplayable without patching (mainly a problem with older games) or active tries to destroy your hardware (Starforce being the famous example) copy protection on games don’t really restrict you from doing anything, that you could reasonably expect to do with your game – you can install it on different machines, you can sell it when you get bored with it and so on. Some even tries (i’m not saying that they succed) to make it easier for you to migrate your game to other machines (Steam).

On top of this, the copy protection can be circumventet easily by even a trained monkey by downloading a small file and patching the game.

DRM on music on the other hand tries hard to limit the fair use of the music you own – preventing you from playing it on more than one player, sell it, listen to it (napster to go), migrate it to other hardware.

In most cases I would give the industri the benefit of doubt and just asume, that they are sufficiently uninformed to believe, that DRM protects against piracy. But in some cases prorietary DRM is there to asure customer lock in (FairPlay and Zune) and support ‘matching’ hardware.

In the case of music, you actually get a supperior product by downloading a pirated copy of the internet instead of buying it of iTunes or Napster (eMusic being the notable exeption in this case). That one fact speaks volumes of the way the music industri treats their customers and (it’s reasonable to assume) affect popular oppinion and customer loyalty.

I’m not saying that this is the one truth or that other commenters don’t have a point, but I believe this to be a significant factor in the low sympathy for the problems of the music industri. And no, this doesn’t in any way justify piracy, but it might help explain it.

Pardon my english by the way, I’m not a native english speaker.

1 – recall Blizzard v. BNetD I don’t recall any recent decision that was so poorly thought through, and yet failed to mobilize the storm of criticism it deserved. So, perhaps you are on to something here.

2 – I think that this speaks volumes about where a certain demographic lives. Yes, they listen to songs, but they don’t respect a song the same way they do a game. A game is an immersive environment, an entire world, in which they may spend quite a few hours. So there’s more value there.

But, I do think you overstate this, and a few posts here and there don’t convince me (yet, anyway)

1 – recall Blizzard v. BNetD I don’t recall any recent decision that was so poorly thought through, and yet failed to mobilize the storm of criticism it deserved. So, perhaps you are on to something here.

2 – I think that this speaks volumes about where a certain demographic lives. Yes, they listen to songs, but they don’t respect a song the same way they do a game. A game is an immersive environment, an entire world, in which they may spend quite a few hours. So there’s more value there.

But, I do think you overstate this, and a few posts here and there don’t convince me (yet, anyway)

I think it has everything to do with how they interact with the content. With movies and music, it’s a passive relationship. You just see it/hear it. With games, you’re playing it, and so you’re more committed to it. You’ve made more of a decision to be involved in it. With straight content, that’s often not the case.

Adam, are you really suggesting that IP skeptics don’t love their music, movies and TV shows?

• I do “pirate” software, but only within the traditional “It’s OK for testing” 24-hour period and only for games.
• Games like the “Monkey Island” series epitomize what I have so much trouble finding in today’s gaming market. Not only did the entire genre practically fall off the face of the earth when it failed to translate well to primitive 3D, the new environment has seemingly sucked the soul out of the “humorous games” slice of the overall gaming market.
• I’m an unemployed university student who gets about $50 per month from his parents
• Games and video drivers are the only exceptions I make to my “no closed-source code” rule
• As a Linux user who longs for the days when there were more decent games, I’m not going to pay my entire monthly income on something that, even if I do like it, may not yet work inside an emulation layer like Wine.

Thankfully, most of my favourite games WILL run inside DOSBox, ScummVM and ZSNES and yes, I have paid for every single one of them.