Over at Affect3d (which should be bookmarked by all you fans of rendered breasts), DireLilith has posted an outstanding essay:
The Dire Pirate: 3D File Sharing and the Laws of Copyright Infringement.
Since it does specifically discuss erotic art, it is quite relevant to what we do here.
When someone downloads an artist’s gallery and puts it on a piracy site, they’ve negated all the hard work that person put into the art. And while no one here really can say what is art and what isn’t, because it’s all perspective, the fact remains that for some artists, this is a form of money. People pay their bills with money they make from artwork, like any porn star would. When this art becomes a career, it also becomes my right to protect it.
Not everyone gives away their stuff for free. Just because some choose to do so, doesn't mean *everyone's* work is free for the taking and distributing.
And speaking of which, recently Greenheart Games released a game called "Game Dev Tycoon". It's a business simulation of a computer game company. Purchase price: a mere eight dollars. As an experiment, immediately (as in a few minutes later!) after the launch of the game, they put the game up on a torrent site - with one significant addition:
The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail… Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers.
Eventually, rampant piracy would drive their company into bankruptcy.
Needless to say, a LOT of people didn't get it:
Or, as another help-seeker on another game board posted,
"Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! I had like 5m and then people suddenly started pirating everything I made, even if I got really good ratings (that I usually get). Not fair.
Is there any way to keep it from not happening? Changing platform won't help."
The whole story is
here.
A lot of the comments on this story are of a few basic types:
1. The game is just a knock-off of another game. (That may be so, but it's not relevant.)
2. People who pirate a game will buy a copy if they decide they like it. Kind of like a demo... (Really? Isn't that why there are demo versions to begin with? And just try that with any other retail business. "I want to eat the pizza before I pay for it. If I like it, then and only then will I pay you...")
3. The company deliberately put a copy of the game on a torrent site, so they were asking for it. (These people are missing the point of the experiment.)
4. People who pirate weren't going to buy a copy anyway. (That still doesn't make it right.)
Interestingly, the experiment seems to have worked out all right for Greenlight Games. Steam has OK'd a number of their games, and sales of legit copies of Game Dev Tycoon are doing better. (can't remember the link where I read this, sorry)