Ok, here goes. This guy Xanrel was implying that 'art' and 'entertainment' were mutually exclusive; when in fact they are not. There is no 'contradiction' as he states. Art is entertainment and can be copyrighted or not copyrighted plain and simple.

Also, he implies that the need for copyright is found in the public's need for art. That is not the case. The need for copyright is found in the need for an artist to gain an honest living by not having his art copied and sold by someone else. His argument is taking a position that a piece of art that is copyrighted is not available to the public:

'But when the copyright to a work will not expire until long after we are all dead, the public is being denied their rightful access to that work.'

That is false since anyone who pays for the art can gain access right then. That statement is also assuming that the people that are living right now should have full access to all pieces of art/entertainment for free at some point during their lifetime; which is a ridiculous claim. He is assuming that we have some 'right' to this piece of art; when in fact we do not.

Okay - let's assume the 90% rate is steadily increasing until Q4'09, who's gonna pay StarDock devs to create the next upcoming great *to_be_pirated* title BEFORE distribution starts?

Okay - let's assume the 90% rate is (somehow) kept under tight observation, monitored to the point it starts lowering to better sales figures, who's gonna budget the next upcoming great *to_be_pirated* title AFTER distribution begins?

Okay - let's presume the rate is 0%, can we get better games?

As it is Stardock ignores the pirates when making their games.  So while having no piracy would be nice, I don't see it causing a noticable increase in game quality.  Stardock would be happy for sure, but I think the biggest result would be Stardock taking more risks on the types of games it publishes/develops.

Hmmm.... We call that twisted logic where I come from. 

A very good effort and likely just what the OP was thinking.

The numbers you'll really want to know are how many of them are still playing it a couple weeks from now.  Those are the assholes that should have been customers and just don't have any scruples.  Anyone that drops a game after just a few days is either really loaded and has no incentive to pirate it to begin with, or never would have bought it outside of a whim.  It's still not even remotely close to an indication of lost sales though.

There is a fairly small, but very dense core of serial pirates that can't possibly pay for what they're taking.  Which is why ISP's are going ballistic over people downloading 300 gigs a month.  How many of that 90% is the guys that download enough software that they'd have to work a second job to pay for it all if they bought it?  The real question the industry needs to ask is whether the pirate before you buy crowd is larger than the pirate instead of buy crowd.  So far no one seems to want to find out, just hang them all and be done with it regardless of the consequences.

Guys like that are where the magical losses come from in some shit tard executive's shareholder briefing attempting to justify paying an arm and a leg for copy protection that's cracked on day one.  It would be sad how much money has been wasted on SecuRom 7, but first I'd have to stop laughing over the hilarity of circumventing it just by deleting paul.dll...

Maybe when nothing will be for free.All your software+games would cost more then 5K euros...maybe then you will understand what deep implications this trial has.

If the pirate bay goes down,a lot of others will follow.Using word to create something out of what you make money..that is piracy.But downloading a book that can not be found in your country and would cost more then 300 dollars to order,now that you can call anything but not piracy.If it wasn't for torrent sites,many of my friends would not be quite good doctors as they turned out to be.The books cost them too much money.

How about it,i give you no money at all.Move you into a a new town,and put you into a university.Now pay for your rent,your bills,your food,your university and books...se iff that works out for you,especially when a book can cost up to 200 dollars and you need at least 15.

Stop acting so brainwashed like "piracy is bad",think before you speak or write in this case.There are 2 sides of the story

Except then no one would be able to afford games, so the publishers aren't going to do that.

Actually, that's still piracy.  It sucks that you can't find the book that you want, but that doesn't make stealing it ok.  Maybe you should take up this issue with your government, and get them to ease their import taxes or whatever it is that's making games and books cost 300 dollars.  Stealing the stuff isn't helping the creators or whatever economic problem your country has that they need to limit imports.

Some people get these things called "jobs" that let them pay for rent, bills, food, and even games and books.  If you have a problem affording textbooks, you should apply for student loans, or take it up with your public education system in your government.  Again, stealing's not a sustainable way to keep your education system running.

Well, obviously each suggestion is only as good as much as you're willing to accept that piracy will always exist. Rather than an elimination of it, you need to focus on reducing it. 

How about providing a disk of the game you made and saying as long as you don't /resell it/ go ahead and play LAN etc all you want (see, demigod style) 

This is an extreme example. I imagine sales are going well or at least decently and I imagine that they will do fairly decently, particularly if they manage to get their servers off the ground. I know myself (and my friends who I play with) will buy copies if we know the internet is stable. At the moment, that isn't so knowable, but give it a patch or two and we'll probably buy in. 

Sure; you could take that. (I don't have time to finish the article, I have to go pack as I am moving out in 5 hours but I will definitely be back to read it as the first two pages are interesting.) On the other hand I would counter with two different things;

A. World of Goo is Wiiware; as in 'not a real game' but more of a flash styled game. It was cheap and easy to obtain, More importantly, it is infinitely more easy to pirate. Any idiot with a wii and a SD chip can pirate it. No mods, other programs or what naught. Did it even come out for PC? If it did, then notice that it isn't even on the top ten. A 90% rate is bad, if that's really legit, but on the other hand it doesn't really seem to be doing well on PC even in piracy rankings. (Which makes sense given that on the PC it would be competing with a multitude of Flash games etc)

B. Secondly, World of Goo still did remarkably well for the type of game it was. I didn't pirate or even touch it personally; ut it is the type of game I personally as a general pirate of various things would buy if I was going to. The reason I wouldn't, is well, it sounds like a flash game. That's the reason I didn't buy it in the first place - I'm not a huge fan of flash games generally, but they're usually pretty short. 

 To counterpoint your article, I present:
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews.html?type=reviews&platform=5&mode=top&tag=subnav;reviews
A list of gamespot reviews for PC games. These are their latest reviews, in order.
Please note that not a single game broke an 8.0 Not a single one. When you have this much garbage being released weekly/monthly, I think a consumer can be skeptical. When I bought NWN; I got a nifty map, a thick manual, box art and a bunch of other cool crap - and that wasn't even the collectors edition. A game I buought used for 2 dollars came with more stuff than any game I've bought since then. Game quality is going down, game content is going down and they want me to shell out an extra 30 bucks for some random nifty toy or poster. 

Secondly:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music

This suggests that (for music) Pirates tend to end up buying more than not. I would argue it's similar to piracy for PC games. When I buy a game, I look at a few things for buying purposes. Is the MP something I will play with my friends? Is the MP something I will play with my friends online? Is the SP campaign something I will play once, or am I going to play it again? I bought Supreme Commander because I played the Campaign twice and really enjoyed the game. I haven't even played it for months sadly, but I did make the investment. Same with Sins of a Solar Empire; when I found myself coming back to it after a month or two and still really liking it, I bought it. On the other hand; Crysis - I played it once, and I didn't even beat the Campaign. I hated it. It wouldn't been a massive waste of my money despite high rankings. 

I don't think it's that unreasonable to desire some of the "long term replay value" that games such as Starcraft, Diablo, Command and Conquer etc provided. It's hard to do, very hard to do, but everyone thinks of Starcraft as some amazingly balanced game - it wasn't for the longest time. It took patches, lots of them, to get it right and it's still going strong. Do I think companies should aim for that type of perfection? No, it's not realistic. But knowing that when I buy a box, there's a strong chance these days that what is in the box is what I am getting, bugs and all, is kind of heart wrenching. 

Which brings me back to Demigod. Fix it, and we'll play online. Until then, we didn't even go online on Launch day. We only play LAN, we have no interest in going online regularly. We don't /expect/ to when we pirate a game. Anyone who wants support from the company or to play online illegal needs to go die in a fire. Or as your article puts it, even pirates hate free riders.

DRM does reduce it.  That's why they have DRM.  Game companies aren't deluding themselves into thinking they will eliminate piracy.  Like I said earlier, most game companies actually consider their DRM a "success" if they manage to push back the 0-day pirate release of their game.  Despite the line about how pirates aren't going to buy the game anyway, the sales figures tend to show that there is a massive addition of people who will buy the game on release day if there's not a pirated release available.  Pirates are generally impatient and greedy by nature, most of them can't handle waiting an entire day for the game they want to steal.  So much that, god forbid, they might actually pay for it.

But Demigod DID do that, and you STILL pirated it.  So did 100,000 other people.  So obviously that's not enough incentive to get people to pay for a game.  And again, what about single player games?

And yet, DRM is pointless, because everyone's going to pirate everything anyway?  That seems like you're contradicting yourself.  If people pirate non-DRM games more because it's easier, then publishers have a reason to use DRM, don't they?

It did, and it got a 91 rating on metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/worldofgoo?q=world%20of%20goo

It got a ton of good reviews.  It's not a flash game; it's just 2D.

It managed to turn some profit, if you consider that "remarkably well".  But the devs said it will be the last time they release anything on PC and that they will be using DRM next time, because of how badly it was pirated.  So the pirates aren't really "helping" to stop DRM in this case.

I disagree.  If you look at the review, and the review says it's terrible, then DON'T PLAY IT.  If instead you steal it, enjoy it, and play it constantly, you can't use a poor review score to justify that you think it's "bad".  If you're playing it, it's worth something to you.  And besides, most low-rated games don't get pirated.  Pirates overwhelmingly steal the games that get high ratings.  If anything, this is almost incentive for companies to make bad games on purpose.  In reality, it's just leading most good companies to abandon the PC as a platform, because piracy is destroying it so badly.

If you don't like the game, then don't buy it and don't play it.  You don't have a "right" to take things for free just because they're not up to your high standards.  You wouldn't walk into McDonalds and steal all their food, despite that it's bad.  You wouldn't break into someone's house and steal all their furniture but justify it by saying the furniture sucked.

I think this is questionable, because nearly EVERYONE pirates music.  Someone who doesn't listen to music enough to have a large mp3 collection probably isn't going to buy much music anyway.  Either way though, this doesn't mean piracy is sustainable.  I know there are lots of pirates who buy music sometimes.  But the amount of music that is paid for is vastly overshadowed by the music that's not.  The record industry is on a downward spiral, and despite the fact that some pirates think this is a good thing, I have a feeling they'll be questioning their decisions if music becomes a worthless market.

I'd say playing Sins for even a week and enjoying it justifies giving the creator something.  The fact that you had to keep playing it for an entire month before you felt like you owed the creators anything makes no sense economically.  Games are relatively cheap compared to some hobbies.  If I went to a concert and complained that the band "only" played for five hours straight and walked out without paying, most people would think I was insane.  The idea that games have to stay fun for a year just to be worth 6 cups of coffee is pretty ridiculous.

Then boycott, don't steal.  If you're sitting there playing the game constantly despite that it's allegedly terrible, you're not doing a good job of marketing your displeasure.  To most people, you're going to look like a thief, not some sort of consumer activist.  Game companies aren't going to listen to the whims of pirates because pirates steal the games they like even more than the ones they don't.

The pirates are the ones who broke it!  Stardock shares some of the blame, but I don't think it's fair to fault them entirely for greatly underestimating the "loyalty" of their fans.

Copyright infringment isn't stealing, you're arguing over the proof of it.  When you steal to live you are physically taking something.  If you have nothing and are pirating copyrighted goods because you can't possibly purchase them, it is a simple fact that you have taken nothing.  If you can't actually purchase the product, the potential for a lost sale is zero.

Almost all copyright infringment in poor countries is fictional loss.  It has been proven to be an eventual gain as well.  The eastern block has been modernizing in the last couple decades.  They've been a hotbed of both piracy and the subject for rants about how terrible piracy is.  The end result is being shown now, they have their own tech sector.  They produce copyrighted goods, thus actually give a shit about copyright.  There are actual paying customers in a place that never could have afforded the goods before learning the joys of video games and other such nonsense and gaining a need to produce them.  Piracy built a new market.

Nosferat is not and will never be a customer for enough products to make owning a computer a reasonable expense at the level of income he makes, thus his piracy can only lead to gains.  The act of piracy itself justifies the expense of the equipment needed to facilitate it.  The equipment is the neccessary precursor to a purchase.  No piracy in his country, no computers in his country, no computers in his country, no hope of ever selling a computer game in his country.

The morality of it is irrelevant, it's good for business.

I was going to say more or less the same thing as WIlly above.  I'm sorry you live in such a harsh place.  But video games and mp3's are luxuries, not necessities of life; I don't think you're justified in demanding you get them for free.  Textbooks are more understandable, but that's not really where piracy is a major problem.

It's still a problem with your government, not with video game companies.  Video game companies shouldn't be required to give their games away for free just because your government is corrupt.

Stealing textbooks might be justifiable, but it's not a long-term solution; your real problem is that you have an oppressive government and a broken economy, not that American and European companies charge money for games.  It sounds like things would be terrible there regardless of what happens with U.S. copyright laws or DRM.  Your situation doesn't have that much to do with the majority of the piracy issue, which is about rich kids stealing games and music because they think they should get them for free.