The Pirate Bay files charges against media companies

Cellius' remarks remind me of the bullshit anti-piracy trailers I have to suffer through far too often on DVD's- "you wouldn't steal a car, don't steal a movie".

As someone said, it's completely disingenuous to compare such things. Pirating a movie in the 'torrent' sense isn't directly comparable to stealing tangible property which an individual/organisation has direct control over, including economic rights.

That's not to say that pirating won't cause economic loss. But then we get into a new ball game, prices and so forth. When I see Scrubs seasons in stores for like 50 bucks plus, I do the math and think, that's like 300 bucks for the show.
Even if I had the money, and a job, etc- I wouldn't spend that kind of money on such things, that's outrageous (same goes for DVD-movie prices here in Australia). So, I download it.
I generally try to rent movies (and probably burn them then, admittedly) instead of downloading, since having a proper rip will be better quality. And downloading 4+ GB ISO's sucks for your bandwidth restrictions. But it's not out of some pseudo-moral deal, that I feel guilty if I burn a movie. Why the hell would you. Same goes for my pirated copy of Nero (although once more, whole different ball game).

Plus, which DVD rental stores or movie corporations are going out of business if I rent and burn or download instead of renting or buying? Same goes for the CD example. We reward these inefficient corporations by buying shoddy products at ridiculous prices (DVD's are vastly overpriced), and drives those prices further, as Nicza flagged. Same goes for crap products like Vista and Ipod's.

I'm not saying it's everyone's moral duty to pirate, or anything like that- sure, you can have objections to piracy. I think there's times when it's inappropriate, such as when a good release has been done at reasonable prices, such as the Ultimate Edition James Bond DVD's- great buy at 15 bucks each. And you want to reward the company and ensure they keep doing good things. But that's an exception for me.

But anyway. I think it's funny to get moral at a piracy-fest, and was amused by SecretSquirrel's comments in the VGMdb thread saying something like "We wanted to distance ourselves from GFF's piracy-fest image that we can't shake off".
Out of interest, what's the point of GFF except to provide a good place for game music piracy, as well as the community and forums of course?

And I hope we can all agree that game music piracy isn't stealing food out of people's mouths.

- Spike

Jam it back in, in the dark.