on piracy! Will this actually work or make any difference to people that still do it?
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It won't make a blind bit of difference, if the major media companies made stuff easier and cheaper to get you'll stop people bothering to download, while companies such as Sky block content such as Sky Atlantic to Virgin users then the downloading will continue.

LOL !!! That's not a valid reason.

It's very easy to legally download things through a variety of providers, the price of physical copies of CDs DVDs and games hasn't actually increased in the last 20 years or so (yes, I still have double tapes that I paid £15 for and £45 for a PS1 Gran Turismo (original price labels still on!).

Furthermore you can usually buy new DVDs & games for half price or less approximately six months after their release date, and there's a huge second hand market (CEX, Game, Poundland etc) that sell used titles for less than £5.

A few years ago they were supposedly hammering kids and single mothers with fines of tens of thousands of pounds/dollars for downloading a few CDs/films.

I'm sure that a letter is going to work a lot better though. Getting out the big guns now.

"LOL !!!" But it is a valid reason. He wasn't [ijustifying[/i it, but was stating a (rather obvious) reason why millions of pirated downloads occur daily.

Do you think they don't actually know the information you have stated? Clearly, those facts do not seem to operate at all to convince the downloaders not to download. So your post amounts to nothing more than a headscratching "Well I don't understand why they still do it ..."

I'm guessing they want the new game NOW, when their mates have it, and not in 6 months time when it's old hat. I'm also guessing that if a download proved impossible, they wouldn't buy a legit copy for the most part anyway.

No, "easier and cheaper" will not stop illegal downloads, since illegal downloaders already find it "easy" and it will never be "cheaper" than free.

It is theft, simple as.

I actually heard some young lad on the Radio 1 news today trying to justify this 'piracy' by saying that computer games, dvd's and CD's were too expensive in the shops, so he had to download them illegally.

By that logic, I can go and steal a brand new Jaguar from my local showroom because I've always wanted one, but never been able to afford it, though I'm sure the staff there wouldn't just resort to a polite letter warning me of future thefts, if I carried this out?

Music is cheaper than it's ever been and easier to access. When I first started buying records way back an album cost around 5 quid (over 30 years ago) and if you only liked a couple of tracks you still had to buy the whole album. By the 90's albums could be well over a tenner. I could go back and buy the CD on Amazon for those old albums for exactly the same price - if not less. New stuff comes in 7-8 quid. My first proper job I earned 7 grand a year before tax and I still managed to buy 5 or 6 albums a month (and no - I didn't live at home - I was in Surrey during the housing boom of the late 80's and half my salary went in rent on a box room in a shared house).

Games cost a lot of money to develop well. They need the revenue - you only have to see how many cheeply developed, rubbish games are out there.

Again, nobody on this thread is [ijustifying[/i copyright theft, but the shops to which you refer, and especially the supermarkets etc., DO turn a blind eye to billions of pounds of shoplifting that they experience every year and which we all pay for as it is in the price of the goods paid for by legitimate shoppers.

Shops could choose to prevent almost all shoplifting instead they take a policy decision to have everything you could want almost unsupervised, doing their level best to tempt customers to pick up stuff they don't really need and never set out to buy. Put this temptation in the path of a population and of course a percentage will take advantage and load their voluminous coats and dresses with meat, cheese, etc.

The [ieffect[/i of their very deliberate sales and impulse buy policies is that in fact they actually predict how many millions worth will in any given month or year be stolen, and they choose to make you and me pay for it, instead of making their products secure. No wonder the police and courts have constantly downgraded shoplifting to almost the point of being a purely civil matter.

How much piracy is there actually? Has anyone got any real figures on that instead of just quoting lazy headlines that mean nothing?

For me, it seems game piracy, at least on consoles is massively down, isn't it? In the days of Amiga etc, virtually no one bought the games as you could copy it yourself at home pretty easily. Those days are gone with Xbox Live and PSN ruling the roost, it's seemingly a lot harder to do that now. Not sure on PC, but again, I don't know anyone who does it, it's all Steam or Origin.

Music as well, who downloads music these days? I have Xbox Music, the Mrs has a similar service free through her phone contract and so does the oldest kid. £7 a month between the family to listen to as much music as we like, legally. The days of trawling torrent sites and burning CDRs or to MP3 players/memory sticks are long gone in our house.

TV and movies are probably the most stolen these days I guess. TV series I'd say very commonly downloaded. Piracy technically, but most people will get into a series that's on TV, download the series they've missed to catch up. Should the owners of that kind of media be against that behaviour? If they don't catch up, they don't watch the current series on TV?

You are never going to stop people getting things illegally and it's counterproductive to try. The entertainment industries just need to continue thinking about how to package and integrate to get most people onto legal packages of some kind and forget about the anti-legal minority.

There is a certain website that I frequent, where I can watch the latest game of thrones, shortly after the premiere has finished on Sky. Nothing downloaded, it operates like youtube.

Would you consider that theft?

If it is there without the consent of the makers and owners of the programme, then its theft.

I'm not sure why you would want to watch something as epic in scale as Game Of Thrones on a laptop though? - Its like listening to a great piece of music through some ty old mono sound system.

Erm, you need to get up to date with technology, we can now connect devices to huge flat screen TV's, watch in full HD with 5.1 sound.

Sky has chosen to limit the Sky Atlantic channel to their service meaning those who have VM or BT are blocked from paying for the content. Theft is defined as

So Sky are the villains for depriving those who can't afford their product?..... Does this make trawling the internet for what, I presume, is an illegal stream acceptable?

I find it unacceptable that they are trying to make it so you can't watch quality TV like GOT without giving £600 a year to Rupert Murdoch. I dont mind paying for what I consume, but I won't have my pants pulled down by Sky.