I have some pretty radical views on this sort of thing and I'm sure I won't be agreed with here for the most part. I do appreciate all the hard work and time and genuine desire to give value to others, and I know that you understand the ideal spiritual outlook that you hope others will share with you, but when it comes to how other people behave or how they choose to live we really don't have any say in the matter, and accepting that IS spiritual.
As much as we'd love to be able to have some kind of `rights` or a notion that we `deserve` better treatment or that certain individuals are `misbehaving`, these are all really wishful thinking. You literally can do nothing to change anyone in any way beyond their own free will. For the sake of your own sanity the best you can do is to position yourself philosophically to be okay with other people's seeming madness. They will mistreat you and misrepresent you and steal from you and attack you, but whether you allow this to alter your personal peace is the only real choice you have.
As someone who loves to give, if you are concerned that someone may be taking something from you which you deem them not to deserve, then you are actually the one who is taking something from them. This amounts to you withholding your giving and limiting it. As soon as you place conditions on your giving and start to say that people can only share if they meet some criteria, no matter how spiritual or moral or ethical those criteria are, you are doing to them what you are accusing them of.
I know this is a tender issue and there are probably very few people on the planet who would not feel considerably upset and angry about piracy, and I have compassion for that, but really there is very little we can or should do about it. Acknowledging it makes it real and making it real for your personally disturbs your peace of mind. Would you rather be right or happy?
I do think that there are people out there who regardless of your outlook on life will try to destroy your product and turn it into a cheap fake. Their justifications and reasoning for why they are doing such a thing is on the same level as any justifications or reasons you could come up with for why they shouldn't. The people who don't want to pay for a game and just want everything free will find a way to have that. Those people aren't going to buy your game anyway, so you might as well let them have it for free. The people who, on the other hand, share some of your sense of dignity and equality are the only people who might actually appreciate you monetarily or otherwise, and they really are your only potential market anyway.
You can't force anyone to purchase your product and attempting to counter-attack hackers thieves and cheats is not effective or called for. It only acknowledges that you allow what they do to upset you and doesn't make any significant inroads towards actually bringing you more appreciation from them. Just as the stats in that report show, denying access to those individuals merely reduces their ability to use your product and has hardly anything to do with converting them into paying customers. I would have to agree with many of their viewpoints that if someone tried to force them to pay that would be taken as an affront to their freedom.
What it really boils down to for me, and I keep coming back to this, is that in truth we are all One unified equal community where absolute sharing is the only possible existence. It's built into our very being, in our minds. Our minds are all connected and we all have a will that is completely free. That freedom means being able to share in everything freely. *Everything*. As soon as you attempt to make any assertions that any individual is excluded from, isolated from, separate from, or rejected from this `whole` you will be attacking the innate freedom of their spirit and they *will* quite rightly see it as a crime against them. Now I know this may sound wacky or new-age or whatever but you have to agree that the evidence clearly shows that people really do react to these forms of separatism in exactly the way they would if their primary assumption is that they share in total freedom. The way they respond to such attacks on their freedom is completely congruent with where they are coming from as unified spiritual beings.
I cannot disagree with the hackers/crackers/pirates when they say that they have the `right` to freely access whatever they want to with no requirement that they give or do anything in exchange. That is their freedom, that is the inherent right of their free will. It is no wonder that they perceive developers/publishers to be trying to force them to pay or trying to deny them access or trying to stop them from doing what they want to, because that is what is happening - these measures are all attacks disguised as being `justified` within a framework of `everyone is separate`, which is the underlying mantra of ego, death and destruction. Saying that separate people have to obey each others rules and regulations is not what contributes to a civilized society, it merely glosses over true values and replaces them with an illusion of getting along. How can we be treating everyone as truly equal if we're saying that some people should or should not do certain things, or that some people are wrong to be however they freely choose?
If someone, with their free will choice, decides openly and freely that they like your product and feel that you deserve to be paid for it, they will pay you. That is the only framework within which payment is justified. All of these other measures to force the issue are just attempts to manipulate other people's free will. Shouldn't our own hands be slapped for trying to do that, before we go slapping the hands of those who we wish to manipulate? Just let them be. We actually invite them to crack and ask them to hack and give them reasons to pirate as soon as we say `no you cant` in any way shape or form. We incite them to `digital aggression` every time we offend their spiritual freedom, and that's precicely what we do when we try to `protect` or conceal or hide or deny them the full freedom to access our creations.
And that leads me to ask additionally, why would you want to limit your creation, withhold it from others, reduce its reach or popularity, make it out to be of `special value` that it does not have, or otherwise portray it as something it is not? Just create your product, let people try it out for a while, ask them to pay for it, if they don't want to they don't have to. The product's quality should speak for itself and if they fall in love with it they will more likely genuinely appreciate it and want to reward you for it. Respect where it's due.
Yes I know there's the whole question of putting food on the table and all that other poverty consciousness `fact of life` stuff. How you deal with that is up to you.
As much as we'd love to be able to have some kind of `rights` or a notion that we `deserve` better treatment or that certain individuals are `misbehaving`, these are all really wishful thinking. You literally can do nothing to change anyone in any way beyond their own free will. For the sake of your own sanity the best you can do is to position yourself philosophically to be okay with other people's seeming madness. They will mistreat you and misrepresent you and steal from you and attack you, but whether you allow this to alter your personal peace is the only real choice you have.
As someone who loves to give, if you are concerned that someone may be taking something from you which you deem them not to deserve, then you are actually the one who is taking something from them. This amounts to you withholding your giving and limiting it. As soon as you place conditions on your giving and start to say that people can only share if they meet some criteria, no matter how spiritual or moral or ethical those criteria are, you are doing to them what you are accusing them of.
I know this is a tender issue and there are probably very few people on the planet who would not feel considerably upset and angry about piracy, and I have compassion for that, but really there is very little we can or should do about it. Acknowledging it makes it real and making it real for your personally disturbs your peace of mind. Would you rather be right or happy?
I do think that there are people out there who regardless of your outlook on life will try to destroy your product and turn it into a cheap fake. Their justifications and reasoning for why they are doing such a thing is on the same level as any justifications or reasons you could come up with for why they shouldn't. The people who don't want to pay for a game and just want everything free will find a way to have that. Those people aren't going to buy your game anyway, so you might as well let them have it for free. The people who, on the other hand, share some of your sense of dignity and equality are the only people who might actually appreciate you monetarily or otherwise, and they really are your only potential market anyway.
You can't force anyone to purchase your product and attempting to counter-attack hackers thieves and cheats is not effective or called for. It only acknowledges that you allow what they do to upset you and doesn't make any significant inroads towards actually bringing you more appreciation from them. Just as the stats in that report show, denying access to those individuals merely reduces their ability to use your product and has hardly anything to do with converting them into paying customers. I would have to agree with many of their viewpoints that if someone tried to force them to pay that would be taken as an affront to their freedom.
What it really boils down to for me, and I keep coming back to this, is that in truth we are all One unified equal community where absolute sharing is the only possible existence. It's built into our very being, in our minds. Our minds are all connected and we all have a will that is completely free. That freedom means being able to share in everything freely. *Everything*. As soon as you attempt to make any assertions that any individual is excluded from, isolated from, separate from, or rejected from this `whole` you will be attacking the innate freedom of their spirit and they *will* quite rightly see it as a crime against them. Now I know this may sound wacky or new-age or whatever but you have to agree that the evidence clearly shows that people really do react to these forms of separatism in exactly the way they would if their primary assumption is that they share in total freedom. The way they respond to such attacks on their freedom is completely congruent with where they are coming from as unified spiritual beings.
I cannot disagree with the hackers/crackers/pirates when they say that they have the `right` to freely access whatever they want to with no requirement that they give or do anything in exchange. That is their freedom, that is the inherent right of their free will. It is no wonder that they perceive developers/publishers to be trying to force them to pay or trying to deny them access or trying to stop them from doing what they want to, because that is what is happening - these measures are all attacks disguised as being `justified` within a framework of `everyone is separate`, which is the underlying mantra of ego, death and destruction. Saying that separate people have to obey each others rules and regulations is not what contributes to a civilized society, it merely glosses over true values and replaces them with an illusion of getting along. How can we be treating everyone as truly equal if we're saying that some people should or should not do certain things, or that some people are wrong to be however they freely choose?
If someone, with their free will choice, decides openly and freely that they like your product and feel that you deserve to be paid for it, they will pay you. That is the only framework within which payment is justified. All of these other measures to force the issue are just attempts to manipulate other people's free will. Shouldn't our own hands be slapped for trying to do that, before we go slapping the hands of those who we wish to manipulate? Just let them be. We actually invite them to crack and ask them to hack and give them reasons to pirate as soon as we say `no you cant` in any way shape or form. We incite them to `digital aggression` every time we offend their spiritual freedom, and that's precicely what we do when we try to `protect` or conceal or hide or deny them the full freedom to access our creations.
And that leads me to ask additionally, why would you want to limit your creation, withhold it from others, reduce its reach or popularity, make it out to be of `special value` that it does not have, or otherwise portray it as something it is not? Just create your product, let people try it out for a while, ask them to pay for it, if they don't want to they don't have to. The product's quality should speak for itself and if they fall in love with it they will more likely genuinely appreciate it and want to reward you for it. Respect where it's due.
Yes I know there's the whole question of putting food on the table and all that other poverty consciousness `fact of life` stuff. How you deal with that is up to you.