It's relatively difficult to change one's identity in real life, due to limitations such as voice and appearance. However cyberspace has made it entirely possible to create multiple aliases of oneself, one for each day of the week, each of the seven sins and virtues, or simply creating imaginary egos.
The person behind the screen is not important, the only important thing is what person is projected onto the screen.
Because everything is digital, and stored and transferred in a non-discriminating method, the person behind the screen is no longer important. What we see and hear is the person that is projected onto the monitor, what we think s/he is. This created two things. False identity for the receiver, and a false identity for the creator.
Games like World of Warcraft is great for making online friends, doing online things, but it's also as unreal as it can get.
Without the need for identification, online chatrooms, games, and forums use virtual identities for communication. It could simply be a way to test out the other side of one's personality, or experiment new ideas and fantasies without the repercussions of real life, or it could be a way hide information that the person does not want to reveal. In video games, it would be for the purpose of roleplaying. The common thing behind all of these mediums is that real identity is no longer important. What one accomplishes in the virtual world rarely means anything for the real world, however it often does make one feel better about themselves. I call this internet ego, or internet pride. Hey at least I can accomplish something on the internet, be it flaming others, spamming, writing a virus, getting to level 50 in WoW, or getting a virtual girlfriend.
High level characters in the MMORPG Aion. A pretty nice virtual accomplishment... at the cost of RL time of course.
On the other hand, it is also easy for the boundary between virtual life and real life to thin out for the player. There are people to meet online, chores (surfing the web) to do, homework to do, games to play, and even develop relationships, what's the difference between this and real life? There are many instances of people who get lost in the virtual world and ends up neglecting their real lives. I found it amusing that this site actually teaches you how to fake an identity: [How to create a fake online identity]. Some pretty amazing but eccentric stuff, such as fake name generators. Although there are the less eccentric uses such as protecting privacy for surveys, offers, and online purchasing, mostly it is used for online games, chatrooms, or simulators such as Second Life.
It's hard to get that sense of satisfaction unless you actually do something in real life. It's so much easier in the virtual world to accomplish something and get that huge ego isn't it? It's a pretty pessimistic viewpoint, but a realistic one due to the addictive qualities of the cyberspace.
"Bloody pirates!", said by both Elizabeth and Ragetti in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, is one of my favourite phrases in the movie since it sounds funny, is short, and easy to remember.
After hundreds of years, piracy has evolved from stealing goods and killing innocents to "stealing" (debatable term) virtual commodities and "killing" (debatable term) people's source of income. The question of why anyone would spend money on something that they could otherwise obtain for free is something that I consider an open-ended philosophy. On one hand it may seem like virtual commodities is no different from physical commodities, and one is stealing if s/he obtained the item for free when other people paid for it. On the other hand, most pirates will argue that they indeed bought the good at full price, and is only "sharing" it with others, just like how one could buy a TV and share it with his friends, instead of having each friend buy a separate TV. Then the argument deepens into the fact there is no such thing as "sharing" a software, because each person could easily use it independently on his or her own computer, and according to the company's regulations he or she is supposed to buy the software package for that purpose. Then the pirate will respond with some legal holes indicating that companies have no right to restrict how one uses or modifies the software that one purchased. The argument goes back and forth with no end, not different from a tennis match, or two equally adept debaters in law.
It's a good thing at least their icon is a ship
As to where the final stand is, I'm sure everyone knows, that's why sites are closed and prosecuted (TV-links), sites are re-opened (The Pirate Bay - these guys must be seriously fearless or seriously stupid to name a site like this), sites go under different names twice a month (iDWANEO), and sites move their domains around and try to form a community of bomb-carrying kamikaze pirates who face prosecution at any time but is proud at what they're doing (apptrackr). It reminds me of the classic war movies, before rocket launchers and nuclear missiles; people would rush in to attack the castle with arrows, ladders, and rams, while the archers in the castle would shoot at the attackers. After all the attackers are dead the second wave would replace the first wave, repeating the exact same attack pattern. Pirates today are much like the infantry below the castle desperately trying to get inside. A soldier risks everything (his life) and gains nothing but a tiny bit of financial reward and lots of pride after a battle, so does a pirate who volunteers to crack code at the risk of being arrested. A pirate is proud of what s/he does, and in a pirate's own words, "making virtual commodities more accessible to everyone".
For all your iDevice needs, and much more convenient than iTunes
Accessibility, that's one of the main reasons why anyone would download a pirated copy of anything. If you didn't have to pay the $500 or so for Photoshop CS5, if you didn't have to pay the $150 or so for Windows 7, and if you didn't have to pay the $69.99 for the Starcraft 2 that you legally bought from EB Games (congratulations), or if you're really cheap, spend the $0.99 on an iDevice game, who in their right mind would spend hours searching for a working copy of a cracked software, then get a headache at trying to scan it for viruses, then spend even more time whenever an update comes out (most pirated software won't contain automatic updates)? I think the pricing behind these virtual commodities is really strategically planned out. They're priced in a way so that the companies actually take into consideration the amount of copies that will get pirated. We price it so high that it doesn't matter if you pirate it or not, we will always have a large group of genuine software loyalists who will buy it anyways at the high price (developers, businesses, etc). Better sell Photoshop for $500 apiece to a smaller target market, than $100 apiece to all the markets. This is great for the business, but bad for the consumers. Honestly (in my opinion), unless you seriously have tons of money to spend on a thing like software, I would really hesitate before spending $500 on Photoshop unless your job says that you need it. Editing that odd picture like once a day, or once a week, is not worth $500 in my opinion. Or take something much cheaper for an example. Sometimes I'd like to merge video files together, or trim them, or edit my music files. These kinds of functions, in today's programming standards, should be pieces of cake. But when I go on the web to see how I can do these, 99.99% of the search results leads me back to the same annoying page - $59.99 for a piece of software that can merge my .avi files together. That's just ridiculous, how many times a day am I going to merge .avi's together? Doing that once and you expect me to pay $59.99 for it? Even worse, most of these programs (won't name any names here) do not have a working demo. The thing they consider a demo will add a horrible watermark to your output, and trim the length of your output, making it completely unusable. The days of the 30-day evaluation period is nowhere to be seen. As you can see, this is the reason why I, along with many others, will look for a cracked version of these trivial software. It's a company people haven't heard of, charging an outrageous amount for a simple program, so most people will not feel that stab of guilty when downloading a leaked copy.
Ok so the "combined retail value of $80" is a bit far-fetched, but supporting indie developers who is trying to support charity sounds like a good cause... especially for a penny
On the other hand, I think there are serious issues concerning pirating really really inexpensive software. The prime example is the fab of iDevice applications. I'm not going to go to wiki and pull out some stat because no one will be interested in it, so I'm going to have a rough estimate and guess at least half of the apps in the entire appstore costs $0.99. This includes classic games such as Cut the Rope, Street Fighter IV (on sale for tsunami relief), and Helsing's Fire, to absolutely amazing apps such as Ocarina, Virtuoso Violin, and SketchPad. It is beyond me why people are willing to pay $50 for a PSP title, yet around half the iDevice population are unwilling to pay $0.99 for a game that is nearly (and sometimes better) as good, especially to developing indies whose income depends on their sales. One of the most extreme examples of "stealing" from indies is the case with the Humble Indie Bundle. It is a package of 5 simple games set to "open price", meaning buyers can pay any price they want, from a minimum of one penny to no maximum. You can't even buy a piece of paper for one penny, yet people are willing to spend the extra brain cells and electricity to pirate the games. This hints that it is no longer a mission to save money, but rather a more political role in that the pirates want to continuously enlarge their presence in the software community. Costs money? We hack it. Free? We still hack it. All of this just to let you know who we are.
It's true that pirates will generate traffic for the software that they pirate, and if the developer is lucky, might even make more sales due to the help from the pirates. But in most cases, all we see is indie developers who are left with a broken spirit and walk away from the scene due to lost sales. There's simply no point to continue developing if their work is simply going to be hacked within minutes of release. Sometimes I think that pirates should seriously be hired by the government, or at least Apple or something, with their superb computer skills. I can't even hack a piece of log in minutes, but they can sure hack a game in minutes.
Digital technology has created a whole genre of music - cybermusic. No longer is music a pure display of artistic talent and one's connection with the mysterious realm of music, it is now a display of how expensive your software plugins are, how great your digital recording equipment is, how familiar you are with digital composition programs and their complex virtual interface, and how good you are at virtually marketing your virtually created virtual commodities.
The beauty of traditional instruments - something digital technology can never simulate
Traditional music focuses on user interaction, Power of each pluck, force of each keystroke, movement of the arms, fingers, and mind, all affect the sound. The musician, in a way, is bonded to the instrument he or she plays. Digital music, on the other hand, uses VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plugins that act as “soundfonts”. Just as regular fonts make up each letter of the alphabet, soundfonts are digitally created fonts of music notes that can be stringed together by the user to create a tune. Digital music focuses on accessibility, as anyone is able to play around with said technology and create music. However, the musician is separated from the instrument he or she plays… the barrier is the computer screen and the incomprehensible lines of code that turns music into 0’s and 1’s. Digital music is rather like Lego, you take one soundfont here, one sound effect there, and you piece together various sounds in infinitely many combination limited only by the imagination… but each piece by itself is limited and artificial.
Quantum Leap - SILK, by Eastwest, a collection of very high quality Asian ethnic instruments such as the Erhu (二胡), Pipa (琵琶), and Yangqin (扬琴). With quality comes price... up to $1000 per pack. So if you're planning to get some flutes, violins, guitars, drums, maybe even a saxophone, you're looking at around $3000 in virtual instruments. Yeah you're trading binary code for a real antique violin.
Companies like Eastwest fully take advantage of this new cyberculture - digital composition and transaction of music, by selling virtual instruments. I admit that these sound ridiculously real... because they were recorded with real instruments obviously. The engineering behind these sounds are absolutely superb, and in my opinion no other software comes even close to the realism that these instruments provide, especially with harder-to-mimic strings instruments such as the violin and erhu. However when virtual instruments start to also simulate the pricing of real instruments... then there's a problem. Would you trade your antique violin for a virtual violin? Perhaps it is "easier to play" (I mean all you have to do is click buttons instead of breaking your neck trying to play a real violin)? Perhaps it is easier to distribute your music when it's created virtually? Or perhaps easier to edit or enhance your music when it's in digital form? All of these are selling points for the massive markets created for digital music.
You can't substitute a live performance for a digital one... no software can mimic the intricacy of the human imagination
Eastwest is only one of the hundreds of companies who excel in the digital engineering and distribution of music, although a very adept one at that. But you can never substitute a live performance of Pachelbel's Canon in D, by a performance artificially created in a software like FL Studio 9. The strength of each note, the fluidity of each arc, all of these come from the human imagination and emotion. The music feeds on the performer's thoughts, where each note is unique and only exist in that single performance. These simply cannot be digitalized by software, because human emotion and imagination cannot be transcribed into lines of code. As a result, any digital piece will immediately sound bland compared to a live performance. Although digital technology has made music more accessible (excluding prices), everyone now has the same set of tools, where people are no longer limited by their imagination, rather now they’re limited by what sounds these plugins can make.
