Is the argument here that something must be owned to be stolen? I don’t think ownership is contested, just who is the owner. Or is the argument that pirating also isn’t owning… Or… What? Just tit for tat and it looks like the thoughts should be related somehow? I’m all for sailing the high seas and for right to repair / software ownership, but the two concepts are independent as far as I can see.
Idk, if I’m going to try to reproduce this mental gymnastics I should really stretch first: I don’t want to pull something and end up a sovcit.
This saying / idea sprang out of folks losing content they “bought” via online platforms.
Basically the letter from Sony(?) Said that due to licensing rights content was going to be removed from their servers… and that the items you bought were no longer available.
So… essentially nothing on a digital platform is ever purchased . It’s just leased until the platform owners decide to alter the deal.
And such, if you can’t actually buy it… Are you actually pirating it?
Licensed, specifically a unilaterally revocable and non transferable licence to view personally. Leasing implies recurring payments, and some areas allow lease assignments and other consumer protections that aren’t afforded to licensing.
Renting implies reoccurring payment, leasing just means “agreement to use X under Y conditions”. Example A: A device leases an IP address from a router. Example B: You rent a movie from blockbuster.
Removal/revocation without violation of terms of service is bogus, but you enjoy a product without contributing a share of the cost to develop or keep developing. Getting gouged is absolutely aggravating and consumers are being taken advantage of, but we all have the option of not buying.
I can also see reasonable situations for removing content, but not “just because” and certainly not indefinitely for everyone.
Idk man… I feel like if I pay ~$40 for a digital item… I should have the same rights with it as the physical copy.
If a digital market place sells me the item… I should be able to return to that market place and redownload it.
Basically once they sell it… they are obligated to host the files.
Or as an alternative … I get 1 download of a drm free product. And everything after that is rebuy.
This sell it for $40 and then it’s gone off your game system or out of your account I think is shit business practice.
Streaming services can do what they want with their content… because you’re paying x money a month to access it… that’s the assumed behavior.
Digital products advertised as “buy it on digital” should behave as items purchased and owned by the end user.
I feel like if I pay ~$40 for a digital item… I should have the same rights with it as the physical copy.
That’s the whole problem - you don’t. Your feelings are irrelevant. If you want that, you need to demand it, and refuse to do business with those who will not provide it. Of course they won’t, so just stop buying digital copies, keep physical media alive.
If you can’t find one then skip the game or accept the fact that you might lose access to it. That’s the way the creator decided their game would be distributed, if you disagree you’re treating them as slaves by getting the fruit of their labour without compensating them and without their agreement.
If you disagree with the original terms, i.e. the game is available on a platform with DRM, then just don’t get it and completion to the devs. Our pirate it but don’t pretend that you’re morally right to do it.
They just don’t want to consider that it’s possible to steal from the people who made the game even if paying for it doesn’t guarantee you’ll own it forever.
You’re equating the law with morality. They differ sometimes.
And yes, personally as soon as I had the money I purchased (or rather leased) everything I pirated and used past a standard trial period. Except for a few indie albums whose creators I couldn’t find. Except for age of empires, now I think if it. I’ll go buy it tonight.
No you’re not if it’s infringing on someone’s copyright and you would agree with me if you ever created something you were trying to sell to make a living.
For downvoters here: they still did not deliver everything that was promised during crowdfunding campaign. And with scale of layoffs I’m not sure they can.
So I hope you check beforehand if that’s actually the case for the specific product you pirate. What I am seeing is that people just pirate everything because they do not respect the creators. From digital art, to indie works in movies, games and music. People pirate because they have the deeply capitalist mindset that if you can pay less (or nothing) for something you should. Even if that means the person that put in the labour and skills has less because of your behaviour.
The idea is that people buy a cd but record companies and some trolls want to make you believe you dont own whatever is on it just a license which is mental gymnastics. You are right.
Are you saying buying a song and buying the rights to a song are the same? That would be a pretty smooth brain statement.
If you are saying that your personal and non-commercial use is just a license in that it is in any way revokable after purchase, then yes I agree with you.
You have to buy it (the rights for music or movie) to do as you please in an unlimited fashion, not buy a COPY of it. Otherwise it’s personal use only.
You’re making an irrelevant distinction here. If you buy a CD with a song on it, do you buy the rights to the song? Or a copy?
A copy, right? You own a copy. The music corporation isn’t going to show up one day and repo your CD because of X, Y, Z reason. You have unlimited personal use of the copy. Not the rights to the whole song, but just the copy. You can play it in your car. You can play it in your walkman. You can loan it to a friend.
But when you buy a digital copy, your ownership rights are dependent on them. It’s more like a lease with terms subject to change whenever the lessor wants, like because they got bought out or they lost the distribution rights or most commonly through pure incompetent inability to maintain the systems that they require you to use in order for you to use your copy.
It’s almost impossible to just buy a .wav of a song anymore. Now when you “buy” a song it has a ton of restrictions on it, any one of which could prevent you from playing it. You can’t loan it to a friend. You can’t play it on a different device unless you log in to their systems. Sometimes you just lose access to it forever with no recourse.
That’s what this post is about. Ownership of the copy, not the rights to the original. Literally no one is talking about the rights to the original. You just brought it up out of nowhere.
No youre bringing stuff up, read back. OP said a cd, not a digital copy. And when you buy a cd, you own a copy not rights. You can’t play the CD as part of your election campaign, or make it your eHitler Minecraft theme and publish it on YouTube. There are terms of use by which you must abide. OP said you buy it you own it and you do whatever you want and that is patently false for a CD which is their example not mine.
If you want to talk about digital copies that is different in some ways you describe, but I. No world do you buy a copy of a song and have unlimited permission to do whatever you want
I specifically said “personal use”. Anything within personal use is fair game when you buy a CD. So no election campaigns, no selling it yourself. Personal use. That’s EXTREMELY different from a digital item that can poof at any time.
And again, stop bringing up rights. No one is talking about rights to media. Totally different thing.
And haui, who I was replying to when you inserted yourself, specifically said a CD first and buy means buy. Did you not go back and see what you’re replying to? You jumped into a thread between two other people and youre making it about you.
Again. Fucking REREAD IT and stop being a twit. Your point is valid for personal use but that was literally never at issue.
A lot of games for example you can buy on GoG, and archive the installation file. That is probably the closest you can come when it’s about owning closed source software. Pirating games that are buyable on GoG is simply stealing money from the creators for no other reason than being greedy and cheap.
Well, GoG does have a lot of games but only few of the latest games that we want to try out. Or could i buy, say, Diablo 4 on GoG? Dave the Diver? Enshrouded? Sons of the Forest? Borderlands? Not even Sims?
Given how DRM has tanked the performance of many games or has rendered them unplayable at some point after release and in some notable cases even after release for a while… I was never entitled to being able to play a game with DRM anyway.
Yes, not even the games i bought. The Need for Speed copy i got which uses SafeDisc which has been unsupported since Vista? Nope! The copy of Colin McRae Rally 2005 which uses StarForce DRM which can mess with my drive as a whole? Nope! SimCity 2013 which i didn’t buy but read the news that the EA servers couldn’t handle the influx of gamers? Nope! Gran Turismo 7 which i also didn’t buy but read the news of where Sony couldn’t handle the influx of gamers almost as if they didn’t learn a single goddamn thing from SimCity 2013? Nooooooooooope!
DRMs would be less contentious if they didn’t somehow mess with the experience of the honest paying users. The worst thing that could happen back in the 80’s and 90’s was perhaps LensLok which didn’t work too well with some CRT screens but also was rarely used. In other cases you had to have the game manual or the funny looking Dial-A-Pirate disc from Monkey Island which could be at worst mildly annoying.
However in the pursuit of profit companies started to really fuck shit up for paying users. Back in early 2000’s it was StarForce “just” making your drive not work anymore or, say, your SPORE key “just” not installing anymore after the third install. But nowadays you need a spare NASA computer for a game that without Denuvo could be working fine on a regular old gaming pc. And there’s not even a guarantee that you can keep ANYTHING in perpetuity that you bought digitally, which is what OP initially complained about. If users don’t get custom servers up quickly, all users can do with their copy of The Crew is to screenshot the Steam page, print it and wipe their ass with it. Same with all those Warner shows on Playstation Video and some shows and ebooks from Amazon IIRC. And remember how i mentioned that SafeDisc stopped working? Without No-CD cracks i couldn’t even play those games even though i have bought them. We don’t have that problem nowadays thanks to discs not necessarily having any game files anymore. Just an installer for the digital storefront and the code, that’s it. Except Garfield - Lasagna Kart for the Nintendo Switch… IT DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING CARTRIDGE AT ALL! JUST AN EMPTY GAME COVER! AND NOT EVEN AN ESHOP-CODE! YOU HAVE TO REDEEM A CODE ON MICROIDS.NET TO GET AN ESHOP-CODE! IF OR RATHER WHEN THAT SITE GOES DOWN AND YOU WANT TO BUY A COPY IN A STORE, PERHAPS WITH A GARFIELD CASE FOR THE SWITCH LIKE I DID, YOU’LL HAVE ONLY A CASE FOR A SWITCH AND ENOUGH SLOTS TO NOT PUT IN THE GAME YOU SPENT MONEY FOR!
If i buy a game legally and in turn am not entitled to keep a physical copy, create a digital backup copy or even to having that copy work (not necessarily working fine, compatibility issues are bound to happen)… I don’t feel like game companies are entitled to my money. Piracy is less convenient than buying a game but the value proposition of actually keeping a game… i have a hard time to truly denounce it. Especially when i think about switching to Linux and know that many digital storefronts make trouble on Linux in one way or another.
I have been thinking about a possible solution a few years ago: Selling full game copies via NFTs. A token that contains all the game files. The token would be created on demand when a user wants to buy the game. The DRM would only have to check whether the token was present in the wallet and that’s Too bad that NFTs are computationally quite expensive and whatever blockchain i would store the copy on, they want their miners to be paid. That’s by the way the reason NFTs only hold links to whatever you buy. Also if digital store owners actually wanted to allow users to resell games, sites such as G2A wouldn’t probably be seen as dubious. Finally my solution wouldn’t stop the arms race between crack groups and game companies. It would lessen the incentive a bit, but at an insanely high ecological and monetary price point.
One of the many aspects of the problem is that this is an infringement on consumer rights. Not currently illegal, but only because the consumer protection aspects of the US have been ground down to nearly nothing.
I think the gist of this meme is that restrictive DRM and piracy are both in a similar ballpark of morally wrong, but only one is illegal because the rich own the courts.
Agreed if you have enough financial stability to do so.
Digital Piracy is always right when you are poor when a sale to acces a copy isn’t possible no one loses anything from acquiring it for free and if anyone deserves free game and movie entertainment to distract them from perpetual hardship its the poor.
That doesn’t make any sense. Ok yes let’s help disadvantaged people of course, but still.
Someone has to make the content and someone has to pay for it: devs gotta eat and the fair cost may be less than game retail, but it’s always greater than zero. If the cost isn’t fair, dont buy, or at least dont pretend you’re entitled to it. If the original costs X, and there are Y “free copies” of it, everyone owes X / (Y + 1), or some angel investor owes the whole total for all of us.
How about museums and parks? Any new person walking through doesn’t incur any (or minimal cost) to experience, and hell, some museums are free or have voluntary donations! That model is possible because of taxes and donations/fundraising/auctions to provide a public service. If Gabe Newell is going to finance a game, sure, you and any impoverished friend can have a free copy. For the game ecosystem now, you and every friend getting a free copy means 1 of 2 things:
To get the next game, all of us paying for it get to be charged a larger share of fair price than if you also paid (even if things are totally fairly priced), OR
We don’t get a next game because revenue was too low.
As an individual it totally doesn’t matter, but if everybody came to this way of thinking then nobody is gonna pay but basically everyone will still want the content.
For the record i do pay creators that make the stuff i enjoy because i am not impoverished and i recognize that within this economy i am the group that should support their livelihoods.
The way i see it when it comes to the poor only 2 options exist.
poor person cant afford to purchase the game so valve gets 0 dollars and the poor feel worse because they see everyone enjoying this thing they are financially excluded from
the poor person obtains a free copy, valve gets the same 0 dollars but now the poor person can be included within the games community, potentially aiding its popularity. Absolutely nothing is lost.
Currently everyone who want to pirate can do so, and yet creators still exists, evidently enough people are paying to maintain it.
I understand your argument in context of a functional fair economy but i am an anti-capitalist
I know you may disagree with this and i respect the focus in wanting to make the current system work but ultimately my ideal is that the means to live should be separate from our productivity. If food, healthcare, housing, family and entertainment are all guaranteed. Then a creator does not need money to share their work. They can create because they want to create because they enjoy to create. And the face that people would copy and enjoy their work is the highest form of flattery as it means people really like what you do/make. The enjoyment of those people becomes the creators contributing to society.
You may think that people wouldn’t do some work anymore but that is where i would wholeheartedly disagree. Many people would do volunteer work if they didn’t need a job, i would still do the very same thing for free that i am getting paid for now but arguably id be even more motivated because id feel like i am helping the community rather then having it be a business transaction for personal gain.
I respect that perspective, and hey some games even say “yeah pirate it and share it with your friends who might buy”. The place I still would have issue is that the society you’re discussing does t exist NOW in the US so it’s a little unfair to live by how things would be if the world were perfect.
I am not sure what you mean. I am not vouching for people that buy games now to stop and become pirates. I also sincerely hope no one has forgone a daily hot meal or sold a kidney just to obtain a game which can be pirated.
Piracy does exists right now in the us and many people do so; i have yet to see it being the main factor of a studio going bankrupt.
Its an indication that most people are willing to do the right thing which is a different thing depending on their socio-economic circles.
To simplify, it would be nice if everyone got a universal provision for food, housing, and money, but they don’t. Your argument is that “if we had these basic things, there’s no reason not to have X game for free.”
BUT, we don’t yet have those things. That makes it not fair to just take it.
They can create because they want to create because they enjoy to create.
Okay so now everyone is a creator, who manages them? Who deals with distribution, with bugfixes, with all the tiny minutiae in Yung modern world?
My job is that I maintain the electrical power that goes to the servers that host the software that people use to create. No one has a “passion” for power and cooling system maintenance, but it’s an absolute necessity even in a fully automated world. Someone has to make sure the robots are working. Who has a passion for creating a controls monitoring system that is 2% faster and 8% more efficient than the previous iteration? Who will decide to create, in their spare time, one tenth of one percent of one percent of one project that eventually becomes the next iphone? Who will volunteers their time to make sure tickets are routed properly between these departments? Who lies awake at night wishing they were independently wealthy so they could have the time and energy to tell people that their poor performance is hurting a project and the project doesn’t want them anymore?
You envision a world where there are billions of artists and no one who knows how to replace the insulation in your attic, or would do it if they could.
I don’t think everyone has a passion for art either.
Honestly your picked the wrong person to lay out this particular example :), no offence.
I have a very big passion for creating small % efficiency every iteration. In fact i refuse to do any task any other way. If i am not improving the flow of a task every time i do it then my talents are being wasted. As long as i can do such improvements even the most repetitive menial tasks are fun. Ive nevee had a task go stale besides when a bosses specifically barred me from looking for potential improvements.
Ive spend much free time to specifically tweak the airflow and temps of my desktop. I absolutely wouldn’t mind to use those skills elsewhere.
Some people get annoyed knowing something is broken/not perfect and get a kick out of solving that no matter what its about.
Some of the stuff you mentioned like routing tickets and much of the work i do know can soon be automated by ai and robots.
I very much agree robots need human oversight/caretakers but it again confused me that there be no people willing to this. Most fellow nerds love robots, some already build and improve them as a hobby, seems only natural that the opportunity to use that skill for a greater good can be even more rewarding.
I am sorry to hear you dont seem to feel this kind of excitement with your job now. I am not sure how you became burned out or where nudged in a career path doesn’t interest you.
I am not assuming your actual personal ability to do a great job but i admit that the fact many people aren’t excited about their job is something that worries me towards work quality. If i wasn’t I would not trust myself to get optimal results.
My hope is that once your livelihood is guaranteed without work income you no longer feel pressure to do what you don’t love so you can go out, discover what you do love and find there is almost certainly something you can do that you are passioned about that can be used helping society rather then just yourself.
I know a few fellow jobless autists with untapped potential as they were failed by the school system that would love a chance to work in your industry.
That’s so incredibly naive. I’m not even mad at you, I just feel sorry for you. You seem like a bright and hopeful person but if you keep looking for this version of society you will constantly be disappointed.
I’ll just say, there are a lot of people who like their jobs. I’m actually one of them. Almost none of those people enjoy their jobs enough that they would choose to work rather than not work, for no additional gain. Maybe you’re one of that tiny sliver of people. But if so, there’s not enough of you to keep society functioning, much less progressing.
There is enough open source and free and dirt cheap content available already that you can’t play in a lifetime. While I agree that stuff that’s too expensive for the majority of people shouldn’t even exist, I don’t see why creative content should be free for the taking in a society that doesn’t support that way of life yet. Unless you also agree that people should be allowed to take everything else for free as well.
To quote the meme
“if you see people steal food, diapers or medicine, no you did not”
I wouldn’t call it free for the taking because i still believe that under the current system all people with the means to pay, should pay. And thats also what i mostly observe in real life.
I am also against people taking and legally buying more then what they/relatives really need. There is way to much wasted around us, even properties.
So in that scenario we can produce infinite steaks, right?
Now, people start stealing those steaks because we can produce an infinite amount of them, infinite supply = cost should be zero.
Now, tell me… What’s the incentive for the steak producer to continue producing those steaks if people aren’t paying for them?
See where I’m going with that?
In the end of doesn’t matter if an infinite quantity can be produced “for free”, there’s people behind the product that pay the price and no matter how you want to justify it, if you don’t respect the way the creator wants to give access to their product to people, you have no moral ground to stand on.
I’m not saying people don’t do it, I’m saying that trying to justify it to make you feel better about it is pure hypocrisy and just wrong.
That’s objectively untrue due to the case study of what’s actually happening in real life though. You CAN steal as many steaks as you want, and people ARE paying, at least for the good ones. Enough to fund giant companies that produce more steaks.
if you don’t respect the way the creator wants to give access to their product to people, you have no moral ground to stand on.
Sometimes the creator is wrong. Monopolies are wrong. Slave labor is wrong. Massive environmental externalities are wrong. In many cases, these things are not illegal, but they should be. Same goes for restrictions on purchases of digital media. It’s wrong, and we shouldn’t respect it. That’s the moral high ground.
I am good friends with someone who works with detained criminals and thats not how most thievery happens. Besides alcohol (but addiction is a different story) baby food is the item most often stolen. Packages of sliced cheese are also common.
The criminal poor don’t go to the store to steal specific items they go to buy food like normal and with every item they are counting if they will have enough on their account. When they get to their budget limit they try to swap some stuff to make
It work. If that really doesn’t work they sometimes decide to take a more expansive items from their cart and smuggle it out without paying.
Of course this wont be the exact scenario for all store-theft but its what i hear is most common at least where i live.
What I’m saying is that there’s plenty of cheap games you can play, even tons of free ones (one a week on epic) if you don’t have enough money. It doesn’t make it morally right to pirate games.
I know people do it, I do it too, trying to pass it as being somehow morally right is what I can’t accept. I’m at fault, I accept it and don’t try to make myself believe that it’s ok, it’s not.
Doing something wrong and realizing it is wrong is a really important skill to have as its part of the guilt mechanisms which is important in a healthy society.
I am going to settle on i agree on what you say here specifically but i disagree that there isn’t more to discuss within the same topic about what is and isn’t morally right. Which admittedly is something that would requires a much bigger body of people to weigh in on.
I primarily use it to see if things are actually worth me paying for them, I’ve lost count of the games I’ve tried out, found they were great and bought outright. Watching things is more of a service issue though, I’ll pay a subscription for something if it’s actually decent, Netflix went and screwed that up for me. If I could actually trust any of the streaming services to not do something stupid again then maybe I would.
Digital products don’t cost anything to produce many copies of for sale. That’s why they can have many deep discounts through the year.
“Piracy” word is unfitting actually but it’s overused by distributors. “Ownership” is unfitting too, but it comes to mind by default when we talk about paying. You either receive a product that you can use indefinitely or a service that you can use indefinitely. That’s about it.
Problem though, is that products almost consistently aren’t delivering on quality expectations as of lately. Or they contain some artificial restrictions/defects that impact the product value in end users’ eyes. Or they can randomly stop working at all. The list can go on.
In the end, it’s not that pirates don’t want to pay for stuff. It’s that they are not allowed to pay as little as they deem adequate for the quality of the product they get.
The ultimate reason behind everything is people’s wish to be able to use stuff they paid for. Indefinitely where possible. And because the product is good enough most of the times.
Piracy was never stealing, because potential purchase can’t be stolen since it’s not happened yet, and any pirate using a product without paying for it can be equal to that potential purchase. The new catchphrase is just a convenient way to remind distributors that they need to provide on value and quality and stop blaming someone for their failure to meet their financial goals.
Some of what you say is true but I still don’t think there’s any A implies B. Quality does seem to be down, prices and DLC are up, and some older content just isn’t available for purchase at all.
Some of this is bogus though. It doesn’t cost any money to make a digital copy, but it costs a LOT of money to make the original. This is like R&D/T&E cost for any manufactured product, so to call it “free” is a little disingenuous. I also agree I agree I don’t want to pay full price, but the “potential purchase” is horseshit. If you walk into a department store and pick up a shirt (even if stock is infinite) because you want it but don’t think it’s cheap enough, that’s theft. Sure you can come back when it’s on sale and buy it, but a purchase/payment is transactional: if you don’t uphold your end, that’s not a transaction. Last, while some of us DO just want a way to pay and own in a legit way, you can look at replies to the last comment and find a 1 in 5 example of “I’m never paying, I want it for free” which jacks the prices for the rest of us even if we are just paying a fair share of up front cost.
Your mistake is trying to explain everything with physical analogies. It straight up won’t work properly.
but it costs a LOT of money to make the original.
Yes and so what? Should there be a link between those costs and the amount of copies sold? I see regional prices increased by as much as 500% sometimes. For titles that have been around for many years too.
It’s just simple to assume that those initial costs will be recouped eventually, so long as the product is good enough. Regardless of piracy. I think it’s also adequate to assume that people must be okay with paying the asking price for what they get, and that it will not make the business less successful, if the product is good enough. If it’s not good enough then it shouldn’t sell much in the first place, and it may be impossible to recoup costs.
This is like R&D/T&E cost for any manufactured product, so to call it “free” is a little disingenuous.
Fine, so let that small (albeit not free) cost of copying one digital copy slip from the pocket of the company. This is where pirates get it. They then create their own supply chain with their own R&D/T&E/whatever costs that are completely disconnected from the company and therefore shouldn’t be a concern.
the “potential purchase” is horseshit
When pirates who weren’t going to purchase a game try it for free and decide they actually want to support the developer or recommend it to a friend, this is a sale that wouldn’t be possible without piracy. Not exactly horseshit.
If you walk into a department store and pick up a shirt (even if stock is infinite) because you want it but don’t think it’s cheap enough, that’s theft.
Exactly because the stock is infinite no one would ask you to be responsible for what you’ve done. That t-shirt is probably cool and more people would want it when they see it on you. But really it just can’t have infinite stock and a price at the same time.
if you don’t uphold your end, that’s not a transaction.
Why even care what transaction is? In the end, some potential sales convert into real sales and that’s all that matters. Digital products can have demos and trials - there is no need for the nature of distribution to be “transactional”.
“I’m never paying, I want it for free” which jacks the prices for the rest of us
Missing the logical link here. But anyway, those people should be outside of the target audience. Yet still there are ways how they can help generate potential sales. By wearing a t-shirt they got for free from some illegal store, you know.
I see no reason why the cost shouldn’t be a function of copies sold, or rather that the maximum of cost and possible revenue shouldn’t be a function of copies sold. The point of selling is to make money, and profitable games beget sequels / remakes / expansions. Of course this isn’t a guarantee that companies are always good actors but we can’t control that.
I have no idea what the intersection is between devs and companies like EA or steam or whoever to be able to say that when you pirate you hurt the distributor not the developer. The cost of piracy may impact either one or both, but the original post is “company bad so piracy OK” so it’s not really a small scale / one-off discussion.
There are some pirates who will pay for a copy when all is said and done, but I would bet a large sum that these people are vastly in the minority. There’s not a good deed potential purchase at the end of probably even 1 in 5 downloads of anything.
To really boil it down, companies are predatory, but it doesn’t justify unbridled piracy. In the same way companies are predatory gougers, people are generally shitty, entitled leechers. Something something two wrongs something something else.
I see no reason why the cost shouldn’t be a function of copies sold, or rather that the maximum of cost and possible revenue shouldn’t be a function of copies sold.
Not sure if you’re thinking of proposing some new system for the industry to go with, that would not be a subject of the same piracy related catchphrases.
Of course this isn’t a guarantee that companies are always good actors but we can’t control that.
We can, in fact, control that with our wallets. To some degree, yes. But it would sound more stupid if someone says “we can’t control companies” and something like “piracy should stop” together.
The cost of piracy may impact either one or both, but the original post is “company bad so piracy OK” so it’s not really a small scale / one-off discussion.
This is what we can’t control though - the revenue split between devs and publishers. As for the “company bad so piracy ok” I don’t think there is anything to discuss. It’s viable and I could use that myself (though I might not even have enough time to care about pirating stuff, I just don’t buy products related to specific parties).
There are some pirates who will pay for a copy when all is said and done, but I would bet a large sum that these people are vastly in the minority. There’s not a good deed potential purchase at the end of probably even 1 in 5 downloads of anything.
And I would say there is even less deed potential in trying to convince pirates into buying stuff instead of downloading it for free. The point is, information spread helps sales of good products (so you want more paid/free end users, not less). Another point is, most pirates will always be pirates (so it’s useless to blame people who wasn’t even going to purchase your product by default). Third point is, digital products are luxury so it’s not a loss of people when they don’t buy your product (they will be just fine without it) - it’s your loss when people are not convinced to give you the money (the amount you ask for) for your product.
companies are predatory, but it doesn’t justify unbridled piracy
So what you’re saying is “yes some companies are providing bad products but it doesn’t mean people are entitled enough to not pay for such products”? Then what would you say as a day 1 purchaser to people who paid 75% less than you to receive the same product? Where is the point when you go from “that’s ok since it was an official discount” to “that’s not okay because they didn’t pay for it (as much as someone else paid)”?
No matter how bad something is or how little someone else paid for it, neither you nor anyone else is entitled to any product free of charge. Period. Whether you indirectly help sales or you don’t, it’s a shit perspective to take.
Yes I sail the seas every now and again and yes companies are shitty, but there’s no inherent high ground to be found in taking something without paying for it.
Well sorry, if I know the company will treat me and my PC as shit for buying their product, I’d rather consider using other party’s services a way to go.
I directly helped with bug reports (that were indeed used to fix stuff) on several products I didn’t own. You can also teach Minecraft’s creator how indirect help of pirates is a shit perspective I guess.
Also no. Bytes can’t be taken, only copied. As I said, physical world rules don’t really work here. You can copy as much as you want without doing any harm, and someone might even thank you later for preserving some work of art that was mistreated or abandoned by its original distributors.
“I’m never paying, I want it for free” which jacks the prices for the rest of us
It doesn’t. Those people are not a loss- they would not have bought even if piracy was impossible/unavailable, they would just do without. Companies claiming they have to raise prices to compensate for people who won’t buy their crap is a lie, and you are a fool to believe it.
If you’re middle class or upper middle class and not a teenager, you spend money on the things you want. If you can get them for free, most people do that instead.
The last time you went to a museum and it was donation requested instead of admission required, did you put any money in? My money is on no.
The difference being that you not buying the moon rock doesn’t affect a person that worked to produce that rock (because there isn’t one) whereas pirating a copy of a game because you decide you don’t want to pay money for it because you fear you might not be able to play it permanently, that’s work theft, you’re profiting off the work of a person/team by enjoying the product they made to sell without compensating them.
I’m sure you wouldn’t appreciate it if your boss came up with a similar way to justify not paying you for the work you do and he told you “Oh no, I’m not stealing anything!”
That’s where I’m at. Whether or not a product is digital or freely reproducible is irrelevant, because rights to distribute ultimately belong to whoever wrote it. Their terms. Violating those terms to obtain a copy, again whether legitimately following those terms would give you full access to a copy or a license to use, is still theft. It’s easier to justify theft when the impact on the victim is so small, but even if it was zero, that doesn’t make it not theft. I’ll say it again, those are justifications, not disqualifiers.
Not that I’m some bootlicker either, I’ve got a jellyfin setup and you can guess where I got those movies. The difference is I’m not gaslighting myself into thinking that there’s anything legitimate about it. I fucking stole them dude (edit, and I don’t have a shred of guilt either). It’s just a stupid catchphrase, with logic comparable to “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”
I think you know it wasn’t steamboat that I was referring to.
So let me ask you: if a company can own an idea how come they get to own ideas off those ideas? Do farms get own the energy I get from food? Why are derived works also held by the company forever?
I wasn’t sure if you meant steamboat, but that’s the cool thing about the word “otherwise”, I can give you conditional answers. English is neat that way.
Anyway, like I said already copyright law isn’t in my wheelhouse. Actually, I’m confused, what are you arguing exactly? That pirated copies are derived works? I don’t understand what this has to do with piracy.
I am pointing out that copyright law is written to protect the wealthy and not to protect artists, which is why I won’t defend it. In theory the law could be redesigned so that it did but that is not going to happen.
On a related note: can you explain why I can’t patent it copyright a recipe? Is food not a creative act?
False analogy. When I am being paid to design something it is to bring something into the world that does not exist. If my employer could find it in the world they wouldn’t pay me.
They’re clearly working on the principal of “might makes right” considering that every single digital media company has had instances of “selling” customers media, and then deciding to make it impossible for the customer to use said media, and they never give refunds.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Since they are legally people, and they have all the power, then clearly it’s ok for the rest of us to be thieves, just like them
If you’re referring to any of the major media companies the creators already got paid. Hollywood and the software industry both use Hollywood accounting so there’s never any profits to be shared in residuals.
Again if they want to be predatory thieves in their business models, it’s totally fine for us to steal right back.
Now… Wait.
Is the argument here that something must be owned to be stolen? I don’t think ownership is contested, just who is the owner. Or is the argument that pirating also isn’t owning… Or… What? Just tit for tat and it looks like the thoughts should be related somehow? I’m all for sailing the high seas and for right to repair / software ownership, but the two concepts are independent as far as I can see.
Idk, if I’m going to try to reproduce this mental gymnastics I should really stretch first: I don’t want to pull something and end up a sovcit.
This saying / idea sprang out of folks losing content they “bought” via online platforms.
Basically the letter from Sony(?) Said that due to licensing rights content was going to be removed from their servers… and that the items you bought were no longer available.
So… essentially nothing on a digital platform is ever purchased . It’s just leased until the platform owners decide to alter the deal. And such, if you can’t actually buy it… Are you actually pirating it?
Licensed, specifically a unilaterally revocable and non transferable licence to view personally. Leasing implies recurring payments, and some areas allow lease assignments and other consumer protections that aren’t afforded to licensing.
Renting implies reoccurring payment, leasing just means “agreement to use X under Y conditions”. Example A: A device leases an IP address from a router. Example B: You rent a movie from blockbuster.
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of the difference
Yes, you are actually pirating it lol.
Removal/revocation without violation of terms of service is bogus, but you enjoy a product without contributing a share of the cost to develop or keep developing. Getting gouged is absolutely aggravating and consumers are being taken advantage of, but we all have the option of not buying.
I can also see reasonable situations for removing content, but not “just because” and certainly not indefinitely for everyone.
Idk man… I feel like if I pay ~$40 for a digital item… I should have the same rights with it as the physical copy.
If a digital market place sells me the item… I should be able to return to that market place and redownload it. Basically once they sell it… they are obligated to host the files.
Or as an alternative … I get 1 download of a drm free product. And everything after that is rebuy.
This sell it for $40 and then it’s gone off your game system or out of your account I think is shit business practice.
Streaming services can do what they want with their content… because you’re paying x money a month to access it… that’s the assumed behavior. Digital products advertised as “buy it on digital” should behave as items purchased and owned by the end user.
Maybe that’s just me being pro consumer…
That’s the whole problem - you don’t. Your feelings are irrelevant. If you want that, you need to demand it, and refuse to do business with those who will not provide it. Of course they won’t, so just stop buying digital copies, keep physical media alive.
That’s the only way forward honestly.
We have to return to physical media. Tho I fear it’s too late.
If you want the same rights then buy a DRM free version.
Good luck finding one
If you can’t find one then skip the game or accept the fact that you might lose access to it. That’s the way the creator decided their game would be distributed, if you disagree you’re treating them as slaves by getting the fruit of their labour without compensating them and without their agreement.
If you disagree with the original terms, i.e. the game is available on a platform with DRM, then just don’t get it and completion to the devs. Our pirate it but don’t pretend that you’re morally right to do it.
They just don’t want to consider that it’s possible to steal from the people who made the game even if paying for it doesn’t guarantee you’ll own it forever.
The copyright troll known as “publisher” just will pocket all money you think you paid to people who made the game.
Option one: pay for game, some money goes to publisher, some goes to creators
Option two: pirate game, no money goes to anyone
Which one helps the creators?
Option three: Donate to creator or buy something directly from them to help offset the cost of pirating.
Pirates: Nah I’m good fam. I just want free shit because I’m too poor and don’t get paid enough.
A donation or purchasing something else doesn’t legally or morally entitle you to owning an unrelated product made by the creator though…
I disagree. Consumer gets game, creator gets paid. Seems pretty cut and dried to me.
Unless the creator gives you their approval, it’s a donation that you can’t assume gives you the right to their product.
It’s funny the mental gymnastic you guys will do to justify your choices and make you feel like you’re morally right.
By the way, I don’t believe for one second that you’ve sent donations to all the creators of which you’ve pirated content.
You’re equating the law with morality. They differ sometimes.
And yes, personally as soon as I had the money I purchased (or rather leased) everything I pirated and used past a standard trial period. Except for a few indie albums whose creators I couldn’t find. Except for age of empires, now I think if it. I’ll go buy it tonight.
it’s immoral to prevent people from sharing tools or stories or songs or skills. i’m entitled to enjoy whatever someone wants to share with me.
No you’re not if it’s infringing on someone’s copyright and you would agree with me if you ever created something you were trying to sell to make a living.
copyright is an immoral government-enforced monopoly.
You wish. https://dashfight.com/news/modus-games-lays-off-mane-6-developers-4490
Let’s ask them
…
You realise that the screenshot you shared tells you to buy from real platforms first and foremost?
You realize that the developers all got paid before the game was even released, right? They were getting paychecks the whole time.
Game wasn’t complete.
For downvoters here: they still did not deliver everything that was promised during crowdfunding campaign. And with scale of layoffs I’m not sure they can.
So I hope you check beforehand if that’s actually the case for the specific product you pirate. What I am seeing is that people just pirate everything because they do not respect the creators. From digital art, to indie works in movies, games and music. People pirate because they have the deeply capitalist mindset that if you can pay less (or nothing) for something you should. Even if that means the person that put in the labour and skills has less because of your behaviour.
The idea is that people buy a cd but record companies and some trolls want to make you believe you dont own whatever is on it just a license which is mental gymnastics. You are right.
Are you saying buying a song and buying the rights to a song are the same? That would be a pretty smooth brain statement.
If you are saying that your personal and non-commercial use is just a license in that it is in any way revokable after purchase, then yes I agree with you.
You can keep your derogatory language to yourself.
I‘m saying if you buy a song, movie, art piece It is yours to do with as you please, forever.
Thats what buying means.
You have to buy it (the rights for music or movie) to do as you please in an unlimited fashion, not buy a COPY of it. Otherwise it’s personal use only.
Sorry if that’s too subtle to grasp.
You’re making an irrelevant distinction here. If you buy a CD with a song on it, do you buy the rights to the song? Or a copy?
A copy, right? You own a copy. The music corporation isn’t going to show up one day and repo your CD because of X, Y, Z reason. You have unlimited personal use of the copy. Not the rights to the whole song, but just the copy. You can play it in your car. You can play it in your walkman. You can loan it to a friend.
But when you buy a digital copy, your ownership rights are dependent on them. It’s more like a lease with terms subject to change whenever the lessor wants, like because they got bought out or they lost the distribution rights or most commonly through pure incompetent inability to maintain the systems that they require you to use in order for you to use your copy.
It’s almost impossible to just buy a .wav of a song anymore. Now when you “buy” a song it has a ton of restrictions on it, any one of which could prevent you from playing it. You can’t loan it to a friend. You can’t play it on a different device unless you log in to their systems. Sometimes you just lose access to it forever with no recourse.
That’s what this post is about. Ownership of the copy, not the rights to the original. Literally no one is talking about the rights to the original. You just brought it up out of nowhere.
No youre bringing stuff up, read back. OP said a cd, not a digital copy. And when you buy a cd, you own a copy not rights. You can’t play the CD as part of your election campaign, or make it your eHitler Minecraft theme and publish it on YouTube. There are terms of use by which you must abide. OP said you buy it you own it and you do whatever you want and that is patently false for a CD which is their example not mine.
If you want to talk about digital copies that is different in some ways you describe, but I. No world do you buy a copy of a song and have unlimited permission to do whatever you want
I specifically said “personal use”. Anything within personal use is fair game when you buy a CD. So no election campaigns, no selling it yourself. Personal use. That’s EXTREMELY different from a digital item that can poof at any time.
And again, stop bringing up rights. No one is talking about rights to media. Totally different thing.
And haui, who I was replying to when you inserted yourself, specifically said a CD first and buy means buy. Did you not go back and see what you’re replying to? You jumped into a thread between two other people and youre making it about you.
Again. Fucking REREAD IT and stop being a twit. Your point is valid for personal use but that was literally never at issue.
As I said, thats the legal definition. Slavery used to be legal, abortion is illegal in many places.
I dont care about your definition of right and wrong. If I buy something, it is mine.
Blocked for repeated derogatory language.
Without a legal system and legal definitions, your claim of ownership doesn’t mean anything, rendering your entire argument pointless.
Now we‘re dogpiling. Nice.
Nobody said we dont need a legal system. I say legal does not define what is „right“.
Only what is legal is at issue. What is right has nothing to do with what you can do or can’t in the eyes of the law.
Bye dummy!
Nah bro, piracy because we don’t wanna pay.
We don’t mind paying. If it is actually owning and convenient.
A lot of games for example you can buy on GoG, and archive the installation file. That is probably the closest you can come when it’s about owning closed source software. Pirating games that are buyable on GoG is simply stealing money from the creators for no other reason than being greedy and cheap.
Well, GoG does have a lot of games but only few of the latest games that we want to try out. Or could i buy, say, Diablo 4 on GoG? Dave the Diver? Enshrouded? Sons of the Forest? Borderlands? Not even Sims?
If you can’t buy it DRM free and don’t want to buy it with DRM then you’re not entitled to being able to play it.
Given how DRM has tanked the performance of many games or has rendered them unplayable at some point after release and in some notable cases even after release for a while… I was never entitled to being able to play a game with DRM anyway.
Yes, not even the games i bought. The Need for Speed copy i got which uses SafeDisc which has been unsupported since Vista? Nope! The copy of Colin McRae Rally 2005 which uses StarForce DRM which can mess with my drive as a whole? Nope! SimCity 2013 which i didn’t buy but read the news that the EA servers couldn’t handle the influx of gamers? Nope! Gran Turismo 7 which i also didn’t buy but read the news of where Sony couldn’t handle the influx of gamers almost as if they didn’t learn a single goddamn thing from SimCity 2013? Nooooooooooope!
DRMs would be less contentious if they didn’t somehow mess with the experience of the honest paying users. The worst thing that could happen back in the 80’s and 90’s was perhaps LensLok which didn’t work too well with some CRT screens but also was rarely used. In other cases you had to have the game manual or the funny looking Dial-A-Pirate disc from Monkey Island which could be at worst mildly annoying.
However in the pursuit of profit companies started to really fuck shit up for paying users. Back in early 2000’s it was StarForce “just” making your drive not work anymore or, say, your SPORE key “just” not installing anymore after the third install. But nowadays you need a spare NASA computer for a game that without Denuvo could be working fine on a regular old gaming pc. And there’s not even a guarantee that you can keep ANYTHING in perpetuity that you bought digitally, which is what OP initially complained about. If users don’t get custom servers up quickly, all users can do with their copy of The Crew is to screenshot the Steam page, print it and wipe their ass with it. Same with all those Warner shows on Playstation Video and some shows and ebooks from Amazon IIRC. And remember how i mentioned that SafeDisc stopped working? Without No-CD cracks i couldn’t even play those games even though i have bought them. We don’t have that problem nowadays thanks to discs not necessarily having any game files anymore. Just an installer for the digital storefront and the code, that’s it. Except Garfield - Lasagna Kart for the Nintendo Switch… IT DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING CARTRIDGE AT ALL! JUST AN EMPTY GAME COVER! AND NOT EVEN AN ESHOP-CODE! YOU HAVE TO REDEEM A CODE ON MICROIDS.NET TO GET AN ESHOP-CODE! IF OR RATHER WHEN THAT SITE GOES DOWN AND YOU WANT TO BUY A COPY IN A STORE, PERHAPS WITH A GARFIELD CASE FOR THE SWITCH LIKE I DID, YOU’LL HAVE ONLY A CASE FOR A SWITCH AND ENOUGH SLOTS TO NOT PUT IN THE GAME YOU SPENT MONEY FOR!
If i buy a game legally and in turn am not entitled to keep a physical copy, create a digital backup copy or even to having that copy work (not necessarily working fine, compatibility issues are bound to happen)… I don’t feel like game companies are entitled to my money. Piracy is less convenient than buying a game but the value proposition of actually keeping a game… i have a hard time to truly denounce it. Especially when i think about switching to Linux and know that many digital storefronts make trouble on Linux in one way or another.
I have been thinking about a possible solution a few years ago: Selling full game copies via NFTs. A token that contains all the game files. The token would be created on demand when a user wants to buy the game. The DRM would only have to check whether the token was present in the wallet and that’s Too bad that NFTs are computationally quite expensive and whatever blockchain i would store the copy on, they want their miners to be paid. That’s by the way the reason NFTs only hold links to whatever you buy. Also if digital store owners actually wanted to allow users to resell games, sites such as G2A wouldn’t probably be seen as dubious. Finally my solution wouldn’t stop the arms race between crack groups and game companies. It would lessen the incentive a bit, but at an insanely high ecological and monetary price point.
When there’s incentive to view the transaction as “inconvenient”, I think a lot of people see it so.
I can’t really imagine the piracy crowd are the ones to accept $70 pricing, either - or ever say the phrase “Dang. You drive a hard bargain.”
Then read the EULA and don’t purchase if it mentions the platform can revoke the access to your account.
Bad news! You’re stuck playing console games that have physical copies!
Good news! Play Xonotic!
One of the many aspects of the problem is that this is an infringement on consumer rights. Not currently illegal, but only because the consumer protection aspects of the US have been ground down to nearly nothing.
I think the gist of this meme is that restrictive DRM and piracy are both in a similar ballpark of morally wrong, but only one is illegal because the rich own the courts.
Is it an infringement on your rights when you go to a theater and they charge you to see a movie which you won’t own after it’s finished?
No, because you’re not purchasing a copy of the movie. You’re purchasing a one time viewing. And that’s a very clearly laid out term of the sale.
So just like it’s clearly laid out in the EULA for the service you’re using to pay for games that what you’re buying is a limited license?
Alright, glad we agree
Hahahahahahaha
EULAs are so unclear they’re often legally unenforceable
Agreed if you have enough financial stability to do so.
Digital Piracy is always right when you are poor when a sale to acces a copy isn’t possible no one loses anything from acquiring it for free and if anyone deserves free game and movie entertainment to distract them from perpetual hardship its the poor.
That doesn’t make any sense. Ok yes let’s help disadvantaged people of course, but still.
Someone has to make the content and someone has to pay for it: devs gotta eat and the fair cost may be less than game retail, but it’s always greater than zero. If the cost isn’t fair, dont buy, or at least dont pretend you’re entitled to it. If the original costs X, and there are Y “free copies” of it, everyone owes X / (Y + 1), or some angel investor owes the whole total for all of us.
How about museums and parks? Any new person walking through doesn’t incur any (or minimal cost) to experience, and hell, some museums are free or have voluntary donations! That model is possible because of taxes and donations/fundraising/auctions to provide a public service. If Gabe Newell is going to finance a game, sure, you and any impoverished friend can have a free copy. For the game ecosystem now, you and every friend getting a free copy means 1 of 2 things:
To get the next game, all of us paying for it get to be charged a larger share of fair price than if you also paid (even if things are totally fairly priced), OR
We don’t get a next game because revenue was too low.
As an individual it totally doesn’t matter, but if everybody came to this way of thinking then nobody is gonna pay but basically everyone will still want the content.
For the record i do pay creators that make the stuff i enjoy because i am not impoverished and i recognize that within this economy i am the group that should support their livelihoods.
The way i see it when it comes to the poor only 2 options exist.
poor person cant afford to purchase the game so valve gets 0 dollars and the poor feel worse because they see everyone enjoying this thing they are financially excluded from
the poor person obtains a free copy, valve gets the same 0 dollars but now the poor person can be included within the games community, potentially aiding its popularity. Absolutely nothing is lost.
Currently everyone who want to pirate can do so, and yet creators still exists, evidently enough people are paying to maintain it.
I understand your argument in context of a functional fair economy but i am an anti-capitalist
I know you may disagree with this and i respect the focus in wanting to make the current system work but ultimately my ideal is that the means to live should be separate from our productivity. If food, healthcare, housing, family and entertainment are all guaranteed. Then a creator does not need money to share their work. They can create because they want to create because they enjoy to create. And the face that people would copy and enjoy their work is the highest form of flattery as it means people really like what you do/make. The enjoyment of those people becomes the creators contributing to society.
You may think that people wouldn’t do some work anymore but that is where i would wholeheartedly disagree. Many people would do volunteer work if they didn’t need a job, i would still do the very same thing for free that i am getting paid for now but arguably id be even more motivated because id feel like i am helping the community rather then having it be a business transaction for personal gain.
I respect that perspective, and hey some games even say “yeah pirate it and share it with your friends who might buy”. The place I still would have issue is that the society you’re discussing does t exist NOW in the US so it’s a little unfair to live by how things would be if the world were perfect.
I am not sure what you mean. I am not vouching for people that buy games now to stop and become pirates. I also sincerely hope no one has forgone a daily hot meal or sold a kidney just to obtain a game which can be pirated.
Piracy does exists right now in the us and many people do so; i have yet to see it being the main factor of a studio going bankrupt.
Its an indication that most people are willing to do the right thing which is a different thing depending on their socio-economic circles.
To simplify, it would be nice if everyone got a universal provision for food, housing, and money, but they don’t. Your argument is that “if we had these basic things, there’s no reason not to have X game for free.”
BUT, we don’t yet have those things. That makes it not fair to just take it.
Big tangent here, but
Okay so now everyone is a creator, who manages them? Who deals with distribution, with bugfixes, with all the tiny minutiae in Yung modern world?
My job is that I maintain the electrical power that goes to the servers that host the software that people use to create. No one has a “passion” for power and cooling system maintenance, but it’s an absolute necessity even in a fully automated world. Someone has to make sure the robots are working. Who has a passion for creating a controls monitoring system that is 2% faster and 8% more efficient than the previous iteration? Who will decide to create, in their spare time, one tenth of one percent of one percent of one project that eventually becomes the next iphone? Who will volunteers their time to make sure tickets are routed properly between these departments? Who lies awake at night wishing they were independently wealthy so they could have the time and energy to tell people that their poor performance is hurting a project and the project doesn’t want them anymore?
You envision a world where there are billions of artists and no one who knows how to replace the insulation in your attic, or would do it if they could.
I don’t think everyone has a passion for art either.
Honestly your picked the wrong person to lay out this particular example :), no offence.
I have a very big passion for creating small % efficiency every iteration. In fact i refuse to do any task any other way. If i am not improving the flow of a task every time i do it then my talents are being wasted. As long as i can do such improvements even the most repetitive menial tasks are fun. Ive nevee had a task go stale besides when a bosses specifically barred me from looking for potential improvements.
Ive spend much free time to specifically tweak the airflow and temps of my desktop. I absolutely wouldn’t mind to use those skills elsewhere.
Some people get annoyed knowing something is broken/not perfect and get a kick out of solving that no matter what its about.
Some of the stuff you mentioned like routing tickets and much of the work i do know can soon be automated by ai and robots.
I very much agree robots need human oversight/caretakers but it again confused me that there be no people willing to this. Most fellow nerds love robots, some already build and improve them as a hobby, seems only natural that the opportunity to use that skill for a greater good can be even more rewarding.
I am sorry to hear you dont seem to feel this kind of excitement with your job now. I am not sure how you became burned out or where nudged in a career path doesn’t interest you.
I am not assuming your actual personal ability to do a great job but i admit that the fact many people aren’t excited about their job is something that worries me towards work quality. If i wasn’t I would not trust myself to get optimal results.
My hope is that once your livelihood is guaranteed without work income you no longer feel pressure to do what you don’t love so you can go out, discover what you do love and find there is almost certainly something you can do that you are passioned about that can be used helping society rather then just yourself.
I know a few fellow jobless autists with untapped potential as they were failed by the school system that would love a chance to work in your industry.
That’s so incredibly naive. I’m not even mad at you, I just feel sorry for you. You seem like a bright and hopeful person but if you keep looking for this version of society you will constantly be disappointed.
I’ll just say, there are a lot of people who like their jobs. I’m actually one of them. Almost none of those people enjoy their jobs enough that they would choose to work rather than not work, for no additional gain. Maybe you’re one of that tiny sliver of people. But if so, there’s not enough of you to keep society functioning, much less progressing.
There is enough open source and free and dirt cheap content available already that you can’t play in a lifetime. While I agree that stuff that’s too expensive for the majority of people shouldn’t even exist, I don’t see why creative content should be free for the taking in a society that doesn’t support that way of life yet. Unless you also agree that people should be allowed to take everything else for free as well.
To quote the meme “if you see people steal food, diapers or medicine, no you did not”
I wouldn’t call it free for the taking because i still believe that under the current system all people with the means to pay, should pay. And thats also what i mostly observe in real life.
I am also against people taking and legally buying more then what they/relatives really need. There is way to much wasted around us, even properties.
Because you can only afford tofu doesn’t make it ok to steal a steak.
If we could produce infinite free steaks, then yes, it is ok.
So in that scenario we can produce infinite steaks, right?
Now, people start stealing those steaks because we can produce an infinite amount of them, infinite supply = cost should be zero.
Now, tell me… What’s the incentive for the steak producer to continue producing those steaks if people aren’t paying for them?
See where I’m going with that?
In the end of doesn’t matter if an infinite quantity can be produced “for free”, there’s people behind the product that pay the price and no matter how you want to justify it, if you don’t respect the way the creator wants to give access to their product to people, you have no moral ground to stand on.
I’m not saying people don’t do it, I’m saying that trying to justify it to make you feel better about it is pure hypocrisy and just wrong.
That’s objectively untrue due to the case study of what’s actually happening in real life though. You CAN steal as many steaks as you want, and people ARE paying, at least for the good ones. Enough to fund giant companies that produce more steaks.
Sometimes the creator is wrong. Monopolies are wrong. Slave labor is wrong. Massive environmental externalities are wrong. In many cases, these things are not illegal, but they should be. Same goes for restrictions on purchases of digital media. It’s wrong, and we shouldn’t respect it. That’s the moral high ground.
“Slave labor is wrong” says the guy who doesn’t want to pay for the labor of the people providing him with content.
If you don’t agree with the way it’s distributed then skip it entirely, that’s the only way you’ve got the moral high ground.
I am good friends with someone who works with detained criminals and thats not how most thievery happens. Besides alcohol (but addiction is a different story) baby food is the item most often stolen. Packages of sliced cheese are also common.
The criminal poor don’t go to the store to steal specific items they go to buy food like normal and with every item they are counting if they will have enough on their account. When they get to their budget limit they try to swap some stuff to make It work. If that really doesn’t work they sometimes decide to take a more expansive items from their cart and smuggle it out without paying.
Of course this wont be the exact scenario for all store-theft but its what i hear is most common at least where i live.
What I’m saying is that there’s plenty of cheap games you can play, even tons of free ones (one a week on epic) if you don’t have enough money. It doesn’t make it morally right to pirate games.
I know people do it, I do it too, trying to pass it as being somehow morally right is what I can’t accept. I’m at fault, I accept it and don’t try to make myself believe that it’s ok, it’s not.
I see where you are coming from.
Doing something wrong and realizing it is wrong is a really important skill to have as its part of the guilt mechanisms which is important in a healthy society.
I am going to settle on i agree on what you say here specifically but i disagree that there isn’t more to discuss within the same topic about what is and isn’t morally right. Which admittedly is something that would requires a much bigger body of people to weigh in on.
Wishing you well!
I primarily use it to see if things are actually worth me paying for them, I’ve lost count of the games I’ve tried out, found they were great and bought outright. Watching things is more of a service issue though, I’ll pay a subscription for something if it’s actually decent, Netflix went and screwed that up for me. If I could actually trust any of the streaming services to not do something stupid again then maybe I would.
Digital products don’t cost anything to produce many copies of for sale. That’s why they can have many deep discounts through the year.
“Piracy” word is unfitting actually but it’s overused by distributors. “Ownership” is unfitting too, but it comes to mind by default when we talk about paying. You either receive a product that you can use indefinitely or a service that you can use indefinitely. That’s about it.
Problem though, is that products almost consistently aren’t delivering on quality expectations as of lately. Or they contain some artificial restrictions/defects that impact the product value in end users’ eyes. Or they can randomly stop working at all. The list can go on.
In the end, it’s not that pirates don’t want to pay for stuff. It’s that they are not allowed to pay as little as they deem adequate for the quality of the product they get.
The ultimate reason behind everything is people’s wish to be able to use stuff they paid for. Indefinitely where possible. And because the product is good enough most of the times.
Piracy was never stealing, because potential purchase can’t be stolen since it’s not happened yet, and any pirate using a product without paying for it can be equal to that potential purchase. The new catchphrase is just a convenient way to remind distributors that they need to provide on value and quality and stop blaming someone for their failure to meet their financial goals.
Some of what you say is true but I still don’t think there’s any A implies B. Quality does seem to be down, prices and DLC are up, and some older content just isn’t available for purchase at all.
Some of this is bogus though. It doesn’t cost any money to make a digital copy, but it costs a LOT of money to make the original. This is like R&D/T&E cost for any manufactured product, so to call it “free” is a little disingenuous. I also agree I agree I don’t want to pay full price, but the “potential purchase” is horseshit. If you walk into a department store and pick up a shirt (even if stock is infinite) because you want it but don’t think it’s cheap enough, that’s theft. Sure you can come back when it’s on sale and buy it, but a purchase/payment is transactional: if you don’t uphold your end, that’s not a transaction. Last, while some of us DO just want a way to pay and own in a legit way, you can look at replies to the last comment and find a 1 in 5 example of “I’m never paying, I want it for free” which jacks the prices for the rest of us even if we are just paying a fair share of up front cost.
Your mistake is trying to explain everything with physical analogies. It straight up won’t work properly.
Yes and so what? Should there be a link between those costs and the amount of copies sold? I see regional prices increased by as much as 500% sometimes. For titles that have been around for many years too.
It’s just simple to assume that those initial costs will be recouped eventually, so long as the product is good enough. Regardless of piracy. I think it’s also adequate to assume that people must be okay with paying the asking price for what they get, and that it will not make the business less successful, if the product is good enough. If it’s not good enough then it shouldn’t sell much in the first place, and it may be impossible to recoup costs.
Fine, so let that small (albeit not free) cost of copying one digital copy slip from the pocket of the company. This is where pirates get it. They then create their own supply chain with their own R&D/T&E/whatever costs that are completely disconnected from the company and therefore shouldn’t be a concern.
When pirates who weren’t going to purchase a game try it for free and decide they actually want to support the developer or recommend it to a friend, this is a sale that wouldn’t be possible without piracy. Not exactly horseshit.
Exactly because the stock is infinite no one would ask you to be responsible for what you’ve done. That t-shirt is probably cool and more people would want it when they see it on you. But really it just can’t have infinite stock and a price at the same time.
Why even care what transaction is? In the end, some potential sales convert into real sales and that’s all that matters. Digital products can have demos and trials - there is no need for the nature of distribution to be “transactional”.
Missing the logical link here. But anyway, those people should be outside of the target audience. Yet still there are ways how they can help generate potential sales. By wearing a t-shirt they got for free from some illegal store, you know.
I see no reason why the cost shouldn’t be a function of copies sold, or rather that the maximum of cost and possible revenue shouldn’t be a function of copies sold. The point of selling is to make money, and profitable games beget sequels / remakes / expansions. Of course this isn’t a guarantee that companies are always good actors but we can’t control that.
I have no idea what the intersection is between devs and companies like EA or steam or whoever to be able to say that when you pirate you hurt the distributor not the developer. The cost of piracy may impact either one or both, but the original post is “company bad so piracy OK” so it’s not really a small scale / one-off discussion.
There are some pirates who will pay for a copy when all is said and done, but I would bet a large sum that these people are vastly in the minority. There’s not a good deed potential purchase at the end of probably even 1 in 5 downloads of anything.
To really boil it down, companies are predatory, but it doesn’t justify unbridled piracy. In the same way companies are predatory gougers, people are generally shitty, entitled leechers. Something something two wrongs something something else.
Not sure if you’re thinking of proposing some new system for the industry to go with, that would not be a subject of the same piracy related catchphrases.
We can, in fact, control that with our wallets. To some degree, yes. But it would sound more stupid if someone says “we can’t control companies” and something like “piracy should stop” together.
This is what we can’t control though - the revenue split between devs and publishers. As for the “company bad so piracy ok” I don’t think there is anything to discuss. It’s viable and I could use that myself (though I might not even have enough time to care about pirating stuff, I just don’t buy products related to specific parties).
And I would say there is even less deed potential in trying to convince pirates into buying stuff instead of downloading it for free. The point is, information spread helps sales of good products (so you want more paid/free end users, not less). Another point is, most pirates will always be pirates (so it’s useless to blame people who wasn’t even going to purchase your product by default). Third point is, digital products are luxury so it’s not a loss of people when they don’t buy your product (they will be just fine without it) - it’s your loss when people are not convinced to give you the money (the amount you ask for) for your product.
So what you’re saying is “yes some companies are providing bad products but it doesn’t mean people are entitled enough to not pay for such products”? Then what would you say as a day 1 purchaser to people who paid 75% less than you to receive the same product? Where is the point when you go from “that’s ok since it was an official discount” to “that’s not okay because they didn’t pay for it (
as much as someone else paid)”?No matter how bad something is or how little someone else paid for it, neither you nor anyone else is entitled to any product free of charge. Period. Whether you indirectly help sales or you don’t, it’s a shit perspective to take.
Yes I sail the seas every now and again and yes companies are shitty, but there’s no inherent high ground to be found in taking something without paying for it.
Well sorry, if I know the company will treat me and my PC as shit for buying their product, I’d rather consider using other party’s services a way to go.
I directly helped with bug reports (that were indeed used to fix stuff) on several products I didn’t own. You can also teach Minecraft’s creator how indirect help of pirates is a shit perspective I guess.
Also no. Bytes can’t be taken, only copied. As I said, physical world rules don’t really work here. You can copy as much as you want without doing any harm, and someone might even thank you later for preserving some work of art that was mistreated or abandoned by its original distributors.
It doesn’t. Those people are not a loss- they would not have bought even if piracy was impossible/unavailable, they would just do without. Companies claiming they have to raise prices to compensate for people who won’t buy their crap is a lie, and you are a fool to believe it.
“they would not have bought even if piracy was impossible”
Yeah, they would forgo their hobby and look at the wall all day instead!
Or, you know, find something else…
That they couldn’t pirate
No, dip ass.
If you’re middle class or upper middle class and not a teenager, you spend money on the things you want. If you can get them for free, most people do that instead.
The last time you went to a museum and it was donation requested instead of admission required, did you put any money in? My money is on no.
It’s because people do not want to pay creatives because you can’t physically touch stuff creatives produce.
Are they being paid now? There are about 9 Walmart workers for every professional writer in the US.
I take a rock from the moon, nobody owns the rock nor the moon. I don’t think I’m stealing it then. I’m just taking it.
So yes, something needs to be owned in order to be able to actually steal it.
The difference being that you not buying the moon rock doesn’t affect a person that worked to produce that rock (because there isn’t one) whereas pirating a copy of a game because you decide you don’t want to pay money for it because you fear you might not be able to play it permanently, that’s work theft, you’re profiting off the work of a person/team by enjoying the product they made to sell without compensating them.
I’m sure you wouldn’t appreciate it if your boss came up with a similar way to justify not paying you for the work you do and he told you “Oh no, I’m not stealing anything!”
That’s where I’m at. Whether or not a product is digital or freely reproducible is irrelevant, because rights to distribute ultimately belong to whoever wrote it. Their terms. Violating those terms to obtain a copy, again whether legitimately following those terms would give you full access to a copy or a license to use, is still theft. It’s easier to justify theft when the impact on the victim is so small, but even if it was zero, that doesn’t make it not theft. I’ll say it again, those are justifications, not disqualifiers.
Not that I’m some bootlicker either, I’ve got a jellyfin setup and you can guess where I got those movies. The difference is I’m not gaslighting myself into thinking that there’s anything legitimate about it. I fucking stole them dude (edit, and I don’t have a shred of guilt either). It’s just a stupid catchphrase, with logic comparable to “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”
I see. So if I make a Mickey Mouse cartoon I own that?
If it’s steamboat yeah. Otherwise you just can’t distribute it. Obtaining copyright is it’s own can of worms, and I’m not the guy to ask about it
I think you know it wasn’t steamboat that I was referring to.
So let me ask you: if a company can own an idea how come they get to own ideas off those ideas? Do farms get own the energy I get from food? Why are derived works also held by the company forever?
I wasn’t sure if you meant steamboat, but that’s the cool thing about the word “otherwise”, I can give you conditional answers. English is neat that way.
Anyway, like I said already copyright law isn’t in my wheelhouse. Actually, I’m confused, what are you arguing exactly? That pirated copies are derived works? I don’t understand what this has to do with piracy.
I am pointing out that copyright law is written to protect the wealthy and not to protect artists, which is why I won’t defend it. In theory the law could be redesigned so that it did but that is not going to happen.
On a related note: can you explain why I can’t patent it copyright a recipe? Is food not a creative act?
False analogy. When I am being paid to design something it is to bring something into the world that does not exist. If my employer could find it in the world they wouldn’t pay me.
The solution is to purchase a game, but then also pirate a drm free version of it.
Although an ideal solution would be to prevent companies from imposing those restrictions in the first place.
They already have. Wage theft is by far the largest form of theft in the US, and they certainly try to claim that it is legal.
So it makes it ok to do it too?
They’re clearly working on the principal of “might makes right” considering that every single digital media company has had instances of “selling” customers media, and then deciding to make it impossible for the customer to use said media, and they never give refunds.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Since they are legally people, and they have all the power, then clearly it’s ok for the rest of us to be thieves, just like them
How about the creators?
It’s funny because so far all the pro pirating arguments ignore the creators, the work they do and the fact that they have to make a living too.
If you’re referring to any of the major media companies the creators already got paid. Hollywood and the software industry both use Hollywood accounting so there’s never any profits to be shared in residuals.
Again if they want to be predatory thieves in their business models, it’s totally fine for us to steal right back.
Do you think people don’t pirate indie games?
Don’t worry, you are on the path. If you are asking these questions you are miles, or kilometers, ahead.