Loss prevention is pretty huge in physical retail and those costs are most definitely passed on to consumer.
See above.
Everybody has their own lines, as morals are inherently subjective. Discussing the relative ethical compromise in pirating software vs. fan fiction vs. mods using unauthorized IP vs. stealing a car vs. stealing a load of bread to feed your family (etc) won’t go anywhere that hasn’t come up a million times before. We already know all those arguments, don’t we?
One thing that isn’t subjective is that it’s simply rude to talk about pirating software in front of developers and industry folk.
That said, stusser, as a couple of us have tried to point out in this thread, concerns about DRM (or in the case of Denuvo, anti-tampering software that protects DRM) are not solely motivated by wanting to pirate software.
Or indeed at all, in many cases. I personally can’t imagine wanting or needing to pirate anything with the discount culture Steam helped popularize, much less with my 1900 game Steam library, but I sure don’t want to have DRM fucking with anyone’s ability to play games now or in the future, mine or otherwise.
Does the authentication happen with Steam or the publisher’s server, or both? I don’t see Steam going anywhere, it’s arguably a better form of preservation than ISOs hosted on a site that can be nuked whenever. Microsoft breaking stuff with new versions of Windows is also a problem, but there’s always the fallback of running a VM. There’s some games from the Dark Ages of PC Gaming(Win 95 thru XP) where that really is your only option. A damn sight better than backwards compatibility on consoles, grumble …
In case we haven’t hit all the usual beats on piracy, le me just say that pirates weren’t going to pay for the game anyways. Why no, I am not investing any of my own money on this assumption.
I am not particularly fussed about Steam myself (see 1900 game library), but layering additional bullshit on top of Steam is uncool, and there are games that aren’t available through Steam or legitimately whatsoever. Right now the pirates largely cover the “what about games with rights issues keeping them off storefronts” base (NOLF, for example), but if DRM were to actually work for once? That has serious potential to suck down the line.
Can we accept the concept of games as software as a service and that the service can terminate?
I’m not sure that I could but I can imagine a day when people shrug and call me an old codger (“in my days we owned our games and played them anytime we wanted to!”). With Steam I think I’ve may have already bought in to this future.
No, because many games are singleplayer and come packaged in box.
You buy a box. They sell you a box. Relation is terminated once money have changed hands.
Many people are collectors as well as hobbyists.
That’s not the legal interaction. The box just contains the physical expression of the software for installation; you are also paying for the licence to operate the software (that’s what your EULA is, but nobody reads that!). The licence may be time limited.
I believe that the EULAs have slowly been chipping away at our rights (did I mention nobody reads those?), but what can we do, right?
Keep in mind that 1) EULAs can’t make you waive some basic rights granted by law, and 2) EULAs have not been ever tested in court AFAIK, so no one is sure how effective they are in curbing/limiting your rights.
Also note that there is a difference between legal and moral, and also between having laws and enforcing those laws. If you have a DRM-free piece of software (in a box or otherwise) I doubt anyone would prevent you from having or running the software in case the license expires or something.
EULA’s are tested in the business world regularly. The most high profile one in common knowledge (which may have eventual ramifications for consumer EULA’s) was the Oracle case in Europe from a few years back.
If you have a DRM-free piece of software (in a box or otherwise) I doubt anyone would prevent you from having or running the software in case the license expires or something.
Wanna bet? Many software vendors would have words…
I would be super pissed If I buy some software with a time limit, and the time limit is not on the front of the box in big letters. Same thing if I buy a box, and the box end being a demo, half a version, region incompatible, or other “defect” that turn what I trough I was buying in something else worse than what I trough I was paying for.
You can have the warning in the back of the box, in tiny letters with confusing legal speak. And I would still feel angry, but this time I will feel I share part of the responsibility for failing for the scam. I will think is a scam, and I will think is legal, a legal scam.
Yes, but if morals are subjective, then rudeness may not be wrong :)
Do you have a link?
When corporations are involved, sure. But individuals? And games? I doubt it.
Also, I have yet to see an EULA with an expiration date for the license, at least where games are concerned.
I picked that too, but I don’t think this is the place for a philosophical debate about morals. Let’s just take the pragmatic route and work with the practical, established premise that if a person does some work expecting compensation for it, then benefiting of that work without providing compensation destabilizes the implicit social contract, degrading social ties, damaging the drive for creative work and contributing to grief and chaos in the end.
The same applies to rudeness in many cases, I suppose.
Yep, the Oracle case was this one:
You realize that, in that case, the EULA was overturned, right? I have yet to see a case in which the EULA wins in court (in part, because most such cases are settled out of court).
It was overturned in EU Courts for the betterment of mankind, I believe in the US you’re still at the behest of the paymasters as ArsTechnica mentions near the end of their article.