Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I felt that way too, at times, but then… why? Sometimes I feel some of the publishing megacorps just love gaslighting us - a car $30k car obviously isn’t the same as a $50 game, but on the other hand it actually is, apparently?
How’s that meme go again - “fuck you, I’d download a car if I could” =)
I believe that license change was deemed to be legally invalid and unenforceable. In any case, it wouldn’t affect people’s ownership of a D&D product, where they bought something and then could no longer use it.
Right, but they tried!
What about BMW selling subscriptions to heated seats? The heated seat is in the car. They want to charge you monthly to use it. Is it morally acceptable to hack your car and unlock free heated seats?
That’s another great example. You own the car, you own the seats, you own the circuitry, but you have to pay monthly for the functionality?? I would avoid that car completely.
Yes. Next question.
Would you download a car if you could?
I don’t know what it can be said about software piracy that it hasn’t been said in the last 40 years of discussions, to be honest.
Legally bad, ethically ok, if you can’t get it otherwise in any other manner.
I mean, technically I have done this.
It was for my 3d printer, and it was a model car.
But I did download it.
It’s actually immoral not to pirate games, TV shows, movies, and other media that corporate license fuckery and preservation laziness have taken off the market. Everyone should be pirating these titles as many times per day as their internet connection allows.
I’ve been informed that I wouldn’t
I would have 0 guilt pirateing all 3 seasons on final space. Tho if the creator Olan Rogers had a spot to send him a donation I would even feel good about doing it.
I gleefully pirate software where the original license holders are long gone, or the current IP owners are just a holding company with no interest in doing anything but dumping the software on a digital storefront. Particularly when I paid the original devs 25 years ago for the same software.
That being said, my GOG library is filled with old DOS games that are trivally easy to get elsewhere for free.
Nowadays, this is more because i don"t want all these nascent gaming experiences to fade away, which is why i think the Internet Archive is doing God’s work & I give them money.
Abandonware is certainly morally acceptable. Also if I had purchased the game on a different platform. I get that they’d love to monetize the same game multiple times but given that it’s my money, the answer is gonna be no.
If I didn’t buy the game 10 years ago and it’s still being legitimately sold by anyone, I wouldn’t pirate it.
And yeah, my answers in my 40s are very different from my teens!
Sure, now that I have money, I basically never think to pirate anything. The only things that need to be pirated is stuff you literally cannot buy. Like, I want to give you money for Freelancer, but you won’t let me!
I still have my original disk too! With Cd key, but the disc cracked years ago.
Why is this not on steam for 20 bucks? I don’t know. Also, the HD patches and updates for modern systems are really slick too.
The next version was even better.
I think that’s a bit of a facile conclusion. Some nonzero number of games also do not get purchased simply because there’s a used copy next to them on the shelf for 10% cheaper.
Publishers love to count every pirated copy as a “lost sale”, which is obviously ridiculous when most of those people would never have bought it in the absence of a pirated version. But with every used copy sold, the buyer was demonstrably willing to spend their actual money on the game, so the argument is a lot stronger.
I don’t want to come down too hard on the used market because I do support overall stronger individual rights to do what you want with your property, but personally I don’t engage with it. If I’m going to spend money on games, I want to make sure some of it goes to the creator and not just a parasitic middleman.
Personally, I land in the same place as most here: As long as there’s a way to buy a game that gives the creator money, then that’s the ethical thing to do. But I’m glad that pirates are preventing everything else from permanently disappearing into the ether, and I don’t have any ethical qualms about those cases.
Maybe buy something new from the developer or series if you particularly enjoy an old game that you pirated? Or just consider the scales more or less balanced from all the times you bought a game and played it barely or not at all? If you’re doing your part to support game developers with purchases, then I don’t think you need to lose sleep over the times when they don’t make it possible to do so.
This is my position at the end of the day.
Example: I buy all my music. The only real change is that I buy digital versions of it now. Spotify and its ilk don’t compensate artists enough.
Several years ago, an artist I had bought things from released a new album. I went to buy it. One of the tracks on that album had some weird copyright issue and couldn’t be bought in the US (or even viewed on Youtube iirc). Because of that, the entire album wasn’t available for purchase in the US, nor were any of the tracks.
I tried many methods. VPNs to foreign countries, “changing” locations and the like. Literally nothing worked. Contacting the artist and their label got no response.
I ended up ripping the Youtube audio of the album.
I’m willing to go to extremes to try to give you money, but if you refuse to let me, well…
At some point that isn’t on me, imo. And it’s very often because of stupid shit.
My view on software is similar. Also of note, the second you give me a legal option to finally pay you, I’ll probably take it. But odds are also good I’ll never know that door opened because it usually takes years and it’s not like I’m checking every week to see if I can.
I’d like to use this moment to highlight the example of a certain Body Count song that literally cannot be purchased. I brought it up on Twitter one day and of all people a lawyer responded with someplace I could download a copy of it. When I said I wanted to pay for it, his response was pretty reasonable: go to a concert or buy a t-shirt from the band. They still get your support and it’s basically a proxy for the song.
Now this obviously breaks down with software. Giving money generically to Nintendo doesn’t help the team that made the game I want. But it’s also a giant corporation so my strong desire to help out creators is also nearly non-existent as well. I don’t care if Nintendo doesn’t get my money that much. It wont keep me up at night knowing they didn’t get my money from an Etrian Oddessy, though it would bug me that Atlus and the people that worked on it didn’t. If they could sell it to me and chose not to, or took it away so they could try to milk more money? Yeah, no qualms there really.
TLDR: Fuck artificial scarcity. Pay artists fairly for their work when you can.
Fortunately, the 10% cheaper one already got purchased. Possibly because the buyer knew it could be resold.
I still can’t believe I gave away my original CD! It would have been a collector’s item.
They have no legal responsibility, but that says nothing of their cultural responsibility. Home of the Underdogs existed (exists?) in a legal grey area, but a morally sound one, because they served a cultural purpose similar to the Internet Archive.
Similarly, the original versions of Star Wars mostly continue to exist through the efforts of legally dubious but morally sound independent efforts to preserve a hugely important piece of culture. That’s really all there is to it when a corporation tries to delete something beloved from society. If they offer a way to buy it, I’m all for it. (Still waiting on Disney to fix this one…)