[Image Description]: A meme in the style of anti-piracy ads stating the following:
You wouldn’t pirate a game you already paid for to be able to play it again since the company stopped supporting it and no longer sells it
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You wouldn’t pirate a ~30 year old game that was never sold in your country and never translated to your language for a no longer made console but that was carefully ported to the PC and lovingly translated to multiple languages, including your own, by a dedicated group of enthusiasts that genuinely love the game and only want others to have a chance to enjoy it as well.
You wouldn’t throw away a project you spent years and millions of dollars working on for a tax write off
You wouldn’t shutter a studio that produced a critically acclaimed game and then tell your remaining employees they need to make more games like that one.
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This made so mad it makes me want to shut down small grassroots videogame tournaments held by passionate communities for games I haven’t monotized in literal decades!
Hot take: if you bought the game, but need to download a crack or cracked version to play it because the anti cheat or product key validation or whatever is broken, then you haven’t pirated the game. You’re only reclaiming access to something you paid for.
Side note, this isn’t legal advice and IANAL.
I feel the same about downloading movies that you bought which became so damaged that they can no longer be watched from the original media. You own the content, but because they packaged it in a way that was prone to becoming unusable, you lost access to the content. You still paid for a license to the media, but lost access to that media. If you regain that access -by whatever means- then you still legally have the right to it.
I know the courts and copyright lawyers would argue about the license being for that particular copy on that particular media or something, but I disagree.
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Sorry, I misspoke. You own a license to have the content.
Many years back , a friend was a manager of a game shop. They let me bring in badly scarred discs of movies and PS1/2 games, pay a very small fee (I want to say like $1/disc?) to get a brand new copy of the disc as replacement. Was a service that was available to resell shops apparently, though she mentioned that it also has a subscription aspect that likely placed it well out of reach of mortals.
I’d even be fine with mildly increased cost on something like that for regular consumers, but alas no…
Fucking sick. Communist
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You wouldn’t download an NFT
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Nobody owns all the thousands of games available for their emulators or thousands of blu-rays
And companies fail to acknowledge that not every download is a lost sale. The people who have downloaded thousands of games for their emulators would not have purchased those thousands of games if emulation wasn’t available.
people who just indiscriminately download everything available
Case in point. Just because they’re downloading it “because it’s free” doesn’t mean they were going to purchase “everything available” but find it all for free instead. They are likely not even consuming most of it anyway, and just collecting.
It is absurd that Nintendo will spend money to shut down a webpage hosting “Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link” when that’s not something they will ever sell again. Someone pirating Baldur’s Gate 3 because they don’t want to pay for it doesn’t change the absurdity of keeping a stranglehold on a 37 year old game.
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Not everything is a debate, you’re allowed to just discuss.
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Little bit of column A, little bit of column B.
I do not disagree that there are people who download things for free because they don’t want to pay for it. However that doesn’t mean every download represents a lost sale. I would argue the majority of downloads never would have been sales in the first place.
Personally I frequently pirate things to try them. If I bounce off of it then I’m glad I didn’t pay for it, if I like it I buy it. I have many games on Steam with under an hour of playtime and most achievements unlocked because I finished the game on a pirated copy, then purchased it and loaded my save.
All that said my main point is that all of this is irrelevant to the actual topic at hand: if I have purchased a game legally and it is no longer being supported there should be no issue with me acquiring the files through another method in order to play it.
Saying “well some people use piracy to get things for free” is as relevant as coming into a discussion about roads needing to be maintained with “well some people use roads to speed, which is breaking the law.”
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Most people download things because they want it for free
Which is the original point of IP such as copyright in the first place, to create a robust public domain. We have Mr. Disney to thank for repurposing our IP laws to lock up content so that we plebs can never enjoy anything without paying for it.
Most artists are more interested in their work getting experienced than getting paid each time, but its the industrialists and the ownership class who profits the most (by far) by locking things down, and even they are glad to circumvent licensing for convenience. It appears we all know it’s a top-side racket.
Download that bear!
I guess I mostly agree, though, I disagree that it isn’t acknowledged. From what I see, piracy oftentimes is explicitly precisely just because people want something for free (myself included tee-hee).
The preservation argument has gotten a lot more prevalent, and I agree that there are a lot of people who use that as a justification for pirating while not actually working to preserve the media they pirate, but I at least see far more people who don’t justify it at all. Not that they have to, IMHO.
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