[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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Me after EA nuked Bookworm Adventures out of existence:
I see this link posted everywhere for weeks now but like, I’ve never been able to use it. The US version of it recommends the DGCCRF which is exclusive to France or visitors thereof. It’s weird that it doesn’t recommend a US branch or have the FTC section at the top
I think there was an episode where they found out that there’s a US law that says US citizens don’t have the right to ownership of software or something like that. they’re only trying in countries where customer protection is a thing, but the practice of removing ownership of software after some time is in a gray area.
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So you’re saying a company representative can come to your home at any time and take all the clothes you bought from them because they still own the rights to the design ?
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Didn’t mean to sound harsh. Not a native English speaker.
It’s still in a gray legal area in most countries or they wouldn’t even be trying. Nobody is trying to steal the intelectual property, just make it that companies can’t come years later and remove things you bought full price . It’s a matter of customer protection.
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.
for that particular copy
I think it’s a different version of s movie that’s important. If you bought the director’s cut but downloaded the cinematic version then you technically don’t have a license for that.
As far as I can tell, the most prominent argument is that it’s a different copy due to stuff like the resolution being different, if you own the DVD copy and download the Blu-ray, that’s what they get you on. I imagine that works the other way too.
IDK. The laws are a mess and the courts are largely bought and paid for by the copyright holders.
Fucking sick. Communist
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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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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.”
Not everything is a debate, you’re allowed to just discuss.
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.
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.
The fuck I wouldn’t.
