https://dbzer0.com/blog/what-are-the-ethics-of-piracy/
Is it ethically wrong to pirate games? I refute 4 common arguments for this.
I wrote this a long time ago, but I think it's still pertinent
It's YOUR DUCKING SACRED MORAL DUTY TO PIRATE AND PRESERVE EVERYTHING GOOD THAT YOU CAN FOR THE FUTURE GENERATIONS. ONLY YOU CAN SAVE HUMANITY'S LEGACY
I've actually been on a spree of buying games lately, supporting smaller developers. Still won't buy from Ubisoft/EA/Activision-Blizzard though.
I find it interesting that you end with the benefits of free to play games since those tend to be heavy on micro transactions, or over powered purchasable gear. Do you not worry that the transition to free to play games will also usher in an era of incomplete until packages are purchased games?
This is already happening even with Aaa games. The initial purchase doesn't seem to stop them anyway.
And no I don't worry about it. I think if there's motivation we'll figure out the way. People won't just ship making or playing good games.
it is hard to make sense of ethics in a world that is wrong
especially when the ones enforcing ethics are the same ones contributing to this wrong-ness
EDIT: also wow, 12 years ago
The true piracy is when people label it "piracy" in the first place. They are hijacking a loaded word in a transparent attempt to make normal activity sound wrong before we're even allowed to talk about it.
That hijack is one of their worst blunders though as pirates are very romanticized in culture. They just made us look way cooler than the computer nerds we are.
Old games & ROMs can only still be played and retrieved due to piracy. Otherwise most of these kind of games will no longer be here. And soon archive.org will kill themselves due to all the e-book and software drama.. And we end up with nothing, the future generation will no longer have access to all those files, games from the 80, 90, 00's etc.
I don't think piracy would end soon though , but it's more likely that it will be more active in countries that don't have hardened kind of copyright laws compared to the countries who have it
And the video games industry can give a single fuck less about preserving them. Only bringing them back for a limited time under reselling compilations or as we've seen, those small consoles a few years back where only a hand picked library of games were pre-installed on them. They're only brought out to simply make a quick buck, nothing more.
Corporations steal from us all the time, and they don't even let us buy their content, they only sell limited access that can be revoked at any time (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/9531016 or https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/12904663). Under these circumstances, there are no ethical issues with piracy.
In a perfect world, every dollar we spend goes right to the creators who made the creation.
I would support musicians more if I knew my money was going straight to them. But a lot of the time, they aren't, so I pirate out of spite against the labels for robbing the musicians through contract, how much they get.
I would support movies more if I knew my money was going straight to them. But a lot of the time, they aren't, so I buy movies second-hand from thrift stores and not the studios themselves.
I would support games much more if I knew my money was going straight to them. But a lot of the time, they mostly aren't. So I buy games dirt cheap and occasionally pirate.
In a perfect world, every dollar we spend goes right to the creators who made the creation.
In a perfect world, shit's created without someone having to create it to make money. A market without middlemen is still a market.
well if you want to support directly an artist almost all of them have a bandcamp page
Take what you can't afford, support what you can, share if you dare, and do not trade for money.
stallman had something like the most ethical thing to is use free sofware and its less ethical to not pay for non-free software but it is least ethical to pay for non-free software. or something to that effect.
Hmm, it's strange grey area. Sometimes piracy is the only way to make the book not disappear. There are niche, low circulation books and magazines which without piracy would disappear and became almost unavailable.
Sometimes the book is no longer in the print because of many reasons:
Ethics & piracy is pretty strange combination and there is no easy answer for it
I agree with all those points.
I don't know if adding exceptional cases to de equation adds to the argument or not. But there are many instances where the ones selling the product are not the ones that made it, and the ones that made it will never see a penny of what you paid for. This is true in old games/media, where rights were bought long ago by corporations and creators see nothing. Also true in any big production made by a big corporation with many workers. The workers who actually create the IP were paid by hour, while corporations and investors get to keep milking the product after creators had been paid.
This will invalidate any argument about creators getting compensated for their work. For those cases at least.
Piracy from the big guy who's exploiting little guys to make and sell products is fair.
Pirating things off the little guy, who's barely making a living is how the little guys stop making content on their own, and will instead opt to work for the big guy who can guarantee a livelihood, no matter how small. If you think you as a society isn't contributing to it then just look around.
And It is only getting worse. While you can fantasize about it, indie-anything who get lucky are exceedingly rare for a reason. But you won't stop removed about how everything from the Big Bad has gone to shit. It couldn't totally be because everyone thinks they're entitled to others hard work, because they paid for "the internet".
But as always, entitled pricks are how we end up on ever more convulsive state of the world, no matter which side you're on. So carry on, ig.