Piracy is theft

I'm moving this conversation out of the I'm not a gamer thread because I don't want to clog it up any more, but I do want to discuss this further.

RevRico said:

Appleseed said:

Get an emulator. Nintendo for days.

This really is the right answer. What you wanna play? NES, SNES, genesis, 3DO, Virtual Boy, N64, etc etc? Grab an emulator, find a Rom pack, and relive your childhood. MAME will get you old arcade games, Atari emulators abound if you want to blow your kids mind.

Sure the graphics suck, but at least the games are complete and finished unlike anything that's been released in the last 5ish years.

They're also free. 

Ummm, I'm pretty sure Nintendo still exists as a company, which means they aren't abandonware.

So by "free" I think what you really mean is "stolen."

RevRico said:

In reply to Duke :

if they aren't available for sale anywhere, then they are free. 

Want me to buy a game I owned 30 years ago just to play it again? Put it up for sale again.

 

I'd all but stopped pirating stuff until publishers decided to start releasing half finished games with no demo or refund window. Now, I find it mandatory, because paying $60+ for some half baked maybe it'll get finished eventually turd just isn't worth it, and those business practices should be punished. Only thing I really miss about PC gaming was only paying for stuff that was worth the investment.

Sorry not sorry. Maybe if publishers didn't try to screw their audience we wouldn't have to. 

Sorry, not true. 

The way you 'punish' publishers for putting out what you consider unfinished or bad products is by NOT BUYING THEM.  But you don't get to say "this isn't good enough to pay money for, but I'll be happy to steal it."  If it's not good enough to play, then just don't play it.  If it is good enough to play, then pay for it.

I don't buy the piracy != theft argument for a hot minute.  That's a self-justification and it doesn't hold any water.  Intellectual property IS a real thing no matter how much you want to tell yourself it isn't.

The smarmy little graphic above is based on a false premise that intellectual property isn't real and that digital duplication, just because it is technically possible, is morally acceptable.

Here's why piracy IS theft:

1. Creator makes a thing (book, song, movie, video game, whatever) with intent to profit from their talent, imagination, and investment of time and money.
    
2. Creator has (for example) a predicted anticipation of making $5 net on 100,000 unit sales for a potential return of $500,000.  Price and investment are set based around those calculations.
    
3. If creator was over-optimistic and sales are only 75,000 units, then net return is only $375,000 and therefore creator only makes 75% of what they were hoping to.  No harm no foul.  That is the risk taken in any investment.  If the creator is wrong enough often enough, the net return is negative, they lose their investment, and go out of business.  Again, NO HARM NO FOUL - that's how business works.  Your product needs to be good enough to make people willing to buy it in order to have it.
    
4. BUT - say the product is every bit as good as the creator thought it was, and easily moves the 100,000 units expected.  EXCEPT - 25,000 of those units are pirated by people who thought they were entitled to the creator's work at zero cost to themselves.  So the net return is again $375,000 and that missing $125,000 has been stolen by users who didn't think they had to pay for what they were using. 

This is the reality.  It is nothing like the stolen car analogy in the graphic above which is disingenuous at best and actually an outright lie.

If your product isn't good enough that enough people buy it, that's on you.

But if your product IS good enough but people pirate it instead of buying it, that's on them and they are stealing from you.  It is a real, actual theft, even though there is not necessarily a physical object being stolen.

I'll say this again for those at the back who want to self-justify their theft:

The way you 'punish' publishers for putting out what you consider unfinished or bad products is by NOT BUYING THEM.  If it's not good enough to play, then don't play it.  If it is good enough to play, then pay for it.

Piracy is not theft. Whether or not it's OK with you, it's still not theft. You are not stealing things.

dculberson said:

Piracy is not theft. Whether or not it's OK with you, it's still not theft. You are not stealing things.

Yes, YOU ARE.  You are stealing revenue from the creator by using their product without paying for it.  To put it another way, you are stealing their talent, creativity, work, and capital investment.  You are benefiting from the fruits of their labor without reimbursing them for that labor.

I'm not taking sides but this I see this as a good place for a shot across the bow and a firm reminder of civil discourse.

Learn it, know it, live it: Welcome to the Party

Duke said:

dculberson said:

Piracy is not theft. Whether or not it's OK with you, it's still not theft. You are not stealing things.

Yes, YOU ARE.  You are stealing revenue from the creator by using their product without paying for it.  To put it another way, you are stealing their talent, creativity, work, and capital investment.

 

Just like hot-linking a meme photo?

Different scale, same concept.

What if you bought a NES way back when, sold it years ago, and now want to relive  the old days? You paid full retail, which reimbursed them at the time. 

Does Nintendo still sell a NES console? Can I go buy a N64 and goldeneye so I can stay up all night with pizza and Jolt! cola? 

If they dont sell it/offer it, is it still theft? 

In reply to Duke :

You're missing a step Duke. 

Creator makes thing for publisher. Publisher likes it, pushes it forward, buys good press and reviews, forces creator to put out unfinished product. Because publisher bought good reviews and people are impulsive and stupid, they buy it first week, publisher makes bank, creator gets pennies on the dollar, product is left to rot in public whether it's finished or not. Maybe, eventually, possibly, they'll think about coming back to finish it.

Occasionally, outrage and backlash will follow, see cyberpunk 2077, GTA trilogy definitive edition, forza horizon 5, etc etc. Changes will be made, reputations tarnished and repaired, cycle continues.

Publishers get their money first week, give lip service that maybe they'll fix things, creator and customer get screwed.

Repeat ad nauseam.

Could fix this by providing demos. Could fix this by allowing refunds. Could fix this by listening to creators and devs when they say it's not done. 

Lots of ways to fix this, except notice the common denominator, the customer and creator wind up screwed. 

Instead, publisher blames pirates for E36 M3ty sales and E36 M3ty dev payout, despite multiple studies through the years showing a majority of pirates actually spend MORE money on media after trying it out. 

Almost as if letting puddle try things out BEFORE purchase would help sales be higher. Bizarre concept I know. 

Now, let's look at another example. I want to play Bubbsy (first random game I could think of not on a compilation pack). Owned it on genesis decades ago. Their publisher has been gone since the late 90s, technically still a Sega property but they're not legally allowed to do anything with it because music and artistic licenses are impossible to keep track of in the videogame industry the way companies are bought, sold, gutted, and changed. Can't find used copies, which *gasp* provide exactly 0 cents to any entity in the industry, so download the ROM because that's the only place it's available. Is that theft?

The videogame history museum would like a word then if it is. 

Make quality products and be honest with consumers, and these problems mostly disappear. Stop letting people that hung out with Thomas Edison control rights laws in the modern world, and these problems mostly disappear. Quit hiring Disney copyright lawyers to be judges who work solely for the industries benefit instead of upholding law, updating law, or trying to keep everything ever created in a single entities hands by constantly changing length of time before things become public domain, and these problems start to disappear. With worldwide connectivity, eliminate region locking and region time delays, allow ALL people to access ALL media they're already paying for, and these problems start to disappear. 

Javelin said:

Duke said:

dculberson said:

Piracy is not theft. Whether or not it's OK with you, it's still not theft. You are not stealing things.

Yes, YOU ARE.  You are stealing revenue from the creator by using their product without paying for it.  To put it another way, you are stealing their talent, creativity, work, and capital investment.

 

Just like hot-linking a meme photo?

Different scale, same concept.

Technically correct.

Duke said:

I'm moving this conversation out of the I'm not a gamer thread because I don't want to clog it up any more, but I do want to discuss this further.

RevRico said:

Appleseed said:

Get an emulator. Nintendo for days.

This really is the right answer. What you wanna play? NES, SNES, genesis, 3DO, Virtual Boy, N64, etc etc? Grab an emulator, find a Rom pack, and relive your childhood. MAME will get you old arcade games, Atari emulators abound if you want to blow your kids mind.

Sure the graphics suck, but at least the games are complete and finished unlike anything that's been released in the last 5ish years.

They're also free. 

Ummm, I'm pretty sure Nintendo still exists as a company, which means they aren't abandonware.

So by "free" I think what you really mean is "stolen."

Nintendo still exists, yes, and to the extent that there are games that are re-released as emulated titles on current hardware, I tend to agree with you. However, there's plenty of that back catalog that isn't available as a modern release, and in that case if you want to play it you've got two options:

1 - Go looking for the original hardware and cartridge on the used market. Take a gamble on whether 20-30+ year old hardware still works, and whether 20-30+ year old cartridges haven't deteriorated into an unplayable state.
2 - Download a ROM

In neither case is additional revenue accruing to the creator or publisher of the game, because the game is no longer supported and is abandonware as a result. Where there is an option to compensate a creator for past works, I agree that one should do it - but for titles that are truly abandonware (the original Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego spring to mind), I don't see a problem.

Piracy is theft, just like borrowing a music CD from a friend and making a copy is theft.  The thing I don't have an issue with is when I can't purchase the "thing" that I want in the first place.

Duke said:

dculberson said:

Piracy is not theft. Whether or not it's OK with you, it's still not theft. You are not stealing things.

Yes, YOU ARE.  You are stealing revenue from the creator by using their product without paying for it.  To put it another way, you are stealing their talent, creativity, work, and capital investment.  You are benefiting from the fruits of their labor without reimbursing them for that labor.

 

So it wasn't theft when apple charged $0.99 for a song and the creator got $0.03 for it because the creator was compensated?

RevRico said:

In reply to Duke :

You're missing a step Duke. 

Because publisher bought good reviews and people are impulsive and stupid, they buy it first week, publisher makes bank, creator gets pennies on the dollar, product is left to rot in public whether it's finished or not.

Sorry, that's the buyer's fault.  If you are concerned this might be an issue, wait to buy it until user reviews are in, or acknowledge you're taking the risk yourself.  Or, just say to yourself, "X publisher often puts out unfinished products, so I'm not buying their broken crap any more."  None of what you say in your post entitles anyone to steal a product.  It absolutely justifies a decision not to buy their bullE36 M3 any more.  That is how the users get their message across to the publisher.

RevRico said:

Duke said:

dculberson said:

Piracy is not theft. Whether or not it's OK with you, it's still not theft. You are not stealing things.

Yes, YOU ARE.  You are stealing revenue from the creator by using their product without paying for it.  To put it another way, you are stealing their talent, creativity, work, and capital investment.  You are benefiting from the fruits of their labor without reimbursing them for that labor.

So it wasn't theft when apple charged $0.99 for a song and the creator got $0.03 for it because the creator was compensated?

Nope, not even a little bit.  The creator agreed to that percentage.  If it wasn't enough, they shouldn't have agreed to that arrangement.

Under current copyright law, despite the multiple attempts by industry players to have it changed, you are legally allowed to make, own, and use a backup copy of media you own. Records, VHS, CDs, dvds, games, etc. 

If I have owned things before, I am entitled to backups of them, as the law is written. 

Downloading a Rom instead of buying a bunch of custom hardware to copy a cartridge is still providing a singular backup, which is, in and of itself, 100% legal. 

So I'm failing to see the problem.

Aaron_King said:

Piracy is theft, just like borrowing a music CD from a friend and making a copy is theft.  The thing I don't have an issue with is when I can't purchase the "thing" that I want in the first place.

That's why abandonware is a thing.  No entity exists to retain ownership of the intellectual property rights.  But Nintendo still exists as a company and it is up to them whether they decide to continue selling (or allow others to sell) their back catalog of products.  Just because someone really really wants a game that is no longer sold does not justify piracy if the owner of the game still exists and has decided not to sell it any more.

If you want the game, source a used copy.  Then the original purchaser is legitimately selling you their rights of ownership and use.

So I'm 99% on Duke's side here (Piracy IS theft), but the Bubsy example is a good one as I do have a few additional roms on my Genesis Mini that are not available for sale anywhere.

I've frequently thought about 'acquiring' Wolfenstein (2009) in a similar manner for this reason.  Its IP got bought by ZeniMax when they purchased id and shortly after the game was no longer available for purchase anywhere.

Another good example is American McGee's Alice.  Excellent game, but you can't buy it anywhere.

Maybe there needs to be a marketplace for retired and outdated intellectual property. When publishers tire of marketing a product, their rights expire.  They have broken their contract with the original artist to market the property, and the property would be turned over to this marketplace. The marketplace would then continue to return revenues and residuals to the original artist.

Its an idea that could work really well, except for one thing. Piracy. No one would buy the old products because they are too easy to steal. So, the artist/ creator still gets screwed, and the "consumer" is still a thief. 
 

Piracy is theft.

RevRico said:

Under current copyright law, despite the multiple attempts by industry players to have it changed, you are legally allowed to make, own, and use a backup copy of media you own. Records, VHS, CDs, dvds, games, etc. 

If I have owned things before, I am entitled to backups of them, as the law is written. 

Downloading a Rom instead of buying a bunch of custom hardware to copy a cartridge is still providing a singular backup, which is, in and of itself, 100% legal. 

So I'm failing to see the problem.

Really, you're going to try that route? 100% red herring.

You are entitled to make backups of properties you already legally own.  Not once owned.  If you have sold or lost or given away the property, then you have lost your right to it.  I won't argue the technicality of whether that extends to downloading a potentially different version of a title rather than physically copying the one you legitimately purchased.

But you know as well as I do that isn't what you were recommending in the other thread.

Duke said:

RevRico said:

So it wasn't theft when apple charged $0.99 for a song and the creator got $0.03 for it because the creator was compensated?

Nope, not even a little bit.  The creator agreed to that percentage.  If it wasn't enough, they shouldn't have agreed to that arrangement.

 

To be fair that's not really accurate for many musicians. A lot are still bound to contracts that predate the concept of music streaming, and the labels commonly set up back door deals with companies like Spotify, so the artists see little or sometimes no compensation at all. On top of that, labels almost always own the masters, so the artists don't have a leg to stand on as far as negotiating a better deal or pulling their work (basically you need to have Neil Young or Taylor Swift-level clout).

Some artists caught in these kind of deals advocate for just pirating the music instead of paying a huge corporation like Spotify because they're not seeing a dime either way.

hybridmomentspass said:

What if you bought a NES way back when, sold it years ago, and now want to relive  the old days? You paid full retail, which reimbursed them at the time. 

Does Nintendo still sell a NES console? Can I go buy a N64 and goldeneye so I can stay up all night with pizza and Jolt! cola? 

If they dont sell it/offer it, is it still theft? 

There's an odd gray area here. Let's say I own a couple hundred Atari games, and several consoles. If I also have roms of those Atari games on say my laptop for "backup" purposes, that's not actually illegal, or piracy. Where they get you is distribution of materials for other than "personal" use and rentention of that information without proper paying for it. I could make 100 digital copies of conkers bad fur day to back up my n64 cartridge, but the minute I put that on a file sharing site, that's bad. 

Edit- what I find most interesting about this discussion is how it ties to nfts. Aside from the sales practices (which can admittedly be shady as berkeley) the WHOLE concept is identifiable information tying to true ownership and distribution rights of a given image that doesn't exist outside of the internet. These days, there aren't physical copies of things anymore. I've got several TB of games and music and video content that I've legally bought and paid for, either as part of a subscription service, or outright. I've bought these from...whoever. Whoever bought them from someone else and on down the line until you get back to the original, singular copy that was developed and sold with the intention of distribution rights and residuals and stuff like that. 

Duke said:

Aaron_King said:

Piracy is theft, just like borrowing a music CD from a friend and making a copy is theft.  The thing I don't have an issue with is when I can't purchase the "thing" that I want in the first place.

That's why abandonware is a thing.  No entity exists to retain ownership of the intellectual property rights.  But Nintendo still exists as a company and it is up to them whether they decide to continue selling (or allow others to sell) their back catalog of products.  Just because someone really really wants a game that is no longer sold does not justify piracy if the owner of the game still exists and has decided not to sell it any more.

If you want the game, source a used copy.  Then the original purchaser is legitimately selling you their rights of ownership and use.

 

So where do you draw the line with abandonware? 

Redneck Rampage was an Interactive Arts company. Bought by Sierra, bought by Sega, absorbed into EA briefly, sold to Take 2 eventually.

Which company would you consider the owner then? Interactive Arts because it was released by them? Take 2 because they wound up with whatever was left of the licenses over 15 years after interactive arts shut down? Some company in the middle that an artist moved to while retaining their image copyrights? The music license holder? The original president of Interactive?

So Gamestop sells used games. It was once bought as an original then given up, resold or traded in. Gamestop stocks it as a pre-owned game and makes money from it without giving the original publisher any money from the re-sell. How is that not theft by Duke's definition?

RevRico said:

Under current copyright law, despite the multiple attempts by industry players to have it changed, you are legally allowed to make, own, and use a backup copy of media you own. Records, VHS, CDs, dvds, games, etc. 

If I have owned things before, I am entitled to backups of them, as the law is written. 

Downloading a Rom instead of buying a bunch of custom hardware to copy a cartridge is still providing a singular backup, which is, in and of itself, 100% legal. 

So I'm failing to see the problem.

I disagree with this. There is a difference between making a backup copy for personal use of something you own, and making a copy of something someone else owns (although you USED to own it)

If I own a game, a copy of music, art, etc and then one day no longer own it, then I have either sold it, given it away, or it was stolen from me. In all 3 cases I no longer own it.  If I want it again, I'm gonna have to buy it again.

If I used to own a hammer but no longer own it, I don't inherit the right to steal someone else's hammer.  I either sold it, gave it away, or it was stolen. In all three cases I'm gonna have to buy a new hammer.

Duke said:

RevRico said:

Under current copyright law, despite the multiple attempts by industry players to have it changed, you are legally allowed to make, own, and use a backup copy of media you own. Records, VHS, CDs, dvds, games, etc. 

If I have owned things before, I am entitled to backups of them, as the law is written. 

Downloading a Rom instead of buying a bunch of custom hardware to copy a cartridge is still providing a singular backup, which is, in and of itself, 100% legal. 

So I'm failing to see the problem.

Really, you're going to try that route?

You are entitled to make backups of properties you already legally own.  I won't argue the technicality of whether that extends to downloading a potentially different version of a title rather than physically copying the one you legitimately purchased.

But you know as well as I do that isn't what you were recommending in the other thread.

 

It was with regards to emulators actually. Emulated old school tech, for the most part, is now historical. There are plenty of legal, legitimate, law following places to download emulators and Roms to preserve gaming history specifically because of how convoluted rights and licensing is in the gaming industry.

My advice to anyone trying to get into PC games is to head over to pirate bay and try some things out before they buy them, but that seemed inappropriate for here. 

I think our existing framework isn't complete for this topic.

I absolutely do not accept that it's totally okay to... pirate a thing that's for sale because the pricing doesn't align with your perceived value. I also suspect you could find examples I wouldn't argue with, but it would have to be a lot more compelling than "this isn't a $60 game IMHO."

There's a huge difference between things you can purchase and things which are not available through legitimate channels. I buy a yearly pass to the sanctioning body's coverage of a favorite series, and then don't watch it, instead obtaining rather better-commentated coverage from a region I can't buy it from after trying rather hard to do so.

Then there's the music example. It used to be you could tape an LP for a friend, and it's true that they might be a lost sale, but it was also a marketing tool of sorts (other people would hear the album at Person 2's house), and had a limit: you had to give up a blank tape, you had to have the person with the LP take the time to do it, and the copy was not as good a source for further copies (dubbing tape decks suck, at least all the consumer ones I was exposed to).

This came up in an NFT thread (not that NFTs themselves are useful here); it's true that digital copies are essentially free to make, but you have to address the fact that someone had to make the original, and most of those who do cannot be written off as villains who are overcharging for shoddy work. Which in itself is a lazy rationalization, though my personal opinion is that there are legit places where an artificial and unnecessary monopoly has been created. E.g. back when you had to have a $200 copy of Office to send a resume as a Word doc while applying for jobs that paid $5/hr.

In summary, while the little cartoon makes a compelling point about the nature of digital artifacts, if we take it to its logical extreme, we remove all financial incentive to make anything digital at all, because every copy beyond the creator's own is "free."

And that doesn't make any more sense than suggesting that stealing an mp3 and stealing a car are equivalent actions.