Poll: A Question on Piracy !

[ThunderCavalier]

The only games I've really 'pirated' as old Game Boy Advance games on my VBA and some Japanese titles. Things like Fire Emblem and M&L: Superstar Saga are hard to find legitimately, and stuff like Fire Emblem 6: Fuin no Tsurugi and Touhou are extremely hard to find legitimately due to them being both old and... uh... Japan-exclusive.

 

[Hazy992]

If you've already bought it, it's abandonware or if it's literally impossible to get it through legal means then go nuts.

 

[Eamar]

I despise piracy. The only time I'd consider it even partially justifiable is in the case of abandonware, and even then I would buy a used copy.

I'm not about to rat someone out for it (we all know that'd be pointless anyway), and I'm sure a lot of my friends pirate things, but I won't support it personally. I just wish people would admit they want something for free rather than trying to justify it on moral grounds.

 

[Kennetic]

If it's a game that isn't made anymore or is impossible to find except at a flea market then that's fine to me. Or if I bought it once before. For instance, I love my NES, SNES, and N64 emulators and I have all the games in 1 folder

 

[Techno Squidgy]

Games that are very hard to find or impossible, that's fine.
Games you already own, but have perhaps lost the disc or something, that's fine.
Games like San Andreas where you are unable to mod the release version, also fine. (provided you already own it and turns out there's a downgrader patch to revert from v2 to v1.1 which you CAN mod.)

 

[shintakie10]

I would never dream of condoning piracy, particularly on this forum. I would say that piracy, like most crime, is indicative of other problems.

Most people pirate stuff out of convenience for instance. I've even heard some people look upon piracy as a sort of "try before you buy" option.

So you'd even go so far as to say that someone who downloads say a ROM of an old Atari game that would either be impossible to find now, or if you did find it would cost literally over a hundred dollars and you'd need the system to play it and none of the original devs would even know you bought it, is in the wrong?

There is a point where piracy actually is perfectly acceptable. If you have gone through every reasonable channel in order to acquire a game and can not find it for a reasonable price, pirate away. Note, reasonable does not mean a game that you don't personally think should be 50 dollars a year after release.

Seductive as that argument is, it is akin to saying; "I am starving and the cost of a loaf of bread is too much, therefore I shall steal from the bakery."

Now whilst that isn't unreasonable in and of itself, it does not address the root cause of the problem; namely that the cost of the loaf is too high. It is conceivable that stealing the loaf will cause the price of bread to continue to rise (ha ha) and that theft is merely a temporary, and therfore unsatisfactory, solution.

I believe there may also be an issue regarding intellectual property rights which rather muddies the water on all this, but I am not an expert.

As I said earlier, I would never dream of condoning piracy and it is also worth noting in the analogy I cited a neccesity rather than a luxury item. Stealing a luxury item is therefore indefensible. Prosecuting someone in the OTT manner certain media companies have chosen is, however, equally indefensible as it fails to address the underlying problem.

Except those two things aren't remotely similar. A better example would be a baker who throws away old stock that didn't sell and someone comes in and takes whatever they want from that pile of thrown out food. The food is still perfectly edible, but the baker will not make money off of it whether you take it or not. Not only that, but they have willingly let it go without tryin to resell it at a later date. They technically own the stuff, but they have given up on it.

We're talkin about abandonware which is most definitely legal to download (it used to be, laws may have changed since then in the US). There's no gray area there. If there are no to very little legal ways to obtain a copy of somethin that don't require extraordinary effort on your part, such as the case of wantin to play old NES or SNES games it is, and the people who owned the rights to it make no effort to make it available for people to obtain it, then it is perfectly acceptable to download and play it.

 

[DoPo]

Seductive as that argument is, it is akin to saying; "I am starving and the cost of a loaf of bread is too much, therefore I shall steal from the bakery."

Except those two things aren't remotely similar. A better example would be a baker who throws away old stock that didn't sell and someone comes in and takes whatever they want from that pile of thrown out food. The food is still perfectly edible, but the baker will not make money off of it whether you take it or not. Not only that, but they have willingly let it go without tryin to resell it at a later date. They technically own the stuff, but they have given up on it.

I hope you won't go into fighting over what example best describes the situation, as things around here tend to do. And that bakery one sucked hard.

We're talkin about abandonware which is most definitely legal to download (it used to be, laws may have changed since then in the US).

I don't think it ever was legal. It is a great big grey area. Essentially, the IP holder is not there to claim their property, which the abandonware sites took as a sign that it's not technically illegal to spread the software. And it's not illegal, because nobody can or wants to enforce that. It's pretty much the 5 second rule for chairs, only in software - if there is nobody to claim it, it's mine.

I don't believe it's ever acceptable to pirate, I just don't believe it's worth giving a fuck about either.

Pirate fucking indie titles, mainstream games, whatever, I don't care. As long as you don't pretend it's some sort of lifestyle or try to justify it needlessly we are good.

A man after my own heart. I'm fine with people saying "I'm a pirate". I hate people justifying piracy, though. It doesn't help that the justifications tend to be borderline retarded sane.

 

[ElPatron]

Does cracking a game with retarded DRM count as piracy? If so it's justifiable, I guess.

But if we're taking applications, books (especially those hard to get, expensive titles required by some teachers) or similar products, then this argument loses its weight.

This. I have told this before but I was faced with a stupid situation in college. A publisher released a book in very scarce numbers and with a very high price. Obviously, there weren't enough copies for all students in the whole university, let alone the whole country.

So obviously teachers encouraged piracy. When asked to release a new edition of the book in larger numbers and cheaper prices, the publisher simply says that too many people pirated it. Well, DUH.

If you've already bought the game or it's practically abandonware.

This too...

 

[FoolKiller]

If you've already bought the game or it's practically abandonware.

Ninja'd on the first comment. Well done.

To expand on what hazabaza1 said:
1. If I already own the game, say on PSP, but I want to play it without the crazy amount of disc spinning and slowdown then it makes sense. Just like ripping your music to an ipod so you can go running instead of carrying 100 cds and a discman.

2. If its a game that is no longer produced and available through legitimate channels then I can understand it. Who wants to pay hundreds just because a game is out of print. Its like not being able to watch Star Wars if they only released it on VHS and they aren't being made anymore. So if you have a working VCR then what do you do?

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I would never dream of condoning piracy, particularly on this forum. I would say that piracy, like most crime, is indicative of other problems.

Most people pirate stuff out of convenience for instance. I've even heard some people look upon piracy as a sort of "try before you buy" option.

So you'd even go so far as to say that someone who downloads say a ROM of an old Atari game that would either be impossible to find now, or if you did find it would cost literally over a hundred dollars and you'd need the system to play it and none of the original devs would even know you bought it, is in the wrong?

There is a point where piracy actually is perfectly acceptable. If you have gone through every reasonable channel in order to acquire a game and can not find it for a reasonable price, pirate away. Note, reasonable does not mean a game that you don't personally think should be 50 dollars a year after release.

Seductive as that argument is, it is akin to saying; "I am starving and the cost of a loaf of bread is too much, therefore I shall steal from the bakery."

Now whilst that isn't unreasonable in and of itself, it does not address the root cause of the problem; namely that the cost of the loaf is too high. It is conceivable that stealing the loaf will cause the price of bread to continue to rise (ha ha) and that theft is merely a temporary, and therfore unsatisfactory, solution.

I believe there may also be an issue regarding intellectual property rights which rather muddies the water on all this, but I am not an expert.

As I said earlier, I would never dream of condoning piracy and it is also worth noting in the analogy I cited a neccesity rather than a luxury item. Stealing a luxury item is therefore indefensible. Prosecuting someone in the OTT manner certain media companies have chosen is, however, equally indefensible as it fails to address the underlying problem.

Except those two things aren't remotely similar. A better example would be a baker who throws away old stock that didn't sell and someone comes in and takes whatever they want from that pile of thrown out food. The food is still perfectly edible, but the baker will not make money off of it whether you take it or not. Not only that, but they have willingly let it go without tryin to resell it at a later date. They technically own the stuff, but they have given up on it.

We're talkin about abandonware which is most definitely legal to download (it used to be, laws may have changed since then in the US). There's no gray area there. If there are no to very little legal ways to obtain a copy of somethin that don't require extraordinary effort on your part, such as the case of wantin to play old NES or SNES games it is, and the people who owned the rights to it make no effort to make it available for people to obtain it, then it is perfectly acceptable to download and play it.

Whoa whoa whoa, where'd you get the idea that it was legal to download Abandonware in the U.S.? We have some of the most restrictive copyright laws on the face of the planet. If it's copyrighted, it's copyrighted. The only reason all those abandonware sites stay up is that non-commercial piracy is a civil matter, which means the wronged party has to sue the person who wronged them. The government doesn't get involved. What this means for abandonware is that the companies that own the rights to those old games usually don't bother to sue anyone -- more often than not because they've long since gone out of business, and whatever giant company has the rights now doesn't really pay attention to all of the older properties they own.

Edit: Not that I'm saying abandonware is a bad thing, I'm just saying it's unquestionably illegal. Morally, I think the current IP system is immoral in itself, and breaking it is less of a clear cut bad thing than, say, committing theft.

 

[peruvianskys]

It's like Game of Thrones, it's the most pirated show of all time because the only way to watch it is to sign up for a very costly cable service just to watch one show. People aren't going to pay though the nose for it so they just download it for free and to me that is understandable.

Except that's not understandable. The content producer gets to decide how content is released. Just because you personally don't think it's worth it doesn't mean you somehow have the right to take it anyway. If you went to the grocery store and thought that apples were too costly, would you say, "This pricing model is ridiculous! I'm just going to take these apples because they chose to make them too expensive."

The correct response is to just not buy a product if it isn't worth the price. At no point does it become appropriate to declare yourself the decider when it comes to what the appropriate price for a product is.

Buy the game after IF it playable but, seriously if you're going to tell me someone is bad because they 'demo' the game then what's your thoughts on the company with millions of dollars not putting out a damn demo?

My thought is, "They made the goddamn thing, they get to decide if they put a demo out or not." If you don't like it, don't buy the game.

 

[Snotnarok]

I'm not into pirating games or whatever but I'm not sure why there's so many diving infront of the bullet for companies that effectively rip people off constantly. On disc DLC, games that weren't finished launched at full price, ridiculous DRM, not releasing demos, making awful ports, lying about system requirements. Not to mention the companies blaming customers of used games and pirates for profit drops/

On this site it's always the average joe who's a scumbag for pirating vs a company doing not so good things.

Don't get me wrong, I buy my games and all that good stuff, however if someone were to tell me they pirate ubisoft games because of their retarded DRM? Wouldn't make me blink an eye.

My biggest gripe is companies not putting out a demo, especially on PC (half the time consoles get the demo). Then you sort of HAVE to pirate the game just to see if you can run it. I've been screwed so many times to just trust the system requirements since several games that I should have been able to run perfectly fine were unplayable, and then you can't return the game!

Buy the game after IF it playable but, seriously if you're going to tell me someone is bad because they 'demo' the game then what's your thoughts on the company with millions of dollars not putting out a damn demo?

 

[Nobuoa Schniell]

As someone who pirates things, I'll say that the #1 reason I tend to do it is when things are difficult to get normally (mostly anime). That being said, I make no attempt to justify my actions. The fact of the matter is that I don't want to put in the effort and extra money to import anime dvds and then find the subtitles for them from the sub groups.

I've also pirated games that I didn't particularly want, but wanted to try. In some cases, I'll find that I like the game and buy it. In other cases I don't and I uninstall it (I don't like to have crap I don't play sitting around wasting disk space). Again, no justification for this, I simply didn't want to put down money for a game that I wasn't sure I wanted (having demos for all games would eliminate this issue).

At the end of the day though, everything I pirate is done so because I don't want to put in any money or extra effort to get these things that I want. I selected "I don't support piracy" because I don't. I don't think there's any real justification for pirating something simply because you don't want to pay for it. I simply do it. I guess that makes me a bad person.

However, my reasons are things that can easily be avoided by publishers/developers if they wanted to put in extra effort. Sure, in a perfect world they shouldn't have to; everyone should just pay for what they get, no questions asked. But we live in a world of piracy, so they need to adapt. Game companies should always offer a demo of their product. Japanese anime companies could outsource some of these fansub groups (really, it wouldn't cost them much at all. The groups are already doing it for free) to add english subtitles to the anime as they're being released, so they can release internationally. This prevent the huge lag time between an anime being finished in Japan and the many months/years it takes for an English localization team to acquire the rights and translate it. Anyway, that's my two cents. You can ***** all you want about morality but the fact is it lies in the hands of the developers to adapt to piracy.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

I really think it's ok.

I mean, if I want to play Contra 3 or Earthbound I would have to pay about 2x more than a normal retail release at least. Paying £80-100+ for a decade old used game isn't right and I won't pay it.

I can see the reasoning behind the argument but it doesn't really hold up for me. There are plenty of free games out there and even more cheap ones. £80-100 is a ridiculous price for any game, but no-one is forcing you to play this one - I'd pick a cheaper game and play that instead.

Yeah but when Earthbound is one of the best SNES games ever, are you saying no one should be allowed to play it unless they pony up insane prices for it? Nintendo don't even make money of it and don't sell it on the eshop, I think it is ok. I mean, people would pay if it was available through the eshop.

It's like Game of Thrones, it's the most pirated show of all time because the only way to watch it is to sign up for a very costly cable service just to watch one show. People aren't going to pay though the nose for it so they just download it for free and to me that is understandable.

Game of Thrones is very different though because the people pirating that could just wait for the DVD boxset. I found Season one for £15, less than the price of a hard back novel, and that wasn't long after it came out. I'll be waiting to buy Season 2 on boxset as well instead of pirating. Someone pirating seasomn 2 now doesn't have a leg to stand on in my view.

I suppose for me it depends on the age and price of the game in question. If the game is twenty years out of production, the console it's on crashed and burned, and the only copies now are £100 for the game and more for a working console then probably pirating is the only sensible option. In an ideal future world these games will all be converted into playable formats on the console or PC of the day (obiously possible or else it wouldn't be possible to make copies for pirates) and they would be available at a cheap cost, but since that day hasn't arrived yet, it seems reasonable to adopt a 'keep circulating the tapes' attitude, at least until gaming's history can be acknowledged and preserved as such.

 

[chadachada123]

If the owner of the IP won't let you purchase the game, with the only routes of getting the game being through second-hand stores or off of somebody else, then I see absolutely no issue with it.

For example, I recently bought Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic used for $10. If this game wasn't also available on Xbox Live (for $20), I would say that piracy would be perfectly moral in my eyes (I wouldn't suggest it for legal reasons, but that's unrelated here), as the developers are getting absolutely no money either through my second-hand purchase nor through my theoretical piracy.

There are other examples, too. Like when there is region-locking and/or the game is not released in your continent. Or when there is horrible DRM latched onto the game that makes it basically unplayable (like Assassin's Creed-whatever). Moral? Yep, but if you practice the latter, you should at least ship the developers some money. Legal? Nope, so don't do it if your morals involve obeying the law.

Also, isn't this thread complete mod-bait, considering it's against the rules to say that you condone piracy?

 

[Use_Imagination_here]

If it isn't available at the standard price then go ahead. Like if you had to buy something new that you don't need to get to it and it's more than slightly inconvenient (expensive).

Also if the only alternative is second hand in which case the developers aren't going to get any money anyway.

 

[acey195]

I don't think this is about the pricing of games specifically, though lowering the price will make people less likely to pirate stuff, there are far more reasons why one would pirate or not.
I myself did pirate in the past, back when it was not really frowned upon, but now I basically only buy games that are greatly reduced in price (steam sales and such) or just don't buy them altogether as I don't have a lot of time to play them anyways, next to my game development hobby(ironical huh). getting screwed over by bad customer service is also a reason for some to pirate(EA..cough), and sometimes its even easier to get a pirated copy working than a official version, with all the DRM, which is not stopping pirates anyways, cept for multiplayer only titles.

that Metal Wolf Chaos game for 250 pounds I would catogorize under bad customer support and I would not judge you if you did pirate that, the developers of the game would never get more money from amazon if they raise the price, unless it sells really well, but I guess its a very old game, so that won't be the case.

defining piracy as a crime is something you have to watch out with. it is not the same as stealing, as you don't take away stuff/or money from somewhere, just copy it. While it is of course not a just thing to do, we all remember SOPA, PIPA and Acta... neglecting the difference between copyright infringement and stealing gives fuel to bills like those.
I don't think I need to explain what would happen...

 

[peruvianskys]

My point is that if the content is unavailable and the proper route is extremely expensive then people will turn to piracy.

Yes, people will. That doesn't make it okay.

If it isn't available at the standard price then go ahead. Like if you had to buy something new that you don't need to get to it and it's more than slightly inconvenient (expensive).

Yes, just like how it's okay to steal something from an antique shop if you think the owner has priced it wrong.