Piracy is theft

Duke said:

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? 

Yes, it is still theft.

You bought your NES and the game at retail.  You own it and can play it.  No problem.

You then sold your ownership rights and rights-of-use to whoever bought your used system.  They new owner gets to play but you do not.  It's a physical game system and the right to play it goes with that system.  If you are the original purchaser you can sell or give that system away as you see fit.  Still no problem.  What you can't do is duplicate the game or system so that whoever buys it gets to play and you do too.  Even if it is physically possible (which it is) it is not moral or legal.

If you sold your original system and disposed of it (by sale, gift, or trash) then you also disposed of your right to play it.  You need to legally acquire a physical replacement in order to reacquire the right to play the game.

 

Does Nintendo still sell the NES or SNES? Can I go to them and purchase one? 

What about all of their catalog? If they no longer offer it (Nintendo, sega, etc), is it still theft? Because youre saying it deprives them of reimbursement for their time, that's why I ask. 

Duke said:

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.

 

The problem with this is that it relies on the assumption that anyone who pirated a thing would have paid for it if they were unable or unwilling to pirate it. An extreme example to demonstrate it:

Say some person makes an "I am rich" type app (displays a spinning 3D jewel and a message on your phone) for $10,000. It leaks onto the web somehow and I pirate it just for the novelty value. Does that mean that if I couldn't have pirated that, I would have paid for it? Obviously not, so my piracy didn't cost the creator anything. Now where do you draw the line between that $10k joke app, a $300 gaming OS, an $80 game full of bugs, or a decades-old game which a company still owns rights to and technically supports but will not sell and as such will not take any amount of money for? You can't draw a hard line anywhere, probabilities are involved.

Beyond this logical weakness in the idea of piracy being theft, you can get into more practical issues - that the "victims" of piracy most often tend to be super-rich movie and videogame studios who have no shortage of money. Their workers may be overworked and underpaid, but judging by their executive and upper management salaries, this isn't an income problem, it's a worker pay problem, giving them more money won't solve that. Edit: Remember that the issue hasn't gotten any better, but has likely become worse, since all this DLC crap came about that ruined modern gaming and flooded the same studios with cash. From my experience it seems that piracy has become less common over the same timeframe as well.

Pirates and the act of piracy have been romanticized to a point where it is difficult to categorically condemn them.  Who doesn't love "Talk like a pirate day?"

What about The Dread Pirate Roberts?  Was he a bad guy?  Or a good guy masquerading as a bad guy?

Sure they were largely a gruesome lot, and did some very bad things, but have you seen what they're up to in Washington, D.C. lately?

Definitely a good discussion.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

All excellent points.  There's the legal/illegal aspect to piracy, but there is also the moral/immoral aspect.

As an example, say I want to play Mario Bros 3 this Friday with a cold beer, for nostalgia's sake.  It came out in 1988 for the NES, and I owned both the system and game back in the 80s.  If I want to replicate that now, I would need to spend $200-300 on a working NES system and controller, a copy of the NES cartridge, and probably a CRT TV.  None of these purchases would put money into Nintendo's hands, just resellers.  And probably not worth it (to me) for just nostalgia's sake.  Or I can download a ROM and play on my laptop.  Illegal?  Possibly.  Immoral?  No.  Not even a little bit.  For all the reasons already mentioned in this thread (can't buy direct from Nintendo, no profit return to them, IP is 35 years old, etc.)

Now same example, but a brand new game....say Forza Horizon 5 or whatever they're up to.  Pirating that would cross both my illegal AND immoral thresholds, because it is available brand new from Microsoft, works without issue on modern hardware, and pirating is directly costing the "OEM" a sale. 

It's definitely a grey area, and people can draw their own lines on the morality, but even that is murky.  To use the record studio example, giving a starving artist $0.03 on the dollar because you have a team of attorneys, managers, and MBAs optimized to squeeze every last cent in your favor, while the artist has a team of one (themselves), may be perfectly legal, but I would argue highly immoral.  The deal is ridiculously weighted in your favor and ripe for exploitation, because you have all the tools to make it so, and are using them.  See also new car dealers screwing of the customer due to their expertise at deals when they close 1000/month to you the consumers 1/decade.  All perfectly legal.  And immoral. 

You also get into weird issues with patent/IP trolls that buy things solely to sit on them and gum up the legal system.  From software or website domains, to Ferrari's (lost) case on the shape of the 250 GTO and kit manufacturers (https://journal.classiccars.com/2020/07/07/ferrari-loses-trademark-case-over-250-gto-design/).  If Ferrari isn't going to make any more, and the current inflated values aren't coming back to them, just rich 0.00001%'ers trading them like NFTs, what is the harm in a kit company making a perfect replica for $1,000,000 as long as they don't try to pass it off as original?  We definitely need some form of IP reform, that if you have abandoned it and don't plan to re-offer it, it moves into the public domain. 

SV reX said:I think the original post in this thread is crystal clear- the offense was in trying to  justify making unauthorized copies of artistic content.  It didn't have anything to do with naming things.  A crime was being justified.  OP called it a crime.

Who cares if it's a "theft" or an "infringement"?

 

In a thread titled "Piracy is theft," where that phrase is repeated time and time again, you don't think it had anything to do with naming things? I think it's central to the point of the post.

How is a public library that freely distributes books, magazines, and DVDs for free not, by the definition put forth here, guilty of piracy?

The question is, would the pirate actually be willing to pay full price for a game if they were unable to pirate it? If the pirate doesn't want it bad enough or doesn't have the money to pay for the game, then the game publisher technically loses nothing. This doesn't excuse the pirate from the crime of piracy, but it does poke holes in the argument from the game publisher that they are losing X amount of money due to piracy. They are creating losses that just aren't there. If somebody doesn't have $80 to buy a game, they don't have it. The fact that they can pirate a piece of software they cannot afford does not create more value. Creating the ability to block pirating a game does not make them more money in this case. It only blocks the pirate from his booty.

The difference between theft and piracy is a semantic difference. Theft involves an item like a car. Steal a car and the original owner no longer has use of it. Copying a game does not necessarily block the original owner of the game to continue to use it. Both crimes are bad but they are different crimes. Maybe it doesn't make a difference to an individual, but it very well makes a difference to a prosecutor appearing in front of a Judge. A criminal can get off on a charge if the wrong words are used in a pleading. Practicing law requires exact semantics. Crime is bad. A prosecutor who is skillful with words and definitions is good.

Flynlow (FS) said:

Duke said:

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? 

If you sold your original system and disposed of it (by sale, gift, or trash) then you also disposed of your right to play it.  You need to legally acquire a physical replacement in order to reacquire the right to play the game.

Very interesting discussion.  By this logic, would a Factory Five Cobra (vs. say SuperPerformance) be piracy?  They are generating new physical copies.  

That depends on the state of the original patent for the Cobra.  I've seen a Factory Five Daytona coupe and underneath, much is different from the original.  Most of the engineering is new.

Factory Five's website said:

Cobra® is a registered trademark of Ford Motor Company

I'm inferring from the above that  F5 has a licensing agreement with Ford, owner of the Cobra trademark and (I assume) design.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

I think pay to win mixing with gaming as a service and the illusion of a streaming carer may be the straw the broke the camels back.

Everybody wants to stream and play online with their buddies, and you can't do that with a pirated copy for very long. Everybody also wants all the new hotness released every week, and constantly updating pirated games is a pain in the ass. 

On the other hand, it seems publishers are scaling back DRM and accepting it as marketing. God of War 4 was cracked in like an hour, there was another big release recently I can't remember that had no DRM at all like it was the 80s again. 

It doesn't really affect me anymore though, only pc games I have are Ceasar 3 and Simpson's hit n run, and somewhere is my emulator collection. Just easier to play on a console I upgrade every 5 years that also transfers my ownership history of games, than to keep buying new bits for my desktop or doing massive reinstalls when I want to play something old. 

Apis Mellifera said:

How is a public library that freely distributes books, magazines, and DVDs for free not, by the definition put forth here, guilty of piracy?

Someone paid for the originals or they were donated. 

RevRico said:

On the other hand, it seems publishers are scaling back DRM and accepting it as marketing. God of War 4 was cracked in like an hour, there was another big release recently I can't remember that had no DRM at all like it was the 80s again.

Maybe Cyberpunk 2077? It debuted on GOG.com which only sells DRM-free games. There is a growing divide in recent years between companies that recognize DRM as something that hurts legitimate customers more than pirates, and as such are abandoning it, vs. those doubling-down with more powerful/insidious DRM schemes like Denuvo and Steam.

Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) said:

Apis Mellifera said:

How is a public library that freely distributes books, magazines, and DVDs for free not, by the definition put forth here, guilty of piracy?

Someone paid for the originals or they were donated. 

Right, and that entitled the purchaser to their single use... according to the arguments in this thread.  It does not... according to the arguments in this thread... grant the library a license for freelance distribution without compensation, which is primary function of a library and is also, coincidentally, what a piracy site does.

hybridmomentspass said:

Duke said:

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? 

Yes, it is still theft.

If you sold your original system and disposed of it (by sale, gift, or trash) then you also disposed of your right to play it.  You need to legally acquire a physical replacement in order to reacquire the right to play the game.

Does Nintendo still sell the NES or SNES? Can I go to them and purchase one? 

What about all of their catalog? If they no longer offer it (Nintendo, sega, etc), is it still theft? Because youre saying it deprives them of reimbursement for their time, that's why I ask. 

You cannot go to Nintendo and buy a new NES/SNES or your favoritest-ever out-of-print Nintendo game.  However, that is irrelevant to the discussion.  What is relevant is that Nintendo still owns and controls the rights to those things.

You are correct that if you go to eBay or the flea market or Gamestop and buy a used NES and a used copy of Goldeneye, Nintendo will not see a penny out of that sale.  However, those systems and games were sold with the understanding that the right to use it went with the system itself.

No matter how many subsequent buyers owned the system, no more than one of those owners could play it at a time.  Each time the system is passed to a new owner, the previous owner loses the right and ability to play that game.  But if someone pirates copies of that game or system, then multiple users can play the game.  the seller doesn't have to forfeit their ability.  It's also irrelevant if the pirate sells copies or gives them away.  Duplication of the original purchase is not in compliance with the terms of the sale.

yupididit said:

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?

Selling used media (CDs, books, DVDs, etc) is illegal in some places for this reason.

When I lived overseas, I used to write a small travelogue. (No blog- predated the internet). I wanted people to see what it felt like to live in different parts of the world. I only distributed it via fax to several dozen supporters. 
 

A year or so after I returned to the States, I found one of my stories had been reprinted in a coffee table style book (for large scale distribution). You know... one of those "Chicken Soup for the..." type books. The publisher even had the balls to credit me as the author and print my name.  I never authorized it, and never received compensation for it.

I talked to a lawyer. Eventually he helped me understand that this was their business model,  and it would be unlikely I would get any compensation no matter how hard we fought.  They stole content routinely, and had a big legal team ready to fight off anyone who objected.

30 years later... I never received a penny.  I still get occasional compliments for the story.  Book is still in print. Company has $66 million in annual sales.

Sometimes stuff sucks.

Apis Mellifera said:

How is a public library that freely distributes books, magazines, and DVDs for free not, by the definition put forth here, guilty of piracy?

Because they lend the original purchase out for someone to look at. They do not make a copy and distribute that copy as well as keep the original 

Apis Mellifera said:

How is a public library that freely distributes books, magazines, and DVDs for free not, by the definition put forth here, guilty of piracy?

Because libraries, by definition, are included in the "fair use" clause of copyright law.

A library can lend a book or DVD to 2,000 people with no legal or moral issue.  But they can only do it one at a time for each copy of the book they buy.  They cannot make 2,000 bootleg copies of the material and lend them to 2,000 people at once.

Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) said:

Apis Mellifera said:

How is a public library that freely distributes books, magazines, and DVDs for free not, by the definition put forth here, guilty of piracy?

Someone paid for the originals or they were donated. 

Falls under fair use. The library is not generating additional copies of said item. They're simply loaning their property out. No different if I give you the keys to my jeep for a loan. I'm not making more jeeps, I am simply transferring possession of the one I do have and obtained legally. Now, if I somehow built a forged, unlicensed jeep and loaned it to you for money, or sold copies of it, that's a problem. 

Honestly I lose zero sleep over pirating no longer made games. It doesn't effect the companies bottom line so eff it.

Duke said:

Apis Mellifera said:

How is a public library that freely distributes books, magazines, and DVDs for free not, by the definition put forth here, guilty of piracy?

Because libraries, by definition, are included in the "fair use" clause of copyright law.

A library can lend a book or DVD to 2,000 people with no legal or moral issue.  But they can only do it one at a time for each copy of the book they buy.  They cannot make 2,000 bootleg copies of the material and lend them to 2,000 people at once.

 

This is actually something my local library is annoyed with. They only get the privilege to purchase X copies of ebooks, so instead of everyone being able to read them at once, you still have to wait your turn in line to borrow the ebook. Even though everybody has a library card and does their library duty.

Now granted you couldn't give 5 people a single copy of a physical book at the same time, you can with digital, just not allowed. 

Since the provider has already been paid for X copies, what would it matter if they went to 5 people or 15 at the same time? If anything, it would lead to more exposure, faster, to generate more buzz. 

Flynlow (FS) said:

Duke said:

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? 

Yes, it is still theft.

You bought your NES and the game at retail.  You own it and can play it.  No problem.

You then sold your ownership rights and rights-of-use to whoever bought your used system.  They new owner gets to play but you do not.  It's a physical game system and the right to play it goes with that system.  If you are the original purchaser you can sell or give that system away as you see fit.  Still no problem.  What you can't do is duplicate the game or system so that whoever buys it gets to play and you do too.  Even if it is physically possible (which it is) it is not moral or legal.

If you sold your original system and disposed of it (by sale, gift, or trash) then you also disposed of your right to play it.  You need to legally acquire a physical replacement in order to reacquire the right to play the game.

 

Very interesting discussion.  By this logic, would a Factory Five Cobra (vs. say SuperPerformance) be piracy?  They are generating new physical copies.  

There are/were five bazillion Cobra kit cars available because nobody fought them for IP reasons, so the design is legally the equivalent of abandonware. 

See also "How Soon is Now", song by The Smiths.  They didn't fight over intellectual property rights when people covered it until someone who had money did it, and the case was dismissed from court because they never bothered to try to protect their IP before.  (This is the general gist, but is also why one can find like 400 different covers of the song)

This is also also why some companies very jealously get lawyery over use of their IP.  They legally HAVE to in order to maintain precedent that they are trying to protect it, because ignoring infringement is evidence of abandonment.

In reply to Flynlow (FS) :

Factory five has a license to produce cobras. They bought it...whenever. So they can do it legally. 

Couple standout examples where this is NOT true was the whole Eleanor fiasco- where the producer in question had no legal right to actually make copies of that car, and did so anyhow, and most notably Ford- who does not actually own the name GT40 and cannot legally make gt40s. Licensing and copyrights are super bureaucratic. It's also why watching the Chinese make cars is comical, it's basically like watching a real life version of a video game that has unlicensed cars that look 85% like the car they're modelled after and even carry a similar name (my GTA fans will know what an imposte phoenix is) but are somehow legally distinct from the original. 

Wanna throw another wrench into the mix?

What happens when I buy a game for my household? Lets say my household is 10 kids. 

If the game has a multi-player option, they are"legally" and morally able to play that game at the same time.

Now, if I make copies of that game for my "personal" use - does that extend to allowing my kids to play that game in separate rooms? 

What if my kids are college aged and take the copied games to college across the country?

These same types of discussions have been had about VHS tapes, music tapes, CD's, arts, and well, just about everything. Every holder of a product license wants to give just enough freedom as incentive to the consumer, but not so much that they are losing money. 

Back in the day I pirated music and just about everything else. It was a lot of work. I still wish having offline music was easier to obtain. Even the legal ways of obtaining music aren't so easy these days. 

GameboyRMH said:

Duke said:

Here's why piracy IS theft:

[words]

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.

The problem with this is that it relies on the assumption that anyone who pirated a thing would have paid for it if they were unable or unwilling to pirate it. An extreme example to demonstrate it:

Nope, not logical.

As a purchaser, you get to buy it or not, your choice.  You don't get to tell the seller how much they should charge by any other means.

As I stated in my example, if the seller puts out a bad - or even just overpriced - product, then sales suffer accordingly and the seller fails to make money.  BUT that's their risk and their decision to make.  You may be right - some of those piracies wouldn't have been sales anyway.  But if they weren't piracies, then the pirates wouldn't be pirates and they wouldn't be using a product they decided was not worth buying.  They would just be lost potential customers, who decided they didn't value your product enough to use it and pay for it.

I explicitly stated that the creator risks poor sales on their own merits (or lack thereof).  That's on them and that is fair. But saying "I wouldn't have bought it anyway, but I'm OK with stealing it" holds absolutely zero water.

If it's not worth the asking price, don't buy it and don't use it.  End of story.

Duke said:

You cannot go to Nintendo and buy a new NES/SNES or your favoritest-ever out-of-print Nintendo game.  However, that is irrelevant to the discussion.  What is relevant is that Nintendo still owns and controls the rights to those things.

You are correct that if you go to eBay or the flea market or Gamestop and buy a used NES and a used copy of Goldeneye, Nintendo will not see a penny out of that sale.  However, those systems and games were sold with the understanding that the right to use it went with the system itself.

No matter how many subsequent buyers owned the system, no more than one of those owners could play it at a time.  Each time the system is passed to a new owner, the previous owner loses the right and ability to play that game.  But if someone pirates copies of that game or system, then multiple users can play the game.  the seller doesn't have to forfeit their ability.  It's also irrelevant if the pirate sells copies or gives them away.  Duplication of the original purchase is not in compliance with the terms of the sale.

It sounds like you're very concerned about the sanctity of intellectual property regardless of any monetary/ethical/moral/practical aspects, which is a view I would simply have to disagree with. Intellectual property is far too powerful already - it locks up culture for amounts of time that can easily exceed human lifespans, ever-increasing along the Mickey Mouse curve, and in this overpowered state it benefits the most popular content creators at the expense of all other creators and consumers (with all of society and culture included as consumers).

Also consider that most people work once and get paid once. If you think about the idea of working once and getting paid an infinite number of times, it's a rather farcical pay structure unseen in the vast majority of professions, and something I would argue is economically unhealthy. Intellectual property as we know it looks like a dire example of regulatory capture IMO.