What are the ethics of Piracy?
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
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.
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.
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-nessEDIT: also wow, 12 years ago
I've been at this a long time 😅
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Thanks! I was looking for something like this 👍
if so, then check the other posts in that series.