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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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These are the situations where I endorse piracy;

  • There is no reasonable way I can purchase the media in question such that any profit at all would go to the original developer or IP owner. Yes, I could pay hundreds of quid for a secondhand console and game copy to play whatever retro thing I fancy that hasn't been ported... but the developer doesn't get any of that cash, so why should they care if I just... don't?

  • There is some kind of unreasonable caveat that means I don't feel comfortable engaging with terms as presented. "Free trial" software that wants my payment info anyway before I can use it? Anything at all that demands my phone number for verification before I can use it? No dice, I'm getting a cracked version.

  • There is no physical version available and I don't trust the developer/publisher's intentions for the future. Always-online and servers could go offline at any time? Pirate. Chance you could remotely "update" my books to censor them? Pirate. (This one has become more relevant in recent days.)

  • If the DRM noticeably degenerates the quality of the product (crashes, nukes the framerate, disables mods, etc).

Chance you could remotely "update" my books to censor them? Pirate. (This one has become more relevant in recent days.)

What is this referring to?

Presumably changes to Roahl Dahl books in a recent edition. Amongst other things, 'sensitivity' readers have removed words including "crazy," "fat," and "ugly" from the books.

I'm guessing the recent Roald Dahl edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controversy

There is no reasonable way I can purchase the media in question such that any profit at all would go to the original developer or IP owner. Yes, I could pay hundreds of quid for a secondhand console and game copy to play whatever retro thing I fancy that hasn't been ported... but the developer doesn't get any of that cash, so why should they care if I just... don't?

I hear this justification a lot but I don't think it actually holds up. The original developer of the IP sold that IP for money or in some other way profited from the assumption that the IP would continue to be paid for. That's all part of value chain. If that breaks down it has the same basic impact as not paying the original developer.

I mean the example given was secondhand sales, not a transfer in ownership of the IP, for a reason. It literally doesn't benefit a developer if I buy a secondhand copy of something off ebay for an exorbitant price.

If I purchase a copy of The Adventures of Scrimblo Bimblo for the Atari Jaguar in year 1995, most of the value that I consider that game to have is my own enjoyment, but a (very) small part of that assessment is the resale value that I will get later on. The publisher of the game knows this, and sets the price of the game—and the compensation paid to the developer—accordingly.

I am skeptical that the publisher is going to set the price in 1995 taking into consideration how much it will sell for on ebay in 2023.

If you were totally unable to transfer ownership would that really not reduce your belief in the value of a game at least on the margin? If it took zero extra effort for me to get a version of a game on steam that was able to be resold over one that wasn't I'd definitely take the transferable one, I'd probably pay some increased amount for it.

Basing one's price based on the possibility that someone will invent a whole new way of selling in a couple of years is like setting a price now based on the possibility that it might get bought by space aliens in 2051.

Also, copyright extensions aren't accompanied by price changes.

Basing one's price based on the possibility that someone will invent a whole new way of selling in a couple of years

huh? This was not present in the hypothetical.

Technically true since ebay started in 1995, but it certainly wasn't important enough soon enough that anyone would take it into account.

I also think it's ok if the product is very unreasonably priced (usually applies to really old products that are still under copyright for unfathomable reasons, or stuff you already bought at some point) or to trial a product.

These rarely apply anymore though with the advent of right of return on steam and subscription models for media (that usually have trial periods anyway).

I would add another big one: Old things that are only copyrighted because of copyright extension. The worst case is old time radio; it's all copyrighted because of weirdnesses in the laws about sound recordings.

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