this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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The main question for this argument that piracy does a lot of good is: are the people who are pirating things using it for this purpose? I don't think there's an ethical conflict for me to say that I am happy for piracy to exist for software that is otherwise unplayable, but think that piracy should not exist for new games that just come out.
Someone quoted a study that within the first 14 years is where most of the profitability comes from. Maybe I'd be okay with people pirating anything that's been around for 14 years, but I think most people who keep using this "pirating is good" line won't agree with this compromise.
If piracy didn't exist the new games would simply become inaccessible for a lot of people, I don't know about the rest of the world but I will give you an example of my country. Getting a gaming PC in my country hurts your wallet like you are buying an house, you are going to have to save for a while before you can afford a entry level gaming pc( like rtx 3050 or equivalent). The average monthly wage here is like $350-$409, you think someone with this income will put 70$ into a game ? A lot of people use piracy as a medium to get access to expensive software like photoshop or ms suite that would otherwise be inaccessible and run their small businesses usually cyber cafes. It's not just about getting free shit, for some people it's the only option.
Yeah, coming from a similar country, buying a Nintendo switch game would cost roughly 3 to 4 days of minimum wage, before tax.
Steam does go a long way to making indie games a lot more affordable though, but AAA games can still cost an absolute bomb. For hobbyists, having only subscription options for software like Photoshop is just too expensive to pay for when they make no income.
Get out of those trash countries. Get work from another country, make money online.
Why does purpose or ethics matter. It is called piracy and not robin hood.
Whatever the intent, it incentives archival even with selfish purposes across different decentralized sources, which is pretty valuable with that huge amount of data that would be expensive for a centralized entity to archive on their own. Not to mention a single point of failure. So even selfishness is leading to helping history not be lost.
And you think 100 years from now or longer if some random historian comes across some still working storage containing long lost media that a pirate had kept they are going to care about the legality of that at the time?
And don't forget how much game versions change from launch, so new version is history too. Same for movies and shows and books with how editing has been done that's led to loss of the original copy. And led to reliance of fans to restore content like Star Wars.
It is happening now with Netflix too where now the pirated versions of some Netflix show is the only way to see what was originally shown.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/netflix-retroactive-editing
https://screenrant.com/tv-shows-films-edited-after-original-release/
14 years... Time doesn't stand still for that long.