Comment by PorciiVorbesc
3 hours ago
>But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
No honor amongst thieves.
I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.
3 hours ago
>But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
No honor amongst thieves.
I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.
I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.
With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.
The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.
It's rightfully romanticized when companies fail to make their products easily available for purchase and usable far into the future.
Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.
They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.
it's still love of the game tho?
donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary
When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
you're confusing pirate consumers and pirate providers
You’re absolutely right. I was way too eager to jump on that
EA: “You software pirates lack honor, you do it just to make a quick buck, just for money! We do it, for glory, for integrity, for respect!”
Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”