Oh, before we begin, I
ought to mention: I'm about as anti SOPA/PIPA as it's possible to
get. There's no need for you to come and widdle in my azaleas.
If SOPA and PIPA do in
fact stay shelved then they may end up having been a huge own-goal for its supporters.
Because its effects would be so wide and so strong, it's turned what
was previously a multi-faceted debate about piracy into a big,
simple, SOPA Vs. Pirates issue, and SOPA is so bad, so unbelievably,
stupidly terrible, that anyone whose brain wasn't surgically removed
at birth is going to find themselves, somehow, on the side of the
pirates. After stories like this, it's not hard to see why
people like Jim “Pirates are dirty thieves” Stirling have changed their tune – whether or not their views have actually changed, they've got to
appear to be pro-pirate or end up on the dangling end of a virtual
lynching.
However, SOPA presents a
false dichotomy. Piracy is not a black or white issue, but a minor
moral maze. To guide you though it, I present my list of 2.5 valid
moral justifications for pirating games.
1:
The game in question is not for sale due to geographical location or
age.
Amazing
as it may seem, not all games can be bought everywhere, especially if
you live in Tuvalu or Tajikistan. If the game is simply not available
for purchase in your country, and you can't get it via digital
distribution, then pirate away. This is one of the very few cases in
which “piracy is not a lost sale” is definitely true – the game
could not
have been purchased.
The
second clause concerns games whose studios have either collapsed or
stopped releasing the game – the point being that you can't buy it
anywhere in a way that would give money to the developers. This used
to be a fairly common scenario for older games, and in some cases it
still is, but with the advent of Good Old Games and
other such services, it is now often possible to buy old games
without having to go second-hand. However, if you can't buy it, or
it's been abandoned, then again, pirate away. Just check before you
do. To borrow a point from TotalBiscuit, abandonware could even be beneficial to the game developers by keeping interest
in a franchise alive and increasing the possibility of a sequel.
2: You
already own a copy of the game in question
This
is a simple one. A lot of my games were bought many years ago and are
still on discs. If those discs get scratched or broken beyond repair,
I see no reason why I shouldn't download another copy. If you lose a
card from a deck of playing cards, you're perfectly entitled to
scribble the number and suit onto the joker or bridge score card and
carry on playing. This does to some degree cover the issue of
emulation, though that's a can of worms I'm saving for my next
fishing trip. Also note that this does not
cover “I'm going to buy it if I like it when I finish it” or some
other equally fatuous excuse. Especially
if the buying later consists of a Steam sale or a bundle.
2.5:
You could not afford/would not have bought the game in question
There's
a reason that this is a half-point, so before you scroll down to the
comments and tell me what a dirty free-tard I am, allow me to
explain. First of all, let's look at the harm that pirating a copy of
the game does.
If
it's a straight up decision between clicking on Steam or The Pirate
Bay, then the harm is obvious: the developers have lost a sale. They
get less money and fewer sales, reducing the likelihood of a sequel
and the survival of the studio. That's pretty clear. However, a lot
of pirates claim that they either couldn't afford or wouldn't have
bought the game anyway, and thus their download doesn't count as a
lost sale, and thus there is no harm done. And yes, if that is
genuinely the case, and that person would never, ever have bought the
game under any circumstances, then it's not a lost sale.
However.
There
is a reason that this was a half-point, and it's this: these reasons
practically never apply. You say
that you wouldn't have bought it, but you were interested enough to
go to the effort of pirating it, which is normally more than the
effort required to buy it on Steam. You say
that you couldn't afford it, but you probably could if you saved up
or waited for a sale at some future point. If you really, genuinely
can't afford it, then there are a tonne of free and really, really
cheap games. I'm currently a student living almost entirely off my
student maintenance loan, which is around £5000/year (around $8000,
I think?), and I can still afford to buy games. I don't buy many: my
most recent purchases, in reverse chronological order, are Magicka,
Skyrim,
Sequence,
Orcs Must Die
and Deus Ex: Human
Revolution.
Most of those were bought on or shortly after release (Magicka
is the exception), at full price. What I'm saying is that while
theoretically these are justifiable reasons, I find it extremely hard
to believe that they ever really apply.
So,
there we are. Those are, to my mind, the only morally justifiable
reasons for downloading games illegally. If you don't fit those
criteria, then please, please,
stop trying to justify your actions as being harmless or even
praiseworthy in some way. Definitely stop trying to make pirating a
game because you're too greedy or lazy to pay for it a political act.
Stop using examples of bad behaviour by publishers or politicians as
justification. Saying “I don't like that they outsourced the boss
fights in DXHR so I'll pirate it” is effectively the same flawed
logic that leads publishers to say “I don't like that they keep
pirating the games so I'm going to drop DRM on it till it screams”.
Yes, they can be dicks. They shouldn't be, and neither should you.
One might think that this kind of basic reasoning was taught in
kindergarten, but apparently not. If you really disprove of a
company's DRM or other actions, then just don't buy the game.
In
short, please, please stop making excuses. You're fooling no one but
yourself.
~Roxton.
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