• @WallEx@feddit.de
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    01 year ago

    From my understanding theft has always been to take something and after the other party doesn’t have it anymore. This never applied to piracy.

    For example: I used to pirate games back in school as I didn’t have the money to buy them. So there is no financial loss for the company. Yet they still frame it as bank robbery or something. “You wouldn’t download a car”

      • @grue@lemmy.world
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        01 year ago

        It never applied to copyright infringement, which is often disparaged as “piracy.”

        • @lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          01 year ago

          Right, but I’m saying “piracy” has the same problem as “theft”. Copyright infringement is even less related to the traditional meaning of piracy than it is to theft.

    • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      01 year ago

      Hollywood was so adamant about “not downloading a car”.

      Now they are the ones downloading actors.

    • Po Tay Toes
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      01 year ago

      Its based on the false assumption that you would actually buy every single piece of media if you didn’t chose to copy it.

      It’s all fake and people accept it. Such is the world.

      • @LoamImprovement@beehaw.org
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        01 year ago

        Actually, I do tend to buy my games when they’re available (and affordable) on the platforms I already use, but I’ve also sailed the high seas just because I didn’t feel like paying $70 for a game that I didn’t think was worth $70 and offered no demo for me to confirm my suspicions, or that was platform-exclusive on a platform that I don’t use.

        I think the thing is, if I could buy a file and know that I would own it in perpetuity, and while the company that sold it to me still existed, would offer the best support they could for it, I’d be a lot more amicable to the prospect of curating a legal digital library. But the way it is now, with exclusivity deals, licensing terms, intrusive DRM, Fomo bonuses, and the implication that pirating old unsupported software is a crime just because whoever owns the rights might decide to repackage it and lease it to you again and again, if they feel like it?

        And keep in mind, these are the same ghouls who insist on making live service games, adding loot boxes and micro transactions, just to prey on the most susceptible people. They’re responsible for good talent leaving or retiring just because they get in the way of people who want to make good games, which would be profitable, but maybe not as profitable as the shareholders want them to be. ZA/UM got eaten from within, Arkane withered down to nothing because they were forced to make a live service game, I can’t count how many studios got tanked or cannibalized by EA and Blizzard/Activision. Corporate is a cancer.

    • Lev_Astov
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      01 year ago

      Thepiratebay guy made an art project at one point that was a Raspberry Pi that did nothing but copy one song over and over again while keeping a running tally on a display of how much value it had “stolen” from the record industry by doing so.

  • @grue@lemmy.world
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    01 year ago

    Copyright itself was never ownership to begin with, and ideas were never property. Copyright is nothing more than a means an end, with the end being to enrich the Public Domain. It exists for the express purpose “to Promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts” and nothing else.

    This is the moral basis for the Copyright Clause, in Thomas Jefferson’s own words:

    It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions; & not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. but while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural, and even an hereditary right to inventions. it is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. by an universal law indeed, whatever, whether fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property, for the moment, of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation the property goes with it. stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me. that ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benvolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. inventions then cannot in nature be a subject of property. society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility. but this may, or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

    • @lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      01 year ago

      Holy shit, mic drop.

      Also, is that Jefferson’s original capitalization? I never would have figured him for the type to think he’s too cool for normal capitalization rules.

      • @grue@lemmy.world
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        01 year ago

        Also, is that Jefferson’s original capitalization? I never would have figured him for the type to think he’s too cool for normal capitalization rules.

        Here’s a picture of it (the first page, anyway, which isn’t the same as the part I quoted). It appears that he, indeed, wasn’t in the habit of capitalizing the first word of sentences. 'Course, it was so long ago that I’m not sure if it really was a normal rule at the time (especially for handwritten correspondence, as opposed to typeset publications).

        • @lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          01 year ago

          Yeah, I know things like capitalization and punctuation were a lot more idiosyncratic at the time, but I can’t recall ever seeing that particular quirk before in historical writing.

  • @leave_it_blank@lemmy.world
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    01 year ago

    You want to really own your game, not just a license, buy on gog. Not on Steam, not on Epic, not on uplay and whatever else.

    Why is everyone so pissed at Ubisoft, they just say what’s practise for years now! And sometimes counter Ubisoft by quoting Gabe Newell, what the fuck? He made not owning games popular!

    • TurboWafflz
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      01 year ago

      There’s a big difference between having to pay a monthly subscription to play a game and just having to use steam to launch it after a one time payment.

      • @leave_it_blank@lemmy.world
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        01 year ago

        I know what you mean, but you still don’t own the game, you have permission to play it, at least as long as the platform lets you or it closes. For now it’s all good, but when the time comes people will loose accounts worth thousands of bucks.

      • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        01 year ago

        Steam can just bar you from playing those games though if they so choose. The only thing preventing that is Gabe. But that guy will have to retire some day.

        You do not own shit on Steam.

    • @RmDebArc_5@lemmy.ml
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      01 year ago

      If you purchase it and they can still take it away from you at will, it isn’t something that can be owned. If it isn’t something that can be owned, piracy isn’t stealing because for it to be stealing somebody would have to own it.

      • @martino@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That only applies to products though.

        Getting a taxi and then running off without paying is still stealing, even though there’s no theft of an actual product involved. There have always been legal ramifications for theft of services, and this is no different.

        For the record I’m not shilling for Ubisoft here. They can eat a bag of dicks. I just think the point the meme is making is based on a false premise.

    • The original context of this quote. Which has suspiciously been removed, is in reference to subscription models taking off.

      The original quote is more along the line of “a subscription model isn’t feasible unless gamers get used to the idea of not owning their games”

      So really any line of logic is flawed because it misrepresents the original comment.

  • Flying Squid
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    01 year ago

    I’m not much of a gamer anymore…

    Might have to visit some torrent sites anyway. Maybe I can find someone who likes Ubisoft games but can’t afford them and doesn’t know how to acquire them…

  • @LittleBorat2@lemmy.ml
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    01 year ago

    Yes please ubisoft make another generic assassin’s creed game that is like all the others and charge me for it on a subscription based model.

    This simulation of a simulation of a game is as important as office365 with teams at least.

    I think they have a solid business case there, congrats ubi.

      • @JargonWagon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I still really want to play Black Flag, ngl. I think I have a weakness for sea songs. Maybe I should play more Sea of Thieves instead.

  • Phoenixz
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    01 year ago

    Everyone here will balk and biych about it and rightly so, but this will happen, unfortunately. Why? Because Ubisoft is on the path of enshittification, and most of humanity are dumb and don’t care and will walk willingly like sheep to the slaughter.