It is discouraging to realize that most people can be thieves if there are no consequences.

Proof: We cracked applications, video games, operating systems without a second thought. And yes, I still think it is a form of stealing.

Oh, poor multi-billion companies. The real theft that actually hurts the entire society and is done with no repercussions is wage theft.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's not theft, it's surprise acquiring.

@msdsk this is like excusing murder because there are genocidal dictators in the world. Our moral compass should not be affected by others’

@PepeTheFrog undocumented acquiring.

@aviophile

Yeah, my moral compass says I should not obey bourgeoise laws that are created to keep the poor poor and the rich ever richer.

Some bands I've pirated music from, but then decided I like them and gone to the gigs and bought the CDs.

It's not theft since you don't deprive the owner of it. You just make a copy of data. You could argue that it's a lost sale, but that falls apart when you just use it because you can access the cracked version - i.e. you wouldn't buy it anyway, if there was no cracked version. Which, as a personal anecdote, is quite true for me for most media: I might look into the newest cracked AAA game, but if I could not, I wouldn't buy it either. Hence the only loss when I pirate that game is my time.

Proof: robbing oil from countries
Proof: robbing people to make them slaves
Proof: stealing land from indigenous people

Everything is okay if there are no consequences. That's just how everything works

@iiii yeah, seeing the comments trying to justify theft by saying they stole from evil rich people etc.

@saucyatom you can not buy all AAA games you cracked when you are child but you would buy some of them by saving money if you had no other way to play them, because urge would be sooo great. Like atari games, you could not have all the flashy games but you had few cassettes(cartridges) you or your family could own.

Also, IP theft is still theft, no justification around that. Don’t tell me something you can not say in the court.

i wouldn't have to pirate software if they didn't charge all users business prices. I cannot afford IDA Pro, Photoshop, Office, Windows or Autodesk software. These companies want to charge me hundreds or thousands a year (excluding Windows, but still, $500 once until EOL is still a lot) for the privelege of using the "industry standard" (i.e. required to do anything) software. Game companies like Nintendo effectively censor their old game libraries by only reselling their most popular games, leaving LITERALLY MILLIONS OF GAMES to just die in obscurity, games that may even be really good and have had a fuckton of love put into them. DRM helps kill games permanently outside their original release constraints, too!

These companies can all get in a line and suck my fucking cock.

@aviophile if I literally couldn't afford it, it wouldn't be a sale if piracy didn't exist. I just wouldn't be able to use it anyway. Not everyone pirates shit without supporting the original devs if possible. I, personally, buy every game I pirate that isn't literal dogshit (and is still purchasable in a manner that supports the original devs and not some random dickhead on eBay)

You operate under the assumption that the laws are already correct and perfect. But they simply weren't built for the digital age

Look, you named so many things people "steal" and yet there seems to be no huge damage... This isn't like pirate ships stealing tons of resources with far reaching consequences... Software piracy sn't even on the same level as stealing a candy bar from a store...

This is on the level of coming to the store, having a cloning machine, copying a candy bar and leaving with the copy... Lost sale but also solved world hunger so clearly not so clean cut...

And the argument that people pirate software that later in life becomes their full time profession is simply true and I personally know people that used software that costs thousands per year and literally wouldn't be doing what they do know if they didn't

The world spins just fine and our currently status quo is the result of social evolution

Also also :) you know why game companies stopped releasing Demos?

Turns out an informed customer is much less likely to buy your actual product than one that only seen the trailers... Marinate on that for a while if we're gonna talk morals... How is that legal?

@Parzi do you happen to know Ross Scott's Game Dungeon on his youtube channel Accursed Farms?

He often tries to raise awareness of the fact that games are being killed by companies by making them unplayable at some point in time.

And pirates are literally saving games from being killed.
Of course it’s not their original intention and pirating is harmful to some degree, but companies are fucking their customers whenever they can get away with it without consequences. So they are not the poor victims that they like to be seen as.

@Lensflare i haven't seen it, but it sounds like a similar reason to one of mine. i'll check it out!

@Hazarth your demo point fails in the age of gaming stream since people can learn gameplay and full story with one push of a button. We learn much more than demos can give us. Marinate on that I guess.

@Lensflare for the last time, companies not being angels is not excuse to steal IP.

@Parzi do you always dine&dash but out of mercy, send the restorans money if you like the taste?

@aviophile yes. But despite stealing is the wrong term, pirates are also not an excuse for companies to kill or destroy games for honest customers.
Because let's face it: Honest customers, not the pirates are the ones that suffer from the practices of companies.

@aviophile don’t get me wrong, I agree that pirating is wrong in general.
But there are also many cases where I consider it ok. Like when someone wants a demo or when the product has been killed, not being sold anymore or is fucking the customer with ridiculous DRM.

@Lensflare let’s also be honest that the biggest share of pirating is done for newest games or the most up to date software, not the ones with killed products, drm problems.

@aviophile weeeell the demo point still holds. Influencers/streamers give you a warped vision of a game cause they force a sense of wonder on you which is not there when you play alone.
Which can be for the good or for the bad, I saw factorio plaid by someone and though it was shit, I bought it and it kept me there for hours.

@aviophile
Ah, except a stream or a video doesn't tell you if the game will even run for you (watch dogs?),

If your controller works with it (any xbox controller compatible game)

if It's actually fun to play or just fun to watch (the streamer adds a lot to the content itself... Games like terraria or starbound aren't all that fun in single player, would be nice to experience it first hand)

Streams will never replace demos. The software world is adapting by adding cheap, free or student licences... Those are very recent changes for both adobe and autodesk :) Now that's how you fight piracy.

The game industry instead does what hollywood does and tries to go against the stream by force. It wont ever work and all they managed to do is put denuvo into everything, which now means even people that bought the product use the pirated versions if they have denuvo bypassed or disabled because It's objectively better.

@aviophile let me put this to you in a way that's understandable by troglodytes one more time:

Cyberpunk 2077. A game that everyone says is bad, and was LITERALLY found to be worth less than nothing as it was removed from an entire console's digital storefront and refunded. I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I had not suffered enough. I pirated the unpatched version, just to see if it was as bad as everyone said it was. After struggling to get it running on Proton, I finally got in-game.

And began to enjoy it.

Outside the issues with Wine/Proton (i can only start the game once before I have to basically reinstall it, because Wine isn't a fan of the game) I really, REALLY enjoyed what I played of the game. Now that I have some money coming in every month, I'm going to buy it when I get the chance. If I hadn't pirated it and seen it for myself, I wouldn't have even considered it.

Ethical piracy does exist, and it's a lot more prevalent than game companies make it out to be.

@aviophile actually it's on sale so i'm gonna buy it and a couple other things rn

okay so steam's being swamped rn but once it's not asking me to fuck off for a few hours before trying again i will

@Parzi you are using tiny percentage of ethical hacking as excuse. And also, you arr buying as a necessity since you can not play properly in Wine?

@Parzi I'm with you on that. I do demo many games by pirating, and more often it goes by "oh, this is actually a better game than it looked" than "oh, it's worse than it looked". Basically I would not have bought as many games because I get bored of them quickly and thus cautious about spending on them without knowing whether I will like it or not.

@aviophile works fine for me, and I can load arbitrary EXEs in stock Proton, I wrote a bash script for it and everything. Runs like dogshit, but only sometimes, and even then i've played much worse. I didn't buy it "out of necessity." I just enjoyed the game.

@aviophile https://pastebin.com/7Tfn8KRf i forgot to include my script in the last comment, so here you go. swap out paths and proton version as needed. It's a modified version of one I found on SO a long time ago but can't find now.

@iiii Same, but I also need to know if I can beat on whatever game enough to run it in Proton. So far, the answer's "literally one game couldn't be tamed, the rest eventually ran fine." I wouldn't know that until I dropped cash on it otherwise, meaning money spent on a game I couldn't play.

@Parzi and then unnecessary refund, which could be rejected if you do it often enough.

@Parzi why are you esporting a variable and then also assign it before running the next command? Isn't that redundant?

@iiii it's not exactly optimized, plus some of the older Proton versions are a little weird with whether they check the env or erroneously expect some flags to always be passed on the command line, or were in my experience, anyway, so it's a workaround for that.