- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
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If paying full price and obtaining a digital copy isn’t ownership, then taking that digital copy without paying can’t be stealing can it?
I legit wonder what would happen if this argument is used ( in a professional way by a professional lawyer ) in a court of law. Like, could this legit be argued to be the same?
I don’t see it going well but I’d love to see it happen. “One rule for ye, another for me” and all that
Ye, same haha
NAL but technically speaking Ubisoft would lose because they would be unable to prove that they were deprived of anything or anything was appropriated from them with their current stance. Realistically they would just pivot and find some other nonsense to try, like claiming a theft of their computer server’s processing power everytime a pirated game accessed their lobby or some other nonsense that would barely fly, but fly none the less.
What if the game was purely offline? Also, how can a pirated game access online lobbies? The last time I pirated a game was because Epic had a BL3 exclusive. And I couldn’t matchmake.
I wonder who would have to prove what. Ubi, that they missed profit (because you’d want to buy the game and didn’t) or the player (who’d argue he wouldn’t ever buy it anyway).
Well the moving party has to prove their allegations, aka Ubisoft moving to sue you means they have to prove everything they say. Since their stated public position is that they are sole owner at all times irregardless of circumstances, they would be legally barred (estoppel) from arguing that any one could hurt their possessory interest (rights and share of ownership). They essentially would have to shift the argument over, similar to a theft of service argument (not paying a train fare is a crime but you didn’t steal a train or turnstile). The question then becomes what service does ubisoft provide? Online servers that do content distribution seem to be the only thing. If you got it on the high seas you never hit their network, so all I see left with my hypothetical napkin math is all that random network traffic ubisoft games seem to always have (even offline).
Thanks, interesting, I am almost tempted to taunt Ubi that I pirated their game and try to get sued lmao.
Bravo.
Piracy is never stealing.
Piracy by definition is stealing.
No. It is not. If you’d like a crime to compare it to, forgery would be more accurate.
Forgery usually involves submitting what you faked to some other entity in order to do something. Maybe if you illegally copied and sold that music. Regardless the penalties are similar anyway.
the unauthorized use of another’s production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright
Piracy can often invovle legally obtained items or even bypassing item bans.
You pirate a movie by taking a real copy and sharing it with others over the internet by making more copies or by making it copyable.
Stealing a movie would be taking the real copy without paying for it.
You could both steal and pirate the movie, but in the context of modern media, the source material is usually obtained legally.
That’s why most torrents usually have the source in the title to show what it was taken from (DVD, BluRay, WEBRiP, WEB-DL, etc).
Piracy by definition is sharing
Incorrect. Last I checked, theft is depriving the original owner of their product or service. When it comes down to it, piracy is essentially making an illegal copy, meaning the original is still there.
I’m not sure how you drew this conclusion, since most people I know consider paying full price to obtain a digital copy to be extremely close to ownership.
I liked Telltale’s Law and Order series. They can’t sell it anymore, but I can still download my digital copy because I bought it full price.
The whole argument in the article is about monthly subscription rentals.
When a contract ending almost caused Sony to remove all Discovery content from users last year, including digital copies of things people had paid full price for, the cracks between buying a digital license and actually owning something that can’t be taken away became more visible to a chunk of people. It’s something, but it’s not ownership, and it can be taken away based on agreements you may have no way of gaining insight into.
Audible is open about it. Well, if you dig through the fine print. Easy enough to rip copies but I’d say most people only realise they need to when they loose access. Maybe not, but $30 for an audiobook seems like pretty shity value if you’re only renting it untill you cancel your subscription.
E: I might be misinformed/ outdated.
You keep the audiobooks you’ve paid for directly with credits when you cancel.
Oh I’m very comfortable with it. In fact I haven’t owned a Ubisoft game in many, many years, and I wasn’t about to change that.
If your games are on steam, you’re already not owning them. The only difference seems to be that steam doesn’t demand a monthly subscription cost, yet
We already have game pass so it’s not like this is something completely new either.
If this makes money, other big publishers will join and in 10 years it’s the norm.
Personally, I’ll try my best to keep buying on GOG and itch.io where I get to actually own my games.
Agree, I own a lot of games in Steam but most come from bundles or were not bought a full price. I do buy full price games on GOG because I can have a backup offline.
The only difference is a huge difference though. Pay once for a game that you can access anytime versus paying continuously for the rest of your life to keep access to a game.
Some games are not worth keeping access to and subscription may end up being cheaper, but it is trading one benefit for another.
I’m not enough of a Linux user to inconvenience myself so I’m just using Steam. The cloud sync is the killer feature for me - if GOG had something like it even if I have to pay extra, I’d so use it.
If your games are on steam, you’re already not owning them
Almost as if all the “evil” in the game’s industry Valve started.
We did it guys, we found the source of corporate greed!
G*mers will do anything to avoid saying anything bad about Lord Gaben
Oh, fear not Ubisoft, I’m perfectly comfortable never owning any of your games again. Ever. Eat shit.
I’m comfortable with not “owning” the games I pirate.
Your move, Ubisoft.
Well I’m comfortable not buying any of theirs. They’re in my steam ignore list along with EA 🖕🖕
Ubisoft disable multiplayer in games like splinter cell and then have the nerve to charge you 20 ducats for a 10 year old game with only half the gameplay requiring a shitty launcher and with glaring bugs that they just didn’t bother to address.
As for the future. There is still emulation. So stock up 😉
We already don’t own our games, because we can’t sell them. We used to be able to sell and exchange games, but with digital platforms like steam, we don’t have the right to sell them anymore, meaning we only bought the right to play the game, not owning it.
Not that there are many pro NFT folks here, but even with that approach it’s still just a transferrable license that they can change to be meaningless.
You still can, that’s why - outside of a few exceptions - I only buy console games on disc, and sell them later
Can’t sell your organs either… Well, not easily.
If buying isn’t ownership then piracy isn’t theft.
Buying a CD/DVD was never ownership of the media that’s on it. It’s ownership of a piece of plastic and a license to play to the content on the plastic within certain limitations. If it was ownership, you would be allowed to project the DVD on a wall and charge patrons to view it, but legally you can’t, because you don’t own anything but the plastic. Buying a CD/DVD was always just a more convenient version of buying a ticket to a concert/theater to see the same thing. You’re paying for the experience of viewing their artwork.
So, as long as you also agree that sneaking into a concert/theater to view a show without paying also isn’t theft in any way, then I can’t argue.
Blah blah blah. Shove that copyright-maximalist take. You own things, god dammit. Even if you only own your copy of a book, it’s not somehow an ink-and-paper license to a copy, it is your copy. That’s what ownership means.
If you don’t know the difference between individual property and intellectual property, stop spitting at people who do.
Just want to highlight how unnecessarily antagonistic your response was. Not sure if that was your intention, but I don’t care to engage with it. Cheers.
The irony is immense.
If you think I’ve been antagonistic, please let me know how. I’m here to have a productive discussion, but so far I’m here by myself.
You could start by actually making an attempt at good faith discussion, instead of pedantic attempts to hide from the point.
But we both know you dont want to do that, because youre not actually here for productive discussion.
I respectfully disagreed with the top level post, and stated facts about why. If that was interpreted as not in good faith, I’m sorry, and I’m open to any counter arguments. So far, two people have pointed out that physical media can’t remotely have their licenses revoked, and I agree, that is relevant to the discussion. If you have anything relevant you’d like to contribute, I’m all ears.
Blunt rejection of scolding is not where the problem started.
I think his point in this case is you own the physical item but not the information on it. If not then I could buy some musician’s cd then I could say “Now I own their music” and start selling copies of their cd, publishing it, stealing their rights to it, etc. I think we can all agree that would be bad.
‘No, see, he meant exactly what you thought he meant.’
Again: I know the difference between individual property and intellectual property. I am condemning the corporate word-games that would deny one of those exists, and the the tutting of people who take that for granted. I don’t need a fucking primer.
Yes, you own the information on it. You don’t own the rights to distribute it to others, but you bought the information and the right to personally use it. When you buy a painting, do you only have a licence to view it?
When you buy a painting, do you only have a license to view it?
That’s a good question. My guess is that the rights to create prints of the painting usually remain with the artist. You own that painting, you probably even own the right to display it for an entry fee, but unless the artist has granted you a license to the artwork, I don’t think you can freely create copies.
Indeed, the right to make copies are often licenced (although you can also sell that right) because it is explicitly written in some conventions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention?useskin=vector) that the copyright resides with the creator to begin with. I don’t think the Berne Convention deals with the option of transferring intellectual property and the copyright to them, but I’m assuming it’s mostly defined well enough in some contract law or other.
I think we can all agree that would be bad.
You’d be surprised. There seem to be vanishingly few people here willing to honestly discuss the legal questions around piracy and copyright. The vast majority are just here to circle jerk about how much corporations suck, completely forgetting about the rights of artists they’re defending in the anti-AI circle jerk one thread over. I honestly think they spend more time flaming anything they disagree with than actually putting any thought into the matter. The dogmatism rivals that of conservative forums.
We found the record company shill.
I‘m all for sneaking into concerts and everything else since ticketmaster is trying to wring every penny out of customers.
All those leeches can die in a hole.
I‘m all for sneaking into concerts and everything else
Then as I said, I can’t argue.
But you should keep this in mind when you go to the next thread and join the anti-AI circle jerk, pretending to defend artists for upvotes.
The record company can’t disable my physical CD from working if they choose to. That’s 99% of the point.
That’s a fair distinction. Congrats, I’m finding there are very few people willing to engage in productive discussion on here.
You arent actually putting forward a productive premise, of course no one is treating it as such
If I’ve said something false, let me know. As far as I’m aware, what I’ve said is how the law works (at least in the US). I understand if you don’t like those laws, but that doesn’t make them not exist, nor does it make them irrelevant when someone makes a reductive statement like “if buying isn’t ownership, then piracy isn’t stealing”. The fact is, in some cases, it is.
Nice, more bad faith misinterpreting of the point
Removed by mod
I want ubisoft to be comfortable with me not playing their games.
They already fucked me on this years ago. One day I logged into Uplay and Battlefield 3 and my 2 other games were just fucking gone. Haven’t touched them with a 10 foot pole since.
What Ubi wants means fuck all to me. Yall wanted us to buy NFT guns too, see how that worked out…
It’s rather amusing how everything people fear happening under communism comes to pass under capitalism in one way or another. Turns out that it is the capitalists who aim to strip individuals of their personal property by transforming everything into a rental service. You see, you no longer possess your media, books, computer, phone, or any other device; they’ve all been transformed into internet-connected subscriptions. The moment you cease paying or when the company decides to discontinue its services, you find yourself in quite an unfortunate predicament.
This is the direction the big companies are looking to move in. This is the direction Microsoft is banking on, too. Even if you like one service more, the end result may be the same. It’s a matter of time before we see subscription exclusives.
GamePass subscribers are the pre-orderers and mtx consumers of yesteryear, normalizing the industry to practices harmful to general consumers.
Piracy is a very noble endeavor to keep alive. Thank you Ubisoft for keeping us on our toes instead of being complacent with trusting digital platforms. Piracy is the true preservation and ownership.
One thing I read (a lot, oddly) is that GamePass is ‘really popular’/the most popular ‘subscription’ service, but I have never met anyone who uses it.
I checked the numbers of people using GamePass, and it seems the numbers have gone:
2021 - 23 million
2022 - 25 million
2023 - there was a brief post on linkedin saying 30 million, but it was removed.
If even the most popular service is struggling to pass 30 million users, how exactly is Ubisoft going to compete? There’s what, 120 million people with Xbox subscriptions, and they can barely get 1/4 of them to use GamePass?
It’s interesting to watch ‘AAA’ studios absolutely faceplanting every year now, hopefully we can make a full indie-sweep soon.
I use gamepass. I’ve definitely saved money with the amount of games my household has played.
I buy games I really like and just try them on gamepass.
The reason people I know tend to give for not using GamePass is you’re essentially paying for demos (which still exist on PC pretty often. I just bought Roboquest because of the demo.)
EDIT: Also, $12/month is a huge amount of money for me to spend on something like that. Just shy of 150/year for games that aren’t good enough to own, but are good enough to play, doesn’t strike me as valuable.
2 other people play on my account from sub accounts on the console. They each play multiple games per month. $12 is less than $60, so even a single new game each month saves me money.
Paying for demos? I’m not sure why you think there aren’t any good games on there. Halo, Starfield, Fallout, Cities Skylines, Forza, Mass Effect, Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Assassins Creed, Yakuza, Dead Space, blah blah blah.
And that’s not including all the smaller games my kids have found. Human Fall Flat, Rubber Bandits, Donut County, Frog Detective are all games we found that we otherwise would never have spent money on.
I don’t support subscription only models, but that doesn’t mean some aspects aren’t a good value.
If the games stayed I’d check it out, but having a game for a few months isn’t something I find value in, which tends to be what people I’ve spoken with about it. Especially since you don’t choose the games.
Also, seriously the PC app is absolutely awful. The games work worse on it than on steam. It crashes, has terrible performance, and break installs constantly.
You also can’t mod a lot of these games, which particularly on PC is a pretty large missing piece.
That’s also not to mention the cost has doubled in two years.
You’re allowed to enjoy it, but I think it’s also clear why it isn’t taking off.
All my friends have it. They just want to play the game once and move on
All of my cousins and friends have this, becaude they don’t care if they own the games.
I think.that most peple like it, I don’t have ultimate, because I.like to own my games.
