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How does pirating make a corporation broke? Making a copy doesn't steal money.
Edit: We can't pirate a company into bankruptcy.
Because they keep whining that they're losing money /s
EDIT: added /s
I have an automated setup that can torrent the same game 100000 times so I can make corporations go broke at the click of a button. Fear me
I have a collection of 10000 classic Nintendo games on an HDD so I can make Nintendo America file chapter 11. Fear me
We can’t pirate a company into bankruptcy because there are still people paying for the movies and games we download. If everyone pirated content, these companies would go bankrupt, and there would no longer be new content to pirate. Online pirates often justify their behavior by telling themselves a story about how they’re 'sticking it to the man,' but in reality, we’re just freeriders enjoying the fruits of others' labor. We’re leeches with no moral ground to stand on.
Well, they have to pay licensing fees for the media, pay crazy money for the IT infrastructure, which they have no matter how many downloads.
You didn't pay up to enjoy the product. They lost revenue. But yes, it didn't "broke" the corporation.
This assumes I was going to buy it in the first place
You would if piracy wasn't an option. Maybe not all of it, but some of it.
They lost revenue
They lost HYPOTHETICAL revenue. Assuming that everyone who pirates a product would otherwise buy it is a textbook appeal to probability fallacy
Unless "piracy" is your alternative to buying a brand new copy at launch, I don't wanna hear it.
If GameStop can make bank re-selling used games without giving back a cent to the developer, how is doing the same for free, without taking up competitive retail space any worse?
Because the copy sold by GameStop was already paid for to the publisher.
So was the install I made a copy of and gave to a friend. Either way the publisher makes the same amount.
Sure there might be a limited number of used copies, but when you're talking about a mass manufactured product with limited demand like a random used game, then yeah, might as well be unlimited. How many used copies of GTA V or Skyrim out there do you think there are? Answer: far more than there are people looking to buy them, and each one of those copies can be sold an infinite amount of times.
The only games that are so rare that this matters are either so expensive or so hard to come by that everyone is okay with pirating them anyways because there's no reasonable way to obtain them, and they're all usually out of print any who.
it's okay to pirate rare games because there are so few of them
it's okay to pirate common games because there are so many of them
Look, I'm all for piracy and against copyright, but you can simply admit you like free stuff without finding twisted explanations to justify it.
Most people have a hard time swallowing the fact that they're nothing but bottom tier leeches.
I say this as someone who buys their games because they don't trust cracked executables.
Granted I have a collection of complete romsets, but I also have three bookshelves of physical games from the Nintendo Switch all the way back to the 2600 (even have a coupla pong consoles.)
Between all that, the hundreds/thousands I've spent on band camp, and the monthly donations to patron creators, free software projects, and the internet archive? Yeah I must be a freeloader lmao. There's a million reasons piracy is ethically correct. Copyright needs to fucking die.
You want bottom tier leeches? Go look to the capitalist owning class that tried to redefine sharing as piracy in the first place.
I have an orchard full of mirabelle plum trees. I keep some of the production for personal consumption and to hand out to friends and family, and sell the rest.
On average, I make back all the money invested in tools and other farming products halfway through the gathering season.
According to you, it's ok if someone comes and steal my fruit after that then?
Imagine calling someone else a leech when you are literally promoting theft because you have decided that after an arbitrary amount of time (2 months, apparently), it's all paid for.
I buy games because it's the right thing to do. Not because I am afraid.
This hypothetical is a false equivalence as fruit is a physical good. Digital media can be copied ad nauseum without the owner losing access to their copy.
When someone steals your fruit, its not just that they have fruit and you didn't get money, its that you no longer have any of your fruit.
A better metaphor is if someone bought your fruit, buried the seeds, grew their own plum tree, and started giving away the fruit that they grew.
Also call it being afraid, but I don't have shame in being security conscious. Not that I run games outside of a controlled VM, but anyone who would run a cracked exe that uses a closed source implementation is fucking asking for it. Only software crack I've ever trusted was massgrave for activating windows/office.
So long as everyone who wants to play a game can purchase it used, its functionally no different than piracy. Except someone who did no work makes money off of it.
If a game can't be easily legally obtained, if at all, its a pretty common belief that piracy is justified in the name of preservation.
The only exceptions to this are new releases which haven't reached critical mass, and smaller releases which will never reach any sort of mass following.
The former is especially important when you realize that two months post-launch of a new piece of media, the company has made back the artist saleries, and everything after that is just bonus for the useless vultures upstairs.
In fact, you're helping them promote their stuff. E.g. everyone is watching that TV show and it's all your friends are talking about. Now you have to do it too.
If instead of pirating you'd be like "I think it's extremely expensive to pay a subscription fee for this low tier content, so instead I've been reading X". Maybe you'd convice someone to join you. But for now you're just reinforcing the media monopoly.
So now i should stop doing everything involving a digital subscription that's fun just to stick it to the corpos? I don't know if I'm misunderstanding your argument
You want to portrait yourself as an anti-corpo warrior. But all you're doing is making corpo content a mainstream monopoly, and through that they will eventually find a way to make someone pay for it.
You will only make corpos go broke if you actually spend some money on alternative content. Meaning that content will get better, and there will be some follower base to enjoy that content with.
I guess i can see the appeal of that idea if you're willing to give up the variety of content you would otherwise have access to by sticking with corporations. I think Lemmy is a good example of this idea. I just can't find it within me to give up the massive amounts of content available to me particularly when it comes to gaming and film.
I mean think about it. I won't play GTA6 so as not to contribute to the oligopoly Rockstar games is associated with. I mean i get your point - small changes make big differences right? - but it's not always feasible to abandon all the good stuff that's out there all in an effort to promote individual innovation.
I will pay for their single player if reasonable, I'll probably pirate cuz their shitty online tracking made GTA5 not even worth playing legally for free. A pirated version would've worked much better and wouldn't require their fkn launcher social club disaster.
But absolutely surely I'll know I'm not an anti-corpo warrior. Just a tiny rebel insignificant enough to ignore. And I only matter a tiny bit, because I actually would've bought their game if it was on GOG.
And if everyone always bought on GOG only, you'd see a much, much stronger presence on that platform.
Till then their answer to you will be "hey you've been playing this game and your friends did too, well in order to play together it's 10$/months, good luck pirating that".
Don't read X, read Mastodon /s
How are you this naive? You know someone has to pay the developers a salary right? How would corporations pay them if nobody bought the game and instead pirated?
/s
If you aren't stealing them they aren't stealing your content or work with AI. This pirating isn't stealing bullshit is tired. Some backwards ass way to justify stealing someone's right to distribute their work and get paid.