6 ms·

I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common. I pirate when I literally can't give anyone my money, or a

by nomel 3y ago

I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common. I pirate when I literally can't give anyone my money, or after something like this happens. Before is just trying to justify not compensating the creators. I’ve seen so many studios go under, that I loved. I think supporting them is important, or we’ll end up with media made for the masses, that do pay. edit: there be pirates in these waters! edit: please include the third and fourth sentence in your comprehension of the above, before responding.

JodieBenitez 3y ago
> You can't claim it's common. cough kindle... cough
- nomel 3y ago
  Are you aware of any cases where they didn't refund [1]? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
  - stbenjam 3y ago
    What good is that? If I buy a book or a movie I want to own it forever not until the company decides to take it back regardless of giving a refund…
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    I don't think that's the point. If the industry is going to regularly make me go through incessant cycles of purchasing, getting refunded, rebuying (for the same price?) then I'm going to pirate the content. What an absolutely absurd expectation.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I thought the point was ownership and how flimsy ownership lead to Piracy. Not a personal rant on how your bad customer service experience justifies your decision to pirate. I don't care if people "steal" from billion dollar corporations. But let's not mince words and pretend it's some Robin Hood act of altruism. The companies already took that piracy into account on their budget book anyway; they won't change their ways over this. That whole Gabe Newell quote about "piracy is a service issue" goes both ways. Piracy isn't always convinent and plenty of people don't wanna set up plex servers and search torrents and organize their library to get "the best experience". They just want to turn on device and play/watch/read seemlessly
      - mvdtnz 3y ago
        What? Unilaterally refunding a purchase I made years ago isn't "bad customer service". It's just a company being shitty and not caring. I am the party that acted in good faith and purchased the content! What are you even talking about?
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Companies don't like refunding either in all fairness. And your phrasing makes it sound like this happens to you regularly. I don't think "refund" is the best use of word here. That's usually a customer returning a product. And a company with bad refund policies tends to have bad customer service.
      - rowanG077 3y ago
        So from your perspective it would be oke if randomly thieves enter your home, "take" some stuff from you and leaving behind a calling card so you can arrange to get paid for it.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        This metaphor breaks down because you don't own the servers hosting the stuff in question. It's not your house to begin with. And it's not my point at all in that comment. I'm just saying most 'thieves' aren't trying to prove they are good people by stealing like how piracy arguments oh so often go here. Nor trying to pretend they are archivist saving artifacts from disappearing off the face of the earth. They are either greedy, desperate to survive, and in a few rare cases a pathological disorder. It's premium entertainment, and people either want to consume a product but dont/can't pay. It's that simple. and I'm not saying that from a judgmental POV either. I've done it quite a bit as a grade schooler.
        rowanG077 3y ago
        The entire point is indeed that you can't own it. You saying it's not comparable because you don't own the servers is non-sensical. It's not like you can choose not use the servers. Well you can. You have to pirate it.
  - lp0_on_fire 3y ago
    "We broke into your house last night and took that book off the shelf. But we left 20 bucks on the counter so it's ok!"
    - nomel 3y ago
      In the case in that link, the publisher was not legitimate. Amazon (literally) sold a pirated copy. They refunded, allowing you to buy a non-pirated copy. The alternative would be to swap it out for a copy from a legitimate publisher, but I assume there are laws around swapping goods out from under people.
  - tedsanders 3y ago
    Yes. When the old online Dominion lost the license to the Dominion card game, they didn't refund buyers with cash; they refunded the buyers with some kind of digital dollars to spend on their other unattractive products. So essentially every dollar spent on Dominion expansions was lost. Really soured me on the idea of purchasing online board games.
- delecti 3y ago
  Is it common? I only know of the ironic removal of 1984, and that was in 2009. I've got 500+ books in my kindle library and am not aware of it ever happening to me. And to be clear, I wouldn't be surprised if it has happened again since, but I've never heard of any, so I agree with the GP comment's assertion that it isn't common.
  - JodieBenitez 3y ago
    I don't know if it's common, but I've seen enough of it that I don't trust companies with their practice. Also it goes both ways: Remember when Apple forced a U2 album on iTunes users ?
    - acheron 3y ago
      They didn’t “force” anything, they made it available to download if you wanted.
      - jkestner 3y ago
        https://www.eonline.com/news/1071481/remember-when-apple-forced-a-u2-album-on-us-all https://www.eonline.com/news/1071481/remember-when-apple-for...
      - amatecha 3y ago
        If you haven't used Apple ecosystem stuff you may not realize, but there are many ways in which this album surfaces, such as simply pressing Play on your Apple Watch (without having specified any song)... I've accidentally played U2's music so many times since Apple "gifted" it to me, despite having zero interest in hearing that music at that time.
      - JodieBenitez 3y ago
        Nope. It was right there in my music collection where it doesn't belong.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common I've never experienced a car crash, so they can't be common, why should I wear a seatbelt?
- tzs 3y ago
  What he should have written is "I've never experienced it in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media, am not acquainted with anyone who has even though most people I know purchase digital media, and it is only been reported a handful of times". Unless it happens a lot but doesn't get any publicity, which seems pretty unlikely as there are too many widely read forums where people it happened to would report it, and too many publications like Ars, Tech Dirt, The Register, Torrent Freak, and many others that would jump on any such story, we must indeed conclude that it is not common. The important question is not if it is common but rather will it become common? Discovery is part of Warner, which is currently being run by someone who will kill content for the tax write offs. He killed "Final Space" for a tax write off, cancelling future season and pulling existing seasons from streaming and sale. And last year they killed a movie, "Acme vs. Coyote", that they had completed and scheduled for release because they decided they'd rather write it off. Because of that right now I would not buy any streaming content from Warner. In the specific case of Discovery it looks like they are just pulling it from other platforms so that it can be exclusive to services they own, like Max and Discovery+. That probably means it is safe for now to buy Warner owned content through Warner owned platforms, but I'd worry that in the future they will decide to write it off and it will leave their own platforms too.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I can Google a car crash down to an exact street in my area with no problem. I'd need to Google pretty hard to fine another instance of a store delisting a video game and retroactively removing it from the buyer's library. I can only recall it happening once before on steam, and it was due to malware on the now delisted game.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
f-securus 3y ago
I bought one of the wwe wrestling games for my kid on my xbox account. Few years later there was a new version he wanted. After playing it he wanted to play the old version. The studio had removed it from the Microsoft store because they wanted to force people to new version. Even though I owned it I couldn’t install from Microsoft store. I contacted support and was told I had to copy it from the xbox it was installed on. I never bought anymore games from that studio. That was years ago and now there are more and more examples of not owning what you paid for.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  This is really common with any games that need to license a ton of things in order to exist. The contract for using a wrestler's wrestler's likeness usually has a time limit. As well as the songs they use for their intro/outro. Racing games have this issue too if they use real car brands. You can't buy the previous Forza games or some old Codemasters racing games anymore because of expired licensing. At least on Steam they're still available for download if you previously purchased them. No clue what the experience is in console or other PC stores.
  - f-securus 3y ago
    From a user's perspective that is incredibly hostile. They push digital goods as more convenient than physical media but don't make it clear that you lose the right to download it after a certain time. That functionality is sold as a benefit but the limited time isn't made clear.
nullhole 3y ago
> I’ve seen so many studios go under, that I loved. I've never experienced that in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common.
- nomel 3y ago
  I suspect you haven't checked. Or this means you only play big name (EA, Ubisoft, etc) games and only watch/read big studio content (Disney, etc). That's fine, but it's trivial to find lists of failed production houses, especially with games [1], with Embracer and Volition shutting down this year (as more examples significant to me). And, you might be surprised at the long list of movie studios [2]. [1] https://www.thegamer.com/failed-game-studios-best-games-metacritic https://www.thegamer.com/failed-game-studios-best-games-meta... [2] https://movieweb.com/famous-defunct-american-film-studios/#blue-sky-studios-1987-2021 https://movieweb.com/famous-defunct-american-film-studios/#b...
HideousKojima 3y ago
Almost all PC games that utilized Games For Windows Live stopped working (new installs and reinstalls could no longer be performed) when Microsoft shut down the service, and AFAIK there are still a couple games that never updated to remove the reliance on GFWL DRM and can only be played by pirating. That's a lot of games, including several notable big name titles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_%E2%80%93_Live_titles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_%E... That includes GTA IV, Street Fighter IV, and Resident Evil 5.
- nomel 3y ago
  As I said, pirating after is one thing. Justifying the pirating with a possible future event that may not happen is another.
  - harry8 3y ago
    Justifying insurance with a possible future event that may not happen is another. Sure but it's very much a minority point of view.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    If the work to crack a game isn't done early on, it can become infinitely harder to do that work later, especially if there's a multiplayer component that needs to be reverse engineered. Being proactive about cracking, emulation, and piracy is the pro-social and pro-preservation of our culture/technology/heritage move here.
    - nomel 3y ago
      Cracking the game early is completely tangential to you supporting the developers of the thing you enjoy. I've bought games and then immediately downloaded the pirated version before. If you don't support the things you like, you're going to end up with the things that everyone else likes.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  Luckily Dark Souls got re-released on Steam without Windows Live. Until that point my purchased physical copy was unusable. Well, it's still unusable but at least the CD key got me a working version.
anonymoushn 3y ago
If you buy a defective game on PSN and then get a refund, your entire PSN account is nuked. If you buy a game on Steam and the devs push malware in an update and you get a refund, your entire Steam account is nuked. An example of a defective game you can currently buy on PSN is Kingdom: Two Crowns. An example of a game whose developer pushed malware in an update automatically downloaded by Steam is Street Fighter V. In the case of PSN, official policy is that defective games are refundable. They just make it impossible to reach anyone about this during the refund window. In the case of Steam, official policy is that devs are free to push malware to your device.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  This sound more like an argument for companies needing to be punished for retaliating against refunds and chargebacks, more than an argument for piracy.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    How else do you punish them if not by affecting their revenue?
    - nomel 3y ago
      You can't punish them for something they haven't done, by pirating before they do it. There will be no correlation, so no feedback mechanism, in that scenario. What do you see as the signal they should pick up on? How will they differentiate it from "they pirate no matter what we do"? These are genuine questions.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Government regulation I guess. But i feel "punish" is the wrong lens to look at this. It's hard for the individual to punish a corporation. Ultimately the goal is to maximize your own purchase so the best way to achieve that is to find a better product. Then that merchant grows based on their ability to serve the customer. In my experience, most companies tend to be punished not by people or competition, but by their own folly. And if there really is no merchant serving your product for your price, that's a much larger discussion to have.
Timshel 3y ago
It's not new that you do not own DRM uncumbered files. It's true that it was expected that you'll lose access due to drm server disappearing not pure deletion ...
meroes 3y ago
Glad you asked. Steam stole my Dungeon Siege content. I doubt there is any language in their TOS that lets them do what they did to people who bought DS which came with the expansion Legends of Aranna, only to remove the expansion from libraries after some kind of licensing dispute. Zero refund.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ChoGGi 3y ago
  There's a guide to enable the dlc again. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1148174213 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11481...
starttoaster 3y ago
I pirate loads. But if it's a small studio I always buy the BluRay in addition. If it's an excellent film or show but it's made by a large studio, I check to see if it's available on one of the streaming services I subscribe to, and if not, I buy the BluRay. Thought process being that it's the job of the streaming service to compensate the creators at that point (which a large point of the writer's strike was to ensure that they do.) If it's something I'm certain I'll only watch once, I just keep the pirated copy. It would be nice if there were some kind of, "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee," Venmo-like service. Maybe every studio could just put up a Twitch stream that I could donate some bits to. But this is all just to say that while I pirate loads, I do have a bit of a conscious about it. That said, stories like this are why I don't lose much sleep over it.
- nomel 3y ago
  > "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee," For me, this is a rental.
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    That seems pretty reasonable. Is RedBox still a thing? Can I rent a DVD and give it right back the next minute? Are there better methods to rent movies these days? I guess Amazon Prime exists.
tonyarkles 3y ago
Ahhh while I've never had specifically purchased media disappear like this, movies that I want to rewatch do often migrate around from streaming service to streaming service, which is fine if you subscribe to all of them but is really a hassle when you start watching something on Netflix and then when you come back to it a month later discover it's not available anymore.
- nomel 3y ago
  Sure, but that's not related. There's no concept of ownership with the library of a streaming service. I think that's well understood by the general public.
  - harry8 3y ago
    Sure it's well understood that it's a service fail and poor quality service leads to piracy.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      You are aware services like that rose to prominence precisely because people decided to sacrifice ownership for rentals, right? You didn't pay $10 for perpetual ownership of IASIP. You paid $10 for a month of access to Netflix or whatever service hosted that show. I still buy physical media or digital downloads of any work I want to keep for more than a month because I value it for those cases.
      - squeaky-clean 3y ago
        In the past people still would rent more than they owned. They just traded having to visit a store with a selection limited by physical space for an instantly available digital service. But you'd never show up to a Hollywood Video looking to rent Terminator 2 and get told that it's a Blockbuster exclusive rental. There were Blockbuster exclusive movies, but they all sucked so it didn't matter. Netflix Streaming gave bigger selection and instant access. You could get 15 minutes into a movie, realize it sucks, and you didn't have to drive back to the video store for a different one. Nowadays the selection on any streaming service feels like 1/3 of what a VHS rental place would have. Sure there's more actual quantity, but it's like the $1 rental bin. Currently, if you pick X popular movie and Y streaming service, odds are you cannot watch it on that streaming service.

by nomel 3y ago

JodieBenitez 3y ago

> You can't claim it's common. cough kindle... cough

nomel 3y ago
Are you aware of any cases where they didn't refund [1]? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
- stbenjam 3y ago
  What good is that? If I buy a book or a movie I want to own it forever not until the company decides to take it back regardless of giving a refund…
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  I don't think that's the point. If the industry is going to regularly make me go through incessant cycles of purchasing, getting refunded, rebuying (for the same price?) then I'm going to pirate the content. What an absolutely absurd expectation.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I thought the point was ownership and how flimsy ownership lead to Piracy. Not a personal rant on how your bad customer service experience justifies your decision to pirate. I don't care if people "steal" from billion dollar corporations. But let's not mince words and pretend it's some Robin Hood act of altruism. The companies already took that piracy into account on their budget book anyway; they won't change their ways over this. That whole Gabe Newell quote about "piracy is a service issue" goes both ways. Piracy isn't always convinent and plenty of people don't wanna set up plex servers and search torrents and organize their library to get "the best experience". They just want to turn on device and play/watch/read seemlessly
    - mvdtnz 3y ago
      What? Unilaterally refunding a purchase I made years ago isn't "bad customer service". It's just a company being shitty and not caring. I am the party that acted in good faith and purchased the content! What are you even talking about?
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Companies don't like refunding either in all fairness. And your phrasing makes it sound like this happens to you regularly. I don't think "refund" is the best use of word here. That's usually a customer returning a product. And a company with bad refund policies tends to have bad customer service.
    - rowanG077 3y ago
      So from your perspective it would be oke if randomly thieves enter your home, "take" some stuff from you and leaving behind a calling card so you can arrange to get paid for it.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        This metaphor breaks down because you don't own the servers hosting the stuff in question. It's not your house to begin with. And it's not my point at all in that comment. I'm just saying most 'thieves' aren't trying to prove they are good people by stealing like how piracy arguments oh so often go here. Nor trying to pretend they are archivist saving artifacts from disappearing off the face of the earth. They are either greedy, desperate to survive, and in a few rare cases a pathological disorder. It's premium entertainment, and people either want to consume a product but dont/can't pay. It's that simple. and I'm not saying that from a judgmental POV either. I've done it quite a bit as a grade schooler.
        rowanG077 3y ago
        The entire point is indeed that you can't own it. You saying it's not comparable because you don't own the servers is non-sensical. It's not like you can choose not use the servers. Well you can. You have to pirate it.
- lp0_on_fire 3y ago
  "We broke into your house last night and took that book off the shelf. But we left 20 bucks on the counter so it's ok!"
  - nomel 3y ago
    In the case in that link, the publisher was not legitimate. Amazon (literally) sold a pirated copy. They refunded, allowing you to buy a non-pirated copy. The alternative would be to swap it out for a copy from a legitimate publisher, but I assume there are laws around swapping goods out from under people.
- tedsanders 3y ago
  Yes. When the old online Dominion lost the license to the Dominion card game, they didn't refund buyers with cash; they refunded the buyers with some kind of digital dollars to spend on their other unattractive products. So essentially every dollar spent on Dominion expansions was lost. Really soured me on the idea of purchasing online board games.
delecti 3y ago
Is it common? I only know of the ironic removal of 1984, and that was in 2009. I've got 500+ books in my kindle library and am not aware of it ever happening to me. And to be clear, I wouldn't be surprised if it has happened again since, but I've never heard of any, so I agree with the GP comment's assertion that it isn't common.
- JodieBenitez 3y ago
  I don't know if it's common, but I've seen enough of it that I don't trust companies with their practice. Also it goes both ways: Remember when Apple forced a U2 album on iTunes users ?
  - acheron 3y ago
    They didn’t “force” anything, they made it available to download if you wanted.
    - jkestner 3y ago
      https://www.eonline.com/news/1071481/remember-when-apple-forced-a-u2-album-on-us-all https://www.eonline.com/news/1071481/remember-when-apple-for...
    - amatecha 3y ago
      If you haven't used Apple ecosystem stuff you may not realize, but there are many ways in which this album surfaces, such as simply pressing Play on your Apple Watch (without having specified any song)... I've accidentally played U2's music so many times since Apple "gifted" it to me, despite having zero interest in hearing that music at that time.
    - JodieBenitez 3y ago
      Nope. It was right there in my music collection where it doesn't belong.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common I've never experienced a car crash, so they can't be common, why should I wear a seatbelt?

tzs 3y ago
What he should have written is "I've never experienced it in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media, am not acquainted with anyone who has even though most people I know purchase digital media, and it is only been reported a handful of times". Unless it happens a lot but doesn't get any publicity, which seems pretty unlikely as there are too many widely read forums where people it happened to would report it, and too many publications like Ars, Tech Dirt, The Register, Torrent Freak, and many others that would jump on any such story, we must indeed conclude that it is not common. The important question is not if it is common but rather will it become common? Discovery is part of Warner, which is currently being run by someone who will kill content for the tax write offs. He killed "Final Space" for a tax write off, cancelling future season and pulling existing seasons from streaming and sale. And last year they killed a movie, "Acme vs. Coyote", that they had completed and scheduled for release because they decided they'd rather write it off. Because of that right now I would not buy any streaming content from Warner. In the specific case of Discovery it looks like they are just pulling it from other platforms so that it can be exclusive to services they own, like Max and Discovery+. That probably means it is safe for now to buy Warner owned content through Warner owned platforms, but I'd worry that in the future they will decide to write it off and it will leave their own platforms too.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I can Google a car crash down to an exact street in my area with no problem. I'd need to Google pretty hard to fine another instance of a store delisting a video game and retroactively removing it from the buyer's library. I can only recall it happening once before on steam, and it was due to malware on the now delisted game.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

f-securus 3y ago

I bought one of the wwe wrestling games for my kid on my xbox account. Few years later there was a new version he wanted. After playing it he wanted to play the old version. The studio had removed it from the Microsoft store because they wanted to force people to new version. Even though I owned it I couldn’t install from Microsoft store. I contacted support and was told I had to copy it from the xbox it was installed on. I never bought anymore games from that studio. That was years ago and now there are more and more examples of not owning what you paid for.

squeaky-clean 3y ago
This is really common with any games that need to license a ton of things in order to exist. The contract for using a wrestler's wrestler's likeness usually has a time limit. As well as the songs they use for their intro/outro. Racing games have this issue too if they use real car brands. You can't buy the previous Forza games or some old Codemasters racing games anymore because of expired licensing. At least on Steam they're still available for download if you previously purchased them. No clue what the experience is in console or other PC stores.
- f-securus 3y ago
  From a user's perspective that is incredibly hostile. They push digital goods as more convenient than physical media but don't make it clear that you lose the right to download it after a certain time. That functionality is sold as a benefit but the limited time isn't made clear.

nullhole 3y ago

> I’ve seen so many studios go under, that I loved. I've never experienced that in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common.

nomel 3y ago
I suspect you haven't checked. Or this means you only play big name (EA, Ubisoft, etc) games and only watch/read big studio content (Disney, etc). That's fine, but it's trivial to find lists of failed production houses, especially with games [1], with Embracer and Volition shutting down this year (as more examples significant to me). And, you might be surprised at the long list of movie studios [2]. [1] https://www.thegamer.com/failed-game-studios-best-games-metacritic https://www.thegamer.com/failed-game-studios-best-games-meta... [2] https://movieweb.com/famous-defunct-american-film-studios/#blue-sky-studios-1987-2021 https://movieweb.com/famous-defunct-american-film-studios/#b...

HideousKojima 3y ago

Almost all PC games that utilized Games For Windows Live stopped working (new installs and reinstalls could no longer be performed) when Microsoft shut down the service, and AFAIK there are still a couple games that never updated to remove the reliance on GFWL DRM and can only be played by pirating. That's a lot of games, including several notable big name titles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_%E2%80%93_Live_titles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_%E... That includes GTA IV, Street Fighter IV, and Resident Evil 5.

nomel 3y ago
As I said, pirating after is one thing. Justifying the pirating with a possible future event that may not happen is another.
- harry8 3y ago
  Justifying insurance with a possible future event that may not happen is another. Sure but it's very much a minority point of view.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  If the work to crack a game isn't done early on, it can become infinitely harder to do that work later, especially if there's a multiplayer component that needs to be reverse engineered. Being proactive about cracking, emulation, and piracy is the pro-social and pro-preservation of our culture/technology/heritage move here.
  - nomel 3y ago
    Cracking the game early is completely tangential to you supporting the developers of the thing you enjoy. I've bought games and then immediately downloaded the pirated version before. If you don't support the things you like, you're going to end up with the things that everyone else likes.
alpaca128 3y ago
Luckily Dark Souls got re-released on Steam without Windows Live. Until that point my purchased physical copy was unusable. Well, it's still unusable but at least the CD key got me a working version.

anonymoushn 3y ago

If you buy a defective game on PSN and then get a refund, your entire PSN account is nuked. If you buy a game on Steam and the devs push malware in an update and you get a refund, your entire Steam account is nuked. An example of a defective game you can currently buy on PSN is Kingdom: Two Crowns. An example of a game whose developer pushed malware in an update automatically downloaded by Steam is Street Fighter V. In the case of PSN, official policy is that defective games are refundable. They just make it impossible to reach anyone about this during the refund window. In the case of Steam, official policy is that devs are free to push malware to your device.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
This sound more like an argument for companies needing to be punished for retaliating against refunds and chargebacks, more than an argument for piracy.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  How else do you punish them if not by affecting their revenue?
  - nomel 3y ago
    You can't punish them for something they haven't done, by pirating before they do it. There will be no correlation, so no feedback mechanism, in that scenario. What do you see as the signal they should pick up on? How will they differentiate it from "they pirate no matter what we do"? These are genuine questions.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Government regulation I guess. But i feel "punish" is the wrong lens to look at this. It's hard for the individual to punish a corporation. Ultimately the goal is to maximize your own purchase so the best way to achieve that is to find a better product. Then that merchant grows based on their ability to serve the customer. In my experience, most companies tend to be punished not by people or competition, but by their own folly. And if there really is no merchant serving your product for your price, that's a much larger discussion to have.

Timshel 3y ago

It's not new that you do not own DRM uncumbered files. It's true that it was expected that you'll lose access due to drm server disappearing not pure deletion ...

meroes 3y ago

Glad you asked. Steam stole my Dungeon Siege content. I doubt there is any language in their TOS that lets them do what they did to people who bought DS which came with the expansion Legends of Aranna, only to remove the expansion from libraries after some kind of licensing dispute. Zero refund.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ChoGGi 3y ago
There's a guide to enable the dlc again. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1148174213 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11481...

starttoaster 3y ago

I pirate loads. But if it's a small studio I always buy the BluRay in addition. If it's an excellent film or show but it's made by a large studio, I check to see if it's available on one of the streaming services I subscribe to, and if not, I buy the BluRay. Thought process being that it's the job of the streaming service to compensate the creators at that point (which a large point of the writer's strike was to ensure that they do.) If it's something I'm certain I'll only watch once, I just keep the pirated copy. It would be nice if there were some kind of, "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee," Venmo-like service. Maybe every studio could just put up a Twitch stream that I could donate some bits to. But this is all just to say that while I pirate loads, I do have a bit of a conscious about it. That said, stories like this are why I don't lose much sleep over it.

nomel 3y ago
> "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee," For me, this is a rental.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  That seems pretty reasonable. Is RedBox still a thing? Can I rent a DVD and give it right back the next minute? Are there better methods to rent movies these days? I guess Amazon Prime exists.

tonyarkles 3y ago

Ahhh while I've never had specifically purchased media disappear like this, movies that I want to rewatch do often migrate around from streaming service to streaming service, which is fine if you subscribe to all of them but is really a hassle when you start watching something on Netflix and then when you come back to it a month later discover it's not available anymore.

nomel 3y ago
Sure, but that's not related. There's no concept of ownership with the library of a streaming service. I think that's well understood by the general public.
- harry8 3y ago
  Sure it's well understood that it's a service fail and poor quality service leads to piracy.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    You are aware services like that rose to prominence precisely because people decided to sacrifice ownership for rentals, right? You didn't pay $10 for perpetual ownership of IASIP. You paid $10 for a month of access to Netflix or whatever service hosted that show. I still buy physical media or digital downloads of any work I want to keep for more than a month because I value it for those cases.
    - squeaky-clean 3y ago
      In the past people still would rent more than they owned. They just traded having to visit a store with a selection limited by physical space for an instantly available digital service. But you'd never show up to a Hollywood Video looking to rent Terminator 2 and get told that it's a Blockbuster exclusive rental. There were Blockbuster exclusive movies, but they all sucked so it didn't matter. Netflix Streaming gave bigger selection and instant access. You could get 15 minutes into a movie, realize it sucks, and you didn't have to drive back to the video store for a different one. Nowadays the selection on any streaming service feels like 1/3 of what a VHS rental place would have. Sure there's more actual quantity, but it's like the $1 rental bin. Currently, if you pick X popular movie and Y streaming service, odds are you cannot watch it on that streaming service.