11 ms·
Piracy
- noncoml 2y ago1. Being pedantic even if you own the medium(cd, cartrige, floppy disk), you still don’t own the software. You just own the license to use it. 2. So you are pro-Spotify but anti-Steam? All the arguments you gave above against Steam apply to Spotify as well. Sounds to me you are trying to justify your decision to pirate to yourself.
- jstanley 2y agoOn Spotify you pay a monthly fee and listen to as much music as you want, but on Steam you have to "buy" each game individually.
- happymellon 2y agoI have games that I have given money to access many years ago, and I can still select them in Steam and install them without paying rent again. Steam is better value for me over more than a couple of months, and so was eMusic until Sony ruined it.
- pathartl 2y agoHow about games that require an account in order to play at all? It's not a new concept and has been around for at least 15 years. Additionally, by modern games relying on matchmaking and lobby systems, almost any multiplayer game over the past 5-10 years is unplayable without an internet connection.
- happymellon 2y agoI'm not sure I follow. Is the argument that Steam is worse than Spotify because a subset of games have got built in self destruct, while Spotify only requires ongoing rent to access that 99¢ song? I think the self destruct is bad, and requiring 3rd party logins for single player games should not be allowed.
- pathartl 2y agoThe argument is that platforms like Steam encourage developers to implement vendor lock in features. It's something that's more likely to happen with something like software vs standard media like music.
- happymellon 2y agoPlatforms like Spotify dont need to because its institutionalised. So I'm not sure its a great argument. The platform itself will remove everything from you unless you keep paying Taylor Swift every month, and the artists you actually listen to probably don't get anything, unless you only listen to top ten charting songs.
- 3abiton 2y agoBut the reasons still stand, despite the author's conclusion. I agree with all the downsides of streaming/renting software. That's what it should be called. Even when you buy a digital media that remains hosted on a cloud server, you never really own it. There should be a new word for it.
- shiroiushi 2y agoWe can call it "buying", even though it doesn't entail "owning", just as long as "pirating" isn't "stealing".
- ethbr1 2y ago> 1. Being pedantic even if you own the medium(cd, cartrige, floppy disk), you still don’t own the software. You just own the license to use it. Per first-sale doctrine, if a license was included with the original medium, then it's irrevocably transferrable to subsequent buyers, without manufacturer being able to sever it, no? Which is why SaaS and "cloud features" did all they could to danced around and obscure this.
- dailykoder 2y ago> The streaming platforms, for which you pay full price, don’t even let you choose the quality of the movie you want to watch. What you watch today might disappear from all platforms in two months. I have seen so many songs disappear from Spotify lately that I am considering to hoard music again. Gladly I have most of those that disappeared on my HDD anyways, since it's been mostly old songs, but yeah. Was kinda frustrating. Maybe it's the task for this winter to go through my spotify playlists and find out which music I do not own yet
- anal_reactor 2y agoHow do you discover new music? That's been an issue for me, considering how I don't use Spotify.
- cpill 2y agolast.fm
- dailykoder 2y agoSure while Spotify can be nice with that, I am an old boomer that mostly sticks to what I grew up with and I just look for new albums of known artists every now and then, but I find the real gems in things like mountainbike movies. Also gameplay movies back in the day. But yeah that ease to find new things is one positive aspect of Spotify. Also to have it everywhere available. So maybe going both ways would be the solution. Using Spotify while buying/ripping/whatever the music that I really deeply value
- mikub 2y agoYou read forums, buy magazines, or, just buy an album because it has some badass cover. At least that's how I did it back in the days. ;)
- fsflover 2y agoBandcamp.com
- SSLy 2y ago[redacted]'s daily and weekly top10. Last.fm, reddit, Apple Music.
- hulitu 2y ago> They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games. Just. Don't. Buy. This. Crap. There are other games which you can play.
- Log_out_ 2y agoUpdate: The non crap you bought is now micro transaction crap. Bait and switch! Have you considered alternative ideas now that benevolent capitalism and resposible consumer are falling apart?
- shiroiushi 2y agoJust download some emulators and some roms for them, and you can play thousands of 80s-90s games all you want for free. You'll never have to worry about them turning into microtransaction crap, plus the gameplay is far better than anything current.
- jampekka 2y agoOr just pirate new games while you're at it? (Which I fully support.)
- shiroiushi 2y agoWhy bother, when the older ones are so much better? It's like the idea of pirating Windows: why?
- aucisson_masque 2y agoHow is the gameplay far better than anything current ? Genuine question tho, I just recently started playing again with portal and find most game to be boring, even the acclaimed one like cyberpunk and rdr2, but I don't see how Mario bros and likes could be remotely better. Imo gaming peaked between 2000 and 2010.
- 2y ago
- everyone 2y agoWhat meme? broken link for me. I wanna see the meme.
- dailykoder 2y agoIt was a twitter link https://files.catbox.moe/cn6yxg.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/cn6yxg.jpg
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoI have pirated everything my whole life and I will proudly pirate these things forever. I do pay for original music, media, movies, but I also pirate everything. These two things are not mutually exclusive and I think every person who is interested in having and owning their own media should be pirating.
- fersarr 2y agoHow do you pirate songs these days?
- 0xbs0d 2y agoSoulseek
- alexdunmow 2y agoShh.
- _ykca 2y ago@dang Please remove this comment. It goes against the uuuh YC TOS as it uhhh praises piracy or something
- sigio 2y agoyoutube, as it has most content and is easy and fast to download
- CaptainFever 2y agoYep, YouTube and yt-dlp is the easiest way to pirate music nowadays.
- fsflover 2y agoTry torrents inside I2P.
- wizardforhire 2y ago
- globular-toast 2y agoI don't think Spotify should be celebrated. For a start, Spotify exists because the music companies basically lost against piracy, but it was their own fault. That devalued recorded music to such an extent they had to change that business model. They collect a paltry amount from streaming (the artists get even less), but it's all they can get now. They've changed their model entirely. Bands are gone. Generic, marketable solo artists are in and money is made from concerts. Records are just marketing. Secondly, though, Spotify is just as bad if you are into proper records rather than concert marketing. Want to listen to Queen? Well, I hope you like the god awful remasters, because that's all that is available on Spotify. And whatever is available right now could change at any moment. It's not a music collection. The only way the record companies could have kept selling records is with vinyl. But they killed that to get more profits decades ago. Good luck convincing people music is worth sitting down for like people do with books, movies and games. Yeah, let me sit down and listen to Cardi B for the next 40 minutes, said no one. The youth just press play on a playlist and whatever comes out doesn't matter, it's all basically the same anyway.
- guax 2y agoI recently acquired a decent but affordable record player and was surprised to find new high quality pressings of some of my favorite classics (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc). Plus tons of new pop artists with vinyl. So a small resurgence is ongoing, hopefully it's stable enough to stay alive for long. They're expensive as hell but the ritual of putting something to play or changing discs when entertaining friends is refreshing in this streaming era.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoSpotify essentially solves music for me. I'm not a huge music fan. I like the stuff I grew up with, and very, very rarely something recorded in the last 10 years. I don't study music, rarely actually listen to the lyrics, don't care about the quality too much. It's always background to what I'm actually focusing on. And the less it distracts, the better. I used to have a few Gb of music, but deleted it all [0] because Spotify fills this niche now. I pirate books if they have DRM, video all the time. But not music, because (as TFA says) Spotify has basically solved that. [0] I'm sure I have it all on a backup somewhere. Just in case Spotify enshittifies further.
- voidUpdate 2y ago> "Look, no one pirates music anymore" I must be the last person that does then. All my music is ripped from youtube
- efilife 2y agoThen there's two of us
- remedan 2y agoDo yourself the favor of joining Red and download your music in flac or mp3 made from high-quality sources instead of YouTube. The interview is not hard to pass if you prepare for it.
- averageRoyalty 2y agoWas red the eventual winner after what/pth? I never found out what happened post what.
- voidUpdate 2y agoI'm not entirely sure what Red is, but all my music is in MP3 and it sounds fine to me. I'm not exactly an audiophile, so youtube music over bluetooth headphones sounds perfectly acceptable to me. It has the beeps and boops that I desire
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- codelord 2y agoHaving worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$ fee. The math just doesn't work with video games. Video games take an army of developers and years of work to make. Game development is one of the hardest and worst paying professions in tech. Most people in the industry are there not for the money but because of their passion for the profession. Most games fail to pay for their production costs despite all the effort that goes into them. Companies who have had a few mega successes have to make enough money out of their popular titles to be able to pay for all the other titles that fail to pay for themselves. Please don't complain about video game prices!
- whstl 2y agoWhen people say "greed of game developers" they're clearly not talking about rank-and-file devs, they're talking about development companies. > An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost Kind of ironic that you're saying that.
- SXX 2y agoMajority of "development companies" are also shit poor and go bankrupt in after 1 or 2 projects even if they're moderately successful. Basically it's just hard to make profit in this industry and well over 90% of games never recouperate development costs. Gamedev is just hard and there are very few exceptions like Epic or Rockstar that even get an option to become "greedy".
- whstl 2y ago> are also shit poor and go bankrupt in after 1 or 2 projects even if they're moderately successful Fair point, but those are clearly not the ones being pointed out as greedy by most people. ...except for maybe scrappy mobile companies that churn shitty microtransaction games looking for whales, but those are greedy indeed, and I doubt they have the sympathy of you or OP.
- dartharva 2y agoGOG exists. Blu-ray discs of movies, shows and music exist. Even when consumers have the option to buy from those modes, they don't. They prefer Steam and Netflix and Spotify instead. Why? Because contrary to the opinion of a couple of online aficionados, the masses don't care that much about preserving media after they have consumed them once, or once the trend has subsided. The market has spoken, the affordability and convenience of not having to manage one's own collection beats the slight lack of guarantee.
- fourfour3 2y agoSteam doesn’t really compare to Netflix and Spotify - it’s not a subscription service where you can play whatever is currently available and titles appear and disappear with no notice. You buy individual games on Steam and it stays on your account indefinitely - you do have to pick and choose what you buy. Something like Microsoft’s Game Pass is closer to Netflix and Spotify than Steam. Steam is more like the old iTunes Music Store model.
- close04 2y ago> Steam doesn’t really compare to Netflix and Spotify - it’s not a subscription service where you can play whatever is currently available and titles appear and disappear with no notice. This is true, you don't need to pay an ongoing subscription for continued access to the games. > You buy individual games on Steam and it stays on your account indefinitely - you do have to pick and choose what you buy. But I'm very wary of that "indefinitely". Steam doesn't set an expiration date but they can do it at a moment's notice. Save goes for any store where the purchase (rental?) is permanently tied to the store.
- fourfour3 2y agoAh, I was meaning "indefinitely" in the sense of "an unspecified period of time" :) Practically, it's very rare for games to disappear from a Steam library once purchased. It happens for stolen/fraudulently purchased keys (eg keys bought with stolen credit cards), but for a whole game it's very rare. It has happened, but generally for games that relied on online servers for functionality and the servers have been taken down.
- fx1994 2y agoAh, fitgirl to the rescue :) Helped me so many time to decide to buy the game,., For example Horizon Zero Dawn, played fitgirl release, loved it, purchased original. But still. fitgirl release is better as it does not require Internet!
- deergomoo 2y agoI think this is conflating two problems. One is preservation and ownership (or lack of), which is a huge problem. Live service games aside, even if you buy physical, what’s on the disc is often unplayable or incomplete without a day-one patch, so you’re just as screwed when the servers go offline. I’ve heard this period described as a future dark ages for games due to how many will be lost, and I think I agree. It’s thanks to the work of “pirates” and true hackers that I’m able to still play digital-only 3DS games for example, because I literally have no legal way to purchase them anymore. The other is cost. It seems like the author is in Turkey so I can’t comment on local affordability, but if anything many games are too cheap, not too expensive. Your typical triple-A game now is unfathomably expensive to make and needs thousands of people to do so. Now personally, I’m not big into those sorts of games. I think trying to create huge games rammed with endless shallow side-quests just for the sake of being bigger than the last one is a pointless endeavour and makes for a worse product, but evidently enough people think otherwise cause they keep getting made. Yes, it is bullshit that digital versions are not only the same price, but often more expensive than physical counterparts (at least here in the UK). But new games were £50/$60USD for so long, which neither kept up with inflation or the rising scale and costs of production. Even today’s typical £60/$70 is far below what games cost in the 90s when you factor in inflation. I dunno what to do here besides keep supporting smaller, less expensive indie output, of which there is a wonderful volume.
- luxcem 2y agoRegarding preservation, even with a user-friendly format, platforms that allow downloading a zip archive or mkv in the desired quality provide no guarantee that the content will exist in 10 years. HDDs fail, they get lost, etc. The reason why old content is difficult to find is not because it's in the wrong format—FLAC copies of all albums ever made exist, and copies of all movies exist, but they are illegal to share. It's not so much a technical issue as it is a legal one: the only way to reliably preserve content is to ensure it can be shared. One solution might be to limit IP duration to only a few years.
- anilakar 2y agoCorollary: If a digital product is not actively being sold, piracy is not stealing. No, an old physical copy being on sale on Ebay does not count. Nintendo, take note.
- chaz6 2y agoMy term for these kind of purchases is "DRU" - defeasible right to use.
- grishka 2y agoThe main problem with digital game distribution imo is that you still pay the full price, but you can't resell the game later. So you're getting much less value in the end. It would be fairer to price digital copies maybe 10-20% of the physical ones because of how single-use they are.
- timokoesters 2y agoLegally, you are allowed to sell the license (at least in Germany). We need to force distributors to give us tools to do it.
- fbn79 2y agoOwning is overvalued. The things you own end up owning you.
- wildrhythms 2y ago>The streaming platforms, for which you pay full price, don’t even let you choose the quality of the movie you want to watch I wanted to re-watch Dune Part 1 before Part 2 came to theaters, so I rented the film on Youtube Movies which said it would be HD $3.99. I paid, but when the movie started playing it was NOT HD. The quality selector didn't even let me choose a HD resolution. I tried different browsers, I tried Safari on my Mac, Chrome on my Mac, disconnecting from my 4K display... was it a some bug? Was it a haywire copy protection because I opened the film on a 4K display over Displayport? I have no idea, but I felt cheated. I haven't paid for a movie since.
- SSLy 2y agoDid you use a DisplayLink hub per chance? This ill-conceived stuff triggers the DRM idiocy.
- teddyh 2y agoRemember: If you can’t re-sell it, you did not buy it.
- TheBruceHimself 2y agoHere's the thing: I take a step back and realize it's not a big deal. No one's dying, suffering, or anything of the sort because I don't reallly my games through steam or stream my favorite tv shows. Worst case scenario is something is no longer available anywhere thanks to it not being stremaable, rentable, on a service. Is this unfortunate? Yes, but is it enough to feel we need to massively change? Nah... Most of the movies ever produed are lost. Many hours of TV shows prior to the 60s were simply not recorded. People also pretend like owning media means they'll one day, decades down the line, still be able to play it but in my experience this is rare. I have CD roms from the 90s that I just can't play. I'd likely need to find a windows 98 machine and do all sorts of magic to get them actually running. How much is any media of value me 8 years after I consume it? It wasn't too long ago that the only way you could watch a movie again is if a theature decided to show it again. You didn't see Attack of the Green monster in it's brief run in 1956? Oh well, too bad. It's only VHSs came out was owning a movie even a concept. So, i've just learned to shrug it off. Ok, so i don't have a solid physical copies of all the Star Trek TNG, but I can stream them and it's not costly. In fact I've never really paid less for media in my life. Hypothetically they could take it from me, and leave me to never see it again. That'd be annoying but just annoying. Piracy is as it ever was: annoying to setup, navigate, some level of danger and, now, nowhere near as well integrated or easy to use as the "legal" infrastructure. Maybe i'm just renting my shows but i'll take that over torrents that stop at 99%, missing epsides and dodgy subtitles.
- skeaker 2y agoFair enough for most of this, but your last point couldn't be more off. Bootleg streaming sites which I won't name are essentially like Netflix but with everything and for free. They come in high quality, stream without interruptions, offer downloads at high speeds, and can even generate recommendations for what to watch next. The only real caveat is that you'll want to bring an ad blocker. In terms of convenience and quality of service, they win a thousand times over compared to paid services where you have to waste time logging in only to learn that the second season of the show you wanted to watch is actually on a different streaming service now.
- edanm 2y ago> Neither side is innocent—piracy is not theft, but let's admit, it is unfair. [...] The companies, with their excessive pricing, instead of selling their products once, turn them into SaaS with lifetime monthly subscriptions. They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games. I'm sorry, but these are not comparable. One side - the pirates - are doing something that is illegal, unethical, and explicitly disallowed by the other side. It's not a voluntary arrangement - it is the opposite. The game companies, on the other hand, are offering a voluntary arrangement. You don't like it, you don't have to agree to it. No one is forcing you.
- belorn 2y agoThe new California law is quite clearly illustrating that what digital stores do is illegal, unethical, and not a voluntary arrangement. When a customer buy a product in a store they expect ownership of the item, not a temporary and limited digital license. Presenting it as a sale is fraudulent and misleading. If companies don't like it they can "sell" their products in countries without customer protection. No one is forcing them to participate in the market.
- reisse 2y ago> "Look, no one pirates music anymore" Is using hacked streaming apps or sharing accounts in violation of ToS considered piracy?
- butz 2y agoWith the rise of GenAI I am no longer pirating legal content. Now I am legally obtaining training materials to build my AI models. I might even pivot to feeding as many video games as possible straight into AI models in futile hope that one day it might produce some sort of playable thing.
- Meekro 2y agoThe subject of the article is a total non-issue that it's trying to turn into a serious problem, seemingly through anxiety. If you're worried about your games aging out, CD-ROMs did not protect you because the average Windows 98 game won't run on modern computers without significant modifications. > How can the boxed price of a game (or software) be the same as its Steam or digital version? In Capitalist economies, prices are set by producers and are significantly influenced by supply and demand. Prices are justified by people's willingness to pay them, and competition creates downward pressure. Games priced at $60 have to compete with $9.99 indie games on Steam, and justify their higher price through quality. > When you buy a game digitally, it never truly belongs to you; services like Steam or PS Store only allow you to download and play it. We're still grappling with what "ownership" means in a digital economy, but Steam's model is clearly good enough for 99% of customers. Even Nintendo (which always loved its physical carts) eventually had to admit that most buyers prefer digital downloads. They're willing to take the risk of losing access in the future in return for convenience here, today. > 20 years later, you can plug in your Atari cartridge and play, but you can’t be sure that Steam won’t go bankrupt and deactivate its servers. (Nintendo recently closed its shops, including for the 3DS, PSP servers are shut down, etc.) I have Steam games from 15 years ago that I could still play. But that's just it: I could still play them. Do I? No, I'm done with them and I'm playing something else now. I heard about the 3DS shop shutting down, but so what? I've got my Switch and I haven't touched the 3DS in many years. > The companies, with their excessive pricing, instead of selling their products once, turn them into SaaS with lifetime monthly subscriptions. Excessive compared to what? Also, most modern software buyers expect continuous updates, patches, security fixes, etc. after the initial purchase, so monthly payments for ongoing labor seem like a natural fit. When you buy a toaster, you don't expect the manufacturer to come into your house a year later and make improvements. > They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games. Some games do that, many do not. Our choices influence future behavior by game makers. I totally agree with you that microtransactions suck, and I try not to buy games that have them. > Without the people who dump and archive these contents, the old series you love so much could disappear forever. Beloved classics rarely disappear. Nintendo Online still offers lots of them on the Switch. But when you describe something as "forgotten software" (as the article did early on), you're admitting that hardly anyone wants to play it.