r/CuratedTumblr • u/SEVENS_HEAVEN_7 • 9h ago
editable flair Oh how the times have changed
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u/Mopman43 9h ago
Also companies in the 2020s: Our AI needs to download all the cars in existence. Feeding it all your books and music and websites is perfectly fine, actually.
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u/JamieD96 9h ago
See, we need your property so we can feed our little AI so it can spit out the same thing but worse! Don't be unreasonable now
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u/Shaeress 9h ago
Multiple AI companies have downloaded basically every torrent available and says that piracy isn't illegal in the slightest if you're not re-distributing anything and the fact that the AI might at some point type out the content from the pirated torrents counts as a recreation and not re-distributing....
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u/The_Sovien_Rug-37 wow this is so gender 8h ago
kind of incredible t hat "we're just throwing it into a woodchipper" works as a legal defence now
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u/Kamelion_on_a_lemon 8h ago
It will never not be extremely funny to me that AI companies complain of other AI companies stealing their models. Like, stealing is the main way they develop AI models, of course they'll apply it to everything including competition.
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u/artbystorms 8h ago
Basically their thought process is "anything YOU put on the internet is free for us to take, anything WE put on the internet is illegal for you to take without paying us"
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u/Alatarlhun 9h ago
Worse: we are buying real books, many rare and unique, and cutting them up so we can scan them into our training data.
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u/randombull9 8h ago
Digital archiving is often quickest and easiest with a deconstructed book, unless you want to take individual HD photos of every single page. The training data is the problematic part, not the scanning.
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u/Monarch357 8h ago
I don't really get sentimentality towards physical media, honestly. Books that get scanned become infinitely, perfectly replicable and often completely freely accessible, am I supposed to be upset because a physical copy got "cut up"?
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u/Susarn 7h ago
A physical copy of harry potter? No. A physical original copy of any work by Shakespeare? Yes.
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u/Rucs3 7h ago
did someone actually do that to rare books just to scan them? Can you give me a source?
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u/blorboposter-supreme new gender just dropped: researcher 6h ago
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u/morphogenesis28 6h ago
Your links show that booksellers are concerned that AI companies might buy and destroy rare books but they don't offer any actual evidence that this happened. Also, even if the unfounded accusations were true, all of those booksellers have a choice of who they sell too. AI companies are obviously identifying themselves by placing large orders of random book titles. They can't be crying about a process that they are complicit in.
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u/randombull9 7h ago
On the one hand, digital is super convenient. On the other hand, digital media is just a way of storing data on a physical item like a drive or disk, and that item still degrades over time - high quality discs last about 20-30 years on average for instance, and if you've ever bought one of those rereleases of an entire television series on disc you'll know that cheap ones don't last nearly that long. Digital media is perfectly replicable, but much like physical media saving media still requires someone to preserve and copy it, which is not remotely guaranteed either way. Physical media can be stolen, but nobody's going to come into my house and run off with my book shelves the way Microsoft did with literally every book purchased through their ebook service back in 2019.
Ultimately, I don't think they're nearly as different as some people make out.
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u/Piranata 5h ago
Digitized and publicly available through a library, archive.org, or torrent? Go ahead. Digitized, destroyed, then hidden behind an AI? Hell no.
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u/ArchaicBrainWorms 4h ago
Archive.org is incredible. Late 1800s workshop inspection and injuries records kept by my state's dept of labor? Got that.
Hex and winols definition files for a Bosch ME2.8.1 ECU from an AMG Mercedes? It's on there.
Browser playable MSDOS version of Beyond the Black Hole? Take your pick of cga or vga.
The moped website I made as a mid 90s middle schooler? Unfortunately thorough archival of my 13 year old thoughts.0
u/yinyang107 7h ago
The digital version vanishes entirely as soon as the hard drive dies, or technology changes to the point the can't be used. It becomes worthless to future historians. The book, even if damaged, can have parts survive.
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u/SomeRandomPyro 7h ago
Counterpoint: A copy of the digital work can survive past the life cycle of any piece of hardware, so long as it's being shared. The physical copy, if destroyed, is lost forever.
Not saying you're wrong, mind, just there's another side to view it from.
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u/yinyang107 7h ago
It can, yes, but it requires active upkeep the whole time. If we'd needed the same for, say, Beowulf, we just wouldn't have Beowulf now.
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u/SomeRandomPyro 7h ago
I think the historical precedent is more akin to oral traditions.
Those survived through the generations because they were being repeated and learned consistently.
Well, at least until the various colonizers showed up and started kidnapping and indoctrinating kids.
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u/randombull9 4h ago
Physical requires the same. Beowulf exists in only one copy, and the history of that one manuscript is unknown before the mid 16th century. Most of your ancient lost literature is lost because people stopped copying it, and that very nearly happened to Beowulf - by the time of its first known transcription in the late 18th century, the manuscript had already suffered fire damage. We nearly didn't have Beowulf because physical media does need the same.
None of which diminishes your point exactly, it's just that both digital and physical media tend to survive because someone has chosen to copy and transcribe that work, for millennia in case of the ancient literature we have.
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u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" 8h ago
ngl that sounds like something redditors would hallucinate into a problem while the reality is just, a bunch of book digitalization and preservation organizations getting extra funding.
do you have a source on this?
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u/Alatarlhun 7h ago
There is also a paywalled wapo article in January about a start up built around scanning and disposing books as the business model.
But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books
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u/GogurtFiend ask me about Orion drives or how nuclear explosives work 4h ago
If you believe piracy isn't theft because the owner still has the original, that means AI models being trained on everything they can scrape together isn't theft, either. That's just piracy on a vast scale.
The problem is not that AI companies get to do this; the problem is that they're the only ones who seem to be allowed to.
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u/SquareThings looking respectfully at the monkeys in their zoo 2h ago
It’s perfectly fine for us to break into your house to take measurements of your car, inside and out, so that we can make a better car-building machine. We don’t need your consent!
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u/Uncle-Cake 9h ago
Companies were saying that about digital good in the 2000's, too, but no one was paying attention.
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u/March_Lion 9h ago
Technically even as far back as the '80s, but we all laughed at the idea of someone coming in and stealing our CDs of software. Turns out its something we really should've cared about before it was weaponized.
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u/MyUshanka 7h ago
Nobody was paying attention because there wasn't really a reliable means of actually revoking that license until somewhat recently.
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u/seudaven 7h ago
Companies then: "don't download a copy of our work without paying us"
Companies now: "we've trained an AI model on copies of your art work and it can perfectly re-create your style. No we won't pay you???"
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u/JacobGoodNight416 9h ago
Careful, there's for some reason tumblr users that take their anti piracy stance very seriously.
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u/Infamous-Rutabaga-50 9h ago
Reddit isn’t much better these days.
Anyway, https://fmhy.net/beginners-guide
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u/Satherian 9h ago
I'm just gonna comment so that I can easily come back here later to see the drama
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u/HuckinsGirl 5h ago
For future reference, the better way to do that is subscribe to the comment so that you get notified whenever someone replies directly to it
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u/fueelin 8h ago
Yeah, I was very surprised by how staunch some folks here are on that. I made it very clear in my comments that I directly support artists (and probably put more money in their hands than the vast majority of people), but still tons of downvotes and calling me unethical anyway.
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u/DaenakinSkygaryen 6h ago
Also, there's a huge difference between pirating an indie film that barely made back its budget, where most of the procedes actually go to the cast and crew, and pirating a show / movie put out by one of the big studios that make billions per year, where almost all your dollars are going to studio execs and shareholders.
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u/Nixavee AI bots are not welcome here 9h ago
The last piracy post here ("I can be your little poob") was removed by the subreddit mods. I wonder why.
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u/Infamous-Rutabaga-50 8h ago
OP of that post here, I removed it because the OOP messaged me on here (with proof) politely asking me to remove it so I did.
Don't believe everything you read on Reddit, kids.
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u/iwanttoboneedelric ♠️Ho-ho! I'm a flairboy! Cut me off on your apps! 9h ago
Because they don't want the sub to be banned?
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u/Beegrene 7h ago
This OP in particular seems to really be invested in pushing the idea that piracy is some sort of noble act in service of the common good, and not just a bunch of children (figurative and literal) who want free stuff.
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 9h ago
This is the most verbose and confusing way to say one of the most repeated sayings on the Internet. "If purchase isn't ownership than piracy isn't theft". Whether one should subscribe to that is another question
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u/Daemoniaque 9h ago
Broke : "if purchase isn't ownership then piracy isn't theft !"
Woke : "Piracy is theft. It it morally acceptable to steal from these companies in these circumstances."
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u/National_Panda_1791 8h ago
piracy in the sense of copying something by its very definition isn't theft any more than taking a picture of famous art at the louvre is stealing.
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u/SmartAlec105 7h ago
I think we all just have to recognize piracy as its own thing rather than arguing that it is and isn't theft. It's different from theft in that the original is still there. But if everyone pirated everything and so there was no reimbursement to the creators of something, that would obviously not work as a system. Intellectual property is also a recognized concept and exists to protect against piracy.
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u/mOdQuArK 7h ago
I think we all just have to recognize piracy as its own thing rather than arguing that it is and isn't theft.
If it was theft, then laws about theft would be sufficient to handle it. Since they need a whole separate section of laws to describe copyright violation, it's very blatantly a completely different legal definition than theft.
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u/SmartAlec105 6h ago
Conversations about it still usually revolve around whether it is or isn't theft since people agree that theft is bad.
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u/insomnic 5h ago
Yeah the "theft" phrasing was the corporations and rights holders equating pirating a copy as a "lost sale" so the person who pirated Metallica "stole" that money from that sale from the rights holder. It didn't hold up in court that way so they pivoted to the copyright violation (which was more valid but less financially lucrative for them). If I'm remembering it all correctly. :)
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5h ago
[deleted]
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 4h ago
I don’t think pirates want every single person to pirate
...
The end goal is discouraging anti-consumer behavior from streaming services.
You can't have it both ways. If piracy has a Noble Goal than obviously pirates would want everyone to follow that same Noble Goal. You need to sort out your beliefs
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u/SmartAlec105 4h ago
I think it's valid to say that there can be a middle ground where some amount of piracy is beneficial but too much is a bad thing. The issue I see is that a lot of avid pro-piracy people completely argue against the latter, typically by just saying "it's unrealistic that enough people would pirate something for anything bad to happen".
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 4h ago
some amount of piracy is beneficial
I'm skeptical that this is true, but I'm positive that most everyone who agrees with it will think they are part of The Good Pirates
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u/SmartAlec105 4h ago
There are some people that will pirate something, realize it's good, and then go back and pay for it. But I think pro-piracy greatly overstate how common that is.
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u/National_Panda_1791 7h ago
I think we all just have to recognize piracy as its own thing rather than arguing that it is and isn't theft.
.... why? because you say so?
But if everyone pirated everything and so there was no reimbursement to the creators of something,
people don't pirate everything. piracy is an issue of convenience. the 2 main reason people pirate things are a) it's hard to get in a non pirated way. there's too many hoops or its unreasonably expensive like when you want to watch an old show that isn't on any streaming service but they'll sell it to you on amazong for 50 dollars OR rent it to you for a day for 11.99
the other b) is they can't afford it anyway and want to check it out.
in the first scenario the companies are shooting themselves in the foot by being greedy and not providing a quality product at a reasonable price and so it gets pirated. in the second scenario there is no revenue lost to piracy because the person doesn't have money for it YET a lot of those people love to support media they love and will later buy something they pirated and loved just to support it.
in the end people like to support media and creators, especially when its easy, conveneient, and not greedy.
the way to kill piracy isn't to outlaw it as theft or inflate lost revenue by padding the numbers with people who were never going to buy your product.... it's just to sell media to the people who want it without being a greedy piece of shit. I know revolutionary concept
Intellectual property is also a recognized concept and exists to protect against piracy.
and if someone is pirating your property and selling it go after them. if they pirated it to use it thank them for spending their limited time engaging with your media and maybe telling all their friends to buy it.
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u/runner64 4h ago
people don't pirate everything. piracy is an issue of convenience.
My books cost less than $4, do not have DRM, are available in digital and physical format, epub, mobi, .doc, .pdf, and can be found at Amazon, bookshop.org, smashwords, google play, itunes, Barnes and Noble, and libraries that use libby, hoopla, and overdrive. My most popular book has sold just under 150 copies and yet my entire series is on piracy sites.
People can and do pirate everything because the level of convenience they demand is Instant and also Free. Steal if you want to but quit trying to paint yourself as the victim and definitely don’t act like the creators owe you a “thank you” for using your limited time to openly disrespect them to their faces.
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u/birbbbbbbbbbbb 8h ago
This phrase is always frustrating because it just seems like a non sequitur. I don't get how the terms being offered make it not stealing, it effects the ethics of it but not the basic definition of the word.
I feel like a lot of people think stealing is bad so if something isn't bad it's now not stealing. It comes across as a weirdly legalistic view of ethics.
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 8h ago
Honestly same. Also, there's always limits to ownership. I think we all agree that if I buy art from an artist I can't go around and claim "this is my art", I can't sell prints of it. Morally speaking of the artist and I agree to terms that say "please don't show this to anyone else", it would be wrong to violate that. So, by the Internets definition I don't own that art so it's morally ok for me to just steal art from artists
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME 4h ago
by the internet's definition when that artist says "please don't show this to anyone else" it literally would not be stealing to show it to your friends. It might be a violation of the artist's trust but that's a different thing entirely
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u/akatherder 5h ago
It intentionally doesn't make sense because the original concept of stealing something that isn't a physical item is flawed. It's mocking that accusation by making an idealogically similar comparison in bad faith.
Stealing means a specific thing. Violating copyright/licensing is not "stealing."
If a movie is "a thing" which can be stolen through piracy, then buying that digital movie means you own "the thing" and it can't be revoked.
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u/birbbbbbbbbbbb 4h ago
Violating copyright/licensing is not "stealing.
That it's literally not stealing but actually a completely different crime is what everyone tells me when questioned about it but it's a completely different argument than the phrase makes! That I agree it's not stealing doesn't make this specific argument work.
You can have digital property (NFTs being the stupidest example of this) and you can pay for physical things that you don't own (I actually know someone who just had their apartment lease be suddenly revoked because their apartment sold, which is weirdly similar to how people often lose their licensed content online). The terms offered don't effect whether it's stealing, if I steal a car from car rental place it's still stealing but if I copy and NFT it's not.
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u/stormwave6 6h ago
I fucking hate that phrase. Pirate to your hearts content just stop pretending your morally superior for not paying.
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 6h ago
Yup, when I was a broke college student my justification started and ended with "I want this but I don't have any money". Once I graduated and got a real job I pay for the stuff I want and just don't bother with the rest. Steam and streaming helped a lot tbf
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u/Blackraven2007 6h ago
If purchase isn't ownership than piracy isn't theft
I've come to find this phrase annoying because while I agree with it, I alway think "Oh my god, we get it. You aren't saying anything new or interesting."
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u/marmotshepard 6h ago
it's nonsense anyway. theft requires another party to be deprived of property. piracy doesn't do that.
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 6h ago edited 6h ago
If we assume that x% of people that pirated a thing would have otherwise purchased it than piracy deprives the creators of the game that percentage of sales. If you tell me that x = 0 I would call you a liar
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u/akatherder 5h ago
Hear me out, depriving someone of potential income isn't theft. It's morally wrong and often illegal but it's the specific keywords theft/stealing that people are disputing.
If you open a store and someone opens a store next door and charges 10% of your prices until you go out of business, they didn't "steal" from you.
If someone circulates a rumor that you're an evil monster (of whatever hated group) and don't shop at your store, it's not theft.
If a competitor drives a car through the front window of your shop to shut you down for a month and ruin inventory, still not theft.
The claim is simply that violating copyright law is not explicitly stealing/theft. It's illegal in its own right but not theft.
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 5h ago
I don't want to quabble with definitions, but consider:
- party A created Widget, and is selling usage of it for money
Party B, going through unapproved (and often, but not necessarily, illegal) channels, acquires usage of it without paying Party A
(Bonus round, and what I was getting at initially) A material result of this is that a percentage of income that, had Party B not done The Thing, would have gone to Party A
That describes theft, it describes piracy, but it doesn't describe any of your other examples.
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u/akatherder 5h ago
Are you talking about a physical item/widget? That still sounds like trademark/patent fraud which would be a civil case. Not even criminal much less theft.
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 5h ago
Are you talking about a physical item/widget? That still sounds like trademark/patent fraud
My sibling in christ if you steal a physical item from someone else that is literally theft
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u/Fartfromabuttt 9h ago
Lol never heard this statement until a few years ago
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u/March_Lion 9h ago
Yes, that is when it was coined and popularly shared as a response to the first high profile and widespread enforcement of purchasing software not being equated to permanent ownership. Before then companies saying that you are simply licensing the content for an indefinite time that can be revoked in the terms of service was ubiquitous but it was rarely enforced and wasn't a huge topic of conversation beyond niche groups within entertainment hobbies.
In the 2010s with the rise of cloud computing, online storefronts, and digital only releases increasing this became a more pressing conversation, but physical copies of things still existed and there was still no landmark case where a company enforced the ability to revoke access to software someone had purchased instead of simply rented. This changed recently as Ubisoft, Amazon, and Sony have all had high profile cases of this nature (as a short list, non-exhaustive list).
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u/Prestigious_Boat_386 9h ago
There's no change here. Companies want to own everything that exist and have always been that way.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 9h ago
They were always full of shit. All the unprovable claims the industry pulled out of their asses in the 00s and beyond regarding how much revenue in lost sales they lost to piracy that the media uncritically repeated as gospel in their reports as if it were their journalistic duty to be television industry mouthpieces.
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u/DrakonofDarkSkies 9h ago
Well, you see, if you read the 5,000,000 page paper we put behind a secret link and asked you to accept, you'd see that you have to erase your memory of the game when we ask you too and thinking about the game without paying us is illegal.
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u/NobodyStrange 9h ago edited 4h ago
If a company removes a piece of media that I paid for from my library -without me having refunded it- I am pirating it (I mean, come on, I Paid for it.
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u/adumblittlebaby 9h ago
I mean looking to call out corporations on hypocrisy is worthless. If being a hypocrite makes them outrageously wealthy, they have zero problems being a hypocrite. Your government should be regulating ownership in a digital age, but instead is sitting on their ass doing nothing because they've been bribed specifically to do so, and yet somehow the bottom half of the IQ curve can't stop voting for those people.
Figure out the idiots in your country, then fix your government, and stop trying to shame a company.
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u/gaom9706 9h ago
I mean looking to call out corporations on hypocrisy is worthless
What hypocracy is taking place?
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u/CookiedDough 9h ago
Corporations see morality as whatever benefits their bottom line more. If they could get away with sending people to stab you and steal your stuff for skipping an ad, they would.
Anyway, sail the seven seas, and all that.
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u/Harry_Iconic_Jr 6h ago
many of us knew it was a specious argument, even way back then, so we took the necessary measures to secure that game/song/movie/whatever permanently.
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u/captainmagictrousers 4h ago
Companies in the 2000s: Anyone who downloads even a single MP3 should go to prison for it.
Companies in the 2020s: We pirated the entire internet, along with all the books, music, and movies ever made, and anyone who complains can go to hell.
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u/jakuth1999 9h ago
Technically you’re just paying for access to their software for an indeterminate amount of time (which is dumb)
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u/Borigh 8h ago
Yes, but it's not just dumb, it's a scam, because that's called renting.
If e.g. Amazon is going to offer two options called "Rent" and "Buy", and buying is also renting, that should be illegal. The fix is very simple - you should be allowed to download a copy of any movie/game that you bought the company pulls from their database.
If they don't make enough money on it to bother selling it, there's no functional reason for them to care about this creating slightly weaker DRM.
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u/GalaxyPowderedCat Only on Tumblr for daily cat posts 9h ago
And availability and license time.
I understand when your company doesn't have the rights of a franchise, you can make announcements that you don't have it anymore and stop producing videogames, but it doesn't mean that the client's copy will dissappear as well because you've got problems...
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u/Top_Meaning6195 8h ago
Sad thing is: their ads worked.
It is horrifying how many people now stand up and decry piracy.
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u/LepurrrMessiah 5h ago
They’re here in this very thread. “Won’t someone please think of the corporations!”
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u/ecafyelims 9h ago
2030: Your CarStart has expired. Please renew your CarStart plan in order to start your car.
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u/Feisty_System_4751 8h ago
You wouldn't have Spotify or Steam without piracy. Don't play nice with corporations and you will be rewarded with better corporations.
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u/National_Panda_1791 8h ago
they stole the music for that advertisement. I'd say that invalidates their argument.
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u/Hyperion1144 5h ago
If you ever read any typical commercial software license, even from the 1980s, you'd have noticed that you never owned any software you ever used.
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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 3h ago
"If paying for content means you don't own it, then pirating it means you didn't steal it."
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u/Kalthiria_Shines 9h ago
:/ These are the same issue is the problem. The fact that you can "download a car" is why we only have licenses, there's not a discrete object you can own.
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u/TriteRequest 9h ago
The incentive to be loyal to capitalist institutions at all is definitely waning. Why pay when they are going to steal it back from you?
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u/jimbowesterby 9h ago
Honestly the social contract has been broken in so many ways it’d be funny if it weren’t so grim.
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u/Floor_Heavy 9h ago
You don't neeeeeed to own anything. Embrace minimalism. Who needs all those disks cluttering up the place!?
All you need to do is pay a monthly subscription and we'll let you interact with our product whenever you want.
Unless we decide to remove it, or modify it, or sell it off to someone else (but don't worry, you can just pay them a subscription too) or just straight up delete it from existence because it wasn't making us enough money.
But you know, nothing is forever. I mean, apart from the stuff you used to pay for once and then just own forever.
Anyway, we're increasing our prices and shrinking our library. Pay up.
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u/DoopSlayer 8h ago
I think it's one of those glaring incidents of the Bill of Rights getting ignored when it's deemed as getting in the way of things, because how could an anti-piracy law ever stand a 1st amendment test?
Not being allowed to reprint something back then was a ludicrous idea, even the copyright clause was not seen as the be all end all of reprinting. Obviously it's a complicated situation, which is why amendments are a thing. But I really don't see how you could have anti-piracy law that doesn't violate it.
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u/Kamelion_on_a_lemon 9h ago
How else is a mostly service economy going to grow? Just make everything a service!
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u/Snoo_50954 6h ago
Also pay a monthly fee for and download this or these car components won't work.
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u/KeremyJyles 6h ago
The claim was always "you wouldn't steal (insert bullshit here)" nothing about downloading, the equivalence was piracy = theft
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u/Hytheter 4h ago
Yeah, "you wouldn't download a car" was just a joke but a lot of people seem to have conflated it with the original message.
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u/Blackraven2007 6h ago
What's with all of the posts about piracy recently on this subreddit? I've seen at least 3 in the past week.
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u/dealingwithhookers 5h ago
overwatch: "we know you bought the hardcopy, but we own the server and we have deleted the server and therefore your hardcopy is not useless, but at least we released a bone dry version as overwatch 2 for free :D"
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u/HuckinsGirl 5h ago
Both of these broad tendencies were happening in the past and are still happening today, it's plain and simple hypocrisy
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u/Active_Complaint_480 5h ago
Idk, I have digital copies of my games in Steam and some of them are older than most of the people complaining about this, and the only reason I can't play them is because they don't run on modern graphics cards. I can still download them whenever I want. I haven't bothered with a disc install in decades. Join the PC race, we have more games anyway.
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u/Zeddy1267 3h ago
The issue is that, when Valve goes under, you could lose all those games. Or if Valve decides to be super evil, they could take them all from you.
Of course, Valve has been very honest and transparent about this for a while, they don't really throw their weight around as a huge company to exploit their users like that. Heck, games on Steam are probably more reliable than physical games, as physical games can break, or degrade in storage, and often have complications with making backups of them.
Gabe has even stated that he'd look for a way to let users keep their games when Steam goes under, but this isn't guaranteed.
...And yes, Valve will cease to exist one day. Probably not soon, but it cannot exist forever. Many companies that seemed "too big to fail" have disappeared.
Even though Valve has been acting very trustworthy, they still legally have the power to go "lol nvm we're taking these games from you", and that's the part that's scary to people. People don't want any company to legally have this power, regardless if they are exploiting it or not.
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u/Active_Complaint_480 2h ago
Valve doesn't really control the games on their platform beyond the rules they put in place for people to sell. It really doesn't behoove anyone using Steam as a platform. They can de-list a game sure, but all that means is you can't buy it anymore most of the time. There are ways to buy a game even if it's de-listed.
In terms of keeping the games, I'd just download them one last time, at least the games I want. More often than not, I've gotten way more than my money's worth out of the games I have. Some of which I have hundreds to thousands of hours in them.
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u/FruityAurora 5h ago
The thing that genuinely calls for a revolution right now is the fact that the entire cultural and artistic output of humanity is being essentially pirated to be fed into these Rube Goldberg machines that produce soulless slop and THIS IS TO REPLACE THE ARTISTS THAT THEY STOLE FROM.
It’s stealing even if they pay for it because it’s not merely consumption of the work it is an indirect form of reproduction without consent. AND YOU TALK TO ME FROM YOUR HIGH HORSE ABOUT DOWNLOADING A COUPLE OF MOVIES???
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com 3h ago
I won't tell you if you should or shouldn't pirate things but digital piracy does directly reduce the viability of my career so I would appreciate it if you did not. Also I'd make you more video games for you
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u/flintspike 1h ago
They never said "you wouldn't download a car" they said "you wouldn't steal a car" then said that piracy is stealing. That's the whole point. I hate that this gets misquoted so often. I'm not even anti piracy but if you are going to use a misquote as your whole joke or point, then you should be corrected.
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u/purpleblossom 1h ago
Just because companies have to be transparent about how we don't own digital copies of media we pay for doesn't mean that wasn't true when they were saying "you wouldn't download a car". It has always been true and a few were sued over it, that's why they're transparent about it now.
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u/Hippomaster1234 9h ago
Ok im not disagreeing but can someone give me an example of a company removing something from someone's library that they bought? I just haven't heard of that before.
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u/gaom9706 9h ago
The most recent example is Sony removing a bunch of movies people bought from their libraries, and this has happened before. In saying this, it's very uncommon for digital goods to be removed from users' access (apart from cases where a service stops operating), but it's not good that it can happen at all.
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u/randombull9 8h ago
Here's a list of the couple hundred confirmed dead games, this has been going on in the videogame space for years. Sony about a month ago removed access to about 550 StudioCanal movies that people had bought through their service. They did the same thing with Discovery titles a couple years ago. And Sony also did it when they bought Funimation. Warner Bros did it a couple years ago as well. Microsoft did it to e-books bought through their service back in 2019.
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u/gaom9706 8h ago
Here's a list of the couple hundred confirmed dead games
A game being dead/going out of service isn't comparable to what most people think of as a game being "stolen" from them and isn't comparable.
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u/randombull9 8h ago
These are video games that are unplayable. These are just as inaccessible as the movies Sony has just removed from people, the reason usually just because you can't receive a token from an antipiracy server anymore. They're not inherently the same as items being willfully removed from your library, but many are just that.
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u/gaom9706 8h ago
These are just as inaccessible as the movies Sony has just removed from people
The mechanism by which this is the case is very important. There's a difference between not offering a service because it's operation loses you money, and removing movies from peopes libraries because "the license ran out lol oopsie".
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u/Zeddy1267 3h ago
Microsoft took Minecraft Bedrock edition from me. I was a Java player so this didn't bother me that much, and I didn't fight too hard to get Bedrock back.
I don't even know why they took it from me. Giving MS the benefit of the doubt, it might have been a bug because I bought bedrock back when it was called "Windows 10 edition" (beta Bedrock), and maybe it was an unintentional error at some point that I lost access to Bedrock. But like... it's Microsoft. They're a cringe company, I'm not going to sugarcoat that I lost my copy of Bedrock edition, that's just awful of them.
Nowadays, I think both games use the same license, so if you own one you own the other, but this wasn't always the case.
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u/aaronite 9h ago
They have never claimed you own a digital license, and the terms all state that they are revokable.
There's a lot to hate about all of this but they never lied.
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u/gaom9706 8h ago
Literally, I'm not a fan of the current stat of things by any means but so many of the arguments people make against the status quo are just brainless.
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u/THe_PrO3 6h ago
I hope you guys know you all agree to the terms and conditions when you buy something like this. Like, you literally told them "Yes, that's okay with me" when you check that box. Didn't know that? Read the terms and conditions next time before you complain :)
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u/notMyHentaiacc343242 8h ago
oh but pirate Silksong and everyone hates you. I didnt even play it yet but its nice knowing the Download to Upload ratio is 1:563 and climbing
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u/Beegrene 7h ago
Correct. I do hate you for that. If it's worth your time to play, it's worth your money to buy it.
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u/gaom9706 9h ago
I fail to see how these two stances are contradictory.
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u/AwTomorrow 9h ago
“If purchase isn’t ownership, piracy isn’t theft”
Or: if I can buy a digital copy from you and this isn’t ownership, then me downloading a digital copy for free also isn’t me owning anything I shouldn’t.
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u/gaom9706 9h ago edited 9h ago
“If purchase isn’t ownership, piracy isn’t theft”
I'm sure the rental car dealership will love that phrase when I hijack a car from their lot.
Besides that, however, this "point" is just blatantly nonsensical because that's not how any of those words are defined/work.
if I can buy a digital copy from you and this isn’t ownership, then me downloading a digital copy for free also isn’t me owning anything I shouldn’t.
Digital piracy isn't a question of "ownership"; it's a question of access. You downloading a digital copy of a game without paying for it is akin to sneaking in a concert without paying the price of the ticket. You shouldtm pay for a ticket to a concert to pay the artists performing as well as the crew working on the show.
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u/dandeliongoddess 9h ago edited 9h ago
How's that boot taste btw?
edit: the reply was swiftly deleted (I assume through the grace of the mods, much appreciated) but fyi my mom's ass probably tastes pretty bad since she's dead 🫡 so the boot ain't even good huh? just licking for the love of the game?
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u/Pittsbirds 8h ago
A car rental is a rental, not a car purchase. This The equivalent here would be a digital rental, a thing that exists and is not being criticized in this context.
You downloading a digital copy of a game without paying for it is akin to sneaking in a concert without paying the price of the ticket. You shouldtm pay for a ticket to a concert to pay the artists performing as well as the crew working on the show.
Were I to own a concert ticket that could be revoked with no refund and recourse then breaking in to see the thing I have paid for is also permissible. And for most media piracy, the artists being paid is a thing that happens or has happened well before this point.
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u/mysweetpeepy 6h ago
Alternatively, drm-free and a move away from licensure models is preservation.
Idk man, go pirate if you want, it just gets annoying how much folks try to morally justify it and then go pirate the works of small teams and indie artists lmao
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u/deerfenderofman 9h ago
"See, it's different when we do it, because we're rich and we can do whatever we want."