Did I “steal” the football match? Did I “steal” the magazine?
A sound basis for you to decide to steal someone else’s work expressly against their wishes if I ever heard one. Bravo!
What’s hysterical is a person defending stealing games with “But I wouldn’t care if they stole MY games!”. What’s that? Different meaning of hysterical? Oh well.
Anyway, the obvious solution here is for all the publishers to go back to 1980s style feelies as DRM. Comic books with 3D glasses and code wheels and all that. Probably want more intricately made stuff that uses all three dimensions though so it’s not easy to download and print. Set your code globes to the following X, Y, Z coordinates and type in the symbols…
The analogy there would be if you went to a friend’s house to play Space Laser Dragons and then went home without a copy for yourself. Comparing owning a personal unpaid copy of Space Laser Dragons to reading a magazine over someone’s shoulder is an embarrassingly poor argument.
I’m not justifying anything, merely putting the seriousness at the correct level. I note you haven’t actually commented on whether you consider both scenarios to be equivalent.
And the football game? did I “steal” that? What if I download a pirated copy of Space Laser Dragons, played it once, didn’t like it, then delete it. Have I stolen it then?
Is it? You are (I think) expressing the view that pirating a game is a bad thing to do, and the justifications for it are not very persuasive. The response was basically, “Yeah, but it’s not very bad, and it could result in a positive change in the behavior of the game publishers”. Seems on point to me.
I’m not a gamer and have no dog in this fight, other than a general wish that companies would spend more time figuring our ways to profit from making their products easier for consumers to acquire and use, and less time figuring out ways to profit from making their products harder for consumers to acquire and use.
Do you have a copy of it at any point? Probably not. Although I don’t know if your “unauthorized viewing” was you peeking through someone’s curtains or you streaming it from one of the illustrious spammers we get.
Do you own a copy of it at some point? Then yes. Really, this isn’t all that hard to figure out and your childish arguments only serve to illustrate that.
Honestly, it’s never been easier in the history of mankind (although I guess only the last handful of decades are relevant) to get PC games cheaply and legally. There’s a reason why Valve is a multi-billion dollar company.
I would think that, for most people, “I respect other people’s property, don’t steal and respect the law” would be the default position barring extraordinary circumstances. And I don’t think “I don’t feel like paying” or “I don’t like the owners so fuck them” represents extraordinary circumstances that warrant stealing entertainment products.
keep in mind that I don’t equate piracy=“theft.” however, my point was very simple: when someone won’t sell or give you something on terms you want, the civilized adult response is to do without it. the poster I was replying to said “if I really really really want it I should just be able to take it” which is the reasoning of a child.
According to centuries of precedent in the English language, I’ve stolen them.
No, it’s just bog-standard usage of a common English word, one that nobody ever balked at until people needed a justification for stealing MP3s and video games.
What is the difference? you’ve watched something you didn’t pay for so they should be equally bad no? You don’t retain a physical copy in either case. What if a friend used a slingbox to give you remote access to a sporting stream?
Look, is pirating bad and wrong?..yes (just in case you are in any doubt of where I stand) but it is a minor moral infringement in the great scheme of things. On the crime swingometer I see it nudging slightly to the left of “neutral”, probably around “naughty boy” Walking into a game store and taking a physical copy moves the pointer further left to “thieving scum”.
You seen desperate to put these on the same level which I think puts you in the minority and, yes, makes you sound somewhat hysterical. I very much doubt you actually see physical theft and illicit copies as equally serious but you won’t admit as much.
And I come back to the main point I was making previously. Without that fairly benign low level piracy of napster et al we would not have Amazon, Netflix, Spotify etc. in the user-friendly form and at the price point we now see.
I definitely think that the continued pressure of piracy forces companies into making better products for the moral high-ground occupying consumers such as me, so they have their uses.
If the content providers decide that the reaction to such piracy is to make a *worse *product for me then they are idiots and deserve to lose business and deserve to be criticised.
You know, it doesn’t matter because neither is like pirating software.
If I was stealing things, I’d probably try to find ways to make false moral relativity arguments as well.
The level is “stealing”. You seem to imply that I view, say, stealing a grape with stealing a car when obviously I do not. But I don’t come up with a bunch of lame comparisons (“But, uh, what if I LOOKED at a grape?? Uh, what if I tasted a grape at my friend’s house??”) to try and justify that I’m not actually stealing a grape. I think your attempt to frame me as “desperate” might stick better if you weren’t casting about and trying to compare pirating software with reading a magazine 
As Miller points out, copying information without the consent of the owner has been considered stealing since, well, forever. Maybe you’re some kid who grew up in the post-Napster era and have always had people justifying it to you and that shaped your perception on whether or not to respect people’s property. You know, when you’d otherwise be denied a pleasure and we can’t have that.
I have a copy of Portal, a game I very much enjoyed. I never paid for it. Did I steal it?
Was it a gift or Valve freebie? Is this a trick question like “The doctor was his mother”?
I know this is the pit, but please fight my ignorance. What is the earliest usage of “steal” to mean “copy without consent”?
I so much miss my access to the OED.
Virtually every definition of “steal” says to take something without right or the owner’s permission.
If you have a pirated copy of a game, you have taken it without the owner’s permission (or right since doing so violates the law). This honestly isn’t that hard.
FYI, the definition of “take” is “to get into one’s hands or into one’s possession” in case we’re going to get into sophomoric “But did I TAKE it if there’s still a copy there??” games. Yes, you did.
So the definition of “steal” is to get into one’s hands or into one’s possession something without right or the owner’s permission.
The weird mental gymnastics people engage in to indulge themselves without worrying about ethics are sort of ridiculous. You’d be better off just saying “Yeah, it’s stealing but I don’t care” instead of embarrassing yourself with this nonsense.
Consider the example of narcotics. Yes, abusing narcotics is bad, just like people dependent on income from creating games not getting any is bad. And no, you can’t stamp out illicit narcotics use any more than you can stamp out digital piracy- it’s fundamentally just too easy to do.
Now in a sane world the response to narcotics abuse would be to treat narcotics addiction as a medical problem. Instead, we think we can punish people enough to stamp out the production, trafficking and use of narcotics; which of course we can’t. Similarly, the companies that produce software would rather go to any length, no matter how quixotic, to try to shut the barn door after the horse has escaped than to stop trying to ram the square peg of copyrights into the round hole of digital technology.
Basically, watch Daffy Duck (as “Robin Hood”) chop down all the trees in his way than maybe try to find another strategy.
Again, it has never been easier or cheaper to buy thousands and thousands (over 15,000 products on Steam alone, not counting GOG, Origin exclusives, etc) of video games. It’s not an issue of it being too hard or too expensive or your mom will die if you can’t get a copy of Laser Space Dragons. It’s just basic childish entitlement mentality on the behalf of those who steal games and there’s not much the publishers can do about that.