An outright property right can be taken away. If I use part of your land for say 30 years, land that you have a deed to, and you do not notify me it is yours during that time, I can make a claim to that part of your land as belonging to me.
Did you know that?
Now, distinctions can be weak and narrow and still be valid. There are reasons the term *Piracy *is used. You are using convenient distinctions. Whether something is a monopoly granted by the government or the market is as irrelevant, and maybe more so, than the High Seas Piracy argument you belittle.
One of your distinctions is ‘outright’ ownership of property. When without permission, a person takes something that does not belong to them, it is theft. Outright theft. It matters not who owns the something, or how they own it, outright or some other way. In the case I laid out with the land use of 30 years, ownership is granted and recognized in the courts. The courts get to decide. That is what we as a society of laws agree upon.
Intellectual property: There are copies and there are copies. There are copies of a work of art that are numbered. There are unsigned copies. All copies made, traded, and sold with permission of the owner of the original are legal copies. Ownership is transferred to those who pay for, barter for, or are given a gift of ownership of the copy.
I would not say Physical property and intellectual property are fundamentally different outside the context of copyright law. I would say Intellectual Property is a distinct form of property, different from Physical Property, but I wouldn’t say they are fundamentally from each other different within the context of law. And theft is a legal term here.
I made a legal distinction and offered an ethical caveat. IP infringement can be a form of theft. There are many forms of theft, just as there are many forms of infringement. Listening to a concert outside a pay for viewing venue, is a perfectly acceptable and legally acceptable experience. Listening to a concert outside is not an infringement of IP rights not granted.
To completion, none. For 2 hours of more, some. It depends on the game.
For instance, when Napoleon Total War came out I tested it for a full day before I decided to buy it. I was very jaded by Empire Total War which got amazing reviews, yet turned out to be one of the worst games produced by a large studio that year.
Note the rating disparity between the reviewers and the actual gamers. It’s difficult to imagine that there’s a single review by a veteran of the TW series in that bunch.
I have bought software (games, utilities, etc) over the years that either turned out to be “incomapatible”, or were so impossibly buggy, they would not even start or load.
So, now, I won’t even consider buying more unuseable junk, until and unless the hardware requirements are clearly spelled out, and I’ve read some reviews. And then I still want the thing “in action”. Software comapanies have put out some really worthless stuff over the years, and charged good money for it. So, it’s not just the end users that can be stupid and dishonest.
Frankly, I don’t bother to pirate, because most of the shit out there isn’t worth having anyway. But I feel no symplathy for “them” on the other side either.
Although I don’t think it’s relevant to the discussion, I’m not a pirate. I’ve never pirated a game, the closest I’ve come is finding alternate CD keys for a game I bought that I lost the keys to when I re-installed it after a crash or upgrade.
I’m also a developer, and I make a living creating and selling intellectual property, so I agree it has value and should be compensated. But there are two main methods of legally selling things in the US market. Selling something tangible, or something intangible. The common law says that ownership of something tangible confers certain benefits as well as restrictions. The benefits are that you can resell it, use it however you want, destroy it, etc. The restrictions are that no one else is responsible for what you do with it(i.e. Smith and Wesson doesn’t owe your victims anything if you shoot people, and Merc isn’t responsible if you overdose yourself) or the state of it after you buy it(you are perfectly able to trash your own stuff). Also if you lose it, destroy it, or sell it, you lose use of it. This is how the vast majority of stuff works, and it’s enforced by the law. The maker of a gun doesn’t get to come after me if I sell the gun to someone else after I bought it and they don’t like who I sold it to. It was mine, I can do what I want with it(subject to the laws for gun ownership transfer, blah blah), but the original maker is out of the loop.
Intangible stuff is less like this though. You aren’t buying the stuff, you’re buying a license to use it. That’s all well and good, but if I’m buying a license, then my rights to it are not tied to the physical object. I should be able to request new copies of the CD, or a new CD Key by proving I own the license. The manufacturer can’t make me buy a new copy if I lose my cd or it gets scratched, etc. Or vice versa, if I register my product, keep my receipt, etc. and call in to get a new CD Key, they can’t refuse to issue one. This is standard in business software. Media is irrelevant, licensing is everything. Once upon a time consumer software did the same thing. Companies had numbers you could call in and for minimal fees to cover shipping and handling they would send you a new copy of the CD if you could prove your license was valid.
It’s the having the cake and eating it too that I have an issue with. Say my boss came to me and said he accidentally deleted an email I sent him that had a report I spent six hours putting together attached to it. Do I get to tell him tough shit, he has to pay me another six hours worth of salary to get me to re-send it? I’d be laughed out of a job if I did that in the real world. But software companies do it all the time, and it’s caused no end of grief to consumers, companies, and the legal system.
No. It would be unethical if it were generally frowned upon because itw as a way of avoiding listening inside the venue. The venue is about seeing the concert as well as hearing it. We call it ‘being there’ at a concert…
I post it because a few people have mentioned the need to understand exactly what IP rights actually are. Nothing like a current easily understood court case, to add flavor and nuance.
I have, in the past. After thinking more about it, though, I stopped doing it. But I agree with you that it’s not really relevant to the discussion.
In this case, then, it seems to me that there is now a third way of legally selling something in the US market: to sell a physical object that may only be used according to a license. I’m not sure this is unique to the software industry. Don’t homeowner’s agreements on houses follow an analogous third way?
As I see it, you absolutely get to tell him that. He is then free to find another employee, but he’s not free to force you to re-send the email.
Similarly, a gaming company is free to tell you that you need to re-purchase the CD. You’re then free never to buy anything from that company again. You’re not free to force them to send you another CD.
I somewhat get what you’re saying. In fact, I probably have a pirated copy of a game in my cabinet right now, now that I think about it: it’s a copy of a game that I legally purchased a decade ago and then lost the disk, but a friend burned me a cracked copy. Honestly, I don’t lose any sleep over that, even though it’s technically wrong: it’s a very small wrong, about akin to using a gas station’s bathroom without buying anything (and please let’s not veer into a debate about my shitty analogy).
And FWIW, I absolutely agree that it’s incorrect to conflate “piracy” with theft. They’re two different things, and although they’re both unethical behaviors under normal circumstances, it just confuses the issue to equate them.
I don’t who Mtgman is claiming, is having their cake and eating it too: the consumer/lessee or owner/lessor? I think he is saying it is the lessor. And that is ridiculous. What I agree with is changing the rules of the game is shitty, but it’s legal. Consumers can vote with their feet, or more appropriately with their lack of agreeing to leased products.
Left Hand of Dorkness: Leasing is a common agreement. Think: Car Lease, an Apt Lease, etc.
Mtgman: You can send your boss a copy of the report they already paid you to compile. You do not own the report, your company does. They pay you to produce. If you have no copy, your boss has choices, you do not. You are an employee.
Left Hand of Dorkness:
1) See above.
2) Reality
3) Your shitty analogy is warm diarrhea in a Dixie cup. Using a bathroom without buying anything is not breaking a law. Buying a cracked copy is closer to receiving stolen property, than using a bathroom.
4) The only confusion is a marked ability to conveniently become myopic.
It’s true that the company owns the report. What they don’t own is your labor.
It’s true that you own a right to use the software. What you don’t own is the company’s resources: they never agreed to send you a replacement disk, so you don’t have a right to it. Sure, it’d be great of them to send one, and sure, it’s at least superficially obnoxious not to, but it’s not a right to get one.
Probably the closest is music licensing. You buy a CD and you’re allowed to listen to it, to make a copy for backup, to re-sell it, but you’re not allowed to broadcast it or use it for public performances. The general model applies well to games, but the “ownership of the physical media” bit gets bobbled. Re-selling the physical media is a violation of the EULA for most software products, and if a company has the capability(such as online games) they can revoke all installations from re-sold media if they are aware it was re-sold. Similarly, you can’t make a backup of most games. So they adopted most of the music licensing structure, but stripped out even more.
I would agree that if you lost your CD you should lose your access to the music, but the tradeoff for this is that you’re allowed to sell the CD if you like. No such rights exist in a license for software.
I guess I come to this from a different perspective, since I’m an IT professional. If I own a license, then the physical media is irrelevant. And the licensing is tracked by both the client and vendor, so if I lose my CD key they can look it up. I’ve never had the kind of issue with a vendor over physical media in the professional software realm that I do with consumer software. Physical media just doesn’t matter, and it seems to me that it’s how it used to work in the consumer market too. I remember calling up Microsoft and saying I had a damaged disk for Windows 98, they said “ok, what’s your CD key” I gave it to them, they confirmed it was valid, and charged me five bucks for shipping and processing for a new CD with a new key. I’ve done the same thing for a ton of other types of software, especially professional software, because what I bought was a license, not a CD, the CD just happened to be a useful transport mechanism for what I really bought.
Games makers sell licenses and give you no rights over the physical media, but still tie your liability to the physical media. This is fine in a free market, I certainly can vote with my wallet, and have done so on numerous occasions. In a more general discussion like this though, I can’t say I get worked up over pirates who bought it once, and pirate it thereafter if a cracked version which doesn’t require jumping through hoops or dies when some piece of crappy plastic or the user manual gets misplaced becomes available.
At this point it may be worth pointing out that some of the online vendors of digital games have gone fully over to the licensing side of things. Buying a game on Steam or whatever will allow you to download and install that game any number of times, but you can’t sell it at all.
I’m entirely in agreement with you on this. My main objection to pirating comes from the idea that someone will get the fruits of a designer’s labors without paying for it. If they pay for it, I don’t much care about the technicality.
