I've made a few posts in this thread on the topic of why 'piracy' (It's not really piracy, either, which is selling copies of something you're not legally entitled to sell) is not the same as theft. The upshot of the argument is that if you download a copy of game X, you're making a copy of the bits, rather than taking them - that is, the original owner still owns the thing, which is quite different to what happens when you steal an actual, physical object. See this post for the snapshot of the argument.
I'll note that nobody has ever been tried in a court of law for 'stealing' from a company when they download games or movies or what-have-you. They get sued for copyright infringement instead, which is entirely different. For example, the penalties are orders of magnitude higher.
It's the same concept of stealing. It's illegal either way. Why on earth would anyone justify piracy? You can't. Justify murdering innocent bystanders too, that's an interesting one.
I believe this thread has derailed enough. I made a blog post if the discussion has anything left. | |
I'm aware that I'm hardly the typical example of people who download games/music/movies/whatever off of the internet, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm trying to make the point that there are shades of grey here - some ends of piracy are manifestly black (Pirating Demigod - a game sold online, with no copy protection, for a reasonable price, by a generally competent and customer-friendly company - after some idiot breaks the release date, then playing it online), and some ends are, IMO, pretty close to white (I can't imagine anyone having much of a problem with me pirating Freespace 2)
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What on earth are you rambling on about? Piracy is piracy, it doesn't matter if it's a modern game or an older one.
That's like saying if I shoot some random prisoner (that was arrested for manslaugter, I guess...) in the head and he dies, it's more justified as he was going to get executed anyway, as opposed to shooting an innocent bystander. Extreme analogy, but same logic applies. | |
It's more that there are substantial architectural differences that make emulation extremely slow. It's like saying that a PowerPC Mac is faster than a Core 2 Duo PC because you can't emulate the PPC Mac at reasonable speed on the C2D.
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Vic Rattlehead wrote:
Which is a contradiction. Read what you're saying. The computers are more powerful, but they can't emulate the "weaker" ones? What? Yes. Just because something is more powerful than something else does not mean it is powerful enough to emulate the weaker thing. If you can't understand that, you'll never understand it. | |
You can write your own SNES games and then run them on an emulator. Some people do actually do that. There are legitimate uses.
That said, under the DMCA, if the SNES has any sort of mechanism to prevent piracy, reverse-engineering it to write an emulator may be illegal. This is utterly ridiculous, IMO, but fortunately the DMCA doesn't apply in Australia. ...yet. (On a side note, this post is encrypted with 2ROT13 technology in order to prevent illegal use of its copyrighted contents. By decrypting and reading this post, you are circumventing a protection mechanism, and are in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.) | |
I don't recall homebrew being legal aside from the 360's indie game section (which is a shame really, I would love to learn to make games for my portables).
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Vic Rattlehead wrote:
There are people better at me in Rock Band 2 that can do what I can do with ease. My computer is much, much 'better' than a PS2, as it can play Crysis at full settings. However, running a PS2 game on my computer is still extremely difficult due to the fact that the technical specifications of the PS2 is vastly different than my computer's and emulating them in software is inherently stressing. | |
There's a world of difference between downloading something that comes out tomorrow and something that came out in 1999, where the original developer no longer exists as a separate entity, where the publisher (which owns the IP) is bankrupt and selling off its licences, where the game never sold very many copies - and so finding it second-hand, especially in Australia, is pretty much impossible. If you can't see the distinction between downloading something that I may not ever be able to legally purchase - and even then, would be purchasing it in a way that doesn't funnel any money to the original copyright holder - and downloading something that is completely new and doesn't contain any DRM to stuff up your computer, then I think you should consider revising your position, lest you be mistaken for a straw man.
As a further example, Mechwarrior 2 came out in 1995. There were a bazillion and one different editions of it, some of which I would have great difficulty even convincing to install, let alone run, and a few which can be tricked into running on a modern PC (I'm setting up a Win98SE virtual machine exclusively for this purpose). I would be surprised in the extreme if I could find a legitimate copy in real life, and even if I did, chances are it would be one of the DOS versions which I would struggle to get running. I own a legitimate copy of the next game in the series - Mechwarrior 3 - because I was lucky enough to run into it in a second-hand store several years ago, and Mechwarrior 4 is being released for free by the official copyright holders. I don't feel a single twinge about having downloaded Mech 2. EDIT: Also, this is the sole thread on the Gaming forum's main page. Bets on how long before it's locked? | |
Is Crysis a particularly hard game to run at full settings? Without seeing any specs, I can only assume it's hard for fossil PCs.
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Homebrew is perfectly legal, and any company that claims otherwise is lying through its teeth. See a number of early legal decisions that found in favour of companies that reverse-engineered Nintendo's lockout chip on the SNES and NES so they could produce unlicensed games for the system.
Nowadays the reverse-engineering part would get you in legal hot water in the US, but just writing and distributing the game is perfectly legal, assuming you haven't incorporated any copyrighted code you aren't allowed to distribute in the binary (Firmware or whatever). | |
Sure. Keep pirating, but it's illegal either way.
And two - DRM doesn't do jack to mess with your playing experience unless your a hacker. If your PC can't run a game that came out in 95, it has severe problems. | |
Homebrew for the Wii/PS3 is illegal, and it's a touchy subject for the PSP/DS. I don't think it even needs custom firmware for the latter two.
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As far as I'm aware the only thing making homebrew illegal is the DMCA, which is an American only thing.
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And using eBay is lolworthy. All the good online shoppers usually use Amazon.