If I’ve said something false, let me know. As far as I’m aware, what I’ve said is how the law works (at least in the US). I understand if you don’t like those laws, but that doesn’t make them not exist, nor does it make them irrelevant when someone makes a reductive statement like “if buying isn’t ownership, then piracy isn’t stealing”. The fact is, in some cases, it is.
You’d be surprised. There seem to be vanishingly few people here willing to honestly discuss the legal questions around piracy and copyright. The vast majority are just here to circle jerk about how much corporations suck, completely forgetting about the rights of artists they’re defending in the anti-AI circle jerk one thread over. I honestly think they spend more time flaming anything they disagree with than actually putting any thought into the matter. The dogmatism rivals that of conservative forums.
When you buy a painting, do you only have a license to view it?
That’s a good question. My guess is that the rights to create prints of the painting usually remain with the artist. You own that painting, you probably even own the right to display it for an entry fee, but unless the artist has granted you a license to the artwork, I don’t think you can freely create copies.
Just want to highlight how unnecessarily antagonistic your response was. Not sure if that was your intention, but I don’t care to engage with it. Cheers.
Buying a CD/DVD was never ownership of the media that’s on it. It’s ownership of a piece of plastic and a license to play to the content on the plastic within certain limitations. If it was ownership, you would be allowed to project the DVD on a wall and charge patrons to view it, but legally you can’t, because you don’t own anything but the plastic. Buying a CD/DVD was always just a more convenient version of buying a ticket to a concert/theater to see the same thing. You’re paying for the experience of viewing their artwork.
So, as long as you also agree that sneaking into a concert/theater to view a show without paying also isn’t theft in any way, then I can’t argue.
I wish someone had taught my friends and me how to play D&D when I was 10, but my parents were part of the “satanic panic” generation, and had zero interest in anything to do with fantasy or improv. Once you get out of highschool, finding a night that everyone can meet up for D&D gets exponentially harder, let alone finding someone who wants to put in the time to DM.
And I expect they were a very similar audience. So I don’t think the bar for what to expect was very different. If anything, the bar should have been much higher for the AAA game.
CMV: if No Man’s Sky’s gameplay was identical to Starfield in 2016, people would have been even more disappointed than they were. The only reason people gave Starfield a pass in 2023 is because we’re so conditioned to being disappointed by Bethesda that fanboys shrugged it off, and everyone else just looked at them weird. I legitimately believe NMS when it first released was a better game than Starfield.
Yeah, I was aware of the case, but I’m confused because it does sound like Valve’s policy only explicitly restricts the sale of free keys for less. Obviously, I’m all for Valve being held accountable if they’re actually requiring the game be the same price on a completely different platform.
I don’t think there’s any difference between “justifiable” and “simply because they can”. If they can, then they can. Yeah, I do support developers, but I’d be lying if I said steam doesn’t add any value to my experience. If it wasn’t 30% worth of value, devs wouldn’t choose it. And I’m all for EGS undercutting them to attract developers, I think that’s the right way to combat it.
If there is any regulation that needs to happen to combat monopolies, then I think it’s the same regulation that needs to happen on all content distribution and streaming platforms, which is: there should be a standard API for accessing content in a cross-platform way so that open source front-ends can be trivially developed. If steam (or netflix, or spotify, or google, or whatever) has established too much power, it’s because they’ve locked their users into their user experience, and it’s inherently inconvenient to have to switch between different platforms and UIs. But if regulation forced a common API, and open source front-ends were developed, people wouldn’t be locked into a specific user experience. You could switch between EGS or Steam or GOG or whoever, and the only thing that would change are the games that show up in your front-end of choice. IMO that’s the real way to solve it.