Whatever you do, don’t use G2A and other similar CD key reseller websites. Developers would rather you just pirate the game because a lot of those keys are stolen, which cause a charge back that ends up costing the developers tens of thousands of dollars in fees. In rare cases it has even bankrupt them.
s/developers/publishers/
Also, not sure how this is programming related 🤷
I hate this phrase because it assumes that copyright infringement was at one point the same as stealing - it never was.
Stealing is a crime, where you take with the intent to deprive. Copyright infringement is a civil offense where the original owner loses nothing.
But see you’re thinking about it the wrong way… Every one of those pirated copies is 100% a potential sale lost.
Won’t you think of the shareholders?
/s
I don’t think that that’s necessarily true. Let’s say someone designs a rucksack because they find the existing options on the market uncomfortable. They produce them on a small scale and they get fairly popular. Then Amazon sees it, copies it, mass produces it for less than the original designer could, and makes sure that any time someone searches for a rucksack on Amazon their version appears first in the list. I think it’s reasonable to say that the original designer lost something there
That doesn’t mean copyright can’t be or isn’t abused, of course
They’ve lost potential revenue, but that is not the same as if amazon would come to their house and had stolen their only rucksack prototype.
Potential revenue is not your property.
It still sucks though.
Potential revenue isn’t, but intellectual property is. At least in most current legal systems, it is
Ah, but they didn’t lose the exact item that the thief gained. For legal purposes, that’s important; nobody could be charged with larceny.
IANAL
deleted by creator
How’s this programmer humor?
More like gaming executives
*publishers
*Game publishers
Look for games that are sold DRM free. Those can’t be taken from you by devs or the store after backed up. And usually devs and/or stores that deliberately sell such games also make it clear people can keep their games.
Is that PirateSoftware?
their lawyers would probably argue that it’s the “unlawful interception of a service”, but i don’t care.
Good luck pirating live service games.
Not completely impossible, given high enough demand. Back in the day, third party servers for WoW and Lineage 2 were quite common. A more modern day example that comes to mind is FiveM, which is basically pirate GTA5 server which is arguably more popular than the official online mode.
Pointing this out isn’t clever.
Software piracy satisfies the colloquial understanding of theft as the act of obtaining something without paying for it, but not the colloquial understanding of theft as the act of depriving someone else of the thing you’ve obtained. Purchasing a software license satisfies the colloquial definition of ownership as the right to do something after having paid for that right, but not the colloquial understanding of ownership as the right to do anything you want with what you have purchased. Software piracy isn’t theft in the legal sense, and purchasing a software license is not a transfer of ownership in the legal sense.
Memes like this are just pointless quibbling over words (barely more sophisticated than “You’re a doodoohead!” “No, you’re the doodoohead times a thousand!”) and contain zero insight into the morality or legality of software piracy or software licensing.
You do realize you’re in the programming humor community, right?
Pirating is stealing the owners right to distribution.
Keep on pretending like you aren’t affecting the salary and lives of artists.
Piracy is not stealing. Piracy affects artists.
These two statements can and do coexist.
