[ddevault]

There are many reasons to use an emulator. You could play your own games on a new platform, or without having to pay for the hardware (a gaming PC which can run an current-gen emulator is expensive enough!). You could use it to play or develop homebrew software, or to research commercial software. You can use it to bypass region locks, which I would argue are quite unethical in their own right.

Even with all of that said, I support piracy. Information wants to be free, and games are made of information. No one has lost anything when a game is copied.

[bscphil]

> No one has lost anything when a game is copied.

Suppose an indie developer working alone hires an intern. They release a game developed together for a console. Suddenly the console becomes possible to emulate, and most of the people who would have bought the game play a cracked and pirated version on an emulator instead. Because of the unexpected lack of sales, the developer has to fire the intern. The intern no longer has enough money to feed their family, and their children go hungry that month. The intern has lost something.

My comment isn't intended to be positive or negative on the whole towards piracy (I do sometimes pirate things). What's it's critical of is the blithe way in which people dismiss concerns with statements like "no one has lost anything". Sure, maybe the developer doesn't have an abstract right against copying the game, and it is true that they have not lost copies of the game when it is copied. But people do lose things.

If you oppose intellectual property rights, it's important to work productively towards creating a world without it in which developers can work on a piece of software as their job and still have a livelihood, not joke about them not standing to lose anything through piracy. I'm not saying you don't do this, I'm well aware of your contributions to open source, for example.

[DoreenMichele]

If you oppose intellectual property rights, it's important to work productively towards creating a world without it in which developers can work on a piece of software as their job and still have a livelihood, not joke about them not standing to lose anything through piracy.

Thank you for speaking up. I try to make similar points at times, though I'm usually talking about writing and content creation and I'm a woman and a writer and poor, so people feel pretty free to be openly dismissive and disrespectful and act like my expectation that I should somehow be able to support myself if I am doing good work is a laughably stupid expectation and, at the same time, I'm an extremist nutter if I start using phrases like "that amounts to an expectation of slave labor."

I don't know what the solution is. A lot of amazing things get done because someone dreamed it up off the clock without the constraints of an employer or client telling them what to do.

But it is a travesty of justice to act like those things should be given for free and the creator has no right to have that come back to them as financial prosperity. It's not only a travesty of justice, it's an excellent way to make sure all your best and brightest people are trying to figure out how to make a buck, even if it means screwing other people and even it means doing work that is less valuable to humanity than what they might otherwise do.

If you want this to remain a dog eat dog, lord of the flies hellscape, hey, dismissing the idea that people have a right to profit from their labor when their labor is clearly enhancing your life (or you wouldn't be using their stuff for free while sneering at the idea that this is a problem for them) is an excellent way to accomplish that.

[bscphil]

Thanks. I think there's a whole interesting discussion about classes of intellectual work like writing and photography that are less respected in the digital world (from the standpoint of copyright) than software and films.

Your comment also highlights another aspect of theoretical arguments of the sort ddevault gives that I think is interesting. If you take them seriously, then there ought not to be any intellectual property at all, so someone should be able to just set up a website like "get your stuff here dot com" where you can download whatever you like, with no legal prohibition or moral inhibition.

If this were true, the piracy landscape would look vastly different than what it looks like today, and I think this seriously undermines the kind of pragmatic responses my comment has gotten along the lines of "actually, piracy is helpful to the industry". Because in all likelihood, that can only be true (if it is true) up to a point.

The ultimate question is, do we see the point of making sure artists and creators have a way to live off the work they do for us? A copyright system may not be the best way to ensure this, or it might even be outright unethical! If so, let's come up with a better one.

[witherk]

Piracy surely does do damage. But I feel as if it's probably a net positive for the gaming industry overall. Maybe I'm wrong but Indie games currently seem to be in a sort of golden age, despite piracy being as alive as ever. As someone who grew up on blizzard and gamecube games almost every game I purchase these days is an indie game, similar patterns amongst my friends.

[bscphil]

That's quite possibly true. Again, I do pirate things sometimes, and I'm not trying to rule one way or another on piracy.

What I'm trying to get at is that saying on the basis of a priori arguments about what "property rights" a person has that they don't stand to "lose anything" through piracy is incorrect reasoning, and maybe even hurtful to the people who do stand to lose something.

You might as well pursue a long theoretical argument with the conclusion that the Department of Homeland Security has no right to exist, then claim that a janitor who works there has "nothing to lose" from calls to abolish it. Even if you're right about the DHS, it's a complete non sequitur, and a rather callous one at that.

[witherk]

I see what you're saying and I agree. I think this particular argument, is pushing back on the notion that piracy is straightforwardly the same thing as physical theft.

[croes]

Surely? https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...

[adanto6840]

There are also more games than ever right now -- it's extremely competitive, even relative to just 5 years ago. Source: Am founder of a small indie 'studio', recently released our second title.

[witherk]

Yeah I would imagine it's insanely difficult. The bar for genres dominated by indie games like puzzle platformers, metroidvanias, roguelikes seems infinitely high these days. Seems rough for devs, but as a gamer it's amazing.

[caslon]

https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...

"In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them."

[RHSeeger]

To be fair, those studies were done in a world where software piracy is against the law in many places, considered wrong by many, and can have real consequences to those that engage in it. Those facts have direct impacts on the amount of piracy that happens. If piracy were completely legal and the average person was comfortable doing it, then the impact on the sales of software would likely be much higher.

It is not unreasonable to argue that some piracy is not a big deal and may, in fact, be helping developers (and producers of other content). However, as soon as you start arguing that it should be legal, expected, and normal to do so, you change the entire landscape.

[bscphil]

Seems like I'm getting a torrent (hah) of comments saying that "piracy isn't that bad actually", when I explicitly said in the comment that I wasn't interested in advocating for or against piracy, and do in fact pirate things myself.

[caslon]

Your argument was, literally, that piracy decreases sales. But all of the evidence points toward piracy increasing game sales. Therefore, the indie dev in your example would make more money.

I'm not saying that piracy is good or bad; I really don't care. I'm simply stating that your argument was wrong.

[bscphil]

That was quite literally not my argument. I gave an example in which piracy decreases sales, to respond to an a priori defense of piracy.

Edit: There is a world of difference between debating a point on deontological ethical grounds and consequential ethical grounds. My point is not about what the consequences are, it's about the fact that a specific a priori ethical defense of piracy like that ddevault gives can't be used to argue that piracy doesn't have bad consequences.

[ohgodplsno]

No, you gave a fully theoretical thought experiment, that attempts to play with emotions (oh no, not just an employee that can't be paid, but an intern, a poor student that cannot feed his family after, because that... wait non that's not what interns do) and tried to spin it as an ethical argument.

[caslon]

I gave an example in which piracy decreases sales

Which isn't something that would have happened in the real world, since piracy increases sales.

[matthewrobertso]

Releasing a game on a console is an involved process with many steps and hoops to jump through. It is much easier to release a game on PC. I haven't looked into the statistics but it is my understanding that the large majority indie games release first on PC before being ported to consoles due to the barrier to entry.

Emulators might hurt developers who treat being console exclusive as a form of DRM or have exclusivity agreements with console manufacturers if their work becomes wildly pirated. I don't track what is pirated or how frequently, nor do I track game developers closely, are there examples of this happening to developers who have shut down?

[bscphil]

> It is much easier to release a game on PC.

That's true. By giving a console example I was just trying to talk about piracy in a way relevant to the emulator topic. You could make exactly the same point about piracy of PC games, though. Many indie PC games don't have DRM.

[matthewrobertso]

I think for most indie developers piracy is free word of mouth advertising, similar to the shareware model. Hopefully when their work is widely pirated developers can turn the attention into sales. I agree it would be very tragic if people lost their jobs due to rampant piracy.

To ask a difficult question though, are there actually any contemporary indie PC games that have been massively pirated to the point where the developer had to fire an intern?

[ddevault]

No one has a right to a viable business model. There are other ways to make money.

I also oppose companies like Nestle monopolizing water supplies to sell back to communities at a premium. If they're not allowed to do that, then their employees will have to find something else to do, or they won't be able to feed their family and their children will go hungry. Naturally, we'll not speak of any of the benefits which might be possible if we eliminated their business model. The only consequence of any import is that their employee's family will starve and die.

This is clearly a false argument. Intellectual property is based on an artificial scarcity and has no basis in the tangible value of goods and services. It's a kind of intellectual rent. It should not be granted special status in law.

[Jasper_]

The expectation here is fair trade. They are providing a good for sale with a price. If you do not pay the price, you do not get to enjoy the good, regardless of if the distribution model inherently enforces its trade value through scarcity or not.

The last several thousands of years of society and economics are based on this principle. Capitalism depends on it. You can be against capitalism and work towards achieving that end. But until we get there, we need to make sure that those in a society built around capitalism obey these fair trade rules.

If you don't want to pay for your software, don't use software that's offered for pay. There's a whole market of free software out there.

[bscphil]

You're going back to the moral argument against intellectual property, and I get you, it's sort of compelling. My point was that suggesting that no one stands to lose anything if we throw out the concept is a bit bonkers. Schematically the argument is something like this:

1. Under capitalism, the only way someone who makes something for others can be sure of providing for themselves and their dependents is if they have a property right in the things they make, thereby ensuring that it has exchange value for them as a commodity.

2. Property rights in intellectual or abstract creations do not exist. Because (insert moral argument), no one ever truly has an intellectual property right. (your premise)

Conclusion: People who create intellectual or abstract works should not be sure of providing for themselves and their dependents, and should therefore do something else and find "other ways to make money". In fact, we can't even say that people forced into some other work (or starvation) have lost anything, because they never had a moral right to it to begin with.

Me: Welllllll

I hope it's obvious that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. (Though we can get into that if you like.) I think it's also obvious from this perspective that this is certainly not like the Nestle case. Nestle is making things worse by monopolizing water that they didn't even create and would exist if they did not. Artists are people who create things that you and I love which brighten our lives, and are asking that they not go hungry in exchange. They are not seizing a pre-existing work of art and holding it out in exchange for an income, they are instead creating things and witholding them to ensure an income the only way that is possible under our present system of capitalism.

I want to live in a world where artists can be assured of not going hungry. I certainly don't think we need intellectual property to get ourselves there, and I'm nearly certain most artists themselves don't intrinsically love intellectual property. But this means we need an alternative. What does that look like: UBI? Something even more drastic? That's the question I was getting at toward the end of the comment you replied to.

[dmingod666]

Only problem is, if while doing the work the developers were told their work isn't going to be entirely paid for they would have chosen to do something else.

You write a book and would be paid by the word. After toiling away for 2 years, 30% of your work will not be paid for because the publishers feel this is just information. You have been decived.

When labor is carried out with certain promises of compensation and after the work is completed if the fruits of the labor are not compensated to the person company doing the effort then it's fraud / stealing.

Broadly your argument sounds like 'knowledge work is not real work' because it doesn't produce tangible assets.

[dmingod666]

The problem is not about free distribution of knowledge or not.

The problem is, in compensation of the people involved in doing the work.

For example if someone sponsored content 'x' and made it free to the public it would be fine to copy it around. Think govt funded research. This has its own problems. The people that commission these works and the general public may not share the same tastes.

The risks of selling to a patron and selling to a yet unknown audience are vastly different. This is why the compensation varies wildly between the two. Its possible that one game may take enormous resources and then not give back any returns resulting in a loss and another one makes massive profits.

The positive ones cover up for the failing ones. If you only look at the positive ones it's easy to be dismissive and say they are getting compensated undeservedly. In the broader picture it is the massive successes that allow for variety in the market place, it is an essential mechanism. If you cap off the upper limits of getting paid, people will be unwilling to make newer / different types of things. The market is essentially funding innovation, variety and a buffer for failures - it serves as a direction mechanism for knowing what people want.

Knowing what to make that people will buy is a very hard and expensive problem to answer. People that can answer it correctly get paid a lot of money deservedly.