[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.

[bscphil]

When ddevault said that "no one loses anything" when something is copied, they did not mean that they had looked at all the studies and determined that "piracy is good, actually". They meant that simply by examining the nature of intellectual property as such, we could know that no one ever loses anything when something is copied. This is an implied deductive argument which does not hinge on what conditions actually exist in the world.

In response to a deductive argument, it's always acceptable to try to present a possible world in which the premises of the argument are true and the conclusion is false. It simply does not matter that quite a lot of angry people in this thread are insisting that the world I presented in the example does not actually exist. If the world could exist, then that's enough to show that there's something wrong with ddevault's point, and that's what I wanted to do in my comment.

Ironically, ddevault understood this when hardly anyone else did. They replied to my comment with a slight pivot on the original take. They said that while people might "lose things", it's not the kind of "losing" that matters, because if someone loses something that was never legitimately theirs to begin with, we don't care or worry about this. (The example of Nestle stealing water is used as an example.)

This was a great response from ddevault, because it actually understood what I was getting at. I disagree with the response, but the point is that it understands what is happening at the theoretical level here, and that's crucial.

[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.

[bscphil]

Thought experiments do not have to be things that would have happened in the real world.

[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.