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by jorvi 829 days ago
Bongs have been freely sold for decades despite being used for something illegal >95% of the time.

You can't make it illegal or restricted to sell something purely because it is primarily used for illegal behavior. Or well, you can, but liberal societies generally don't.

Note that there are good reasons to restrict sales. Enabling dangerous behavior would be one, which is why we restrict or outright ban the sale of some guns, chemicals, cars, etc.

1 comments

Agreed; and if you're selling bongs as they normally are, you get a pass. Same with selling mod chips or modded consoles.

It's when the bong is pre-loaded with the goodshit and the console has 2 terabytes of pirated media that you've clearly crossed a line.

The gray area comes when you're doing the first, but "wink wink, nudge nudge" letting people know where to get the second.

Which I don't really think you can effectively stop, but you can at least not be blatant about it. See Dolphin compared to Yuzu - for me, at least, the line is somewhere in between.

Though - to be fair - I could also see a strong argument for full copyright abolition.

> It's when the bong is pre-loaded with the goodshit and the console has 2 terabytes of pirated media that you've clearly crossed a line.

Definitely. I am very libertarian in that I think bongs should be able to be sold with whatever goodshit, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion :+). Selling a console pre-loaded with pirated content is a no in my book too though.

> The gray area comes when you're doing the first, but "wink wink, nudge nudge" letting people know where to get the second.

AFAIK Yuzu never did this. But they provide a way to decrypt (read: circumvent) Switch software protections in a way that according to Nintendo requires some of their intellectual property. Although I personally suspect that Yuzu became too good too soon, where Nintendo is losing an appreciable amount of both Switch and Switch game sales to Steam Deck + emulators.

> Though - to be fair - I could also see a strong argument for full copyright abolition.

As far as art goes, I’m fine with copyright for.. say.. 25 years. Maybe the natural life of the artist? I feel that 25 years is good enough though. If you haven’t made significant money off of your property by then, its very likely you never will.

Software copyright is another beast entirely, with a lot of complex drawbacks.