Using “forced” in the passive voice is telling here. Wouldn’t it show more agency to say you chose to pirate them because your desire to play them outweighed your estimate of the moral / legal downsides?
Wouldn't it show more agency to acknowledge you chose to focus on the word 'forced' because your desire to make a rhetorical critique outweighed your interest in engaging with the substantive issue of abandoned software preservation?
Perhaps. I admit I find the phrase “I was forced to pirate this game” so jarring that it is really hard to process the text around it, so maybe I missed some substance.
People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
Like, they can write the best and most entertaining video game of all time, one that makes you pass out if not almost die from joy, and they have the right to sell only a single copy for $10 quadrillion and sue the shit out of anyone who plays it without their permission.
And there is no right, or need, to play a video game as far as I'm aware.
None of what you described is a moral downside. Yes, people already admit that it is illegal to engage in copyright infringement regarding stuff that it is impossible to buy in the first place.
That has little to do with the fact that it does not contain any moral downsides to doing that.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
IMO they shouldn't - not for intellectual property.
Look, IP laws like Copyright make a lot of sense when we're encouraging innovative and rewarding companies for putting something unique and desirable on the market.
But if it's not on the market, there's nothing to incentivize or protect. Then it just becomes hoarding, or, more often - using IP as leverage to artificially inflate the value of it. Basically, you can not sell things, thereby making the thing more scarce on purpose, so later on you can maybe scrape more cash.
This sucks. It's bad for consumers, it's bad for markets. So, maybe we should consider disincentivizing this.
Proposal: if you do not sell copyrighted material, you forfeit the copyright. You keep all the protections and incentives of copyright. But! You essentially legalize pirating old shit or you force companies to put their money where their mouth is and distribute said old shit.
If this old shit is truly a harm to someone's bottom line, then uh, you need to be selling it. Otherwise there's no bottom line to harm.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
textbook bs of putting other people action under microscope, no one is this precise in making decisions related to day to day stuff.