JasonKaotic said:
Do ROMs actually count as piracy? I mean, it's not like you can buy it new. Squeenix won't get money for it either way.
I guess that is the case for abandonware (software that the companies no longer provide), but that is not the situation for many of the most popular ROMs (and particularly the ones that they are advertising). Nintendo's online store still sells many of the popular NES,SNES,N64 games and Square recently started selling their FFVII PC port through their online store (and it was already on PSN). While their are plenty of retro games where the companies wouldn't get the money anyway, that isn't always the case.
Acrisius said:
Geez, you really have nothing better to do than play white knight and "contact Nintendo and Facebook" while also "trying" to contact Square..? How much are these companies paying you to sit on that high horse and police the interwebz? Because if it's anything near the amount of ZERO, I really don't understand why the hell you bother...and why you're more concerned about those multi-billion dollar international corporations than you are concerned about the gullible poor facebook user who is likely to fall for a scam? I find it hard to sympathize with you or your opinion, it just comes off as the usual bullshitty "anti-piracy, corporate fanboy" who likes to wave a flag that says "Moral high ground" at people who think or do things differently.
While I respect your right to disagree, this seems like more of a personal attack against me rather than something that contributes to the nature of the thread. Anyway, I wouldn't consider myself to be a "corporate fanboy", quite the opposite in fact! (though you do have me on being anti-piracy) I hate when gaming companies do disc-locked DLC, delay regional releases or other anti-customer activities, but I also hate it when any other type of company puts making a profit above treating their customers right.
In this case, we have Facebook deciding that it would be more profitable to not monitor what type of content they promote. While I don't believe that they could be expected to monitor all of the content on their website (much like it would be impractical for google to monitor all youtube activity), I question whether we should hold those same standards when they are accepting money from a very finite number of people. As you said, these are multi-billion dollar companies, so why can't facebook afford to pay people to check who they are entering business deals with to promote their products apart from the fact that it might cost them a little bit of cash. They value this bit of extra cash above their users.
Imagine if a user sees this ad and doesn't know think that their could be anything illegal about it as it is promoted on a legitimate website, go to the site and download a game. They have now committed copyright infringement and (as unlikely as it may be) they could potentially get in trouble for it. While you could argue the same could happen by a google search, I believe (though others may not) that by accepting money to promote it, Facebook is partially responsible. To me at least, that seems like a topic worthy of discussion and debate as to the validity of that viewpoint.
Once again, I respect your opinion and your right to disagree, but I don't believe that I am a corporate fanboy, I just don't want to see ANY company acting poorly by conducting itself without respecting the rights of others.
