"Pirating" a game that was never released in your country/language

[CrystalShadow]

Snip

Thats a well thought out piece of reasoning, I congratulate you.

You are right I don't create anything of particular note, hence the reason I am not overly concerned with copyright laws, If I were ever to take my writing in a more serious direction, I would become more interested in the legalities.

Lets not get sidetracked by the economy issue, I only mentioned it as a minor benefit of used games industry, its not the meat of my argument that piracy is bad.

So can we agree that Piracy whilst being legally wrong is moraly wrong as it damages the industry that creates the pirated items?

-edit-

I didn't mean that first sentance to sound sarky, I genuinely thought it was a well thought out piece of reasoning, damn internet.

That's OK, it didn't come across that badly. Besides, I've learned not to jump to conclusions with anything that can seem sarcastic. You never really know.

You're right that the economics of it is a bit of a side issue.
Since it's clearly harmful to the industry, it's morally questionable to support piracy.

Of course, a lot of related issues are also morally questionable, regardless of if they have the support of the law or not.

But then we get back to technicalities of how copyright works, what it's being used for, and what it was actually intended for.

Certainly I cringe at the thought of letting companies withhold stuff for the sake of their own profit.
The long-term effects of this could easily have the effect of destroying much of this generation's cultural artifacts.

Many old books are only still with us because people copied them and passed them around.
Giving a single person or group absolute control over what can and cannot be copied also means there is a single point of failure.
If whoever has that control is lost somehow, there is a large risk the work itself will be gone for good along with it.