Poll: Would You Pirate Media You Already Own

[Trivun]

Just after Christmas, my house at university was broken into. I was at home in another city at the time. THings taken were my Xbox 360, half my games, all my CDs, all my DVDs that I hadn't brought home with me, and a digital camera.

The DVDs and games I can replace cheaply at CEX, but the CDs are harder to track down cheap copies of. So I plan to download them soon. I paid for them out of my own money, and it's not my fault they were stolen, so I feel morally in the right by downloading free copies of those songs that were stolen. Is that really so bad? If I paid for them anyway, why shouldn't I be able to download the music?

 

[ethaninja]

Everything comes to a factor with this argument. Such as price, how badly I want it, whether or not I can still get it. But usually, yehem.

 

[ethaninja]

I hate pirates and all that they do, but if i payed for it (Like the laser burnt copy of COD 4 i had) then ill copy a working copy onto my harddrive or somthing.

Hehe you upstanding citizen you =D

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I can't see any good reason not to. My Wii's disc drive is dying on me. It's out of warranty, and there's no way I'm buying a new one for $200 for the relatively small amount of use I get out of it compared to my PC. It's really, really easy to mod the thing to play games off an external drive of some sort, but it's a pain to rip them because almost no non-Wii drives can do it (and if the drive in the Wii dies, I can't at all) and faster in a lot of cases to just download images other people have made, which also would save me from having to strip out the junk data they pad the discs with to make them all appear to be the same size.

I just want to be able to play the games I have legitimate retail copies of already sitting on my shelf and don't even care that I could also play stuff I haven't paid for (because I have a squidload of stuff I do own already and need to finish and get my money's worth out of). If I can download stuff I already own, I will keep using my Wii and possibly buy other games for it, as long as nothing else is broken but the disc drive. If I can't, I won't and won't bother replacing it, either. That's what it comes down to for me, in this case.

 

[Brad Shepard]

I hate pirates and all that they do, but if i payed for it (Like the laser burnt copy of COD 4 i had) then ill copy a working copy onto my harddrive or somthing.

Hehe you upstanding citizen you =D

Eh, i just hate the fact that people put there hearts and souls into a game and then people do that crap (Dimigod anyone?)... on that note i did kill COD 4 off of my harddrive after a week of that and bought another copy i havent touched for some reason...

 

[AtticusSP]

I own Morrowind and I pirated it anyway because I couldn't find Tribunal, and my dog ruined my Bloodmoon disc.

 

[RagingPhonetic]

Paid £40 for Oblivion on PS3. Paid £15 again for the GOTY. Then I decided I wanted it for PC. Lets just say that copy was a gift from some joint friends I met on the coast, the bay if you will. Good friends.

(Exactly the same story with Fallout 3)

Arrgh, I know what ye mean.

The reason that record companies are against piracy is because they make their money through the digital and physical CD sales. If you really want to support your fave band, see them live.

 

[Gwarr]

I hate Ubisoft at the moment . I bought Settlers 7 and cannot play it for 7 days now and their support is always offline . If I had the power and the computer knowledge I'll be damned if I wouldn't pirate it just to teach them a lesson.

Did I mention you cannot get your refund at your store and the support from ubisoft doesn't answer? There also has been 0 official posts about the issue....Never buying a Ubisoft game again.

 

[reg42]

I would, yeah. If say, I lost my CD to something, then I would.

 

[DazZ.]

I've been thinking about it for a game I've lost, still got the CD key and you don't need the disk to play the game, so if I didn't uninstall I'd still have it.

Don't see why Quake Wars isn't on Steam though, if it would let me put my CD key into there to add it to my games list I'd be a very happy bugger.

 

[luas_dublin]

BAck in the early 00's I had my collection of PS1 games stolen.Just the discs (some scumbag took the cd wallet with them when we were having a house party), so I still had boxes etc.
I bought back one or two second hand , for the rest I got the ps1 chipped , and rented what I could from a video store and burnt them to cd, and printed repro labels.I managed to get one or two of the rarer ones in iso form on DC+ (remember this was 2001) and created a disk of that.
Was what I was doing ethical? yep I think so .Was it legal , nope.Technically I was supposed to be a good little peon and buy new copies of everything (not second hand though as the publisher doesnt make any money from that.)

 

[LogieBear]

Old playstation game Tomba 2, have the disc but pretty messed up.
But the beauty of the internet allowed me to play once again =D

 

[Earthmonger]

No.

Why would I want an illegal copy of something I already own.

Time and convenience.

Example: I own Neverwinter Nights. I tried to install it last year and found disk three was scratched. CREanim.xxx would not read from the disk. What am I gonna do? Send it via international post back to Bioware for replacement? Buy a second copy (if I can even find this 2002 title)? Hell no, I just downloaded disk 3 and the install went fine.

 

[LooK iTz Jinjo]

As for movies, people have been doing illegal things with them for years. Have you ever seen a movie at a friend's place? Criminal. Ever taped a movie off TV? Very VERY illegal. DVD copying was just as convenient.

Yet we have things like Foxtel IQ and Tivo as well as actual DVD recorders - sold quite legally, which allow - infact recording is encouraged and is the actual SELLING point of Tivo and Foxtel IQ, of course a given with a DVD recorder.

And yes, I would pirate something I already own, whether it be as a back-up or something I lost. In reverse I also buy some things I pirate. I live in Australia and such many of our TV shows lag behind the American showing dates, I often download a TV show in order to keep up with American audiences (also I don't like waiting) but then once the DVD is released in Australia I go out and buy it anyway, just for the sake of owning an actual copy on DVD.

 

[Auric]

Yes.

Definately if DRM locked me out, i mean wtf. "You can only install this twice by the way, after that you may as well use the CD as a coaster because your not going to be able to do anything else with it"

Pisses me off in so many ways.

Also, what the guy above me said, Aus TV is often weeks, if not months behind the american version, i wanna keep up to date!

 

[Daedalus1942]

Yeah, yeah, another piracy thread. But the issue came up in this Lifehacker post [http://lifehacker.com/5510752/do-you-pirate-media-you-already-own] and in the New York Times recently. An illegal download is still illegal, but would it be unethical if you already own a copy?

I sure would. EA can whinge all they want, but I paid $100 for Dead Space on PC when it first came out and as soon as I've used up all my copies, they're not getting my money a second time.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

but would it be unethical if you already own a copy?

That depends on a person's own ethics.

Considering that a lot of previously open concepts such as Fair Use have been severely undermined by subsequent laws, I personally have no problems with obtaining 'illegal' copies of material I already own.



Also, I get a laugh out of those "You wouldn't steal a car..." ads. Growing up where I did in the 80s more kids stole cars than copied movies, music and games.

 

[Seydaman]

I own Oblivion on the Xbox 360
I wanted it on the pc, so I "acquired" it.
I see no fault here.

 

[fix-the-spade]

No.

Why would I want an illegal copy of something I already own.

Clearly you have never fallen foul of EA's faulty disc policy before.

PS, this is exactly what I did with Battlefield 2142, for the reason above. Strangely, the pirated version works online, maybe it's using the account key off the one I paid for.

 

[Yossarian1507]

Yeah, either because of DRM or if the game I bought doesn't have an option to set the language back to English, and Polish dubbing is so crappy, I cannot listen to it. The latter option happens only, if I cannot find solution to the problem in the game files