What exactly is the moral difference between pirating a game and borrowing one if you...

[Old Father Eternity]

The whole piracy thing and the 'lost sales' that stems from it is petty squabbling at best.
There are those, who would not have bought the product anyway, no loss there and those who after trying the pirated version of the product out (be it because they initially lacked the funds or it simply was not available for purchase where they were), acquire it legally the first chance they get, meaning a sale is gained.

 

[Entitled]

Let's follow your logic along, and come up with some less cherry-picked examples:
Assuming in each case, no other patrons miss out (in the short-term) due to your actions...
Would you ride a train without a ticket?
Would you sneak into a concert without paying?
Would you sneak into a museum without paying the admission cost?
Would you attend a lecture series without paying the lecturer?
Would you sleep in a hotel room without renting it?
Would you attend a convention without paying admission?

By your logic, you should also be entitled to do all of the above.

I'm in a fundamentally easier position than you in this case, because my logic only states that positive externalities can be considered a morally accepted net benefit, not that they always are, and therefore that "benefiting from someone else's work" in itself is not the source of having to pay for things.

For example, here is another negative example: If a critical amount of people in an area pay for private fire protection, or for a vaccine, they might end up putting an end to large scale outbreaks of fire or disease, thus giving a benefit to the few freeloaders who didn't pay. However, in most of those situations, the government usually decides that this imbalance unacceptable, and to avert the tragedy of the commons, reaches down and provides universal protection from taxpayer money, thus universally balancing out the benefits and obligations.

So apparently life-threatening necessity can be one of the reasons that justifies that everyone must equally pay even though individually they would get benefits from a positive externality.

In your own examples, the common ground seems to be the access to land property. You made a good point, that trespassing can also be a problem that morally overrides the benefits of a positive externality.

But why do you think that your example is more similar to piracy? When comparing picking up a used newspaper, to sneaking into a concert, the latter has it's special circumstances that make it worse, but you are not really invalidating the first example, or proving that you always DO have to pay for benefits after all, just thinking up extra-elaborate examples where there are further special circumstances present beyond just "benefiting from a work".

If you're a tax-paying citizen, public areas are built and maintained on your dime. That's where your sense of entitlement comes from: you have already paid for it, by paying your taxes.

I disagree with that, public land existed long before government-built infrastracture did, and even currently, beyond the maintained roads, there are also plenty of public areas. My entitlement to walk around originates from the fact that "I'm a human being god damn it", and letting all the areas around me be owned by private interests would be seriously harming the basic dignity of me walking around freely.

The Internet is not a "public place." It actually exists entirely on a series of boxes and cables which sit in people's homes and businesses

Just as a game is not the DVD that it's stored on, but the very information, the knowledge that it contains, likewise the Internet is not just "a series of boxes and cables", but the very act of people commnicating through it.

Just as copyright arguments are separate from the argument of who owns the discs, my analogy where the internet is compared to a "public place" isn't describing the physical internet as public property, but the acts of communication that are passing through it.

Copyright limits the freedom of that communication.

Maybe some aspects of such a limitation are necessary, but the desire for greater emphasis on individual freedoms is also justifiable.

I question whether censorship of the Internet and persecution of file-sharing is necessary for sustaining a large culture and entertainment industry.

Rights can be limited only by equally important rights of others. If all production of culture would collapse by allowing free acces to information on the Internet, then that access needs to be limited.

But if publishers simply don't feel like moving on with the times, and they are lazily insistent on profiting from that particular business model of charging everyone for every digital access, which they can't enforce, then they have a very week reason to continue limiting free culture for that alone.

 

[Amir Kondori]

This sounds like a lot of mental gymnastics to justify pirating to me.

The first post really sums it up best, your friends are only going to have a limited selection of games and talk about "deleting it when done" which makes me assume you are talking about PC. Most PC games today can't be lent out in that way, if they activate on Steam or similar services that key gets tied to the account.

Basically your friend had to buy his copy for lending to work and you can't get the game anytime you want, he has to let you borrow it, etc. There are a lot of big differences between lending and pirating.

I don't think there is a legal justification for piracy but if someone couldn't afford a game anyway, like a student, would I judge that person for pirating? Nope, not at all. I think most of us have been in that position at some point. Now if someone works and has a disposable income and still pirates, then I would personally judge that person to be less moral.

Morality is one of those things that people like to pretend is universal but is actually anything but. Even the things that people think are universal taboos, like pedophilia, have been adopted as a normal part of the culture in at least one society. So since humans already do this anyway, do what you feel good about without breaking the law.

 

[TomWiley]

Yeah, I really think gamers would love such a system. After all, people seem more than happy with Steam which doesn't allow the user ANY of these rights mentioned.

People are happy with Steam because it co-exists with piracy. All steam games can be infinitely shared, in case your Steam account gets lost, or steam goes bankrupt, and you could just crack the games you own, or redownload them from "other sites". It's just not... legal, but it's there, and it's a large part of how Steam is used.

For example, those ridiculous sales wouldn't need to happen if Steam would only be compeing with other stores, as opposed to begging for you to choose the official option.

I know that, I freaking love Steam. But that wasn't my point. I was trying to be satirical about this whole game sharing Xbox One controversy.I guess describing the exact policies that console used as something positive was too subtle...

 

[K12]

1) One is illegal and the other isn't. I know you said moral reasons but I consider breaking the laws created by a democratically government to be a relevant moral negative.

2) Rights. At some point every game disc has been purchased by someone. If I buy a game I have the right to play it 24/7 if I want to. When lending I am temporarily offering some of that time to someone else, only one person can play it at a time, so I can only lend to one person and I can't replay it when it's lent out.

3) Scale. If a game takes a week to beat then I could potentially 52 people could play through a single purchased game in a year, and there would have to be considerable effort involved and everyone could only play it once. With piracy the same 52 people could play it in a week, plus 52 more and 52 more etc. Plus there's a realistic limit of distance involved to, I'm not going to loan my game to friends 100 miles away, but you can pirate a game from anywhere with an internet connection.

4) Money to the developers. With borrowing the developer has still been payed for every copy in circulation even if they don't get money from every person who played it. With piracy every player has their own copy and the developers get no money for those copies.


The main moral difference is that in one case you are being given permission to use something from the owner (borrowing a disc) and the other case you are doing something without being given permission by the owner (copying intellectual property)

 

[Blaze the Dragon]

The only legit arguments I can think of for piracy is the whole 'make your own demo' idea, that you pirate a game to try it out and if you like it, you buy it, and if you don't like it (without finishing the game!) then you delete it; and acquiring games that you cannot acquire any other way, like if you want to play a game for the NES that isn't on the Virtual Console. The problem is that many people say that they at least only do the first one, but then they stretch it more and more over time to, "If I feel like the game was worth it, I'll pay for it" and still just play the game as normal and not pay for it because it wasn't bioshock infinite or something of high caliber

Other than that, everything is just justification for trying to get free stuff without giving money to the devs. At least when borrowing a game, there's only 1 copy floating around, and as many have mentioned, only one person can play at a time. It would be comparable to how multiple people might split the payment for a game, both can then enjoy it as long as they take turns. If you want to remove your ability to play the game in order to let someone else play the game, that's your choice and is fine.

When it comes to piracy, one argument I absolutely hate when people make it is, "If I couldn't afford to pay for it, then I might as well have pirated it, as they wouldn't have gotten my money anyways." How does that make any sort of sense at all! What you're saying is that if you can't buy the stuff you want, you should be given it for free. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. "Oh hey bob, thanks for working those 2 extra hours today, but um, I can't actually afford to pay you for it, so thanks for working for free!". Just because something is infinitely replicate-able, doesn't mean that the cost to make it is 0. Hell, even the cost to copy it isn't 0 if you think about it. It costs money to get the electricity to spin up a hard drive, and maintain servers, and everything. On top of that there's obviously the money that went into paying the developers for making the game and the hours they put in to actually do the work. I liked the one guy's analogy of sneaking into a movie theater that isn't full. Even if you take a seat, nobody was going to sit there anyways, but the point is that in order to acquire things, you have to pay for it one way or another, even if you're not necessarily paying for it with money. The only exception is if someone chooses to give it to you. I'm pretty sure that if you went into court over that and told the judge that "Oh, well I only had 5 bucks on me and the tickets were 11, so I just figured that since they weren't gonna get my money anyways, I might as well watch it for free." He would face-palm in response. The exact same argument can be simply abused from personal preference. If you simply don't feel like you want to pay $50 for that game, then you wouldn't have bought it, and therefore you justify pirating it for yourself. And because piracy is so easy, then that 'feeling' might crop up a few more times than average.

Now then, properly comparing it to lending. As many have already mentioned, it's both a matter of scale, and the fact that there is only one copy laying around. You could argue that you're robbing them of a potential sale, but there's no difference between letting a friend borrow it, and the game being played through twice, whereas with piracy, the 2 play-throughs of the game could happen at the same time. That's an odd way to phrase the argument, but basically what that means is that in the first case the game is simply continuing to be played, whereas the second case would require that there be 2 copies be in existence.

I'll admit that it might get fuzzy to some people if you're letting ALL your friends borrow it in turn, but the main difference still holds up. That one copy is getting played a lot in turn and can be done with one copy, whereas if he let all his friends pirate it from him, that would require there to be several copies.

 

[somonels]

I don't know what went on in your youth but I - we - frequently exchanged and copied disks both magnetic and optical. That's how we had a community and could keep up with each other as we didn't have the proficiency nor opportunity to have lan parties.

There isn't a huge difference apart from market control. A torrent will very quickly flood a very significant portion of the potential market with copies which won't bring a dime to neither publisher nor developer. Physical copy sharing is still very much the same thing, but still somewhat limits the availability to the ranges and speed to individuals. Meaning SOME of them might cave in and buy the game.

In the end there is no significant difference but I still miss the days when I was a relatively computer-savy hoodlum, exchanging some floppies, and arguing how the hell we were supposed to beat the Ur-Quan Masters. I haven't formed social connections like that since then and I feel a lot poorer - accidental pun - without them.

 

[JimB]

Aren't these two statements inconsistent?

Not at all. The producers have still been paid for the movie you recorded off of TV: They've been paid by the TV studio airing it, who, when they bought the rights to air it, also bought the rights to make nearly infinite copies of it, which is functionally what they do by broadcasting it, since the only limit to the number of viewings is how many televisions exist within range of the broadcast and how many of those televisions are turned to the broadcast. Likewise, the TV stations have been paid for your viewing by the advertisements they include, so your copy is paid for by the advertisers. Everyone involved has been paid; the only crime, legal or moral, occurs when you try to sell your copy and profit from something that isn't yours to copy.

Just to make this clear: if I tape a movie off the TV and watch it multiple times, there is no intrinsic difference from my torrenting the same movie.

I don't know what torrenting is, so I can't say except to speak in hypotheticals and say the difference that I assume exists is the person making the torrent has no right to make infinite copies of the movie you just downloaded.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

From a moral standpoint, piracy and lending are defined by your individual values. The difference is how badly piracy has been demonized by Publishers and Developers scrambling for something to blame instead of their own inadequacy to provide the consumer with a worthwhile product. The people who don't want to pay for things will always find a way of not paying, it's that simple.

That argument only holds up if, after pirating something, you always make some sort of donation to the developers who made it. If you get any kind of enjoyment from it, you owe them something.

I believe someone else quoted you with a response, but morality of ownership is not based on enjoyment but legality, and we're not talking about the legality of the situation. But let's say you are right, this seems to imply that whether you're playing a pirated copy or a friends copy, you still owe the developers/publishers something for your enjoyment.
But from a moral standpoint, people can justify their piracy by saying they wouldn't have bought it anyway. I might be coming off pro-piracy, which is the exact opposite. I don't condone piracy, I think it devalues digital content which already suffers from rapid value deterioration thanks to market saturation.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Piracy is considered to be theft while borrowing something isn't.

Nope. Piracy can be criminal but it never falls under the category of theft. Think about it - if someone 'steals' $5 from your wallet, and you look in there and there is still the same $5, is it theft? Something needs to be missing in order to have been stolen.

 

[Flatfrog]

Just to make this clear: if I tape a movie off the TV and watch it multiple times, there is no intrinsic difference from my torrenting the same movie.

I don't know what torrenting is, so I can't say except to speak in hypotheticals and say the difference that I assume exists is the person making the torrent has no right to make infinite copies of the movie you just downloaded.

But once the movie has been broadcast on TV, what difference does it make to the original producer whether I watched it on that channel or on the TV? They earn the same either way.

I know the answer, of course, but it's pretty convoluted. The process of torrenting (or otherwise pirating) devalues the broadcast rights by decreasing the viewing figures, which makes the advertising revenue lower. So in the long run this lowers the money that TV stations can afford to pay for the right to show movies.

By which logic, in the long run the only solution to piracy is product placement. It's the only form of advertising which isn't dependent on the distribution channel.

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

I'm in a fundamentally easier position than you in this case, because my logic only states that positive externalities can be considered a morally accepted net benefit, not that they always are, and therefore that "benefiting from someone else's work" in itself is not the source of having to pay for things.

We're talking about the moral imperative to pay for things that you partake in, on an individual level. You can't use cultural deconstruction to absolve people of their personal responsibilities. I mean, there is no "formally enforced reward system", as you put it, for being a good parent; that doesn't make being a good parent optional (in a moral context, anyway).

Like they say, "there is no such thing as a free lunch": everything that benefits you, is something you owe, whether the benefit is incidental or not. People may let small things slide, but I can't see how someone can feel entitled to a free lunch, so to speak. Even if the chance of anyone being affected by your choice, or even noticing, is 0%, you are still gaining something for nothing. Isn't that wrong on a philosophically fundamental level? You talk about the open exchange of ideas, but all I'm seeing is leeching.

But why do you think that your example is more similar to piracy? When comparing picking up a used newspaper, to sneaking into a concert, the latter has it's special circumstances that make it worse, but you are not really invalidating the first example, or proving that you always DO have to pay for benefits after all, just thinking up extra-elaborate examples where there are further special circumstances present beyond just "benefiting from a work".

I disagree with that, public land existed long before government-built infrastracture did, and even currently, beyond the maintained roads, there are also plenty of public areas. My entitlement to walk around originates from the fact that "I'm a human being god damn it", and letting all the areas around me be owned by private interests would be seriously harming the basic dignity of me walking around freely.

You keep mentioning these "special circumstances" involved that make sneaking into a show wrong. What exactly are these circumstances? The prerequisite to each example is that nobody notices or cares, so the reason you view them as inherently "worse" has to come from a sense of disentitlement. So, we're getting somewhere!

I think, essentially, this comes down to an argument of public sphere versus private sphere. Riding on a train without a ticket feels like you've invaded a private space where you don't belong (because you have); whereas downloading a game from the comfort of your own home doesn't carry the same weight. However, what exactly is the difference? Extending the metaphor, the game developers have built and maintained the train and the railroad, whilst you take a free ride on their private service (it is their personal code running on your machine, even if you aren't making use of their online services). Unless they have actually released their code for free to the public domain, it exists within a private sphere. The fact that you're accessing it from your own home is superficial, in this day and age (the same world where you can steal another person's life savings from the comfort of your own home, too).

The validity of copyright as a concept is a separate argument, one which I think we've had before. I don't think we need to go into that, as it's more of a legal issue than a moral one. We're talking about what a person personally owes the developers of a game they've pirated, not how the publishing model damages the industry.

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

From a moral standpoint, piracy and lending are defined by your individual values. The difference is how badly piracy has been demonized by Publishers and Developers scrambling for something to blame instead of their own inadequacy to provide the consumer with a worthwhile product. The people who don't want to pay for things will always find a way of not paying, it's that simple.

That argument only holds up if, after pirating something, you always make some sort of donation to the developers who made it. If you get any kind of enjoyment from it, you owe them something.

I believe someone else quoted you with a response, but morality of ownership is not based on enjoyment but legality, and we're not talking about the legality of the situation. But let's say you are right, this seems to imply that whether you're playing a pirated copy or a friends copy, you still owe the developers/publishers something for your enjoyment.

I think so, yes. Why wouldn't you owe the developers for creating a game which you play and enjoy?
Again, this is from a moral standpoint. It's not about what you have to pay, but what you ought to.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

I think so, yes. Why wouldn't you owe the developers for creating a game which you play and enjoy?
Again, this is from a moral standpoint. It's not about what you have to pay, but what you ought to.

No, because our morals (pertaining to mine and yours) might be different to what the pirate deems morally acceptable. From our moral standpoint, yes a donation or even purchase of the title is the moral thing to do. But seeing as the pirate doesn't have our morals, then no. As far as they're concerned they've acquired something that they might not have bought anyway and aren't depriving the publisher or developer of anything.

Yes it can be argue that they should simply go without if they don't want to pay for it (which is my view). Video Games are a luxury and there's no way to explain away your own entitlement to a luxury item. When it comes to taking something without paying for it, all roads eventually lead to ethics, which in itself is a tangled mess of a subject.

 

[veloper]

What amuses me in threads like these, is that even when an OP clearly specifies moral (or sometimes ethical even), but NOT legal, most of the answers still focus on the legality of the issue.
That's prolly because legality is the dull and easy approach.

Only when you view a purchase as financial support for the art or for the dev, may you briefly touch upon the moral or ethical side of things.
Else all you got is this invisible and victimless event, where it isn't even interesting whether it truly happened or not. Only supporters/customers make a difference.

 

[Entitled]

Like they say, "there is no such thing as a free lunch": everything that benefits you, is something you owe, whether the benefit is incidental or not. People may let small things slide, but I can't see how someone can feel entitled to a free lunch, so to speak. Even if the chance of anyone being affected by your choice, or even noticing, is 0%, you are still gaining something for nothing.

Well, that's where you are just wrong. There is no such thing as a free lunch, because the lunch has to come somewhere. But me-playing-a-game as opposed to not playing it, doesn't have to be taken away from anyone else.

There is a legal maxim, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." If you want other people to stop doing certain things, your right to do so depends on whether otherwise they would harm you.

You would extend the definition of "harm" ridiculously far, so that "people enjoying something that I didn't allow them to enjoy" counts as you being punched in the nose.

When you pick up a used newspaper in a café, or you record a TV show on DVD thanks to Fair Use, or you read a 100 year old Public Domain novel for free, or you publish a critical parody of another story, using their coprighted characters, you are not just acting under the sufferance of the "real owners" who could forbid it if they want to, you are actually using your rights, and if anyone wants to stop you from doing so, they are in the wrong, both legally, and morally. Writers are not just kidly allowing you to quote a paragraph from their work "for nothing" because they are so generous, but because they have to, because beyond a point, the needs of public culture override their control rights.

Isn't that wrong on a philosophically fundamental level? You talk about the open exchange of ideas, but all I'm seeing is leeching.

Under your own provided example of "even if the chance of anyone being affected by your choice, or even noticing, is 0%", what exactly is getting leeched away from others?

You keep mentioning these "special circumstances" involved that make sneaking into a show wrong. What exactly are these circumstances? The prerequisite to each example is that nobody notices or cares, so the reason you view them as inherently "worse" has to come from a sense of disentitlement. So, we're getting somewhere!

I think, essentially, this comes down to an argument of public sphere versus private sphere. Riding on a train without a ticket feels like you've invaded a private space where you don't belong (because you have); whereas downloading a game from the comfort of your own home doesn't carry the same weight. However, what exactly is the difference?

Oh, that's simple. The difference here is the difference between a negative right and a positive right, between a property being violated, and a monopolistic regulation being violated.

A train (or concert, or museum, or hotel), is an actual place that is someone's property. Being there uses up space from them, even if they are not using it at the moment, it's in their possession, and being there limits their property.

Trespassing in leeching. And unlike in my above question, I can actually ansswer what is being leeched away: Space, land, usage options for your property.

The same is not true for copyright infringements. If I download a novel, what is being taken away? Your right to stop me from downloading that novel?

The fact that you're accessing it from your own home is superficial, in this day and age (the same world where you can steal another person's life savings from the comfort of your own home, too).

Another person's life savings are property, even if nowadays counted in an electronic format, it refers to money with an objectively existant backing behind it (even if that backing is no longer gold, but the GDP of a country that produces it).

At the same time, even though IP has been traditionally connected to physical property like books, discs, the information itself didn't ever function in a similar way to the object itself, and digitalizing the "product" just revealed this difference.

The validity of copyright as a concept is a separate argument, one which I think we've had before. I don't think we need to go into that, as it's more of a legal issue than a moral one. We're talking about what a person personally owes the developers of a game they've pirated, not how the publishing model damages the industry.

The problem is, that copyright influences the definition of what is and isn't piracy in the first place.

Just look at my above examples of Fair Use recordings, Fair Use copying of franchises, or time passage into Public Domain. People are defending these as their rights, even if they still mean benefiting from someone's work for free, while at the same time, they decry file-sharing as "piracy", even though the only categorical difference between these is whether copyright law allows them.

 

[senordesol]

It's counterfeiting (essentially). When more money gets printed than is supposed to be in circulation; it devalues the currency. A sale of a game is a sale of ONE game. That game is to be enjoyed by a single entity, but can also be enjoyed forever (ostensibly). The hang-up here is the 'single' entity definition. Some might argue (and, indeed, in many cases they are) that the single entity should be the initial purchaser; but it can also be argued that so long as it is one, and ONLY one, single entity enjoying each discrete experience (meaning only one person has one copy at a time) that this does not devalue the sale as its purpose has been fulfilled: a single entity enjoying the experience forever.

The latter is generally accepted as the most equitable as it always remains that only one copy is being enjoyed by one person, while still affording rights to the purchaser to sell or lend his property at will. In such a case the $44.99 the creator has been compensated is the same $44.99 he has asked.

But when a single copy is sold and 10,000 copies are enjoyed simultaneously, this devalues the initial purchase. For where the creator has asked for $44.99 per experience, he is only being compensated an average of $0.004 per experience. (This is where terminology like 'theft' and 'loss of sales' appear, even though they're not technically correct). The market here is enjoying a $449,900 value for just $44.99.

This is why the 'I wouldn't have paid for it anyway' argument is absurd circular logic. Yes, the creator is not technically losing any sales, but his content is still being devalued. As the creator, he has a right to ask for due compensation for his labor and by refusing to pay for the experience he created; you are denying him his just compensation and devaluing his work. Injury is occurring here.

 

[veloper]

It's counterfeiting (essentially). When more money gets printed than is supposed to be in circulation; it devalues the currency.

That analogy doesn't hold up, because you cannot buy any things with that data you downloaded. The data simply has no percieved value, unlike fiat money.

Only when you make a copy of the box and the manual and the dics and sell it for the real thing, you can speak of counterfeiting. That thing does happen around the world, but it's not the kind of piracy we are talking about here.

 

[Ishigami]

Piracy is considered to be theft

No it isn't. It is copyright infringement. Don't be a tool.

From a user?s point of view there is no difference other than the pirate does not know from whom he downloaded the game/crack.
However there is a legal difference for the publisher. He usually can?t do shit about you borrowing a game/movie/book (or whatever) from your friend since transferring a license is legal in most nations but he can sue the living crap out of you for infringing their copyright because that is illegal in most if not all nations.

That is a cool business: In Germany cease-and-desist orders by lawyers who specialize in copyright infringements make roughly 400 million Euro a year and only 1 ? 3% of the cases ever reach a court room.
Wrap your head around that for moment.

Don't break the law!
Change it.

 

[senordesol]

It's counterfeiting (essentially). When more money gets printed than is supposed to be in circulation; it devalues the currency.

That analogy doesn't hold up, because you cannot buy any things with that data you downloaded. The data simply has no percieved value, unlike fiat money.

Only when you make a copy of the box and the manual and the dics and sell it for the real thing, you can speak of counterfeiting. That thing does happen around the world, but it's not the kind of piracy we are talking about here.

It's not a 1:1 analogy, but it stands that the product itself is still being devalued as copies exist that the creator has not been duly compensated for.

It may not have 'perceived' value, but it does have negotiated value.