It’s a nice sentiment but seriously - the whole “if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing” thing is both overused and has always annoyed me. How are the two related? You can still be stealing regardless of if you have an option to buy or not. You could still steal an item that isn’t for sale.
What we really should be focusing on is whether pirating in and of itself is stealing, and whether it should be a crime. This overused phrase is distracting from the issue at hand, imo.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
A user obtains the game through legitimate means by “buying” the game. However, they do not own the game, and are in fact, just renting something. This is despite decades and decades of game buying, especially pre-Internet, equating to owning the game and being able to play the game forever, even 100 years from now.
By pirating the game, a user has clawed back the implied social construct that existed for decades past: Acquiring a game through piracy means that you own the game. You have it in a static form that cannot be taken away from you. There’s still the case of server shutdowns, like this legal case is arguing. But, unlike the “buyer”, the game cannot suddenly disappear from a game’s store or be forcefully uninstalled from your PC. You own it. You have the files. They cannot take that away from you.
The phrase essentially means: You have removed my means of owning software, therefore piracy is the only choice I have to own this game. It’s not stealing because it’s the only way to hold on to it forever.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 2 days ago
I think Ubisoft is clearly in the wrong, but you’re not making a good case. You’re conflating very different meanings of the word “own”.
In terms of legal ownership, only the copyright holder owns the intellectual property, including the right to distribute and license it. When a consumer “buys” a piece of media, they’re really just buying a perpetual license for their personal use of it. With physical media, the license is typically tied to whatever physical object (disc, book, ROM, etc.) is used to deliver the content, and you can transfer your license by transferring the physical media, but the license is still the important part that separates legal use from piracy.
When you pirate something, you own the means to access it without the legal right to do so. So, in the case at hand, players still “own” the game in the same sense they would if they had pirated it. Ubisoft hasn’t revoked anyone’s physical access to the bits that comprise the game; what they’ve done is made that kind of access useless because the game relies on a service that Ubisoft used to operate.
The real issue here is that Ubisoft didn’t make it clear what they were selling, and they may even have deliberately misrepresented it. Consumers were either not aware that playing the game required Ubisoft to operate servers for it, or they were misled regarding how long Ubisoft would operate the servers.
Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty, i.e. a promise that what they buy will continue to work for some period of time after they’ve bought it, and an obligation from the manufacturer to provide whatever services are necessary to keep that promise. Game publishers generally don’t offer any kind of warranty, and consumers don’t demand warranties, but consumers also tend to expect punishers to act as if their products come with a warranty. Publishers, of course, don’t want to draw attention to their lack of warranty, and will sometimes actively exploit that false perception that their products come with a perpetual warranty.
I think what’s really needed is a very clear indication, at the point of purchase, of whether a game requires ongoing support from the publisher to be playable, along with a legally binding statement of how long they’ll provide support. And there should be a default warranty if none is clearly specified, like say 10 years from the point of purchase.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I’m not trying to frame this in the context of the lawsuit, even though that’s the point of the original article. The Crew’s nonfunctionality is just a consequence of our lack of ownership.
Perhaps this article would explain things better than I could.