“If buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing” got to be the worst slogan ever because media piracy is never stealing

“If buying isn’t owning then the sky is blue”

like it implicitly accept the framing that “making a duplicate of something without disturbing the original” is the same as “physically depriving someone of something” which does imo also lead credence of the similar framing that “buying means buying an indeterminate length license” by the same ppl

(from my bsky because it was in response to a friend on there)

@charlotte if buying isn't owning then I've finally understood the basic concept of how buying a copy of a piece of media works

@ben we both know that IP ownership is not what anyone means here.

@charlotte what they usually mean is "I want to be allowed to make money selling the game that I'm not licensed to resell" but that isn't as catchy so they pretend it's about ownership

@ben reselling or lending out physical media is also something that digital storefronts tend to make impossible, which is also something you are just allowed to do with physical items

but imo the bigger issue is that those same storefronts can also just Take Away what you have bought for a ton of reasons including ones where the customer was absolutely not at fault at all

@ben the economic system of capitalism kind of breaks apart with infinite supply items like digital goods but the solution to that is to not restrict what consumers can do

@charlotte the problem is that game developers still need money to survive

so if they can't get it from making the games someone likes, they're probably going to stop making those

I wish it were possible for every game to be freely available and donation based, but as I've experienced myself, that's not a reasonable thing to expect to be sustainable even for a game that has been played by millions of people

stealing a mass produced product from a store and pirating a piece of media have basically the same effect even though they are different physical actions

@charlotte are there situations where it's okay to steal or pirate? definitely

is "situations exist where this is okay" a valid reason to do something? definitely not

@ben @charlotte they really do not (for more than one reason), and I feel like the continued existence and success of GOG by this point has long disproven the premise that "game developers getting paid" and "people having control over what they do with their games" oppose each other.

@joepie91 @charlotte GOG doesn't really give anyone any additional rights over what Steam does.

"No DRM" is basically just meaningless marketing language - they have DRM in games available from GOG, even in first party singleplayer titles.

GOG existing is certainly a testament to the effectiveness of marketing, but there's nothing you can do on GOG that you can't also do on Steam. If you want to copy a game's files to a CD-R and mail it to your friend, it's equally easy to do it on either store.

@ben @charlotte okay, so which titles are those? because just about every single title I've looked at in the past, their steam build doesn't launch unless you have steam running with the game in your account, whereas the GOG build ships with no such integration

@ben @charlotte (notably, some games will ship with both a steam and galaxy integration on both platforms; but then detect the platform based on some property of the installation, and load a *required* steam integration if it's from steam, but an *optional* galaxy integration if it's from gog. so merely an integration DLL/.so being present doesn't tell you much about how its actually integrated)

@joepie91 @charlotte in most cases, a "required" Steam integration just means Steam needs to be installed and the game needs to know what its appid is, either through an environment variable that the client sets automatically or through steam_appid.txt.

Steam generally does not need to be running.

Some games are even able to start up when the Steam client isn't installed at all.

For example, for Turok:

DRM-free when Steam is not installed or by creating a steam_appid.txt file in the game's installation directory containing its Steam App ID number 405820.

@ben @charlotte aside from this not matching my observations in my own testing, this sort of thing even being necessary is *already* very dubious from a "your games are yours to choose what you do with" perspective (ignoring the legal aspect because we both know there's a huge gap between legal definitions and reality there)

and in particular, it means that there is a very real difference between "games on steam" and "games on GOG" in terms of how easy it actually is to just... give someone a copy, which goes back to the original point: if there's anything ranging from indie to AAA games with a day-one release on GOG that are financially successful then I have great difficulty believing that DRM actually in any way is necessary to put food on the table

@ben @charlotte or to put it a bit more bluntly: there's a lot of (repeated and independent) evidence across industries that DRM is not necessary for healthy media industries. while the evidence that it *is* necessary is basically "well, publishers say so". I think I know which I'm believing.

@joepie91 @charlotte Steam is not innately a type of DRM beyond "you can't download a copy of the game without a license" which applies to every digital media store.

The biggest thing stopping people from pirating stuff is that they want to financially support the people who make the thing they like.

Any DRM is a lot like locking the front door of your house. It won't stop a determined attacker, but it is a good deterrent against casual break-ins from people with a conscience.

@joepie91 @ben > (ignoring the legal aspect because we both know there’s a huge gap between legal definitions and reality there)

german courts tend to take a broad approach with what counts as as a “technical security measure” yeah. there is also precedent that hard-coded credentials count as effective password controls

@ben I mean, that's really not how or why locks work (despite it being a popular myth), but also I have no idea why you are arguing "game developers still need money to survive" in response to @charlotte arguing against DRM when we seem in agreement that DRM isn't the thing stopping people from pirating stuff

@joepie91 @ben nvm that DRM is more like a landlord controlled lock which you have no control over minus maybe having some of the keys to it. with all of the downsides to that (if the lock gets changed out you can no longer enter) while mainly legally deterring folks who force entry anyways. very forced analogy anyhow

like i would say that DRM mainly punishes legal buyers for choosing the paid option since the pirated option has the drm removed or deactivated. it does slow down piracy perhaps but that is it

@joepie91 @ben another example

choosing to watch tv or paid streaming or purchased blurays legally requires an approved player chain from the receiver/disk reader all the way to the display. and what is considered approved here can be greatly limiting and extra expensive purchases to match.
meanwhile the pirated alternative can be done on anything that can receive, decode and display full hd video in real time.

my dad recently tried watching sportsball on his pc using a subscription he is legally paying for. but the video output was all black because his monitor isn’t approved to display the content (it doesn’t support HDCP)

my mom has CDs that you can’t listen to on specific CD drives due to copy protection on the disk. meaning that to listen to them you need to buy an approved player (most standalone cd players)

@ben @joepie91 and like ultimately this is friction you encounter only if you are trying to do the right thing

pirated blurays do not require an old intel pc with intel txt support. pirate streams can be watched on most things that have a web browser. and you can swap flacs of these cds on soulseek with no issues

@ben @joepie91 and this is also true with games although they have transitioned away from physical media for the most part

arguably worse with games because game DRM has a history in being literal malware, moreso than that one CD DRM malware stint that sony had

@ben @joepie91 it’s also friction you encounter when you try to archive it or try to publish a pirated version, but like. only a single group has to figure out how to break it before the floodgates are open.