LogFAQs > #954557507

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

That's not a requirement that adji put forth.

adjl posted...

If your livelihood depends on selling exact duplicates of your possessions? Yes.

I dunno about you, but I generally interpret "your possessions" as indicating ownership.

Zeus posted...

On general principle, whether or not something is lost doesn't entitle somebody to pirate and, more importantly, it doesn't entitle them to profit (either directly or indirectly) off piracy. Even if you could reasonably that they lost nothing (which is debatable), anything he earned should go to them and then damages on top of that.

It doesn't morally entitle it, but it does mean that claiming damages is a whole lot harder. That said, I agree that any profit a pirate earns from their piracy should be going to the content owner. There's an argument to be made in favour of allowing them to cover operating costs, but profit is never going to be okay.

Zeus posted...

And, honestly, most of the things being pirated are likely to be popular titles that have been re-released. Few people go for the really obscure s***. And in the case of something like SSBM, Nintendo is making a deliberate choice not to re-release to aid sales of the more recent titles.

In general, yes, most people downloading roms are looking for either current games or more popular games that are likely to be rereleased (although Nintendo really is not in a rush to release even more popular older stuff, given the agonizingly slow drip-feed of content into their current VC offering and the notable lack of many higher-profile titles). That's a more practical consideration if we're looking at the overall impact of piracy, such that treating "it's the only way to play old games!" as a broader defense of piracy doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Looking at the value of games as art, though, there are many games that simply would cease to exist if not for piracy, which is generally quite undesirable. Sometimes, that's because they're really not very good. Other times, it's because they've slipped through the cracks due to licensing issues (Scott Pilgrim and DuckTales Remastered, to give a couple examples) or other corporate shenanigans (Silent Hill PT). There are plenty of examples, however, of quality games that simply have not been rereleased, without a clear reason for that deficiency. Even the Wii's Virtual Console (by far the most robust effort Nintendo has made to distribute older content, though now completely shut down) had only 74 SNES games available, and you know there were far, far more than 74 worthwhile games on the SNES. A good chunk of that was due to third parties not providing their licenses, for whatever reason (sometimes their own rerelease plans), but whatever the reason, the fact remains that a ton of games simply aren't seeing the light of day outside of ROMs.

Personally, I think piracy laws should be amended to more explicitly define abandonware and require companies to make a definite decision one way or the other, releasing games to public domain if there are no concrete plans to do anything with them after a long enough period (probably somewhere in the range of 10-15 years). I would absolutely love to see official "streaming" services for retro games that did offer entire system libraries for a reasonable subscription fee (comparable to Netflix), which would prevent them from ever qualifying as abandonware, but if nothing like that (including individual rereleases) is ever going to happen, there's really no reason not to let people make and distribute copies of the abandoned games for the sake of ensuring they remain possible to play.

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