- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- polygon
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- polygon
Ubisoft responded to California gamers’ The Crew shutdown lawsuit in late February, filing to dismiss the case. The company’s lawyers argued in that filing, reviewed by Polygon, that there was no reason for players to believe they were purchasing “unfettered ownership rights in the game.” Ubisoft has made it clear, lawyers claimed, that when you buy a copy of The Crew, you’re merely buying a limited access license.
“Frustrated with Ubisoft’s recent decision to retire the game following a notice period delineated on the product’s packaging, Plaintiffs apply a kitchen sink approach on behalf of a putative class of nationwide customers, alleging eight causes of action including violations of California’s False Advertising Law, Unfair Competition Law, and Consumer Legal Remedies Act, as well as common law fraud and breach of warranty claims,” Ubisoft’s lawyers wrote.
Oh cool then piracy isn’t theft.
It never was.
I agree with the sentiment, but what exactly is the explanation for this? If you’re allowed to lease or rent or purchase a license, isn’t stealing that thing for free still theft?
Chill with the downvotes - I’m not disagreeing. I’m just trying to understand where the line is.
I couldn’t possibly care less about what a megacorp tries telling me what I may or may not do with information that can be copied perfectly and infinitely at 0 cost.
I 100% agree. However, this statement is a very large blanket statement. I see it repeated all over the place. It’s great to pirate from greedy megacorps. I do it. It’s great. But it’s not a great statement to repeat ad nauseam because it doesn’t apply to
The people who argue against piracy of megacorporations’ content will bring up these points every time because this phrase makes no sense from their perspective. It prevents actual discussion from taking place. It’s not productive to our cause to use something so ambiguous and inflammatory as a catch phrase.
Grant me the serenity to pirate the things from big corpos that need pirating, the courage to pay for indie work, and the wisdom to know the difference.
You can not steal something that it is impossible to own. It is possible to purchase and own a house or a car, someone choosing to lease or rent instead does not change that. It is impossible to purchase or own a copy of The Crew, so it cannot be stolen. You also cannot steal a hotel room, trespassing is a different crime than theft.
Do people not literally have the crew on disk? There you go, they own it.
Maybe read the post before replying to comments:
Well let me go back to 2005 and tell young me that I only own a license to WoW so I can say “no shit idiot” and slap my future self. If you were deceived that’s on you.
Which is it? Pick a lane.
The problem is you’re using the rational part of your brain rather than starting with a conclusion and working backwards to find justification for your actions.
https://archive.org/details/CopyingIsNotTheft1080p
For me the difference would be the pricing model.
One time purchase? It’s mine.
F2P/subscription model? I know the service will die some day.
Do you feel the same way about, for example, a video rental store?
Chill with the downvotes - I’m not disagreeing. I’m just trying to understand where the line is.
You’re specifically paying for an agreed upon amount of time with the product. The negotiated price reflects this limited access to the product.
‘Licensing’ something with no stated time frame that one side can arbitrarily choose to end at any time makes little sense and they know it. They were perfectly happy with leveraging the assumption that you owned a copy of the product up until it became inconvenient to them.
Indeed. If I buy a video rental store, I expect it to be mine until it goes bankrupt.
This may help. And this.
I mean, are you taking your definition of “theft” from the law? Or from your own internal set of ethics for right and wrong? Is it theft if no one is deprived of anything, because bits copy, and because you’d never trade dollars for the privilege of maintaining an exploitative relationship with a company but that is all they’ve made available?
If you’re hung up on whether the legal system thinks it’s theft - I dunno what to tell ya, it obviously does.
Edit: uh, maybe you’re literally asking for how the logic in that statement works, which I read as just “if it can’t be owned, how can it be stolen?”
As someone else pointed out when this article was posted yesterday, the legal system doesn’t consider it theft, it’s considered copyright infringement, though I suspect this doesn’t change anyone’s opinion on it
Oh, yeah that makes sense too. Bad premise all around I guess.
Yeah, I am just confused on the logic. Like what is the relation between us not owning it (which is bad) and piracy not being theft? I wholeheartedly agree that pirating things is okay if a license gets revoked, and it is 100% okay to pirate something you bought even if you still have the license and it hasn’t been revoked. It’s yours. You paid money for it. But from my understanding, this statement doesn’t just cover people who bought it, but everyone, regardless of if they bought it.
I mean, “theft” implies depriving someone of something, to me. But I don’t want to bicker about definitions if your position is more about morality of taking something for free than about the definition of theft.
For myself, I’ll happily pay for things that provide fair value and a fair agreement / relationship. That includes donating to stuff that is offered for free - there are a handful of content creators and other services (Internet Archive, Signal, etc.) that I directly support, every month. And by the same token, I don’t feel bad at all about enjoying something, for free and against their wishes, from a company or publisher that only offers unacceptable (to me) terms.
To me those are perfectly consistent. My dollars go to individuals and publishers that produce the kind of media ecosystem I think is good for us. Because - we must be clear - it’s not a level playing field, and the shift away from consumer ownership is a plague of exploitation inflicted upon us. It’s now metastasizing away from strictly digital domains, now to physical hardware, which is outrageous. Roku, for instance, can update your streaming device overnight and force you to accept their new terms, in order to keep using your device. This is not hypothetical, it happened (may have gotten company wrong).
Do you think the companies enacting policies, particularly ones prohibiting ownership outright, are operating from an ethical or moral framework? I promise they don’t believe in anything like that. They screw us precisely as hard as the courts, and the court of public opinion, allow. And they’re always trying to move that line in their favor.
Why do you care about pirating? Who or what are you standing up for, I guess I’m asking?
It still may be. Is it theft to take a rentable car without renting it?
You are getting a good without enabling it’s production. Just because the additional cost from you doing this is extremely low does not mean it ain’t theft. Just means it ain’t such a terrible thing to do.
Does the rental company now have one less car they can rent?
Does the developer now have one less license they can lease?
No they don’t, because I returned it before a shortage occured. They just lost the profit from rent.
No he doesn’t.
In both cases the additional cost caused by your actions is very low. Damage was still fine to the provider.
If the additional cost per user is very low people should not be priced out, still.
That’s strange, the goal post was right here just a minute ago…
Whatever time period you had taken the rental car for was a time period that they could not have rented it to someone else. You can’t know until after the fact if there would have been a shortage in that time frame. There’s also the extra wear you have put on the car.
If you took a rental car for 5 minutes and returned it I doubt anyone would charge you with anything.
Depends if you see theft as someone taking something they didnt pay for or earn, or if you see it as someone depriving someone else of their property, or both of them count.
I’d argue both qualify as theft, and pirating is the first case. Just because you can replicate something for free (which is not the case with software) does not mean you are entitled to it.
Ah, so children playing in the park is theft. (They didn’t pay for or earn it). Drinking from a creek is theft. Breathing air is theft. I quoted your post, I guess that is theft as well.
I am not claiming they are entitled to it, I’m just saying it’s not theft.
You can’t steal from nature. Parks are provided for the public, its literally the whole point.
Any more gotchas?
So you don’t define theft as “someone taking something they didnt pay for or earn” then. Glad we agree.
If someone’s part of the “public” then its provided to them for 0$, thats the deal. If they are an adult in that area they might pay for it in taxes, but most places won’t limit access to local taxpayers. There is nothing underhanded happening there. Its provided for a group of people and those people use it within the guidelines setup for them.
Im sure you will have as little to say in your next reply but do try to actually make a point.
Of course it is. I don’t know who you think you’re disagreeing with here.
Interesting considering you had a lot to say without making any point at all. What exactly is the point you’re trying to make here?