• 520@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    that can change at any time if Valve bothers to patch it

    Sure. And DRM free can become DRM laden with a patch too

    it’s technically piracy

    No it’s not. It doesn’t even legally count as copyright infringement. You are legally allowed to crack your own legit copy of software. The only thing possibly in the way is the EULA of the software (almost all of them have a possibly-illegal no reverse engineering clause)

    it takes effort the average person isn’t going to do

    The average person isn’t going to be backing up their games in the first place.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
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      11 months ago

      DRM free can become DRM laden with a patch

      Only if you download the update for that game.

      The patch to the Steam DLL could impact every game, and it still requires the user to patch the binary. Steam updating the binary to patch out the fix has a much bigger impact than a game adding DRM later.

      You are legally allowed to crack your own copy

      I’m pretty sure you’re not, though there’s potential for some gray area. Here’s 17 U.S. Code § 1201, (a) (1) (A):

      No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

      And yes, the average person does “back up” their games by having a copy of the installer in a Downloads directory or maybe a separate drive. They’re probably not going to use a NAS or cloud service, but that’s probably still more likely than applying a patch to a binary.