In the UK we have run into a few instances where digital games failed to be "fit for purpose" and the government stepped in to demand refunds, but frankly it doesn't happen enough, or quickly enough. More on that later.
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I recall the EU recently put stronger enforcement on digital purchase returns in place, but I don’t know if games storefronts have been affected.
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Germany demanded under threat of embargo that Valve allow Steam customers refunds for non-functional games. Valve said "We give in, but just Germany." Whether they were crossing their arms and pouting is not recorded.
Seriously though, Steam's EULA says something like "Refunds will only be granted in territories where legally required".
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Do you guys consider playing game demos to be piracy?
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No. If it's being legally distributed for free, go nuts. It's effectively being licensed to you for a cost of zero. It might still have distribution restrictions, though, so you might still be pirating it if you don't get it from an official source.
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Do you also consider using adblock while browsing the internet (youtube, websites etc) to be piracy too?
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Probably. There's no EULA for the internet, so legally it's kind of eeehhh, but if a site was to put a clause in its Terms and Conditions page saying that ads must be enabled to use that site, you'd be violating that agreement by using an ad blocker. That might not be classified as piracy, but it's definitely a form of theft.
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And yet by the law you can't make more than one copy of a thing you bought, even for yourself, it's considered piracy then.
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That's nothing to do with "stock". That's an anti-distribution law. It's a way of ensuring that only you can use the product you bought i.e. stopping people who haven't paid for it from using it.
Copyright lawyers aren't worried that you duplicating a game is going to deplete finite reserves of data. People aren't digging zeroes and ones out of a mine somewhere. "Digital stock" is a myth.
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You didn't give me any arguments in the paragraph I quoted, just the statement. I didn't even have anything to work with, and you're calling me lazy?
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I'm not entitled to an ebook just because I dropped my paperback in the sink.
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... I'm sorry, I genuinely thought that statement was so obviously true that only some kind of moron would need it clarified.
The ebook and the paperback are two entirely seperate products, and the publishers are totally entitled to charge you as such. I mean, look at them. Hold a tablet in one hand and the book in the other. They are not magically linked, they're two entirely unrelated products that happen to contain the same information. Pirating a digital copy of a physical game disc you once owned is the same.
Arguing that digital copies don't cost anything to produce isn't actually true - distribution requires bandwidth, electricity etc. and actually costs a hell of a lot, it just works out as a fairly low cost per copy because you can produce so many. And it's not like physical copies are made to order; whether I buy a boxed copy of a AAA game, or leave it on the shelf, the publishers will still print another 20,000 discs tomorrow.
It doesn't mean jack shit what other purchases you've made. You're a customer, not a patron; you don't pay installments to the developers and acquire the rights to anything with their name on it. They charge one fee for one copy of one product. Those are their terms. Take them or leave them.
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That's exactly what I meant. Paying before pirating, that's the case sometimes.
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That's a pretty rare occurrence (relatively speaking) and only really happens under extreme circumstances, like a DRM malfunction stopping legal copies of a game from working. I believe that a customer is always entitled to what they paid for - no more, no less - so if for some reason the publisher was unable to deliever that functional product to a customer, yes, I could condone that customer pirating a copy. ONE copy.
I don't think you can really say that kind of situation is representative of piracy as a whole, though.
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Come on, you can't compare buying food to buying entertainment.
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CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
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"I once bought a coffee from a shop, therefore I already paid for a coffee, therefore I can drink as many individual coffees as I want"
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See? I just did!
The point of the coffee analogy was to demonstrate how dramatically you've chosen to misinterpret how retail licensing works, by applying the same misinterpretation to Starbucks.
You're taking a set method of retail licensing (the agreement that purchasing one copy of media/coffee allows you to enjoy it for as long as you own it) and trying to bend it for your own convenience (purchasing one copy of media/coffee entitles you to as many more copies/coffees as you want for free).
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Do you suggest I should pay each time I listen to a song?
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If you listen on an official YouTube channel, you already do. Your adview is in lieu of payment, meaning you effectively did 0.1p's worth of work and passed that on to Google, who passed it on to the channel owner. A few other companies operate on the same idea. It's just another form of licensing, and that diversity of options is good for the consumer.
The point is, they choose how they license their own products. Again, take the terms or leave them. If Starbucks wanted to charge people by the sip, they could. And as consumers, we'd choose not to buy coffee from them because that's fucking stupid.
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That's actually up to interpretation. I don't think it's my mistake, since marketing is a vile beast and can manipulate the consumer completely. Imagine you saw an advert of a banana in TV (weird situation, but plausible) and it made you want that banana really much because of it's banananess. You bought one wrapped in a way so you can't see what's in it (it's kinda shaped like a banana). You unwrapped it and it's a cucumber. Let's say you hate cucumbers. Was it really your mistake of judgement? I'd say no.
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I actually really like cucumbers
That's not an example of manipulative advertising (all ads are manipulative), it's an example of outright fraud, which is not that same thing. Namely, the latter is a crime while the former is not. In the UK, the Office of Fair Trading exists in part to prevent "false advertising", the legislation concerning which has very long lists of very specific definitions, and is therefore not really "up to interpretation". Advertising bananas and delivering cucumbers is certainly going to qualify. A cinematic trailer clearly labelled as "Not In-Game Footage" will not.
Much as you might complain, adverts can, will, and probably
should present their products with an unrealistically high level of polish. As long as they don't
advertise anything as present in the game when it isn't, it's all legal and pretty much par the course.
Obviously national laws will differ, but my point that your purchases are your own still stands. You choose who you listen to, you choose what you buy, and are liable for your own misspending. Capital-letter False Advertising is a crime, the perpetrators are liable for the misspending of those they defrauded, and lawyers
can and
will get involved to prevent it.
Basically, if you think you've been mis-sold a product, take the company to court. If you don't think you'd have a good enough case, that's probably because it wasn't mis-sold, you just made a bad choice and want to blame someone else.
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I've never started. They're awesome. What made you think I hate that?
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Every time I suggest you should actually pay for the things you want, you complain that you shouldn't have to.
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That, except "provides statements without backup and is pretty closed-minded about them" instead of "disagrees with me"
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I don't need to explain that [piracy] can be ok. Demonizing piracy is like demonizing entire humanity for WWII.
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lol
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... let's say it's an African kid, who spent his all money for a cheap computer and he is basically broke and with no job, there's no scenario when he could give money to the developers. I imagine Phylum and MM standing behind the poor kid's back and shouting at him whenever he tries to get some entertainment, legal or not.
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Life is far too short to go around harassing people for every selfish decision they make. If a starving man steals a loaf of bread, is he acting selfishly? Of course, he's visibly harming the livelihood of the baker. Would you stop him? Of course not. Because like I said before, society is based on the principle that we can all be a bit selfish sometimes without becoming an outcast.
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The goal of the developers is to make money from the player's entertainment... When somebody pirated a game he's not sure about and it turns out it's shit... he definitely won't be entertained, thus the developers have failed their task. Should they really get money for a bad job?
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This is exactly what I meant about you thinking that paying for commercial products is optional. It's not.
It is not at your discretion whether you should pay money you legally owe to game developers. The terms of the transaction are not contingent upon your enjoyment of their product.
They don't sell you a box labelled "FUN" that you can return when you find that there was nothing in it. They sell you a copy of a video game. Their side of the deal is done when they deliver that. Grow up, and do your side.
