Is it piracy if ......?

[WereKitten]

Words Of Wisdom said:

Pyro as Bill said:

1. If you download a game that you are really looking forward to that is available now in another region but you have to wait weeks or more in your own region. You have already preordered the game and intend to pay for it.

2. Same as above but you have actually paid for your pre-order before the game is released.

3. The game is released and you've snagged a great online bargain but will take 1 week to arrive, you can't wait a week and so download it.

_{(Wii Sports Resort is awesome!! )}

Game piracy is the act of illegally obtaining a copy of a game so it doesn't even matter if you pay for it or even if you play it.

I'm surprised so many people in this thread fail to realize this.

So many absolutes. That's a definition of piracy that holds for your personal opinion or your country's law maybe, but is in no way general.

There are countries (such as mine) where you are legally entitled to own as many copies as you want of a piece of software as long as you paid for one original copy (and the copies are not keeping you from buying multiple originals if those are needed). Please note that the license of the software might still restrict you from installing it on multiple machines (e.g. Windows) but that's an entirely different issue from owning N copies of it.

Thus in many countries it's not illegal at all to download a copy of that game if you paid for it, which I'm pretty sure legally covers cases 2 and 3 of the OP. Case 1 is probably not legal on the other hand, but I personally wouldn't fret about it.

@twesterm

An analogy with a car, really? You just fell in the abyss between intellectual property and physical property, and there's no worse way to defend the rights of authors of intellectual products.