Do you often pirate things on a computer?

[dunno001]

NJ5 said:

dunno001 said:

Gilgamesh said:

Here's another way of looking at pirating, technically the thing that's being pirated is just being shared not stolen, because in order for it to be pirated in the first place someone must of bought it. If I let a friend borrow a game I own is that not pirating?

That is not piracy, as while your friend is borrowing the game, it deprives you of the ability to play it. There was one license sold, and one copy existing for it. This is fine (even if a few companies may want to say otherwise). What would be piracy is if you made a copy of it for your friend, as your one license now can be used twice concurrently. I assume that Canada also has something like the US's version of right to resell? Loaning it is selling it for $0, with the intent that it will be sold back to you at a later time for $0. Weird wording, I know, but it does allow it to fall into the fair use part.

That makes sense, but companies don't abide by it. If I buy a game and lose/damage the DVD, they'll make me pay for another license and another copy. Shouldn't it be possible to buy a copy for cheaper if you already have the license?

 

I know that a couple of companies used to do this, though I don't know if they do anymore. I do wish it is something that they would do. For disc items, I would probably say that you need to send in the damaged copy with, say, about $10 to cover shipping, pressing costs, etc. However, this also ran into logistics problems of if you need to take a game OOP, or if someone has a problem with your game outside of a region you have say in. (I'm guessing this is why nobody does it in actuality.) Take this scenario: my copy of Persona 1 (PS1) got scratched, and I ask Atlus USA for a replacement. I live in Europe. Atlus would run into 2 issues- first, they probably don't have spare copies of P1 still laying around. (If they did, I think they'd happily sell them.) So they would need to press more. But, the costs for pressing 1 disk are, well, not feasable. Secondly, they only have rights to distribute the game in North America. Knowingly shipping a game directly outside of NA violates these rights given to them by Atlus JP. (Did Persona 1 get an EU release? If so, it's also in violation of the company who got EU distro rights.)

So sure, if these issues could be dealt with, I'd love to see it become commonplace. But it won't happen, as it's a cost incurred setting up the system for something that has a high potential of reducing revenue.