Helloplite said:
Buying a digital software also grants you the license to use it. By emulating it, while nothing is physically taken, you are still committing theft of intellectual property by using something which has not been licensed to you for personal use. How would you feel if someone submitted your school essay as his, without your permission? Better yet, how would you feel if someone used your code which you developed for 5000 hours with a huge cost in terms of money and time, without your permission?
Emulation is only acceptable if the developer is no longer around to profit from the product, or if the product in question is impossible to buy legally anymore. Anything else is just a cheap excuse to moralize an illegal activity. You can pretend no one is losing anything, but this is not about the physical properties of a game software. This is about intellectual properties and use licensing. |
It's not theft of intellectual property, it's misuse of intellectual property. It's using IP in a way which you have no legal right to. For example. If I buy a legal copy of a blu-ray, digitize it, and then sell it to my friends for $5, I have no taken anything from anybody, but I am certainly breaking copyright law, because I made and sold copies of a file I had no right to copy and sell.
And why are you acting as if I think this is legal or moral? I never said copyright infringment was acceptable or legal. It isn't acceptable or legal, and I say this as someone who has been negatively impacted by copyright infringement. I only claimed it wasn't theft/stealing. Because it isn't. That doesn't make it okay.
