| IcaroRibeiro said: Well by "no problem" I didn't mean moral problem, I just said emulation is easy and don't need advanced tech knowledge to use it. If a kid can emulate games, a grown ass man will have no major problem either The discussion about the blurred lines of which levels of piracy should be accepted however is far more complicated. Once I get my first job I also quit piracy (mostly, still pirating some comics and animes), but then I had an insight of a fundamental truth: Without piracy, I wouldn't have the same hobbies as have today. Or at least wouldn't be nearly as engaged to them as I am today. For instance, I don't spend money drinking or partying, I'd rather just save money to buy more mangas or go to cinema instead. So in reality the years of a shameless stealing when I was a teenager (when I couldn't afford any of those things I was stealing anyway) actually created an avid customer for many years perhaps decades to come. I also think I have a more... "open" perspective about piracy because of a strong cultural difference. You live in Canada, an american neighbor. I can only guess the absolute majority of cultural products you consume are quickly released there. I'm Brazilian and sometimes movies, series, games and comics can simply never be released here. For instance, books. I only started buying non released books in Brazil when I got a Kindle and could download them, before that it was just incredibly hard and expensive to import something all the way from USA, and of course the options were far limited, it was basically Amazon or nothing So in the end, while piracy is in fact stealing I can only find it morally wrong when a simple question is raised: Can you afford whatever you are stealing? And by afford, sometimes it means you would need to stop spending with another things i.e. deciding to whether rent a movie or buying a game but still affording nonetheless If the answer is yes, then I agree. It's a bad thing and should stop If the answer is no, then I disagree. That person wouldn't have bought it legally anyway, so why bother? |
I actually grew up in the Netherlands where piracy was the norm. From early age, games mostly came on copied cassettes for C64 and MSX, then copy parties with the Amiga 500 and PC.
Some things also never got released there and I went to Amazon as well from 1996 on. Importing from the UK and USA. I imported a region free DVD player from the UK to be able to watch the movies I wanted to watch.
I don't know what I would have done without piracy. Maybe I would have been chasing work more, make my own money to afford games. I would most likely have spend more time on learning to code and making my own things.
That last argument only holds up for food imo. It's luxury entertainment, not essential to live.
But on the other side, it also exposed me to many genres and different games I would maybe never have bought. And I might have spend my time in worse ways without the vast access to games. Anyway for kids growing up and wanting to try everything out, I don't see a problem with it. But at some point, you lose that excuse.
