Piracy: Common Myths

CMDreamer

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Piracy is all about obtaining an economic profit from such activity. Like those pirates that sailed the seven seas, long ago; the therm has it's roots on them.

Actually, piracy (in the perspective of all entertainment industries), is any activity that may harm their profit, clear and simple.

Sharing is not piracy, because when you share, you're not getting any economic profit from it, so you're not harming their profit. There's nothing as simple as that.
Many years ago, sharing was a common thing, and you could see people sharing those old "floppies" with many types of software in them; when the industries behind them saw their profit harmed (under their perspective), they payed the law makers to create all those copyright laws to protect them, because the only way to stop "the masses" is by having a law that limits their acting.

But anyway that's just my very own perspective.
 
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dAVID_

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True. but again... they can't PROVE it if you don't distribute.

They can't even prove it wasn't planted. Innocent until proven guilty for criminal cases. And there are court rulings on speculative damages.

Proving download doesn't prove any copyright violation on the part of the downloader.
If they can prove that you downloaded copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder, they can convict you for copyright infringement. Simple as that.
 

Kioku

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I forgot this thread existed. Unfortunately, I have to see it again. Too many wannabe e-lawyers thinking they know and understand. The fact of the matter is that piracy is illegal. No matter how you want to spin it. I don't care that you do. I don't care why you do it. Just don't pretend you're not breaking any copyright laws.
 

djnate27

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The whole structure is seriously flawed. I use to “acquire” every game that interested me. Later I decided that I will only play games that I obtain a physical copy of. These are usually USED games I buy secondhand so the Publishers/Developers/Console maker don’t see a ‘red dime’ (Knives Out).
 
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spectral

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The whole structure is seriously flawed. I use to “acquire” every game that interested me. Later I decided that I will only play games that I obtain a physical copy of. These are usually USED games I buy secondhand so the Publishers/Developers/Console maker don’t see a ‘red dime’ (Knives Out).

You're right and they hate the used games market just about as much as they hate piracy. It's just more difficult for them to do anything about as selling used games is legal. It's not impossible for them to counter it though. MS planned to block games working on more than one console when they announced the Xbox one but scrapped the idea due to the negative publicity it was causing. It's why they are now so keen to push digital.
 
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Zaphod77

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If they can prove that you downloaded copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder, they can convict you for copyright infringement. Simple as that.

Unless you confess, they most likely can't prove it.

which is my point. :)
 

Zaphod77

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And that proof is darn near impossible to get without very invasive spyware and human rights violations.

As long as you stick to direct downloads, they have their work cut out for them to prove their case. First they must prove that the copyrighted work was on the server you downloaded it from. Otherwise they have no way to even GET probable cause to search your computer, unless you do something silly like confessing. To do that they have to download it themselves from the server. which is fair, they own the copyright, they have permission, it's not a violation for them to do that. Then they have to get the access logs to the remote server, which will have a list of all IPs that have download the file, provided said haven't been scrubbed, and even exist in the first place. And if they do get logs, there are probably dynamic IPs in them. If so, they also have to get info from the isp to prove that it was assigned to that customer at the time. Which again is not a guarantee.

So assuming they somehow get accurate logs, and track it being downloaded to your home's IP at the time, they still haven't proven that you personally did it. It could have been someone else in your house sharing the same internet IP. It could have been someone who hacked into your wi-fi. That happens all the time. It coud be a house guest on a laptop who is long gone, and they can't trace it because the computer isn't even there.

Even the presence of the files on your computer is not proof you downloaded it. maybe you just downloaded a no-cd so you wouldn't have to put in the CD. Maybe it's a gog.com game you bought. there's no way to tell the difference by looking at your computer. Your computers copy could be legit. the pirated copy might be on a different computer, which as i said above, might not even be there.

Some malware may have downloaded it. That's not your fault, is it?

It's just not that simple to prove. :)

If you do torrent without a VPN, then all they have to do is join the swarm, and they find out all the IPs of everyone involved at the time. which makes it MUCH easier for them to match things up and get that proof and claim major statuatory damages.
 

dAVID_

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And that proof is darn near impossible to get without very invasive spyware and human rights violations.

As long as you stick to direct downloads, they have their work cut out for them to prove their case. First they must prove that the copyrighted work was on the server you downloaded it from. Otherwise they have no way to even GET probable cause to search your computer, unless you do something silly like confessing. To do that they have to download it themselves from the server. which is fair, they own the copyright, they have permission, it's not a violation for them to do that. Then they have to get the access logs to the remote server, which will have a list of all IPs that have download the file, provided said haven't been scrubbed, and even exist in the first place. And if they do get logs, there are probably dynamic IPs in them. If so, they also have to get info from the isp to prove that it was assigned to that customer at the time. Which again is not a guarantee.

So assuming they somehow get accurate logs, and track it being downloaded to your home's IP at the time, they still haven't proven that you personally did it. It could have been someone else in your house sharing the same internet IP. It could have been someone who hacked into your wi-fi. That happens all the time. It coud be a house guest on a laptop who is long gone, and they can't trace it because the computer isn't even there.

Even the presence of the files on your computer is not proof you downloaded it. maybe you just downloaded a no-cd so you wouldn't have to put in the CD. Maybe it's a gog.com game you bought. there's no way to tell the difference by looking at your computer. Your computers copy could be legit. the pirated copy might be on a different computer, which as i said above, might not even be there.

Some malware may have downloaded it. That's not your fault, is it?

It's just not that simple to prove. :)

If you do torrent without a VPN, then all they have to do is join the swarm, and they find out all the IPs of everyone involved at the time. which makes it MUCH easier for them to match things up and get that proof and claim major statuatory damages.
If law enforcement gets a search warrant to bust into your house and go through your hard drives, guess what? You're fucked. If they got that far, it means that they already have some evidence on you, which probably includes server logs and/or data kindly provided by your ISP.
And even if you're using full disk encryption, that countermeasure is only effective as long as your computer is shut down (and even then, it might still be possible to recover decryption keys).
The only fool-proof defense against copyright is living in a third world country where copyright law is lax/ignored.
I should probably make a disclaimer here: I am not a lawyer. I'm just some bumbling idiot arguing about computer forensics and copyright law on a video game oriented forum.
 
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Zaphod77

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Even with logs from the isp, that only goes as far as the router, and not your PC. If you provide your own router instead of using their bundled one (which could maybe possibly log enough to actually follow the chain of download). they have no proof, and no cause for a warrant. They just know that some device that was connected to the network at that time downloaded it.

Again, they can't get evidence just from direct download. there MUST be something else for them to get enough, at least in the USA. It make much more sense to go after the distribution.

There may be some countries that have enough of a copyright gestapo to actually prosecute downloading. But i don't know what they are.

And my original point was that there's no such thing as a ddl sting. Just bait torrents, because those are much easier to get evidence off of.
 
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r0achtheunsavory

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There's no such thing as intellectual property because it would require a tyrannical world government to enforce. Who wants to live under a "new world order"? Pretty much nobody. This is why whenever some buffoon starts mumbling jibberish about intellectual property you can tell them to go F themselves.

All they're trying to do is get you to perform mental gymnastics to agree to prop up their invalid business model. There was no cosmic event that occurred where Gawd on the 7th day said "let it be known that EA sports should have a valid business model of selling recycled basketball games over the internet".

Lots of invalid business models fail all the time. If you like what they sell and want to try to keep them afloat by handing them money, well, that's your perogative. It's really an economics lesson. Anything based on artificial scarcity has no value according to the invisible hand of the market and it will eventually force the value to zero in one way or another.

Fiats? All go to zero. Bitcoin? It's an imaginary widget based on artificial scarcity, same thing as fiat. Will also go to zero. Money is required to be a non-perishable, physical commodity resource, which is why gold and silver are the Schelling point of money.

When software tries to act as some form of commodity money and pretend it has a shelf value of $50, the invisble hand of the market sends it to $0 anyway no matter how hard you try to stop it. It's an invalid business model artificially propped up by govts.
 
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Zaphod77

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The NES (and presumably anything earlier) has expired patents. maybe the master system can be cloned too. But only systems that don't have a BIOS, can be cloned so easily.
 

FAST6191

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As of 2021 What game systems have expired all their patents and so can be legally cloned?
The length (term, as in term limits for politicians, if you prefer the proper legal phrase) is less of an issue. Most consoles are arrangements of common chips and that is hard to do anything with (one reason why emulation can exist so happily) -- not like Nintendo made the 6502 for the NES or ARM chips for most of its handhelds and consoles since the GBA. You having 4KB of video memory at a given address is also nothing special, novel, unique or inventive.
The patents then tend to come into things like the controllers (see the NES dpad one for a fairly famous example), mechanisms for inserting the cartridge* and other such things, though I am sure the US will have a few software patents later down the line *spits*.
There are ways to chain patents together -- prior art (as in someone did this before and thus you can't claim it as new) is supposed to be a thing in patents (whether the US actually does this is a debate for a different day) and it gets harder if you trip over your own patent from a few years earlier so you have something of a grace period in which you can file another patent using/referencing the contents of an earlier one, which is why the end of some relevant patents can be a bit nebulous.
You also have the added bonus that the US changed its patent rules in 1995 (the PS1 dropped in 1994 in Japan so presumably patents would have already been in place before then) to be more generally 20 years with some older stuff now maybe being shorter. Though at this point everything from before then should have expired.
20 years back from 2021 though means the GBA, xbox, PS2, GP32 and gamecube, especially if all of those were filed/granted prior to consumer launch, have just dropped out of protection in the US or will shortly. I don't know what will go with some of the accessories, controllers and the like that were released later in the system lifetimes, and possibly something that could have happened in a later board revision.

Will have to do some research but I don't think I have seen too many patents in game world be destroyed. Equally it is generally noted most don't care about patents per se and instead just have big war chests so when another company tries it on they can go nuclear.

I doubt there are any submarine patents either (see video below for a brief discussion of that one).

*offhand I don't know if the NES insert and push down had major ones on but that sort of thing. Also brings up the issue of you can clone the thing by dodging the push down thing and just doing a straight insertion like most other cartridge based consoles.

BIOS, as mentioned above, as well as related things like firmwares and loader menus can make things more fun as that is software and software is copyrightable. As we are only seeing works from 1925 exit copyright this year ( https://gbatemp.net/threads/new-in-the-public-domain-for-2021.580143/ ) there is a while to wait there yet. There are some open source BIOS things -- most BIOS and firmware is very basic (here is the GBA/DS/DSi, arguably on the more complicated side of such concepts, http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#biosfunctions for an idea of what it entails) and thus you can recreate the calls in your own code if you wanted.

Copyright would also mean doing something like https://bitbuilt.net/forums/index.php?threads/gba-board-scans.807/ , scanning in and recreating the exact layout before flogging that on might be dubious as the board design itself likely falls under copyright just like layout in a book or the like. You getting all the chips and finding these traces need to be matched impedance and creating something similar though would be a different matter.

For the US side of things a choice video on patents

Same guy has some decent talks as well on other things that might be relevant.
 

raxadian

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The NES (and presumably anything earlier) has expired patents. maybe the master system can be cloned too. But only systems that don't have a BIOS, can be cloned so easily.

Also the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Sega CD and Sega 32x.

The Sega CD bios may still be copyrighted but not all emulators need it.
 
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smf

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smf

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Software follows different laws to hardware..

Otherwise any Game from 30 years ago would have become freeware and that's not the case.

Software gets copyright protection (life+70 years), chips get mask protection (10 years) and everything else you need to try to patent (20 years).

But bios is software.
 
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