These days I generally pirate the single-player content I purchase anyway. Anything that requires Origin, Epic, uPlay, or any other cancerous software to be installed gets paid for and promptly pirated. I trust the Pirate Bay more than I trust Ubisoft.

I do the same thing for my Kindle purchases. Luckily I have a Paperwhite whose serial number works with DeDRM to strip DRM for all my Kindle purchases (except Hindi books which are not downloadable for some reason).

You could also use the PC kindle app to download books and strip their DRM. That might be easier than transferring every book back and forth. (I use the kindle 1.26 version. It requires an additional plugin to convert the new amazon format, but works with DeDRM after that.)

Thanks for the tip, I haven't tried it with the PC Kindle app! An additional issue with (most) Hindi books is that they aren't supported on the Mac app, so they don't even download into the app's storage, let alone as standalone AZWs for manual transfer.

Dont you worry about Malware, Viruses and suchlike?

Not from reputable uploaders. It's about reputation, and people like, say, Fitgirl have a hell of a lot better reputation than Ubisoft or EA.

Yes. From Ubisoft. It's the pirated version that lacks the rootkit ;)

> Dont you worry about Malware, Viruses and suchlike?

Nowadays DRM are running in kernel mode so I'd say that the pirated version is safer in a lot of cases ...

you mean DRM and anti cheats ?

If you use a private tracker you will usually be fine.

What good private trackers still exist and are possible to join?

TL, must be run out of an embassy or Transnistria lol

According to https://opentrackers.org/torrentleech/ account creation on TL is currently open, but unfortunately when I try to create an account via Tor enabled Onion Browser on my phone nothing happens when I push submit. Even with most permissive JS settings in the browser. Sad times.

try a normal VPN then? I hope you are aware that bittorrent is bad for Tor, maybe they are helping you.

when you get in, you need to seed something, if you are worried about torrent activity on your network, try to seed something benign like a linux distribution.

Doesn't sound like he is trying to torrent over tor.. Just access the tracker website. I use tor to access several of them cus they are blocked at an ISP level in my country, and tor-browser is a convenient workaround.

GGn

Is that really practical these days given the frequency of updates developers put out for their games?

More like "frequency of bugs" developers put out for their games. Best to buy only once the "GOTY/Definitive/Special edition" is released and all DLC's are available and when it's a couple of years and 50 patches old - including patches fixing the patches. And when the game is on holiday discount sale. The game is then smooth and playable with no blood-pressure inducing defects and doesn't need too much Googling/forum-posting on asking what went wrong.

It seems there is a window of ideal time. You've described when that window opens. It closes as OS's evolve out from under the last patch. Steam in particular appears in no hurry to require games be playable after any initial QA.

I don't want to be forced to install one-way updates just to play a single-player game.

Apple's iOS App Store has normalized how updates can remove and disable (or just break) features, and there's no way to downgrade.

I don't buy games in a broken state hoping they'll be good later. Either I wait until they're done or don't buy them at all.

And I refund if it's bad and I didn't know it in advance. Steam refund experience has been great but they started warning me about "refund is not for trying games". Good things don't last forever but they day they start to BS me I will go back to piracy or give up on DRM titles.

I wouldn't feel guilty but I just do not want to bother. Half the reason I pay is I don't want the trouble.

It's definitely fine morally, but unfortunately it's illegal anyway.

Who cares if it's illegal? It's not like you're gonna get caught. Just use a VPN.

Why is that? If you buy the game off Steam or something, this implies that the creators/publishers/platforms have gotten their due compensation. The cracks and files on ThePirateBay are done on a volunteer basis, meaning that it’s not costing the game developers any money.

It is costing a developer money — someone who downloads the pirated game would’ve otherwise bought it. Game devs make money on sales.

However if you have already bought the game, and then download a pirated version, it isn’t.

Maybe lay off the eggnog or before reading HN so that you don't comment this poorly w/o reading the thread... They've bought it, the Dev. Got whatever pittance the publisher seems worthy, they just want an experience unadulterated by crappy launchers or corrupted by overzealous DRM.

I was reasonably certain that this thread was specifically speaking in regard to the latter case.

> It is costing a developer money — someone who downloads the pirated game would’ve otherwise bought it. Game devs make money on sales.

Source? No research ever managed to prove that.

Is there any chance you misunderstood? They said they wouldn't feel bad morally about pirating things they had in fact already paid for? Does your ethics require you to stick to the letter of the terms and conditions including allowing people to keep your money and take back the value they promised you?

Because laws are not about justice. If you get something stolen you need to go to a judge to get a sentence that gives it back to you. You cannot take justice on your hands and expect to not be punished.

I don't think that is entirely true. For example, if a cheating happens in an online game you don't wait a court decision to ban the player - taking the justice on your hands and expect to not be punished. Or killing a person is illegal but you can use your self-defence rights if the other person is trying to kill you. You can use interfaces from copyrighted language (Oracle v. Google) for fair use purposes without getting a court decision first.

If the thing that you are trying to do is legal by universal laws, international laws and national laws (in order). You don't really need to worry.

In that stealing example let's assume someone stole something and you "stole" it back. Good luck for the first stealer to initiate a court case - which probably the stealer will not initiate because he will lose it plus with the expenses for the court. No court case meaning no complains therefore no crime.

There are many old games that runs some kind DRM system that is using deprecated Operating System API's - some of them are undocumented and mostly operated in ring 0.

Just because you pirated a game that you own a copy, in order to play it on newer version of operating system does not make you criminal. You may need a court decision only if you are not able to private or fix it without the company help but that's all.

This is infeasible though as evidenced by how actual theft doesn't get handled by the legal system (police, prosecutors, and judges). Realistically the only way to get your stuff back is to take it back yourself or somehow force the police into action by doing the work for them.

In many jurisdictions it's not a legal infraction to steal back some property since it was legally yours.

But you can.

I would be interested in knowing if that would be legal. As might you technically have purchased your license?

Copyright violation is a tort, not a crime. If you were sued for it, they'd have a hard time proving damages given that you have paid for a valid license.

You would have to stick exclusively to downloading though. As soon as you upload as well (e.g., torrents) the defence that you have a valid licence for your personal use no longer suffices. And even if you are fine from a legal standpoint (which I fear may not be the case in every jurisdiction), there is still the financial risk of getting sued by someone with much bigger pockets.

The defendant in a copyright violation case is not just liable for actual damages. The plaintiff can elect to take either actual damages or $750 to $30,000 per copyright infringement. This can rise to up to $150,000 if it is determined to be willful copyright infringement.

https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-17-copyrights/17-usc-sect...

Not necessarily[1].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

Good point.

Though that criminal statue wouldn't apply to the actions described here, it is indeed an example of how copyright violations of some kinds can be crimes, even felonies.

Generally speaking, it's uploading/transferring content to others that is illegal, not downloading it for yourself. At least, de facto if not de jure.

In most jurisdictions, copyright infringement isn't a crime, it is a civil tort, meaning you can be sued by the copyright holder for damages. Most big media copyright holders (MPAA/RIAA/etc) have a policy of only going after uploaders because it just isn't cost effective to go after downloaders for damages. A downloader can only be sued for the retail value of what they downloaded, while uploaders can be sued for the retail value of what they uploaded times the number of downloads. But this isn't codified in law, it is just corporate policy.

>A downloader can only be sued for the retail value of what they downloaded

Is this the actual law?

I remember hearing about people being sued for $100k+ just for downloading a few albums back in the Limewire days.

Most likely they were also distributing (uploading), not just downloading.

Reading the EFF's history (and thinking about how the technology works for one second!), it seems this was how the lawsuits were put forth.

I remember a story a while back of a gentleman who had a house fire and then went and later pirated all the music CDs he had lost. I think they interviewed a copyright lawyer who basically says that the law doesn't permit that, I remember the quote that buying a copy entitles you to a copy and that "there is no such thing as a listening right".

But is it that particular copy? If I backup a digital file that I buy and it gets deleted and I have to restore from the backup, is that offside?

That's a little different. Copyright, without any license involved, is very strict about the copying, how the copy gets made and where it's copied from. But if there's a license, things might get fuzzier.

It's the same argument as vigilante justice.

Sure, but taking this to its logical extreme, it seems like I could justify any act as long as it’s also legal.

While I totally agree with the advice of “it’s illegal so you probably shouldn’t do it”, I don’t think it’s a terribly interesting conversation philosophically. Deferring to human law in these discussions feels like an existential cop-out.

I think the question is substantially more interesting if you pretend that you have a magic wand to make the laws whatever you want, and then ask “why would it be wrong for me to torrent a game that I have purchased a legal copy of?”

You might as well remove the legality of it from the question then and focus on the moral aspect.

In the case of downloading a copy of the game you own, I don't have a moral issue with that.

However, I don't think that generalizes to any digital good. I'd say it is morally wrong to make copies of a digital good where an additional instance gets you some benefits. For example, downloading an additional digital ticket to a limited virtual event, thereby gaining access for free, or any instance where the original creator loses a sale and someone gets to enjoy or profit from said copy of the digital good.

Well, sadly if something is legal then they can actually do that thing. I don’t like it myself, but that’s unfortunately how it works.

No argument but I feel like that’s an orthogonal topic to “is it moral for me to pirate a game that I purchased a legal copy of?”

I’m well aware that I’m legally allowed to do legal things, but “laws” have a lot of politics and emotion involved in their creation, and I don’t feel like they’re a great place to determine the “morality” of something.