From my understanding theft has always been to take something and after the other party doesn't have it anymore. This never applied to piracy.
For example: I used to pirate games back in school as I didn't have the money to buy them. So there is no financial loss for the company. Yet they still frame it as bank robbery or something. "You wouldn't download a car"
Next year Ubisoft is complaining how people start a subscription just before the holiday and cancel after the holiday, with people playing dozens of games in a short period. This destroys their cash flows and shows great disrespect for the developers.
Copyright itself was never ownership to begin with, and ideas were never property. Copyright is nothing more than a means an end, with the end being to enrich the Public Domain. It exists for the express purpose "to Promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts" and nothing else.
It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions; & not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. but while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural, and even an hereditary right to inventions. it is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. by an universal law indeed, whatever, whether fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property, for the moment, of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation the property goes with it. stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me. that ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benvolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. inventions then cannot in nature be a subject of property. society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility. but this may, or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.
I understand the slogan and why it is used, but I have never had any moral qualms about pirating the intellectual property of a billion-dollar corporation, call me weird.
You want to really own your game, not just a license, buy on gog. Not on Steam, not on Epic, not on uplay and whatever else.
Why is everyone so pissed at Ubisoft, they just say what's practise for years now! And sometimes counter Ubisoft by quoting Gabe Newell, what the fuck? He made not owning games popular!
Might have to visit some torrent sites anyway. Maybe I can find someone who likes Ubisoft games but can't afford them and doesn't know how to acquire them...
The best case for Piracy is the Gearbox PC port of Combat Evolved.
Broken graphics and other issues which downplayed the impact of the original Xbox version. If copyright - JUST COPYRIGHT, not "intellectual" "property" - is abolished, we no longer have to wait for 343 to finally restore a masterpiece to its former glory.
Everyone here will balk and biych about it and rightly so, but this will happen, unfortunately. Why? Because Ubisoft is on the path of enshittification, and most of humanity are dumb and don't care and will walk willingly like sheep to the slaughter.
The term “If purchase isn’t ownership” has no relationship to the article quote. The suggestion of not owning games refers to having subscription-based access to them; as of yet only ever offered as a suggested alternative to purchasing games, which is still very much an option.
These memes are always using terribly structured logic to justify piracy.