No, it isn’t. Stealing is depriving somebody else of their property. Making an identical copy of something illegal is, well, illegal, but it isn’t stealing.

According to the penalties allowed under law, it’s around a hundred to a thousand times worse.

So I wait until a patent on them would have expired (17 years), and then consider them fair game.

that being said. i download roms; therefore, am stealing. my excuse: i’m poor. is it a good excuse? no.

In the end, I think the industry must respond to people wanting to play old games from all these console, handheld, and PC libraries. Obviously this is starting to happen, but only in dribs and drabs. As long as games like Golden Sun, for example, are out of print, very expensive to obtain and tied up in a vault somewhere, gamers are going to figure out how to get their hands on these titles in their own ways.

What iTunes has shown is that when you make digital downloading ubiquitous and cheap with a big library, a LOT of people will do the legal thing less because of altruism and more because of ease and convenience.

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work [e.g., whether it's a work of fiction, since facts are not copyrightable];
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

My jazz prof would have been fine under the first criterion, but probably none of the other ones. The fact that he gave us the full MP3s to download is a pretty major strike against him, and legally he’s probably on pretty shaky ground.

That said, I’m more interested in the moral issues rather than the legal ones since the overlap is sometimes, ah, less than absolute. :) Like I said, I doubt that any of the musicians would object to a professor holding up their work as the pinnacle of the genre and molding a new generation of jazz fans.

I agree that Steam is an improvement over brick-and-mortar retail in many ways, but my point was that game companies don’t have alternative revenue streams like musicians do. A band can make up for lackluster album sales with concert tickets and t-shirts (which give them a bigger cut), but if a game company doesn’t sell their games, that’s it — there’s nothing else to even cut the middle man out of. Piracy, then, is arguably much more harmful in the video game industry than in the music industry.

I do think you make a fair point that comparisons to the music industry are somewhat moot – but I still think that there is something to it. I was kind of under the impression that Steam was itself a kind of way of “cutting out” (or down?) on the middle-men, as it at least gets rid of the whole store front retail chain.

Interesting discussion, and it’s certainly going to come to a head at some stage. I really think copyright laws are going to have to receive a significant shake-up in the not too distant future.

Naturally that’s at his discretion, but what’s the message here?

More recently, though, digital distribution methods like Steam and the Wii Virtual Console have begun to change my mind. At the very least, it’s no longer a trivial decision to download an old game when the company is still selling it (or has the option to do so).

The moral gray area for me is that there’s no way of knowing if titles will ever be available on services like Steam or VC. Should we wait indefinitely to see if an opportunity arises to buy them legitimately? Here I think Matthew’s rule for when to pirate with minimal guilt seems pretty reasonable.

As for your points, Ben, I sympathize with the high costs of games in Australia (I mean, holy shit!) but I can’t see either of those conclusions as morally defensible.

Fans aren’t useful to a game company if they’re not paying for any products. In the music industry, a fan who pirates a band’s albums often goes to concerts and buys merchandise, but a gamer who pirates games doesn’t support the company by buying some other product. All the company get at that point is publicity, which is nice, but having publicity without sales isn’t a scalable solution.

Regarding the second point: the fact that the creators of a game don’t get a large cut of the profits doesn’t work as a justification for not paying them anything at all. Again, unlike the music industry, there aren’t serious alternative revenue streams for these guys that cut out the middle men. In fact, there aren’t serious alternative revenue streams at all; Valve can’t survive on plush Weighted Companion Cubes.

To play devil’s advocate for the other side, though, people like Ben are enriching the critical discourse surrounding video games, so I personally find it pretty easy to overlook piracy there. (Of course, that’s incredibly subjective, so I don’t know how tenable that argument is.) It reminds me of the history of jazz course I took in college — the professor had us all download over a hundred MP3s from his personal collection, without paying the slightest bit of attention to copyright, so we could analyze and discuss them in class. Illegal? For sure. But would any of the musicians have objected?

I’ve been trolling eBay for that one for a while now, but at this point you can’t walk away with a copy for less than $50.

As someone who is interested in working in both the games industry and the software industry, I personally see pirating video games or software as a bit self-destructive.

That being said, I have a rule for old games: if I can’t find a reasonable way to acquire it legally (be it due to rarity or age) I’ll probably not feel too bad about pirating it. Fortunately the advent of digital distribution is making problem less common nowadays (ex: Psychonauts on Steam), and it’s likely to only get better.