Lisp?

a sane language

JavaScript

Pick one.

Hades didn’t really seem like my kind of game, so I torrented it to try it out. Then I bought it, and later Hades 2, too.

I’ve also bought some comics I’d previously read on the computer, too, if they were good enough and I’ve come across a nice edition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6y8cqayjQI

Why rename the files when you could just categorise and index them…?

This seems unnecessarily destructive.

Nah, coconuts don’t have the right kind of teeth and ear bones.

That cat was seeing a bird or bird equivalent when the picture was taken. It was almost certainly chirping, and probably wiggling its butt, preparing to pounce.

But that’s how you learn!

it’s like checking it out from a library’s collection

Yes, exactly. But better, because by “checking it out” you’re not preventing anyone else from also enjoying it at the same time (on the contrary, by nature of the bittorrent protocol you’re improving the availability of said cultural work, helping to preserve it, and culturally enriching society to a greater extent than libraries can unless they don’t artificially restrict access to digital works).

Is that moral?

When copyright holders can remove access to paid content on a whim, or destroy already finished works because it’s somehow more profitable than selling them, or simply don’t care about preserving the works they claim to be responsible for, archiving them even against their wishes is not only moral, but a moral imperative.

Culture is more important than profits. And if preserving culture is illegal, the law is wrong, and must be ignored until it’s been corrected.

Piracy has always been stealingᵢ. Violently. Using ships, or boatsᵢᵢ.

What you’re calling “piracy” — falling into the “intellectual property” mafia’s trap by borrowing their malicious misnomer — is just plain old sharing.

Copying what we like (sometimes changing and adding our own ideas to it) and sharing it with other people, so they can like, share, and change it too.

It’s how human culture works and has always worked!

Copyright (another intentional misnomer, since all it does is restrict the right to copy — and share, and modify — cultural works) is, at least in its current form, not only detrimental to culture (and its spread and preservation) but an attack on human nature itself.

Sharing, in these dark times when destroying cultural works seems to have somehow become more profitable than commercialising themᵢᵥ, has become not only an essential part of human nature, but a moral imperative for anyone who cares about art, culture, and social progress.

As for the hypothetical profits we are supposedly “stealing”, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, sharing not only doesn’t cause a loss on profits, it increases themᵥ. It’s free advertising.

It’s not about profits. It’s not about authors’ rights. It’s never been. It is, and has always been, about control. About deciding who and when can have access to culture, and who can’t. When we can be human, and when we are not allowed to.

I — Well, sometimes mostly murdering, I suppose, if there was not enough to steal; and of course there was the whole letters of marque thing, which made it political and complicated. But mostly stealing, OK?

II — It being on navigable water is what distinguishes it from pillaging, if I’m not mistaken.

III — In the borrowed words of Sir Terry Pratchettᵥᵢ, “The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”; sharing stories, and any other form of culture, is what distinguishes us from other species. It’s what makes us human.

IV — And even before. “IP” wranglers have a long history of not being reliable custodians of the cultural works they claim responsibility for, and sharing has many times been the only way to preserve said works after their (often malicious) mismanagement.

V — There’s studies, too, if Gaiman’s account is too anecdotal for your liking.

VI — GNU

implemented in the real world

They never were intended to. They were specifically designed to torment Powell and Donovan in amusing ways. They intentionally have as many loopholes as possible.

Remove the first law and the only thing preventing a robot from harming a human if it wanted to would be it being ordered not to or it being unable to harm the human without damaging itself. In fact, even if it didn’t want to it could be forced to harm a human if ordered to, or if it was the only way to avoid being damaged (and no one had ordered it not to harm humans or that particular human).

Remove the second or third laws, and the robot, while useless unless it wanted to work and potentially self destructive, still would be unable to cause any harm to a human (provided it knew it was a human and its actions would harm them, and it wasn’t bound by the zeroth law).

first three

No, only the first one (supposing they haven’t invented the zeroth law, and that they have an adequate definition of human); the other two are to make sure robots are useful and that they don’t have to be repaired or replaced more often than necessary…

That’s the neat part: you don’t.

You are suggesting that piracy eventually leads to profit.

Provided the product is something people want, yeah. If not, at the very least it won’t decrease profit. As I said it’s free marketing. Sharing. Word of mouth. Trying before you buy.

That’s not a definition of piracy.

No, it’s not, correct. I don’t know why you think I was attempting to define it, but to be clear I was replying to this rethoric question of yours, and disputing your implicit assertion that it subverts the means for a producer to profit off of a product (which it evidently doesn’t):

Is piracy not inclusive of subverting the means for a producer to profit off of a product when using that product?

(This is the end of the previous paragraph; just putting this here because otherwise, at least in my client, the two quotes back to back look like they might be confusing to read; this probably is, too, but hopefully not as much.)

I am saying piracy is obtaining a digital product in an unauthorised manner to avoid paying for the product

No, piracy is the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea. Of course dictionaries also include, at this point, definitions like (from Oxford’s) “the unauthorized use or reproduction of another’s work” (which is clearly wrong, as it would include things that no one refers to as “piracy”, like plagiarism or copyright infringement) or yours (also wrong; that would be corporate espionage and sabotage; you might have been trying to say “obtaining a copy of a digital product…”), due to the concerted malicious efforts over several decades by IP lobbies to attack such a fundamental aspect of culture and of human nature as sharing (which is what is being attacked when the word “piracy” is used in this context) by labelling it with the same word as a particularly horrible crime.

I am ambivalent to piracy.

That’s horrible, tragic, and sad. Regardless of whether you’re using the correct definition or the malicious one.

it is up to content producers to combat it.

Sure, if by that you mean provide an affordable and more convenient alternative.

Though I’d argue that given that most of them (with exceptios such as Valve, which is doing an excellent work combating it, judging by the amount of unplayed games in the stereotypical Steam library) seem to prefer to make their customers’ experience worse (to the point of installing malware on their computers) such alternatives should, at this point, be forced through customer protection regulations.

but that’s not the topic I’m discussing

I wasn’t replying to whatever topic you were discussing (and at this point I neither remember what it was, nor care to), as I thought was evident by quoting a specific part of it I was replying to said specific part, to wit, your implicit (and clearly incorrect) assertion that “piracy” negatively affects profits.

Then for some reason you started talking about definitions, and here we are. 🤷‍♂️

You’re saying “piracy” subverts the means for a producer to profit off their product.

I’m saying the exact opposite: that it not only doesn’t do that, but in fact almost certainly increases said profits (and linking references to support said position).

And I’m absolutely not defending “piracy”. It shouldn’t exist, as its existence is a symptom of serious issues within the market. And getting rid of it is simple: just provide an affordable and more convenient alternative. Valve did it. Netflix and Spotify did it, for a while.

But, if said alternative doesn’t exist, “piracy” will happen, and it happening, while definitely a worse situation than said convenient and affordable option existing, will be more beneficial to both society and content producers than the absence of both.

Is piracy not inclusive of subverting the means for a producer to profit off of a product when using that product?

Not really. Most people who “pirate” games or media wouldn’t have paid for them anyway.

As Gabe Newell said (and demonstrated with Steam), “piracy” is a service problem.

Give people an affordable and more convenient way of accessing said games or media (Steam, Spotify before it got enshittified, Netflix before it got enshittified and the market got fragmented beyond any reasonable usability), and we’ll happily stop “pirating”.

If anything, “piracy” increases profits. Neil Gaiman compared it to word of mouth, or sharing your copy of a book with a friend: people in markets his books had trouble reaching (again, a service problem) “pirated” his books, liked them, and shared them with others… increasing his sales in said markets (people liked his work enough to try to find the books and buy them, and many who would have never heard of him became paying fans).

“Piracy” is free marketing (of course, this doesn’t work if your product isn’t worth its price, but bad products not earning money is a good way to improve overall quality), not theft. And without all the inconveniences of paid marketing. And often it’s a symptom that the way you’re selling your content is too inconvenient or overpriced for at least a fraction of your potential consumers, and thus needs to be fixed or improved (either voluntarily or through regulation).

Iain M Banks’s Culture series; Consider Phlebas, for instance, or The Player of Games, seem to be pretty much what you’re asking for.

Yeah… on the one hand Larian are great… on the other, a significant portion of your money will probably go to Hasbro, who laid off most of the team that worked with Larian to make this right before Christmas.

Pirate this, and buy any of the Divinity games, I’d say.