a tangential anecdote: in the older days of torrenting, I remember there was a big slap fight over the morality of piracy. games publishers were starting to lean on digital distribution platforms and DRM was becoming more draconian by the month. there was a big freakout over the PC release of Assassin's Creed 2, which introduced the now-common scheme of a single player game requiring a constant online connection (
article, this retard bought into all the anti-piracy propaganda too, so you can get a sense of what some people actually believed at the time). to justify the increasingly awful anti-piracy measures, companies like Ubisoft and EA trotted out androids at every opportunity to explain that actually, piracy is an extreme emergency and a despicable crime. it was used to justify publishers ignoring the PC as a platform, saying the cost of porting was not justified because piracy devastated sales (and not because they were getting kickbacks from Microsoft to help sell their console lol). think of the poor developers! (this was years after
the EA Spouse post exposed how games publishers treat their employees like cattle, lol) one of the common things to say at the time is that piracy is
literally like breaking into a store and stealing an expensive product off the shelf. but I remember reading a counterpoint that said rather than breaking in and stealing, piracy is more like going into a store and making a copy of something on the shelf and walking out. it's not destructive, it doesn't inhibit the ability of the company to sell the game, nor does it deprive others. somebody who takes a free copy of a product is not necessarily doing so in lieu of paying for it. of course, as time went on, publishers figured out the problem wasn't piracy, but their shit service, or the consumer perception that the price was massively inflated for what the the product was. GOG broke everyone's brains by offering a digital marketplace totally free of DRM - where piracy was (and still is) as easy as downloading a copy of the installer - under the philosophy that if you offer people good service for a fair price, people who have the money to do so will tend to buy the product out of a sense of respect and social responsibility. piracy has never effectively been directly addressed; the last attempt at that was Denuvo, which has been fairly successfully neutered at this point. what really killed piracy was consumer-friendly efforts like Humble Bundle and Steam sales. games publishers still do stupid shit to try and milk consumers for money, which is why every major publisher has their own digital marketplace now so Valve can't put their stupid overpriced games on sale (although that's waning too). but they've stopped bitching about piracy for the most part, and the moral panic has pretty much entirely faded as a result, outside of these fringe emulation communities whose goal at this point is largely preserving access to these libraries of old software that the console manufacturers have abandoned entirely. most of them have figured out by now that piracy literally doesn't matter, but I guess the paranoia of getting poached by corporate lawyers persists.
Emulation is not piracy. Especially if the game you're emulating is not sold elsewhere anymore.
It is piracy, but it's also based.
piracy is just a legal distinction, really. it means you're violating the terms of access the publisher has dictated. but often those terms are retarded, and in the case of old software that's not classified as abandonware yet, respecting those terms is often literally impossible since, as stated, the game isn't being sold anymore, or online services have been shut down, or whatever. some old games with online DRM are unplayable in their retail state because the authentication servers have been shut down, but the publisher never released a retroactive patch to remove the DRM. the argument probably wouldn't fly in court, but any publisher attempting to legally enforce their terms in that situation is obviously ridiculous.
