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[Movius]

What is person Y's copy of the game stored on? good will?

I can't say I understand what you're getting after. It is probably stored on a hard drive that is also owned by Y.

Y owns a hard drive and a game.
Y stores the game on the hard drive.
Z owns a hard drive.
Z makes a copy of Y's game from Y's hard drive to Z's hard drive. (With Y's blessing, in this case)

Where exactly did physical theft occur? As far as I can see it can only be considered theft if you accept the concepts of intellectual property or copyright.

Who said anything about theft? I'm talking about fraud.

Y buys a game where Y agrees to pay gamemaker X $XXX for ownership of one copy of the game (which X created and owns) on the condition that Y provides nobody else with a copy of the game.
Y owns a copy of the game on his storage medium of choice.
Y produces a 2nd copy of the game which he gives to Z, knowing that it breaches the agreement he reached with X.
Y commits fraud.
If a) Z knows this to be the case. He is complicit in the fraud.
b) Z doesn't know this to be the case. He is also a victim of Y's fraud and deletes his ill-gotten copy in order to not be complicit in the fraudulent activity of Y

[Dacke]

you know, that's pointless and doesn't make any sense with piracy and the modern market.

I'm not surely a capitalist saying that a worker needs to get what he think he deserve, now if a worker is not an employee he needs to get that directly from the ones that makes use of his products, simply as that, let socialism and capitalism out... also because any socialism is ALWAYS on the worker's side, not on the consumer one.
That lazy dumb ass that pirate games doesn't deserve anything for any idealistic reason in the world, also if you want to apply socialism, it's needed to say that the state needs to put money in to finance anything is made, if not, there's no socialism and what you work on belong only to you 

The capitalism/socialism-statement was a counter to Movius' statement that IP and copyright are fundamentally socialistic ideas. I wasn't saying that piracy is made legitimate by socialism (though I personally feel they have some interesting elements in common). What I said was that concepts of IP and copyright are consequences of a capitalist system, where everything you produce needs to be considered property in order to keep the system functional.

As to your specific views on socialism, I don't think they are entirely accurate but I don't want to get too off topic. It might make an interesting, separate, discussion in the future.

Absolutely No.
When you buy a game you get an end-user agreement license (EULA) that strictly prohibite you to make that, buying the game you agree to the license.
Also, when you buy a disc you're not actually buying the game itself, but only something where the software is stored and a license to use that, you can't make copies because it will violate the license, and the ones that download\copy it CAN'T do that because they receive the eula only actually buying the game, there's no copyright inflingment, but there's theft, or a violation of the terms of use if you want to see that from this side, because you're using something you're not intended able to.

What I was responding to was the claim that copying software is some kind of physical theft that is wrong independent of IP-concepts. I find the whole pirate-discussion interesting and the key question is whether IP is a legitimate concept or not (which it might very well be) but I think it's very wrong to claim that piracy is the same act as physical theft.
 
If you want to go technical: you don't actually sign any EULA when you buy the game but rather when you install it. That would mean that it is ok to copy games and hand the copies away as long as you don't install it yourself. No, it is indeed the copyright-laws that place the actual limitations on your right to make copies.

[Dacke]

Who said anything about theft? I'm talking about fraud.

Y buys a game where Y agrees to pay gamemaker X $XXX for ownership of one copy of the game (which X created and owns) on the condition that Y provides nobody else with a copy of the game.
Y owns a copy of the game on his storage medium of choice.
Y produces a 2nd copy of the game which he gives to Z, knowing that it breaches the agreement he reached with X.
Y commits fraud.
If a) Z knows this to be the case. He is complicit in the fraud.
b) Z doesn't know this to be the case. He is also a victim of Y's fraud and deletes his ill-gotten copy in order to not be complicit in the fraudulent activity of Y

There you go, that's exactly the point I've been trying to get across. Pirating is not physical theft and if it is to be considered a crime I think fraud actually is a good comparison.

The question we've all been discussing is whether being the creator of a game grants you the right to dictate how the buyers may use said game. Copyright is simply an implementation of such license agreements on a bigger scale, they are not separate things.

[Movius]

There is no dictating of terms. No one is holding a gun to your head and saying "BUY THIS GAME UNDER THESE CONDITIONS OR I WILL PULL THE TRIGGER AND FIRE THE GUN. AS A DIRECT RESULT A BULLET WILL BE FIRED FROM THE GUN INTO YOUR SKULL AT SUFFICIENT VELOCITY TO PENETRATE THE SKULL AND INFLICT FATAL DAMAGE TO YOUR BRAIN." It is a voluntary agreement between two parties acting of their own free will..

[Paul Eres]

Unfortunatelly when trying to copy real objects the scale at which you can build is the least of your problems. Maybe I am not familiar with today's science but I generally have a good grasp of physics and biology.

Yes, but the difficulties have been worked out theoretically. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler for a summary.

Information, in order to exist somewhere else outside your imagination, needs a carrier, and the plum, in order to exist somewhere else outside your imagination, just needs to be. A plum is a plum. A book is not information, the words printed inside it are. Since the word 'carrier' or 'medium' implies a procedure of 'printing' information upon it, you can easily conclude than any information must be copyable (but I'm too lazy to derive this - is it not obvious?).

It's not obvious to me. To me, everything is both information and matter. You can't have anything without matter and you can't have anything without information. All matter has an informational aspect, and all information has a physical aspect. You can't simply separate the two and say that a game is information, because a game always necessarily has a physical aspect. Similarly, you can't take a person and say that he or she is just the mind, they also have a body, and the mind is inseparable from the body. To call matter simply a "carrier" for information is inaccurate, as is saying that a book and the words printed on it can be separated.

The meaning of words changes with time. This is a fact, I really hope you're not going to ask of me to prove it.

It's not a fact, it's bogus. The meanings (i.e. the referents, what words refer to) of words don't change over time, maybe many people believe that, but it's false. The uses of words and their definitions change over time, but the meanings do not. What a tribal group meant by "water" 100,000 years ago, whatever sound they used for it, is the same as what we mean by "water", they were referring to the same substance. The uses of words can change, but what they refer to cannot change. Something can't go from being information to not being information without it itself changing in some way, just as water can't go from water to not water without it itself changing in some way.

[Paul Eres]

The question we've all been discussing is whether being the creator of a game grants you the right to dictate how the buyers may use said game. Copyright is simply an implementation of such license agreements on a bigger scale, they are not separate things.

This isn't unique to IP, plenty of products come with agreements about how you may and may not use it.

Remember those bed mattress tags that say it's illegal to remove them? Sure, nobody went to jail for it, but it's illegal to remove them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_label

Similarly, you can't buy a cat or a dog and then torture it to death, there are rules about that.

It's illegal (I believe?) to unlock cell phones, so that they work with services other than the ones specified by the manufacturer.

Examples could go on endlessly, no matter which product you can think of, there are rules and agreements regarding its use, which you implicitly agreed to when buying it.

Implicit contracts exist, everything doesn't have to be explicit. A sign on the road with the speed limit is an implicit contract to go by that speed limit if you drive on that road. You don't sign anything that says you agree to follow their rule, but by using their product (the road) you implicitly agree to abide by their rules even if you didn't agree to the rules in explicit fashion.

[charon]

Unfortunatelly when trying to copy real objects the scale at which you can build is the least of your problems. Maybe I am not familiar with today's science but I generally have a good grasp of physics and biology.

Yes, but the difficulties have been worked out theoretically. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler for a summary.

I still think your claim is like 'yeah we got the technology we got bricks and mortar so sure we can build any house or bridge or tower you like' and then I say 'okay in that case use the bricks and mortar and build me a life-sized replica of Earth'...

To me, everything is both information and matter. You can't have anything without matter and you can't have anything without information. All matter has an informational aspect, and all information has a physical aspect. You can't simply separate the two and say that a game is information, because a game always necessarily has a physical aspect.

We're dancing in circles.

I am saying that 'something is information' precisely because no method of actually copying physical matter has been invented yet, therefore only things that I call 'information' may actually be copied while things that I do not call 'information' may not.

Once matter may be copied in the same way information can be copied today, the word 'information' might lose its meaning entirely (and so might the word 'matter' when we speak of it), disappear from the vocabulary or whatever. Most likely, the culture and society will/would change, because something like that was never possible before - so far, only information could be copied, and matter could not.

[Paul Eres]

At least it's theoretically possible to build a replica of earth, whereas it isn't theoretically possible to bring a dead star back to life. Building replicas of planets should be no more difficult technologically than building replicas of plums, the difference would only be in how much material, energy, and time is required.

I don't think information and matter would lose their meanings -- they would still refer to the same things: the substance itself and the organization of the substance, which together are both needed to create an entity.

That doesn't change regardless of what the technology level is, entities will always be in part substance, and entities will always be in part the organization of that substance, and it doesn't make sense to me that the ability to copy the organization of an entity would make that substance primarily its organization, and likewise doesn't make sense to me that the inability to copy the organization of another type of substance would not make that substance information. Games, like plums, are substance with organization, and the nature of substance and organization don't change with the ability to copy the organization.

So call games information if you like, but I think that's setting up an artificial system which loses sight of what's going on in reality: games have substance and organization, like every other entity, and simply because that organization can be easily copied does not mean the nature of games is only the organization of substance and not the substance too.

[Ragzouken]

This isn't unique to IP, plenty of products come with agreements about how you may and may not use it.

Remember those bed mattress tags that say it's illegal to remove them? Sure, nobody went to jail for it, but it's illegal to remove them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_label

Similarly, you can't buy a cat or a dog and then torture it to death, there are rules about that.

It's illegal (I believe?) to unlock cell phones, so that they work with services other than the ones specified by the manufacturer.

Examples could go on endlessly, no matter which product you can think of, there are rules and agreements regarding its use, which you implicitly agreed to when buying it.

Implicit contracts exist, everything doesn't have to be explicit. A sign on the road with the speed limit is an implicit contract to go by that speed limit if you drive on that road. You don't sign anything that says you agree to follow their rule, but by using their product (the road) you implicitly agree to abide by their rules even if you didn't agree to the rules in explicit fashion.

From the very article you linked to: 'The wording of the warnings printed on some law labels has caused a common misconception in the USA that removing such a label under any circumstance is a crime, prohibiting consumers from removing labels from items they have purchased.'

It would be illegal to torture a cat or dog to death whether you bought it or not. The 'owner'/seller of the animal couldn't choose whether that law applied to their product, or impose restrictions on how the animal was treated either.

As far as I am aware, it is illegal to not build in a mechanism to allow a phone to debranded/unlocked for use with another provider.

The road etc isn't really a product, the laws that govern the road and things in that class of a example can't be really compared to sales and the likes. You don't buy a stretch of road or anything, you pass through it.

[Gnarf]

(I believe?)

Exactly. When it comes to these things, it isn't incredibly straightforward and clear cut.

The process of buying a game seems to be a bit like this: You pick up a game at a store and pay some money for it. When you get home you put the game-disc into your computermachine and find a file on it with some text saying that you're only allowed to play the game while having a pancake on your head. You laugh it off because that's not how human beings do business and install it on both of your computers even though it specifically tells you to install it on only one. I've no idea if you're actually breaking a law or not, I'm not a lawyer specializing on the Simon says field of law, too many retarded technicalities, don't have time for that.

I don't have a problem with agreeing that piracy, generally speaking, is a not very nice thing to do. Though I don't think it's the worst thing you can possibly do, and there are tons of gray areas. And no matter if it's really totally the creator's right to decide that no one gets to play a game unless they live in Finland and pay him money on the first Friday after a solar eclipse, I don't really mind that piracy makes it harder to get away with stuff like that.

It is also totally bad in some ways. Very.

And sometimes I break speed limits.

[mewse]

It's simply copyright law.  You don't have the right to copy something created by someone else.  EULAs don't enter into it (unless you want to make a supplementary argument, making it about contracts instead of copyrights.  EULAs probably wouldn't count as contracts if seriously tested in a court of law, because they don't represent a meeting of minds, are entirely one-sided, are not presented to the end-user until after the purchase decision has been made and the shrink-wrap opened, and many/most software shops don't accept returns of software which has had the shrink-wrap removed.  But IANAL;  don't make important decisions based upon my amateur analysis)

If you don't accept copyright law, that's fine.  But you have to understand that virtually everyone else in the world does accept it.  And you have to not be surprised when the rest of the world doesn't condone your actions.  Especially those of us whose work you're illegally taking. 

And you have to not be surprised when you're fined or imprisoned for your illegal actions.

[Gnarf]

Twas just this talk about implicit contracts that made me recall wondering if I was breaking some some law or something if I didn't uninstall and install Diablo II or something once a week and every other weekend (or never played it at my dad's). Companies are full of shit and that.

But yeah, carry on. Plums. Aristotle believed they were part substance, part potentiality and part actuality. Which might mean that the word "potentiality" is not one of them Stephen Colbert words.

[Ragzouken]

I accept that copyright law applies and that piracy in general is not friendly, but I reserve the right to be suprised if someone is excessively fined or imprisoned at all for non-commercial piracy.

[mewse]

I reserve the right to be suprised if someone is excessively fined or imprisoned at all for non-commercial piracy.

Well, that's your right.  But it seems a little silly to me.

People have already been sued, fined, and imprisoned for non-commercial piracy of music and movies.  Do you really, honestly think that software makers can be far away from doing what authors of other forms of IP are already doing?


Especially after enduring the taunts of the people performing the illegal activities, in threads like this one.  Just saying.

[charon]

At least it's theoretically possible to build a replica of earth, whereas it isn't theoretically possible to bring a dead star back to life. Building replicas of planets should be no more difficult technologically than building replicas of plums, the difference would only be in how much material, energy, and time is required.

I was trying to say that making a plum from atoms is like making a planet from bricks.
You may be capable of building nanobots like you're capable of building houses from bricks, but so far, noone has ever tried to build a planet from bricks.

So call games information if you like, but I think that's setting up an artificial system which loses sight of what's going on in reality: games have substance and organization, like every other entity, and simply because that organization can be easily copied does not mean the nature of games is only the organization of substance and not the substance too.

I decide to stick to my definition for as long as replication and transfer of games remains momentary over any distance, and replication and transfer of food remains limited to crop growing and ships travelling across the oceans.

I would still like to know what this 'substance of games' is. Until I do, it's quite difficult for me to find any arguments against its existance...