Piracy is midnight oyster and clam harvesting without a license to break the oyster cartel, making restaurant oysters and clams more available and cheaper to customers.

It is from this grand tradition along the US West Coast that the notion of media piracy rose, and much like the Golden Age of Piracy robbing the Spanish Silver Train, piracy is associated with snatching ill-gotten gains from those who don't deserve it, sometimes benefiting communities that do. (YMMV).

Media Piracy is copyright infringement, which is totally not stealing.

The US Supreme Court taking content out of the public domain so that it can be reserved for private use isn't stealing either, but it causes more harm than piracy.

We also get little conversation about how copyright extensions and patent trilling robs the public use of public-domain content, especially when the Mouse is lobbying the federal government to extend rights further.

Most IP owners didn't create what they have, but bought it off someone else. I have little pity for rich people.

I'd say society is better off with no IP related temporary monopoly than the system we have. There are enough instances where creators die penniless and publishers make all the profits to suggest there already is no financial incentive for an inventor to invent. Like Goodyear, they do it more as a hobby or in the interest of society.

Maybe if we had social safety nets so everyone not rich wasn't desperate, we might be able to have a robust innovation sector that was less focused on using law to screw competitors and consumers.

To answer your question, for the non-tech-savvy having to pick a server is, yes, too much of a leap. We are conditioned in the industrialized capitalist world against making decisions we don't understand.

If we want to market it, we could make a wizard that randomly designates a server from a set of cooperating servers. Include also reminders that a user can join multiple servers and each one has separate rules (say, regarding posting NSFW material even to appropriate communities.)

I just talked to a Redditor who was entirely unfamiliar with the recent changes at Reddit.

Does the game just disappear if it was never cracked?

Considering there are tons of games that are no longer supported, the answer is yes, the game customer is left to the elements when the publisher decides they're done. And with the current DMCA, we're not even legally allowed to break DRM for legal purposes (such as to play games we bought when the DRM is no longer supported.)

Curiously, it does send a message for the determined end user that legality is only for suckers (or for companies who have to operate within the constraints of licensing). Curiously, Windows 10 and 11 depend on the ignorance of upper management regarding the degree to which Microsoft has surveillance access, since companies don't get to medium-sized without having a few skeletons in the accounting closet. I'm surprised so few companies haven't switched to Linux Red Hat (which has a similar support package) but then Red Hat is going through its own scandals right now.

Anyway, if your game is popular, you can expect the old version to be supported until the redux comes out. If it's a niche game produced by a company that the publisher bought a while ago and would like to forget, yes, it'll disappear into the aether as you watch.

I think the abortion and trans kids situations are putting into sharp relief the danger of large third parties knowing too much about us. Facebook is absolutely scanning its servers for signs of unwanted pregnancies and relaying that information to red state law enforcement. Other platforms may be doing the same thing.

Women in the US are advised not to use period-tracker apps, given they do often sell the data they glean, and don't discriminate against far-right interests. And anti-abortion organizations are shopping.

Yes. In order to run pirated content I had to run through a couple of hours of troubleshooting to disable the Microsoft anti-malware software, which would quarrantine and refuse to restore software without consent.

Pluton is a new name and may be Windows 11. Hopefully you can uninstall it with a third-party utility (windows utilities won't let you, and doing it by hand involves mucking around with the registry.l

I'm going to make the switch to Linux once I can brave it because Windows is malware and spyware and getting worse with each iteration.

If this lawsuit is ruled in favor of the plaintiff, it might lead to lawsuits against those who have collected and used private data more maliciously, from advertisement-targeting services to ALPR services that reveal to law enforcement your driving habits.

I think companies just started outsourcing to contract workers who can't afford legitimate software, so that when they sue the guy for piracy, he's just poor. His life may be ruined by the suit, but the company is fine.

Edit: Fixed sentence cohesion

I'd think that we're here for the quality of our experience and not for loyalty to a specific platform. Lemmy has some great advantages, especially for those of us fresh from Reddit who are sick and tired of corporate shennanigans and enshitification.

There's lemmy politics which seems about disagreements that may or may not lead to defederating. But this isn't for me a dealbreaker, and Reddit corporate made it super clear that it was on the side of the conservatives even if it found their hate speech brand-unsafe. My kind were not liked, and we could expect spittle in our drinks now and again.

So what would woo me away from Lemmy? Only if I found subs of my interests that I couldn't find here, and then I'd haunt both platforms.