“curtail developer choice” is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that’s almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.

Absolutely. Every indicator available suggests Enshittification will hit the subscription models within the next few years.

Sure, we’d all like that, but pretending that piracy is some sort of noble way to bring about a collectivist creators’ paradise is yet more self-serving fantasy.

Not really, because obviously nobody who sincerely believed it was of no value would spend their time downloading it. The contradiction is in simultaneously claiming that something is of no value and therefore shouldn’t be paid for, whilst still expending effort to illegally copy it, this proving that it did have value. The only way to square it would be to claim that you’re the one who created new value by the act of downloading it, which is blatantly nonsense.

I hate IP trolls as much as the next person, but that feels almost like a non-sequitur

And I’m saying that it’s a strawman, because that’s not the principle copyright law operated on in the first place.

It works for anything small scale enough for its creators to be able to do is as a side hustle that may or may not pay off. Try funding a triple-A game that way and see how far you get.

Thats a pretty story, but completely unconnected to reality. If it worked like that, id be okay with it.

What do you think an investor is then?

Investors became investors by paying creators for their work in advance without knowing what they’d produce. It’s incredibly short-sighted to say “hey, the creator already got their paycheck so my purchase makes no difference now”.

Maybe it would help to think of it as paying the creator for their next game.

The problem with almost every pro-piracy argument like this is that they fundamentally require a significant percentage of the population to disagree with it. “People who can pay will pay and I’m not taking anything from them” only works for as long as both the general population and retailers regard piracy as wrong and keep funding all those games, movies etc for you.

Heck, all you pirates should be upvoting anti-piracy posts like this, we’re the ones keeping your habit funded…

not actually true

the pirate would not have bought the copy anyways, but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire

Also, the person deciding whether or not they “would have” paid for it, has a strong incentive to kid themselves that they wouldn’t. Imagine if cinemas worked that way, and you could just walk in and announce that you weren’t going to buy a ticket anyway and since there’s a seat over there still empty it’s not going to cost them anything for you to sit in it. They’d go out of business by the end of the week.

Also also, either the thing you’re copying has value that arose from the effort of creating it, or it doesn’t. If it’s of value, then it’s reasonable to expect payment for it. It’s it’s not of value, then you shouldn’t miss not having it.

This is a specious analogy. e-books from libraries are already heavily controlled and are usually quite expensive to provide. Physical copies have their own inbuilt limits to distribution.

You’re treating copyright like it’s some sort of hardline moral stance against consuming any media you haven’t directly paid for, when actually it’s more like a very long list of compromises to balance the conflicting requirements of creators’ needs to be compensated for their work versus society’s need to benefit from that work. This is why lending libraries, fair use etc are legal and piracy isn’t.

Yeah, OP’s take is like that of petulant child arguing semantics as though it changed a thing. Doubly cringe for adding that second section at the bottom where he depicts his opponent giving up and agreeing with him.

yeah I thought it looked kind of gay notthattheresanythingwrongwiththat

I can’t follow the point you seem to be trying to make.

The point is that it’s really easy to point at stuff after the fact like it’s obvious. Take for example your mention of flags; the World Wide Web Consortium recommends against their use, because countries aren’t languages, and so the use of flags to represent them is potentially contentious depending on what market you’re selling your product in and which flag you choose. Any screwup you make there would be really easy for some smartass to show up afterwards and say “well obviously you shouldn’t use a Taiwan flag to represent Traditional Chinese if you’re selling in China, dumbass, you shouldn’t need special training to know that… and while we’re at it, at least a few of the 8 million Ukrainians who speak Russian probably aren’t keen on identifying themselves in their profile with a Russian flag either”.

Again, and I feel like I’m repeating myself here, my point isn’t that you’re incorrect, it’s that getting on your high horse about it and calling people dumb is kind of a neckbeard move because every aspect of i18n has the potential to make anyone look dumb.

Nobody’s arguing that it’s the right way to do it, we’re just saying that breaking out words like “dumb” after the fact from the comfort of our keyboards, over problems that aren’t necessarily obvious at development time if you’ve not had i18n training, is kind of harsh.

Yes, this one. i18n was a three day training course at my last workplace, because things that seem really obvious if you’re an Arabic speaker browsing a Russian website, aren’t at all visible to the original developer who has their environment set to English, develops in English, puts all the frontend labels in a “messages” config file to be sent for translation by another department in another country, and will likely never even see the end result.

While reading this I had a sudden flash of inspiration in which I saw clearly exactly how gravity works, but then when I started typing I forgot again. It’s quite frustrating

Yeah the irony of it all is that professionally subtitled shows were already inferior to fansubs, because the fansubbers were a self-selecting group of people who were fans of that show specifically. I guess Crunchyroll realized that their subs sucked anyway so why pay money for them?