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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

It's sad how many people here lose their ethical compass and reach for rationalizations (homebrew!) when it comes to something that is clearly mainly used for software piracy.

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As much as you would like it to be, copyright is the status quo not per see the ethical choice. It's also not the only way to remunerate creation.

I don't personally care about copyright. I don't pirate video games because they are generally artistically as interesting as blockbuster movies which is to say not at all but I don't really have an issue with people denying profits to the entertainment industry.

Writing emulators is fun in and of itself by the way. I don't think most of the developers use them to play.

Imagine your friend is an indie developer, he releases his game, people pirate it, with the argument that he is merely part of the entertainment "industry" and thereby not worthy of an income.

Indie developer and large corporations like Nintendo are not fungible. Anyway, indie developers chose their plight. Most of them don't really make money so it's pretty clear they don't do it trying to strike rich. Plenty fund themselves through means which are not linked to copyright like kickstarter.

The fact that the system currently relies on copyright is not in itself a justification for it nor does it means it's a good system.

Tons of people do things that might one day make money while not actually ever making money. For me that's an indie game. But that kind of mostly unrewarded labour won't be done if getting paid one day relies on, essentially, begging. Speaking for myself I would rather spend my time on something that benefits me in that case, like a gym or a cooking class.

Not my concern how other people use software, the same as it's not my concern if they're using the same web browser as me but to do something illegal. I use emulators to have a better experience playing games I own.

I own a Wii U. I own a copy of Breath of the Wild for Wii U, a game still sold for the Switch. Is it unethical if I dump the files for Breath of the Wild from my Wii U to run with Cemu on my Steam Deck?

No, but that's not how most people use Switch emulators.

I'm sure there's a survey of Switch emulator users you can cite to support this claim, right?

Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...

So, no. The answer is no.

There is no way for you to, with the certainty you did, say what you said. You have absolutely no way of actually knowing what people use emulators for, and you're just pulling it out of your ass and pretending it's the absolute truth.

So no, you have no way of knowing that jumping out of an airplane without a parachute would kill you, since you can't provide a peer-reviewed study showing with p>0.95 that jumping out of an airplane without parachute kills you. So you have no way of actually knowing etc

Next time, don't make sweeping claims that you have no way of backing up and pretending that what you're spouting is God's given truth to the world. None of what you said is evident or obvious, and it's completely ridiculous to compare it to jumping out of a plane.

You are making a massive assumption based on nothing but your own beliefs, and you need to make it clear that the assumption is nothing more and certainly not the fact you are parroting it to be.

If someone could show that 50.1% of videos viewed with VLC were pirated, would VLC be unethical to use and support?

No. Everyone does understand that such usage is fine. It's like owning a gun. You can use it legitimately to display on the wall or illegitimately to rob a liquor store. In the case of guns the fear for illegitimate usage is such that a lot of countries chose to restrict gun ownership in general.

Not everyone understands that. There are plenty of people at Nintendo who would still tell you that is illegal

Even Nintendo and Sony themselves directly benefit from emulation community:

https://twitter.com/PCBrown/status/794210799199760384

https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1060617281661595648

Ethics and legality are orthogonal. Not all legal activities are ethical, and not all ethical activities are legal.

Pirating videogames is clearly unethical. It's a form of freeriding.

It's not "clearly unethical", there is much more nuance than a "black or white" morality. It's also paramount to proper preservation of works. We can't trust rightsholders to be the stewards of their own preservation, as we have historically seen them destroy works because they don't want to store the archive. Given that copyright's end game is the public domain, I don't believe a rightsholder should even have the right to destroy a work. They owe that work to the public in the long term. If you believe that is "entitlement", then you argue against the core reason for copyright's existence, according to the copyright law of the US (which has also permeated the rest of the world in effect).

Some pirates may just want free shit, yes. But some pirates, especially modern ones, really are working more on a preservationist angle and intending to ensure that works aren't lost or destroyed. Rightsholders aren't forced to ensure that the public actually has access to a work once copyright expires, so the public must ensure that for themselves.

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