Someone actually emailed Valve about this back in 2013. Here’s their response: https://i.imgur.com/4sa1Ln6.jpg

Thank you for contacting Steam Support. In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.

It seems like Valve wants us to think they have an EoL plan. With the goodwill they’ve built over the years, I want to believe them.

I’d say in your case piracy was 1000% justified. You bought it, you should be able to play it.

I think piracy is acceptable if one of these two conditions are met:

• You already own a copy of the game
• The game is no longer sold as new, such that any legitimate copy would have to be secondhand.

identifying legitimate problems with the best available option

Being closed source and using DRM aren’t necessarily problems. In Valve’s case, they aren’t at all. Valve’s DRM doesn’t hurt performance, and doesn’t stop you from playing their games offline.

So?

Closed source isn’t necessarily evil, neither is DRM. It’s all in how you implement it.

Valve’s launcher/drm are so much less intrusive than their competitors. They’ve demonstrated more openness to user customization and modding over the years than just about anyone else. If we didn’t have Valve, we would have more EA and Epic Games, do you really want that?

Obligatory I am not a lawyer, this is just my opinion.

A let’s play is a derivative work. You can claim fair use, but that’s hard to do. Fair use often boils down to a question of ‘does the derivative work compete with the original enough to cause a loss in sales?’ Think of when people film themselves watching a movie for YouTube, without cutting anything out and barely commentating over anything, meaning that someone could watch their video instead of the movie and get almost the same content.

In this case, he filmed himself playing the entirety of a visual novel. I think it’s fair to say that for a lot of people, his let’s play could absolutely substitute for playing the game, thus losing sales for the developer.

Probably just down to less stuff running in the background using up CPU cycles. I can’t imagine it makes a huge difference, but more than nothing.

It’s kinda tragic too. I do agree with the sentiment behind age verification, it is in the kids’ best interest that they not be using porn at that age. But there’s really no way to effectively enforce this without violating basic rights. There is no good solution. Given that dilemma, all we can do is try to better prepare parents to deal with this in their home.

Its enough to make me log into Reddit again. Wait a second…

Speaking of, how are regulators / governments going to deal with Lemmy? Virtually all existing legislation is intended to deal with centralized stuff run by companies, not federalized. By some regards, there may be actual legal issues with the current setup.

Lemmy by its nature is unlikely to ever face the scrutiny that corporate-owned platforms do, but that doesn’t mean we should be unprepared.

Edit: …virtually all existing legislation…