When does a question "support piracy and pirated games"?

Question

There's been a lot of talk recently about what it means to support piracy and pirated games. A very recent example is this question, in which a user asks a question that turns out to be a valid problem for a legitimate copy of the game, but in which he admitted in the comments that he's using a pirated version.

Even after it was clear that this problem exists in non-pirated copies, the question was still closed due to the mention of piracy.

Is the simple mention of piracy enough? Does the question need to be more intrinsically tied up with piracy? Where do we draw the line?

Answer 1

As I see it, closing a question strictly because the asker admits (or implies) the use of an illegal copy, is a misuse of close votes.

There are two major problems that arise from this, "Piracy == Close" policy. The first has been demonstrated by Sterno, who re-asked the question that sparked this whole debate.

Ignoring the comments and edit history of each question, here are each of the question bodies:

Question 1:

I'm doing quest Discerning the Transmundane on xbox 360 version 1.0.0.0. I've killed orcs, falmer, high elves, and dark elves but I can't harvest their blood. I can only search them(loot).

What am I doing wrong?

Question 2:

I'm doing quest Discerning the Transmundane and I'm on level 15.

I've killed orc, falmer, high elves, and dark elves but I can't harvest their blood, I can only search them(loot).

I'm playing on the xbox360, game version 1.0.0.

One of these questions is still open, and the other has (at time of writing) been put on hold as off-topic. Which is which? Does it matter?

Voting on a question (up, down, or close) should be done based on the merits of the question alone. Before voting to close, ask yourself: "Would this question be acceptable if it was asked by someone else or without the last paragraph?". If the answer to that is, "yes", then you should not be closing the question, you should be fixing it!

The second problem with such a strict policy is one of community stigma and retroactive consequences.

To use a personal example, I have asked one hundred and thirty six questions and answers in the Skyrim tag.

If, tomorrow, I were to admit that I have never owned a legitimate copy of Skyrim, and every single one of those was based on a pirated version of the game, what should happen? I'd have admitted to using a pirated copy, which means that all 21 of those questions should be closed? That all 115 of my answers should be deleted and invalidated? Should I never be allowed to ask a question in the skyrim tag again?

We don't judge the source of Arqade's content, we judge it's quality. I suppose I'm advocating for a specific, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy -- as long as you're not actively advocating to pirate content (or looking for us to help you do so), you're welcome to share your knowledge, or ask questions.

And I'm going to have to strongly disagree with Badp about identifying pirated content. With the rare exception, I'd be willing to wager that the vast majority of questions on Arqade would be identical regardless of the copyright status of your game.

And I'm going to have to disagree that "version 1.0.0.0" or its like can be used as a reliable indicator, as well; people without wi-fi may never update games on their console, Steam Users can prevent automatic updates of their library, and when developers release stand-alone patches, even pirated versions can be "up to date".

I agree with Agent86 -- if all references to pirated content can be removed from a question (or answer), that should be done, and the question let stand. If that means the only right answer becomes, "Update the game to the latest version", I am okay with that.

Answer 2

When I think of the "no piracy" policy, I think of avoiding situations where we're suggesting an illegal or questionably legal activity to further another illegal or questionably legal activity.

We close questions to prevent answers - in this case, the "evil" of the answer is the furtherance of this illegal activity. I have no issues with this and support it as a policy.

If there's a question, and the "piracy" is either implied, suggested, or otherwise suspected, I tend to view it through the lens of whether or not other people could be legitimately in this situation. After all, DRM issues and anti-piracy checks can occur to legitimate buyers, and glitches arise in all games regardless of how they were acquired.

If I can either assume good faith or cross out the irrelevant portions of the question, I suggest we proceed without closing. Especially in cases where it's up to the community to judge the actions and intentions of the asker beyond what's present in the question, I'm inclined to let things pass. However, if the piracy and the question's issue are intertwined and inseparable, and valid answers will only condone further bad acts, then close.

If we take a look at a similar situation where, say, a user is leaving good answers but then going on a curse-filled litany at the end of every answer, we would probably edit the curses out, and leave the answers as is. Then we'd deal with the user's behavioral issue separately from the post.

If we close valid questions on the basis that piracy is tangential to the asker's situation, we are punishing the user by proxy by punishing the question. "You're a pirate, evildoer, and therefore unworthy of an answer to your question, no matter how valid the question is." I really kind of hate punishing users by proxy, as I don't think it works well and it causes all sorts of issues.

Instead, perhaps we should punish the user directly for their misdeeds, and allow the question to stand - that way, the benefit for the answer is reaped by all, while the punishment for the negative activity is felt directly by the user.

Answer 3

One of the founding principles of the network is to focus not on people, but on information. It's why we disallow discussion, why votes are focused on posts and not people, and a host of other components we have enabled to improve the quality of our Q&A above all. A great question asked for stupid reasons (though this tends to be done more often on, say, Stack Overflow) is still a great question. Following from this, our general approach on things is to judge not on intent, but on content.

Let's thusly delve into the problems where this started - someone openly (and, typically, stupidly) admits that they're yohoho-ing all up ins with their wares when asking a question about a problem they faced in the game. We know the user is a salty seadog but since we judge on content, we look at the question. The fact that the game is pirated is actually considered pertinent data at this start because until evidence is shed otherwise, we have no ability to ascertain whether or not that data is relevant to the problem. There's basically three ways this can go from here.

• The problem has nothing to do with it being a pirated copy, and is a legitimate problem that normal gamers also run into. I agree with Raven and agent here. This eliminates the pirate-ness from being pertinent data and it can thus be removed from the question, leaving us a legitimate question. Requiring a landlubber to re-ask the question is not only focusing on the user instead of the post, but it also creates extra work for several parties that serves no benefit to our goal of content generation. The question is a legitimate question and should live as such, and the original asker is irrelevant. If anyone else could've asked it, it's them who decided not to ask it in the first place.

• The problem is entirely because it's a pirated copy. Basically, if the problem's identity boils down to "You're a pirate and getting a real copy of the game would fix this problem", that's all we can offer. I would venture that support for pirated copies are not in the scope of our knowledge, in the same way that news is outside of our scope. If we wish to be anti-piracy, then allowing for a subset community of Pirates Helping Pirates with their copies of the game is not really conducive to our end goals. I mean, it even abbreviates to PHP. Point is that this lets us be a safe harbor for pirates to work with each other - they have other places they can do this, just like people can visit news centers to get news.

  I personally don't think that should leave the question open. For the same reason we shouldn't point people at news sites as an Answer to a speculation question, I don't think we really benefit by having "You're a pirate and that's why you can't have nice things" as an Answer. Both of these are general advice that we can and do give without people needing to ask. I would suggest that we close this scenario as Off-Topic when we identify it as such.

• The problem exists in normal copies, but the solution doesn't apply to the original asker because it persists for different reasons because pirates. We should cater to the normal game problem and provide solutions for those. We won't be able to help the asker directly since, again, PHP is bad. Just like dealing with someone who asked the wrong question to solve a problem they have (the XY problem as it's commonly known elsewhere), the route here is to work with the asker on how to break this down - we basically give them the choice between the two routes above. We can either remove the piracy references and focus the question on the legitimate problem and they accept that it won't solve their own copy, or we leave it as focusing on the pirated version which warrants closure. Leaving it open to address the proper question does mean we probably lose the capability to have an accepted answer, but in most cases we can have a highly voted correct answer that is enough of an indication of how things go.

This all relies on us making the identification of the scenario in the first place, though, and this may not be immediately apparent or even for a while it may not be apparent. Anecdotally, it actually doesn't take very long for folks to identify whether something exists as a normal copy problem versus a pirate-only problem. Someone venturing to answer the question tends to also identify it as a real-copy problem. Until such happens, a simple comment along the lines of "We do not perform support for pirated copies of games, so unless this also is a problem in normal copies, it is unlikely that we will be able to provide a solution for you." addresses everything nicely. Then we let it sit, either as is or until we get the necessary identifying information. We are of no obligation to do any research on our own part, and I venture that we shouldn't waste any of our time and effort to do such, if we believe that it is most likely a result of being a pirate. If it isn't a prevalent problem that exists outside of pirates, then the question will languish, it won't attract votes, and and it will be reaped for inactivity eventually, which is even less work on our part to clean up. There's plenty of time for people who would know and can prove the legitimacy of a question to speak up in its defense.

In summary, the mention of piracy does not invalidate a problem until it is identified that piracy is the root of the problem, is how I would approach it. This makes it mostly in-line with a lot of what agent86 and Raven Dreamer are saying, though I do differ in that I do believe that questions wherein we identify that piracy is, indeed, the root of the problem, that we are better served to simply close these rather than post answers which equivalently amount to "stop being a pirate".

...y'know, half the reason I held off for so long was because I wanted to write less but this still feels like a monstrously long post.

Answer 4

In general, the pirated version of a game really is a different game from the "public" one.

• The public version gets updates, the pirated usually doesn't.
• The public version integrates with Steam, Origin and pals, the pirated thinks it does but it doesn't.
• The public version passes any internal anti-piracy checks, the pirated doesn't and may have "extra super-special seriously explosive features" as a result.
• The public version can play in MP, the pirated doesn't.
• The public version is one and only one, while multiple different pirated versions of one game can be published, and the user probably doesn't know what version they've got (at best we'll get "uh, it's the one with the most active torrents")
• We explicitly chose not to support pirated versions of a game, and all of the variables they introduce.

For this reason, the asker may not be helped by an answer that is otherwise correct. This is a problem because:

• The asker is the one and only person who gets to accept an answer
• The asker doesn't have the version of the game we support and answer to to check if the answer works or not

At the end of the day, we aren't going to run out of question numbers. If the question also applies to legitimate customers of the game, let them ask instead. Let them get the reputation from the question; let them exercise the duty of accepting an answer; let them get in touch with answerers, regardless of reputation, with the comment area.

Sure, we can make exceptions to these rules where it makes sense, and my close vote was just a regular user's 5th close vote. But this is an area where I'm a little less lenient than usual. :)

Answer 5

We are not here to judge users (though educating them might sometimes be adequate...). While posts and comments clearly implying the necessity of piracy should be removed due to the legal implications, the mere fact that someone uses a pirated version of a game does not render an otherwise valid question suddenly invalid. Any traces relating to piracy should however be removed, and as long as the question remains valid for legally obtainable versions of a game it should remain here.

While the question mentioned here is posted by someone who admitted they pirated the game, we should not make quick conclusions - as a false positive take this question where I was not the only one to first assume that one meanwhile very established user was asking us on how to actively pirate a specific game. And would we have been too paranoid about this back then, we'd probably have driven away one quite helpful user.

Answer 6

I'm not very clear on what policy or practice has been established or agreed upon.

The impression I have in the mixture of answers and ensuing comments was: the onus should be on site members to differentiate between intent and content by encouraging edits and semantics as a means to mitigate negative reaction and sentiment.

That idea seems like rationalizing a zero-sum to get stop-loss.

I feel the policy shouldn't be to deal with it case by case, but to avoid it altogether regardless of how grey-the area is until it's no longer grey. I typically don't like a closed policy of system, but it is of benefit in some areas.

The following examples are why I think having a strict policy is a better alternative to what I understand the feeling to be.

A (now closed) question regarding Minecraft would not launch was posted a few days ago. The asker was told support would only be given for "vanilla" versions and the official launcher. Okay, cool. In this case, there's no support in official capacity for launchers other than what's packaged with Minecraft.

The next day, another Minecraft Launcher question was asked: Do I have a cracked Launcher?

This is not directly a piracy question but it isn't clear whether the subtext of the question was motivated to learn ways to side-step or develop additional practice to thwart piracy. The nature of the question is unclear, but the semantics of it make it answerable. I answered based on the semantic presentation.

Another example:

Can you share Steam game files - was answered with a reminder the recipients would need to have license to use the software once the transfer of files was completed.

Giving the steam Game Data to a friend - has an accepted answer reminding the asker would have to provide license keys to the recipients.

These linked questions have two important and opposing details: onus of responsibility for obtaining license. It appears this difference is from rules within specific titles but in level of understanding by the person answering and lack of official support for the act to clearly define a solvent answer.

If the question about how to handle piracy is somewhat contingent upon semantics and content, then so too should be the answer. When the official source of the product in question has no answers on what or how to do something with the product, regardless of how the question is worded, we should refrain from giving an answer that leads to questionably legal outcome or encourages use of the service or product outside the scope supported by the source.

I don't think it gets any simpler than that.

Answer 7

SE's policy is to not dictate to us how to handle piracy, so studiously avoiding even the possibility of being involved in helping someone using a pirated game isn't our concern. That means my concerns about exposure to liability aren't relevant – SE has lawyers (while I don't) and have presumably consulted them and made an informed policy about how to handle this. If they're not worried, then I'm not worried.

(I would delete this answer normally since now it doesn't address the question, but I'll leave it for those who can't see deleted posts and their comments.)

We expose the company that runs the SE network to legal liability internationally if we knowingly leave open a question about pirated content. It is not actually known if doing this is illegal of us, but it is not worth out time or the company's money to hash this out with a day (months) in court in potentially many jurisdictions.

If a question is about a pirated game, we must close it or risk financially ruining all of SE. Piracy-related questions, with any smidge of piratical activity in the question, are off topic for good reason. We have zero wiggle room to hash out here.

Unless we want to bring in SE's legal council, of course. I don't think that's a good idea though.