Video games as a special case in copyright ethics

A brief thought on the inapplicability of a common argument against file sharing to the case of old video games:

The most common argument against file sharing is that artists lose money when people download rather than purchase music, films, etc. Now, for a variety of reasons this is actually not a very compelling argument to anybody who really thinks about it. It's full of holes. Chances are very good that piracy actually makes artists more money - but that's not the subject of this post. For the purposes of this post, all that really matters is that this bad argument at least has some sort of superficial, surface plausibility. It's not completely outlandish. When it comes to most music and films - and certainly to anything remotely popular - the option exists of going into a physical store and buying a physical plastic disc for money. Through the long chain of middlemen, at least some of that money makes its way into the pocket of the people who worked hard to produce that piece of work. When you don't buy the work this way, but download it from a file sharing network, then this chain of events doesn't happen, and so in some loose sense, the artists "lose" money. You can see why people might be sympathetic to this point of view the first time they think about it.

Even if this argument was absolutely bulletproof, it's interesting to note that it absolutely does not apply for video games beyond a certain age, because the video game market works very differently to the music and film market, in that products age extremely rapidly. If I felt like buying some music or films which were produced in the 70s or 80s, I could easily do that. There's still a big market for those products, and so people keep producing them to keep up with demand, and they get released on new forms of media when they come out. However, if I wanted to play a video game produced even in the 90s, I'm probably out of luck. It's just not possible to buy a game that old off the shelf. No store on Earth stocks them.

I'd really like to play Final Fantasy VII some day, since it is widely regarded as a classic of its genre, and not having played it makes me feel like I'm missing out on an important part of being a geek, kind of like a fantasy fiction fan who's never read Lord of the Rings. I have two options for acquiring FFVII. I could buy a second hand copy from someone, which is the perfectly legitimate, law-abiding citizen option, or I could download it from a file sharing network, which would be illegal, and make me a "pirate".

The thing is, there's no solid ethical argument for why anyone should buy a second hand copy. If you do so, none of the money you spend (and this might be a lot of money - because the game is so famous and people are reluctant to part with it, copies can sometimes go for over $100 on eBay, more than the cost of a brand new modern game) goes to the people who helped to make that game, to compensate them for their time and creativity. Every last cent of it goes to the person you're buying it from, to compensate them for giving up a physical possession. By downloading the game illegally, no money changes hands at all, but then nobody is giving up any physical possessions either. There's absolutely no difference between the two options from the point of view of the artists. They certainly don't lose money when you download it. There's simply no option today by which you can acquire the game and compensate the creators. The nearest you could come is to pirate the game and then send a cheque for a tiny amount to every writer, programmer, animator, composer, etc. who worked on the game, which is obviously not feasible for a bunch of reasons. Unless you're a devoted collector who actually wants the physical product to put on a shelf, the most sensible thing to do is to just download it and not feel one iota of guilt.

This is a good example of where copyright law does far less to protect artists than it does to hurt consumers, by making the difficulty of legally acquiring a game directly proportional to how popular it is. Imagine how much less popular the Beatles would be amongst young people today if the only legal way to get one of their albums was to buy it second hand for $100!