Are Ripped Games considered Pirated?

[Joe Forster/STA]

Oh, there's nothing complex about this!

Authors (who create stuff from "nothing") give up most their rights to publishers (who sell already created stuff) because it's publishers that have the money to keep authors alive while they're creating their stuff. (You can't create a multi-million USD game alone, without financial support.) But then publishers rip off authors by 1) overpricing stuff and 2) keeping the vast majority of the profits. It's not us, users, who (possibly) rip off authors; it's publishers who rip off both authors and users.

Don't give in to capitalist propaganda! Most legal constructs (licenses, agreements) exist to protect capitalists, not everyday people. If they're legally allowed to do anything to increase their profits, they will do it, no ethics whatsoever. This includes lying about profit losses and using emotionally charged words like "stealing" and "piracy". Obviously, you can't even steal digital information because that would mean that the original owner loses one of his or her copies/instances of it; you can only duplicate or share it like ideas where the original owner keeps the copy/instance. Human society has always been based on such sharing (spoken language and writing was invented to help with it) but capitalists are piggy-backing the system for their own good. Some authors actually love their works being remixed - including being made fun of - under "fair use" rights as that proves that they made significant cultural impact.

So, please, feel free to do whatever you like to, just don't discuss it on this forum.