So much for free markets, democracy and freedom of speech. Yes, they blocked it because of copyright infringement but let’s face it, piracy should be viewed as a market option for people to get their content, providers need to step up their game and make their content easier to get to from official / payed sources instead of attacking piracy this way. If they can’t do it, well, their loss, eventually someone who can will be on the market.

If piracy is a market option, that implies it’s legal (or at least decriminalized), therefore copyright is not enforceable. There are all kinds of issues if that’s the case, depending on how much of copyright we choose to not enforce.

If piracy is decriminalized, what’s to stop someone from setting up a store and completely undermining digital distribution?

I think penalties for piracy are unreasonable, but I don’t think piracy should be completely decriminalized. The penalty should be capped at a reasonable number (say, median retail price times number of distributed copies, capped at 50, reduced based on means; if multiple games, cap at 10 games worth). That shouldn’t ruin most people, but it should deter enough to preserve demand for legal copies. Also, since penalties are reduced, it’s probably not worth it for big publishers to go after pirates unless it’s actually impacting their business.

good because fuck copyright.