Stop Defending Corporations from Piracy, You Freaks

There are all sorts of video game discourses you shouldn’t get into which I am simply too stupid to ignore, and of those, probably the weirdest is the crush of bootlickers and pretend Internet naval captains getting their ships of bullshit ready to defend Nintendo, manufacturer of the best-selling console in the world right now, from the possibility that some video game players might be pirating one of its new releases and worse, playing it on PC with an unlocked frame rate and higher resolution!

Kotaku published this article by Zack Zwiezen on Saturday evening: “Metroid Dread Is Already Running On Switch Emulators.” In it, Zwiezen writes, “Via the popular Yuzu open-source emulator, Dread is already possible to play with custom controls and unlimited FPS settings, which is to say, more powerfully than it runs on its native Switch.” In the comments and on Twitter, gamers rushed to point out that letting people know that Metroid Dread could be pirated was, apparently, irresponsible:

“Older games, I can understand – but encouraging the torrenting/pirating of a game one day after its’ release? For fuck’s sake,” one commenter wrote underneath the article itself.

“I support archival and even deeper rights for the end user of software than currently exist, but this… this feels wrong,” said another.

Twitter user @theWellRedMage said, “Hey @NintendoAmerica @NintendoEurope @Nintendo @FBI can you get Kotaku shut down? That’d be great.”

VGC News editor Andy Robinson linked to the article and said, “So we’re just promoting piracy now? What on Earth is going on here.”

Since yesterday the post has been pretty substantially edited, and now has a disclaimer at the bottom: “An earlier version of this story was understood by many readers to be a direct suggestion to illegally download this just-released game. We regret this interpretation.”

Folks are not handling the idea that anyone could be “stealing” 60 whole dollars from Nintendo – who I must remind you is the console leader right now and also just got done selling tens of millions of video games over the last couple years through a pandemic – all that well. “Kotaku” has been trending all day, and if you just got online without any context you might be under the impression that the sky is fucking falling.

People are upset because Nintendo hasn’t prioritized their subsidiary studios who typically make Metroid games for like 20 years, and this is the first Metroid title in a while (See also, Bayonetta.), and they view this article and the knowledge it contains of other people’s behavior as some kind of existential threat – to them? to Metroid? to Nintendo??? It’s not really all that clear.

The facts are these: Nintendo is not only one of the video game companies that is doing the best in this whole fucked pandemic situation, it is also one of the most heavily litigious companies in the world when it comes to intellectual property (IP) enforcement. If there is any moral or ethical quandary in Zwiezen and Kotaku’s reporting on this emulation situation (which has since been picked up by PC Gamer), it’s not that they’re going to affect Metroid Dread sales at all; it’s that the extra publicity that comes from Kotaku’s platform is going to attract the eyes and appetites of Nintendo’s horrible legal team.

In 2018, the entertainment company filed lawsuits against several ROMhack websites, leading to their shutdown. In late 2019, they brought litigation against ROMUniverse, which resulted in a $2 million summary judgment awarded to them from the sole proprietor owner of the site. That sole proprietor has been so thoroughly ruined by the whole situation that the company can’t even get $50 from him and is seeking a permanent injunction from the court against him. In late 2020, the company brought yet another series of lawsuits against physical hacking device makers, and one such group, Team Xecuter, was targeted by the Department of Justice and two of its members, Gary Bowser and Max Louarn, were arrested and charged with 11 felonies, including a count of fraud. In the lawsuit against Bowser, Nintendo wants “$2,500 for each trafficked device, as well as $150,000 for each copyright violation.”

So, you see, Nintendo doesn’t need a privateer navy of simps crying over spilled sales of Metroid Dread, they already have a squad of stormtroopers in IP enforcement at their disposal, ready to fuck over anyone who dares to crack open their code for any reason. But hey, if you really can’t get over your bootlicking, if you absolutely must continue caping for a company that made billions of dollars in sales off the backs of quarantined and isolated people in the pandemic, they are always hiring more corporate IP shock troops (see featured image).

Even stripping away all the benign justifications for it, like archival or access in the developing world/global south, IP piracy is a simple moral good. And even more specifically, digital intellectual property and its enforcement is more and more apparently bad for the ability of culture to actually flourish than it is good for protecting any kind of “property rights.”

Think about how closed the Internet has become as all content is siloed into one of a handful of social media networks.

Think about the strangleholds corporations like Disney have, where their ownership of multiple IP franchises and whole other corporations has led to a stagnating film and television culture that almost exclusively revolves around one of their pieces of content, exchanged periodically throughout the year for the next piece of derivative content.

Think about the effect anti-piracy efforts by the RIAA had on the music industry; now “legitimate” streaming services fuck artists over harder than piracy ever did. Video games are setting themselves up for a similar hellscape: premium, closed subscription services like Apple Arcade, PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass are easing the burden of “ownership” on the customer while their corporations are removing legitimate ways to actually own digital and physical games.

Think about how Twitch streamers and YouTube creators have had to struggle and fight for years against automated copyright strikes and byzantine appeals processes because some algorithm thought it detected a clip of someone else’s IP in the video or audio. All of this goes back to intellectual property and its enforcement, and none of it is great for our pop culture, either now or for future generations.

Hell, the fucking pandemic has become the site of an IP battle as basically anywhere that isn’t Western Europe, the UK or the United States can’t get enough fucking vaccines to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

Intellectual property and its enforcement, and not piracy of digital content, has made the internet less free and open, constrained creativity, caused the price of access to content to go up, created artificial obsolescence in physical products like the PS Vita, and even exacerbated a pandemic’s toll on the world. It does not need defending.

If anything, it needs more piracy to confront it.^[1]And before anyone says shit everything on my website is in the public domain, you fucks