Who is Jequesto and what was this law you are talking about?
Please enlighten me.

Anyway, people:
It's not about thought control - we already have thought control. Especially if you consider what you are being taught at school / college / university and what they want us to think. But no more conspiracy theories please.

It's about rewarding (debatably) immoral and obviously criminal thoughts

"GOGs users reward criminal thoughts!" Now that's a headline pleasing my eyes.

Your analogies are interesting but not quite on point.

The difference being in this case:

1. Person A thought about acquiring something unlawfully but didnt do it.
2. Person B and C acquire that thing lawfully and give it to him (nothing illegal or immoral occurs).

In your first analogy:

1. Person A thought about doing something immoral.
2. Person B and C suggest person A could do immoral (cheating on wife).

In your second analogy:

1. Person A thought about doing something illegal.
2. Person B suggest Person A should do the illegal act anyway.

Like I say, I find your analogies interesting, but they are bad ones. As a result, I will not be rewarding you with any free games :)

Hey go easy on me, will you. :-)

My second analogy isn't wrong. You're "implying" (oh I love that word) that the person should do the illegal act... But I didn't write that. It's bad, but for other reasons.

The correct analogy would be:

"I didn't rob my neighbors Ferrari and stole his keys from greedy (hopefully not dead and cold) hands, because I felt bad out it."

"Great job, here take mine."
"And mine..."

It's a boring and dull Analogy. Nobody wants to read about that. Ferraris are so "yesterday".

Oh and for goodness sake, don't reward me for my posts - reward those doom bringing do-gooders who supported and foster criminal thoughts with their gifts...

Interesting perspective, but the analogies listed are clearly of a different order of magnitude than what transpired.

No illegal acts were rewarded, and no grand philosophical statements made.

Just a simple matter of someone wanting a game, not having the game, and people gifting it, as they often do here; nothing sinister about it.

Relax, not every action speaks of a manifesto :-)

College students always have drugs on them. That alone would have been worth it.

Educational subsidy that people don't have to ask for. Intelligent people produce more value. And piracy is more efficient than getting games into public libraries.

I've been yearning for a certain game on GoG, but I've not mustered the strength and money to buy it just yet. The thing is, one of my friends has... acquired it through other means (the GoG version, too), and for some reason insists he could "give" it to me every time we happen on the subject. He seems absolutely flabbergasted every time I refuse. He can't understand that this is a service I feel some sort of respect toward, and that there is no way he can "give" it to me since it doesn't belong to him anyway.

The silliest thing is that he's not played it once. It's just sitting there on his hard-drive, as if it's sole purpose was to tempt me. (he doesn't do so on purpose, he was genuinely interested on the game when he got it, but his attention span is woefully short)

Not that I pirate other games anyway, and I've not actually done any abandonware either after discovering GoG. (actually my moral views about that changed radically with GoG, I don't really condemn if others do it even now, but I don't find it acceptable for myself.

I'd say GoG has done many things quite right to earn the kind of trust one can read from this topic.

But I say again: If you become evil like everyone else, I will turn against you in a second >: ) So don't.

Bzzt! Wrong answer!

That you should not commit a crime, and then tell everyone you did not commit a crime, so that maybe they'll reward you for that.

.. and you know, I'd jump on the bandwagon of "I almost pirated..." but I haven't pirated anything in years. >.>

I didn't say your analogies were wrong, just not on point. Your Ferrari analogy is better - although not perfect, because stealing requires that someone be deprived of possession of an item whereas pirating doesn't deprive anyone of possession of any physical property.

That said, I don't see any problem with someone saying, "I almost took that butttt i didn't, smiley face" and another person saying "hey no probs, bro, have this one, winky face" and another person saying "and this one, smiley face with boobs". I find that conversation perfectly legitimate.

Of course, given the price of the Ferrari compared to the price of the awesome Hotline Miami, I would say a better analogy would involve maybe a packet of delicious biscuits (like Tim Tams) rather than a motor vehicle.

It was more along the lines of understanding some people will pirate, for money reasons mainly, and wanting them to have a good version. Saying he had "nothing against it" is to take his words WAY out of what he meant and stuff like that is the reason companies are against it 100% in public.

Except they could check the file digests against the GOG Wiki to confirm they match the GOG provided ones and thus haven't been tampered with...

The loss of culture is a completely separate matter, and yes of grave importance. IMHO in order to get the right to use DRM in a product you should be required to register a DRM free version with the LoC or similar institution elsewhere to ensure that it is available when the copyright and patent periods end.

Are you saying his stance was "I am against it, but I will support it with patches"? It does mainly seem to be only major publishers that are against it 100%. Notch has told people to pirate Minecraft if they're unsure if they want to pay for it just yet, another company said that their priority is to "make games that people actually want to pirate" before they start worrying about stopping it, and Vince XII, creator of Resonance, actually posted on the Pirate Bay page for his game saying something to the effect of "I'm glad you want to play my game, even if you didn't want to pay for it. I hope that if you enjoy it, even if you don't end up paying for it, you tell others that you enjoyed it". Then contrast that with publishers saying "Each pirated copy costs us $60" and "piracy funds terrorism" and so on.

To be honest, the vast majority of games you buy off GOG are not funding the original developers at all, and in many cases not even the original publisher. You're basically paying a totally unrelated Polish company to pay a percentage to a totally unrelated American copyright holder in most cases. Don't get me wrong, I obviously like GOG and have bought many games here, but to try to position it as directly opposite to, and a remedy to piracy isn't really that accurate or straightforward. Go and pirate a random GOG game now and the chances are, you're giving exactly as much to the people who made the game as you would be if you bought it off GOG. You could argue that GOG are taking advantage of the goodwill and desire to actually pay for games that anti-piracy people possess to charge them money for a product they had nothing to do with.

How did the rights fall off the hands of the original devs/publishers? If they handed the rights over just for kicks, they can't really complain. If they sold 'em, they can't really complain. Etc. It's not like the rights were stolen from them. The devs and whatnot got what they needed or asked for 'em, so it's unreasonable to say that the new owners do not deserve the money they get from the sales.

Naah, everyttime you pirate something MAFIAA kills a puppy so think about the puppies!