This is a non sequitur disguised as a clever slogan.
In other words, “I think digital purchases should be permanent” does not logically lead to “therefore piracy isn’t stealing.” That disconnect is what ultimately shows how silly the statement is.
But to nail the point home
“If I buy a coffee, it should stay hot until I finish drinking it. If it doesn’t, walking out without paying isn’t stealing.”
At least you get to keep that coffee for as long as you'd like.
You can keep it till it has a thick layer of mold on it if you'd like.
That's the point of it.
It used to be as simple as buying that same coffee.
You have the physical item, you get to keep it and play it when you'd like.
Or you can resell your game and moldy coffee as you'd like.
You could even put the cup of coffee in a container, keep it on a shelf and show it to you children one day and tell them how it came from a coffee shop that's long since gone out of business.
But you still have the coffee and you can do with the coffee whatever you'd like.
You can even pass it on to your children.
But for digital games, you don't own them. (At least for the majority of digital stores out there)
I can buy GTA 6, and Rockstar
could disable it one day after.
(Pull a full Concord without a refund, and it would be "
within their right" to do so)
To use the coffee analogy, this is like buying your coffee, and then after one sip, the waiter comes over, takes your coffee away and tells you "We have revoked your coffee, you only had a license to drink it and we're now withdrawing that license".
At that point, frankly from a moral standpoint, if I walked over and took my cup of coffee back and walked out with it, I would not consider it stealing.
Based on the set standard, I would expect to have access to the coffee I purchased until I'm finished with it.
But according to the license of that coffee shop, you don't own the coffee, you only have a license to sip on it's contents as long as the coffee shop sees fit. Doesn't matter if you finished your coffee or not.
You can't share your coffee, and you can lose it at any time. Nobody owns that coffee that's purchased from that coffee shop, while a different standard has been set by the coffee shop industry up till that point.
If someone offered me the same coffee in a back alley for free, I would also not feel bad taking a free cup of it.
I would have never owned it anyway, I just skipped the fee of having limited access to that coffee. I'm not stealing coffee since I would never own the coffee, I'm skipping the coffee shops idiotic terms and tasting the coffee for free from the guy in the back alley. That's the point of this.
We're not making an argument that the coffee should stay hot, we're making an argument that the physical counterpart used to allow for unlimited access to the product, while the digital counterpart does not. We want to just keep access to our coffee the same way without the coffee shop snatching it from our hands before we're finished drinking it.
You're not stealing the coffee if you find free access to a cup of coffee from the same coffee shop, you're skipping a fee to a license agreement and a version of that coffee that the coffee shop is allowed to snatch from you at any time.
This is why GOG is such a big deal.
You actually own the games you buy there.
It doesn't matter if they are digital. Just like that old moldy cup of coffee, you can even pass it on to your children one day.
... now I want coffee ...