Steam Key Re-sellers

[SirAndrewD]

LucasGames Their Finest Hour beckons 

Starflight! 

[Gusington]

I absolutely would expect that from a slimy blob.

[al_infierno]

There are - as always different shades of these types of site. Some may be more dodgy than others - but I regularly buy from CD Keys I dont see any real difference than buying a steam key from them or green man gaming - or gamers gate...

If you don't see the difference, you haven't been reading the thread carefully.

The difference is that the game developers who spent their time and money creating the game you are now enjoying get screwed over by CD key resellers and don't end up earning any money when the credit card companies catch on.

When you buy from legitimate stores like GOG and GreenManGaming, the developers get paid. Those sites are not key resellers, they're legitimate vendors. It's a very simple difference.

[Sir Slash]

You must hate Flea Markets huh al?    Sorry to say but people have always found ways to trade, traffic, and sell their shit no matter what. It may not be, 'legitimate' but there's no real stopping it.

[al_infierno]

You must hate Flea Markets huh al?

I can't tell if you're being intentionally obtuse or if you're just not getting it.  The flea market analogy only works if you're stealing credit cards and then using them to buy stuff and immediately re-sell it at the flea market for cash.  If you don't think that's theft and thus morally repugnant then I suppose we just have to agree to disagree.

Sorry to say but people have always found ways to trade, traffic, and sell their shit no matter what. It may not be, 'legitimate' but there's no real stopping it.

I really cannot stand this line of thinking.  Just because you can't stop it doesn't mean you should support it and feel OK with ripping off the people who actually put their time and hard earned money into creating the product.  Do you also enthusiastically shop at fences for stolen jewelry so you can save money instead of going to a pawn shop or, better yet, an actual jeweler?  Or visit your local traphouse to save a few thousand bucks on a "used" car?

[The_Admiral]

You must hate Flea Markets huh al?    Sorry to say but people have always found ways to trade, traffic, and sell their shit no matter what. It may not be, 'legitimate' but there's no real stopping it.

Aye, as Al is saying, and moral implications aside, a flea market is akin to second-hand consumption, it is something I was advocating myself just a few posts above - that is, legally-speaking if one consider that a license is a product like any other (and not something along the line of a show or an attraction - although it could be argued it is too, cf. the precedent parallel with movie tickets) then you should be able to re-sell it after use. That's what ebay was about on day 1 (vs Amazon), that's what a flea market is.

A flea market ain't about selling fake bags or reselling stuff you bought just the day before using a stolen credit card, or stuff that you found on the road after a truck fell upside down. At least not in my country, but it's been some time 

[Sir Slash]

I was NOT trying to be obtuse, thus the, 'Grin' emoji. Clearly you feel strongly about this al but people who disagree are not out to destroy gaming or support crime. Your thoughts here are your Intellectual Property. But by posting them here, you are sharing them with us and making them public. If we share them with others without your permission, are we stealing from you? If there was a place where I could sell them to people and make money doing it would that be a crime? Possibly. It would be a shitty thing to do to you or anybody else. But somebody would do it and that shouldn't surprise you nor be seen as the End of the World. And BTW, I hate Flea Markets.

[The_Admiral]

To be fair, considering your current avatar, one would expect you to hate all kinds of fleas to begin with 

[Gusington]

 

[ArizonaTank]

I would love it if software was sold like hammers at the hardware store; once I buy it, its mine to do with what I want.

But software is licensed and only the right to use it is purchased.

It is a system that does not thrill me, but has frankly served me well as a computer gamer.

So, I will support licenses and publishers.

Unless the software publisher allows the license to be transferred, the idea of buying a "key" is generally out of the question in my opinion.

[devoncop]

Well this thread certainly got some interest.

I feel like some dressed to kill girlfriend (stop it Gus) who flirts with a guy and when he responds tells her boyfriend and eggs him on to flatten the guy 

[Gusington]

I will not 

[JasonPratt]

I will not 

I was expecting a different smiley, but maybe that should be from Devon... 

Your thoughts here are your Intellectual Property. But by posting them here, you are sharing them with us and making them public. If we share them with others without your permission, are we stealing from you? If there was a place where I could sell them to people and make money doing it would that be a crime? Possibly. It would be a shitty thing to do to you or anybody else.

If you're selling Al's posts to other people off site, that could be a theft of intellectual property, yep, unless you're passing an amount of that profit back to Al according to a percentage he agrees with.

Some of the legal grey areas are (as I think you're also referring to for your argument), that by posting literally anything here (including as attachments) we are making them public, thus publishing them, on a platform that allows copies of that material to be made and passed along (not simply passing on the same unit, for sale or otherwise) -- and moreover which makes some profit, at least potentially, off selling ad-space. We're tacitly giving permission for the site to use the material we post to make profit without recompensation to us -- much less compensation to anyone whose material we're posting on the site.

So, as an example very pertinent to myself  -- if I ever had any hope of doing anything with the first-and-currently-only novel of my fantasy series in the future, I've shot that hope directly in the head by having posted it here as a pdf in the Books category. It is now publicly "Published", in a form that allows infinite copies to be made. At this point any publisher who wished to buy the rights to make a profit from creating and distributing it, would have to work first with the site owners as to compensating them! Legally I've given up my rights for future compensation, for all practical purposes, unless a publisher is so desperate to have series rights or whatever that they're willing to waive any loss of profit-return for their investment by having my first novel out in the public domain already.

Same goes for my theological and philosophical work, largely posted elsewhere (though there's a copy of one here somewhere in the RPF category, too). Even if it was massively popular, I'd be the only person who dared to invest money trying to 'publish' it for a profit because I already made it publicly available: I've already published it, and worse by a method capable of practically unlimited copy propagation. (It would actually be WORSE if the property was massively popular! I know a library reference work, of which I bought a physical copy at around $360; once the publishers made their required return on it, mostly from institutions buying a copy, they released the whole thing in a nice free pdf, nearly a thousand pages, so that anyone can use it. But in so doing they made it unlikely anyone would want to publish it for sale again.)

[Sir Slash]

This is why I only post my bad ideas here, never my really good ones. I'm protecting my Intellectual Property. Like my idea for a Clothes Dryer that folds your clothes when it's finished.... Probably shouldn't have mentioned that. 

[ArizonaTank]

This is why I only post my bad ideas here, never my really good ones. I'm protecting my Intellectual Property. Like my idea for a Clothes Dryer that folds your clothes when it's finished.... Probably shouldn't have mentioned that. 

Doesn't matter, it will shortly be made irrelevant by my clothes dryer that uses sophisticated AI to pair socks. :)