Games

Laws should be heavily influenced by what is morally right and wrong, but morality as a concept is not influenced by laws. An individual’s or culture’s sense of morality might be, but if laws are derived from morals then that’s fine.

Questions of morality will have different answers when the context changes, so it may be morally unacceptable in one society to do something and morally acceptable to do the same thing in another. Laws have an influence on morality only insofar as laws have an impact on the context in which actions take place. This would not be because the law prohibits those actions.

Some examples:

• If a law is passed outlawing sharing nonconsensual AI-generated pornography, it should be because it was agreed that doing so is morally wrong. The law being passed doesn’t make it suddenly morally wrong.
• If a law were passed making some completely innocuous action illegal, and frequently punished - say, hand-painting Nintendo or Disney characters on an interior wall in your own house - then posting publicly on someone’s Facebook wall about loving their Princess Peach X Princess Elsa mural would be morally wrong, even though it would have been fine to do that before the law was passed.

The context that we have is that it is illegal (in the US) to:

• distribute copyrighted materials
• download copyrighted materials
• bypass DRM even when making a backup, except for specific purposes. With video games, unless you are circumventing DRM because the auth servers were taken down (inapplicable for the Switch) or solely because you have a physical disability and are patching the game to support other input options (standard keyboard and mouse specifically excluded), then it is still illegal.

So in either case you’d be doing something illegal. But morally, in a situation where you’ve purchased the game and are platform-shifting to an unsupported platform (like the “time-shifting” defense used with VHS recordings, DVRs, etc.), then the laws aren’t really relevant. The laws certainly don’t exist because there’s societal agreement that this type of platform shifting is morally wrong.

The reason the person I replied to had to pay someone to rip his own game for him is because Nintendo makes it difficult to do so. Even if the law were different and allowed those actions, I don’t understand why anyone would think that it makes sense that a corporation can morally obligate their customers (who want to consume their product in a particular way) to perform work with no value add when the customers could get what they want by doing something much easier.

Unless you’re actually causing harm (directly or indirectly) to someone by your actions in one instance but not the other, I don’t see how one option would be morally acceptable and the other morally wrong.

If the game were supported on the other platform, then the context - and potentially the outcome - changes. If Nintendo invested a decent amount of money porting BotW to Android phones and it cost them a decent amount of money to do so, then would it be morally wrong to not support them and to emulate it instead? Would there be an ethical obligation to support them? What if the Android port was terrible - would it be acceptable to buy it, then use the emulated version anyway - and if you’d bought the Android version and were emulating it on Android, would there still be a moral or ethical obligation to purchase the same cart you were emulating? What if Nintendo just licensed or repackaged Yuzu and didn’t actually make any changes to the game, so their investment was minimal?

It’s a different situation entirely when determining whether it’s morally wrong to host a site with freely downloadable ROMs. The site could be used by people who did not purchase those games, causing lost revenue to their creators.

Both of those situations have grey areas and I can see why someone would consider them immoral. I have opinions on them, of course, but there’s a lot more nuance there; I can easily see why someone would feel differently.

With this specific situation I don’t understand - and am trying to understand - how someone could come to different conclusions for the morality of the two actions. Are they inferring that you support the site hosting the content when you download it? (If you use an adblocker and don’t financially support them, would it then be fine?) Are they assuming torrenting, where you would have to either leech (which they would consider immoral) or seed, and thus distribute, as well? Or is there some other factor that I’m not thinking of?