Imagine that you are reading an article on the Internet, and the article refers to a work of fiction that you have never heard of. You may be curious enough to look up more information on it, and upon reading the synopsis of the work, it sounds interesting. It could be a video game, film, or book. There is, however, one problem; the work has been out for years, perhaps decades, and buying a new copy is simply not going to be possible.
You could buy it used. If it is rare, then copies might be sold at a high price. If it is a video game, it might only be available for consoles that you never owned. If it is a film, then you might not have the device that the film needs for playback.
The choice in this scenario is yours to make, but in cases like this, some people turn to file sharing, where they find the work somewhere on the Internet and download from there, for free. From a legal standpoint, sharing any copyrighted content is still inadvisable. However, copyright holders have varying tolerance on sharing older works.
For video games, there are emulators that allow console video games to be played on a computer. While emulators can be legally used to play purchased games that have been transferred (“dumped”) to the computer, some people use emulators to play games that they downloaded from file sharing sites. As some emulators have gained a strong following with little opposition from video game publishers, it remains to be seen whether this practice will remain unaffected.
Finally, there are some people who also download newer works from file sharing sites, and it is these kinds of people whom I can never support. I remember some games in particular, such as the Witcher 2[1] and Spore[2], being popular targets for downloading when they were new. I even remember reading a post on the Spore forums, where a person mentioned that he downloaded Spore illegally and asked if he could keep his game if he was never going to buy a copy anyway. Other posters (surprisingly) politely told him that what he had done is already illegal and that he could not keep his game. I never replied to the post myself, but I could not help but think that he was foolish to publicly admit to an illegal act.
