Russia legalizes piracy to subvert video game and other sanctions

This story about a turn to the dark side, boiled down, in 1:19 minutes.

What's the fuss?

As the Ukraine-Russia war continues, governments and companies around the world have placed severe sanctions on the latter. Russia has responded by bending the laws.

The situation

Countries around the world have refrained from sending their own troops to support Ukraine, but instead have placed sanctions and ceased business in numerous industries.

• Notably, giants in the consumer tech and gaming industry have not only stopped selling in Russia, but are preventing existing Russian players from engaging with their products.
• Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation have all halted sales in Russia and Belarus both for their consoles and games.

In the interim, Russia has reportedly proposed easing piracy legislation in order to circumvent these sanctions from the West.

• Russian companies have received permission to not pay patent holders to use any intellectual property from any country that has applied sanctions.
• The Russian government looks like they may promote tools to allow their citizens to pirate consumer software, including video games and movies, without consequence.

Boiling it down

Video game piracy is a problem in a similar vein as music or film piracy.

• Pirates download game content to their PCs without compensating the developer, circumventing a traditional transaction.
• Although many stopgaps have been implemented as well as companies taking measures into their own hands, game piracy still runs rampant on the Internet.

Some modern games have inherent defenses to piracy that make them unique compares to music or movies.

• The most popular games on the market are free-to-play, making piracy a useless prospect, and recoup costs via in-game-microtransactions.
• The developers of these games would not only have to block installation, but would have to actively block Russian gamers from playing the game outright - a tall task.

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