Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"

kpw@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 1729 points –
pluralistic.net

The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

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The action is still harmless. Information should be free.

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.

https://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html

How is creating a popular a novel any different than creating a popular object? Hundreds of hours of labor go into both and the creators are entitled to the full value of said labor.

Say you have an amazing story about the vacation you took last year, and told all your friends about it. You would justifiably be pissed if you later found out one of your friends was telling that story as if they had done it. It's the same for someone who writes a book or any other form of media.

We aren't talking about plagiarism, the friend would be telling the story about you still.

Spoken word narratives are such an integral part of culture, imagine if your grandpa told you to never repeat any of the stories of his childhood because "he owns the copywrite". Insane. That's what you are suggesting.

Ideas are not objects. Having good ideas shared incurs no loss to anybody, except imagined "lost potential value".

I'm saying that those who create are entitled to the value of what they create. If a company asks to look iver some of your work before hiring you, says that they aren't interested, and then you see them using that work afterwards i doubt you would be saying "well, information should be free".

If you want to write stories, draw pictures, make movies or webshows and distribute then for free ti everyone, then that's a noble initiative, but creatives depend on what they create for their livelyhood.

saying that those who create are entitled to the value of what they create.

Here I was thinking we all deserved a giant meteor.

The publisher example is one of a difference in power and you're saying that IP is there to protect the author. Except this whole video is about how that doesn't happen anymore. The law is written and litigated by those with power.

That happens already.

If the situation is reversed, the hammer comes down on the independent artist.

We need stronger worker and consumer protections. Copywrite is a shit solution.

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if information is free, the action would be harmless.

FTFY.

Including your personal information?

Strawman. Is intellectual property the same as personally identifiable information? Can you doxx a director using their movie?

Comment I replied to said information.

No reasonable person who says "information should be free" is also lumping in PII with that. It's clear from the context in this thread that they are referring to media and knowledge (seeing how the post itself was about media and everyone has been discussing the justifiability of things like piracy amid the erosion of digital ownership), not about posting where people live and shit, so you bringing up personal information is at best a misunderstanding of what the saying "information should be free" actually means or at worst a logical fallacy and deliberate attempt to derail the conversation.

Also, just saying, personal information is currently free regardless of whether or not it should be or whether it's legal or ethical. There are thousands of websites indexable by search engines that list people's information for anyone to take, mostly from data breaches or otherwise scraped from the internet. It's one of the main ways scammers get your contact info. There are even websites specifically dedicated to archiving doxxes, hosted in jurisdictions with no privacy laws so the victim can never get it removed. Search your own phone number or email, I bet you'll find it listed somewhere possibly with a ton of your other information. Unlicensed movies are immediately struck off the internet as soon as they're discovered though, funny how the law takes pirating movies more seriously than the posting of private information that can literally ruin people's lives and make them a target of assault, stalking, vandalism, etc.

What is exactly "information" in this statement? Is a feature length movie "information" that needs to be shared freely? At 4K freely or will HD suffice for the meaning? Or is it just a plot summary? I'm in the camp that will argue just the latter.

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