I'm amused at these statements these 'wannabe' pirates make to justify piracy. A smart person would pirate quietly without letting the world know or justifying it.
I know why I do it & I don't want some validation, internet points, 2 minutes of fame to sound / look cool.
You've just let the world know you're pirating though
Because for some piracy isn't simply about being a cheapskate but also about activism
Theres some truth to this, but a lot of people do use this as a shield against the general cultural acceptance that piracy is stealing or otherwise morally underhanded. I do it, but I don't have any illusion I'm one of the activists. I just get indignant and refuse to pay someone for content or entertainment who I think is damaging to the medium or predatory in general. I feel like if I really wanted to make a statement, I just wouldn't consume their work at all -- but life is short and I want to have my cake and eat it too.
It's possible to do both, I consume plenty of pirated media simply because it's unavailable due to pathetic capitalist imposed digital distribution limitations and lack of equitable paid access.
I also consume other pirated media because I wouldn't spend my resources for access because I don't yet know the value of the content and won't pay just for an opportunity to be disappointed, been there enough times to have learned that lesson. I'm happy to spend my time to find out your media sucks, but not my money, because that's also my time with the addition that I've put actual effort into converting it into fungible assets.
I also deliberately pirate media that I would pay for and do understand the value of, both because I can't always afford to purchase said product from a company making billions of dollars in exploitative corporate profits and because I have no interest in caring about that over my own personal satisfaction in life.
So true! Here, have some internet points and validation!
I don’t want some validation, internet points, 2 minutes of fame to sound / look cool.
No, you just need everyone to know you don't care about sounding/looking cool to sound/look cool. Totally different.
Too cool to be cool syndrome.
How did you do formatting injection in your username?
On the website you can modify your user display name with any font set you like. I used a random fancy font website and simply copy and pasted.
Nice, thanks!
I believe its just a display name, which I assume probably doesn't have as more lax rules on valid characters (such as emojis) than usernames do.
"A smart person would pirate quietly without letting the world know"
While posting "I do it & I don't want some validation..."
Hypocrisy doesn't make them incorrect. If you're going to be a pedant get better at it.
To be fair, saying on the one hand what a smart person would do, and on the other hand doing the exact opposite, makes them a dumb person even by their own standards. At which point it matters less if one particular statement of theirs is correct or not, cause they've established themselves as an untrustworthy source.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know if the previous poster meant to go in this direction or not.
How stupid a person is doesn't change how correct an objectively correct statement is irrelevant of if you "trust them as a source". Just like how smart you are doesn't change that you've made an objectively incorrect statement. Fox news can still give you the correct time of day even if you wouldn't respect their opinion on how hot it is.
As much fun as setting up a torrent box is, being an argumentative asshole is even better.
They are screaming because they rather pay for convenience, but that is not how it works.
Now for most sources of media it's more ethical to pirate their content than obtain it legitimately.
Though granted, if you want to hurt the company more than by pirating their content, you can by not pirating their content.
(Sadly, as seen with The Wizard Game, people are not so motivated to walk away from their beloved franchises. So ⛵️🏴☠️🦜⚔️🌊)
Confused - how does not pirating hurt the company more? Wouldn't it be the exact same outcome for the company (as when pirated) or is this kinda like when GoT was arguing their popularity is even bigger when you look at the number of people torrenting their episodes
When we consume content and like it we have a tendency to want to patronize it, so yeah, if you pirated Wednesday season one, you're more likely to watch season two buy T-shirts and other swag, look for more Addams related content, and so on.
A good example of this happened in Russia when Neil Gaiman's books hadn't yet been marketed there. There were some unofficial and crowdsourced translations (some Russians learned English just to read Gaiman!) and so when the market finally reached Russia, it exploded, because the fan base had already been established.
GoT was an unusual case because HBO was bought separately from normal cable packages, and so fewer people had it, so it depended on piracy and social contacts (groups gathering for viewing parties at their friend's house). There were even public venues who would show the new episode (unofficially, so an unlicensed public performance) and by HBO ignoring these, it allowed the fanbase to swell to incredible proportions (at least until Season 8 which popped that bubble). Still, there are tons of spin-off markets from which HBO (now MAX) continues to profit.
When we like our content, we become invested in it. It becomes part of our lifestyle. We talk about it with friends. We make friends with folks who are also fans. And this is the point when we're susceptible to collectables and spinoffs.
Also we^†^ pirate for one of three reasons:
We can't afford to buy the content but want to consume it. Or it's not available in our region
The official version is odious to use (has DRM, forces us to watch commercials, etc.)
The company that makes this stuff is malignant (cruel to its employees, bigoted against marginalized groups in the society, is associated with dangerous sects and subcultures) and we don't really want to support them.
So in those cases where these are not factors, most people are going to choose to not pirate content they like, or support it in other ways. (If you want to support musical artists, it's far less important that you buy their songs on iTunes, and far more important that you go to their concerts when you can. And buy their concert t-shirt for $60. John Coulton also takes tips.)
† We in this case refers to the larger demographic of those capable of pirating. When a product is expensive or unavailable or whatever, people who sometimes buy will look for ways to pirate or obtain deals or whatever. Yes, there will be piracy enthusiasts who never buy, but that's a slender demographic despite what the anti-piracy propaganda might suggest. Also if content is only pirated, that may mean it was never officially released, or the release version was really poor quality.
You just said admitted to pirating, you little muppet.
While I do have no morals when it comes to copying smb elses hard work(I am a programmer, basically my job) I Support games when they are good. Movies are rarely any good but the cinema isn't as expensive for me anymore than when I was a student.
And most important you can't refund bad movies in the cinema.
I still think it should be illegal to sell someone elses work though. This also means profiting from it when you use it in your product/development environment.
TL;DR:
Piracy can be a means of demonstration to show the flaws in copyright. Which obviously needs to be public.
I think some still feel some level of guilt about it and naturally, whether consciously or subconsciously, rationalize it with ideas like this. I guess the progression from that is posting about it to show that “yes I pirate, but I’m not a bad person because rationalization”.
Pirating is like church sins, less about avoiding causing harm and more about preserving hierarchy and tradition, even though abuses and theft by intellectual property holders cause way more harm and economic cost than infringement, by multiple orders of magnitude.
You’re so right! Here have an internet point.
if you create an argument for the moral implications of piracy then you aren’t a REAL pirate (how do you define that, even?)
Until we live in a world where people have equal access to information and essential technology piracy is a moral imperative.
Should something which costs a few hours worth of work in the developed word cost three weeks worth of work in a less developed country, just to make a publishing company worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a few extra bucks? Of course not!
Every other argument is a moot point to me. If I hadn't pirated Photoshop and other software when I was a poor kid I wouldn't have the six figure career I have today. The ultrarich steal from us every day in more ways than I can count. Maybe when they start being held accountable I will start caring about their bottom line.
Here I am wondering why there is still a downvote button in the YouTube comments... it does nothing!
The same reason that a lot of crosswalks have fake buttons. So you feel like you have control.
and why elevators have non functioning close buttons
Some elevators.
All the ones near me have fully functional close buttons.
true, it definitely depends where you live. If you’re in the US then it’s definitely a case of most don’t work, because most elevators at this point have been made after 1990, but if you live somewhere else then it can definitely be a case of some, or even none
but that said there definitely are functioning crosswalk buttons that work so being pedantic about some, most, etc, is irrelevant because as long as there are any that dont work its relevant to the topic
While simultaneously undermining your sense of trust in the world
Actually it's worse than nothing. Youtube promotes comments based on engagement, so while only an upvote increases the tally, voting at all still makes it more visible.
The downvotes are still counted, just not displayed. You can re-enable it via browser extensions.
Pretty sure those extensions all use some sort of estimate methodology, the dislikes aren't available via any apis or anything
Interesting, I wonder exactly how they work, then?
I've never used one myself but I've heard talk of various ones either A) taking the public (real) like number and extrapolating the dislikes based on an old like/dislike ratio available for the video from before the dislike removal (doesn't work on new videos) or B) the extension includes a feature where the user can like/dislike the video within the extension and then the dislike number is extrapolated using the public (real) like number and the extension's private like/dislike ratio. In either case the number is not connected to the "real" dislike count that YouTube would have access to internally
some sort of estimate methodology
Hey GPT4 watch this video and tell me what its ratio of likes to dislikes would be
For videos. The commnt dislike has done nothing for years
Oh, didn't realize it was referring to comments. Yeah, that one's pointless!
Do we really need excuses for pirating media?
I pirate movies because I think digital access to them is overpriced, goes to the copyright holder instead of the creators, it's convenient and most importantly because I can.
I can't pirate going to the cinema, nor can I afford to build my own, therefore I gladly pay to have a seat and enjoy a movie there.
I think this logic is silly.
Employers don't own you, so witholding wages for services you provided isn't stealing.
Getting a haircut and not paying isn't stealing.
I think the better justification is: rights holders make it a pain in the arse to access content affordably, so fuck you, just going to steal it.
You're only partly right.
You example services. Of course it is not possible to own services.
Piracy is only applicable to products.
The point of the Twitter guy is, that companies intentionally stop selling their software etc. as products to sell you the same thing as a service, so that you cannot own it.
Not only that. Remember when Sony said that you don't own the PS4 you bought for several hundred bucks but just purchased the right to use it as intended so you're not allowed to tinker with it and for example install another operating system or figure out how their security works.
That's what is meant by buying is not owning anymore.
I could go on about cars with subscriptions for heated seats that are already installed but not turned on etc.
It's true that SaaS does stop you from owning software... But what good does "owning" a piece of software do you if you can't get updates anyway? Back in the pre-internet era we got used to software existing as discrete versions but it hasn't been like that for a LONG time. As soon as patching became a regular occurrence, "ownership" became a service contract with a CD attached. Then the CD vanished, and it just became a service.
While I do dislike needless "as a service" stuff, that model does genuinely suit a lot of people. It's not a conjob; companies offer this stuff because a lot of customers want it. Most of the companies that are selling you SaaS stuff themselves use SaaS things in-house.
Yeah, it sucks to hear it, but this guy is right.
It's also (typically) modeled in such a way that your software is consistently updated to new versions on release. You get active hotfixes, patches and improvements as they are released.
Most people jump software versions in stages of about 2-3 years. You'll find a lot of SaaS packages will be priced as if you were instead purchasing the software at those stages.
All in all, if you have every intention of using the software regularly, it's priced well and typically makes for a much better user experience.
Indeed. And that's without considering that a lot of SaaS stuff on the consumer level lets you cancel at any time. Ok, you can get burned for 30 bucks if it turns out not to be all that useful, but the full packages are typically priced somewhere between eyewatering and "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING?", and they always have been.
A perfect example here - GeForce Now costs like 20 per month, cancel whenever you like. A 4080 gpu costs way over a grand. It's up to you whether you prefer to own, rent or not bother at all, but it doesn't take a lot to convince me to spend 20 bucks, but it does take a lot to get me to stump up for a whole new PC.
I think you slightly missed the point too. I think he meant that even when you buy games for example (or any other software).You don't actually buy the game. You only buy a license to use that software.
Can we not become subreddit by posting this shitty screenshots trying to justify our reasons? Just share your media and enjoy it.
what do you mean trying to justify? discussion of shitty anti consumer tactics in digital media is perfectly valid
A screenshot of some comment is not really discussion though. This is a pretty base level understanding of the concept, which is why I say it's more cope then actual discussion.
This is one of the most popular posts this week here with more than 4 HUNDRED comments. I don't know what you view as a discussion but I think this was a pretty successful attempt at creating one.
I will say this thread had way more discussion then I was expecting when I originally posted this. My point about the screenshot still stands, I would much prefer we discuss something new related to sharing media, instead of recycling the same discussion about why its justified to copyright infringe.
I was gonna say the same thing but then I saw the 2200-something upvotes.
This community is doomed to be exactly like the low effort meme sub r/piracy if people keep upvoting this lazy content.
My headcanon is that it's a passive form of protection: when copyright owners look to communities like piracy they are met with highly upvoted silly memes, which would cause them to miss the more helpful pirate advice mixed within.
I don't think piracy needs to be justified because different people have different reasons.
Sure you could argue that you're not actually stealing but creating/downloading a copy of something it already exist.
I always found that anti piracy commercial "you wouldn't steal a car" ridiculous as that's not how piracy works.
For example, I do it because I don't agree with how segmented the video streaming industry has become in recent years with this many different services that force you to buy a bunch of subscriptions while continuosly pulling content. Unlike the music streaming industry where all the most popular content (the majority of it) can be found on pretty much every serivce. You could have Spotify or Apple Music, not much difference (if any at all) in content or quality.
When I was a teenager I did it because I couldn't afford to buy any sort of media content and options were limited. Pretty much everyone that owned an MP3 player was pirating music.
The entire issue with these arguments, though, is that the opposition parties just answer those claims with “then you shouldn’t be ingesting that content”. If you aren’t willing to pay for it, then you don’t have the right to view/listen/stream it. Free market a-holes will always, correctly, bring up that the market works by putting out products and people paying for what they support and not paying for what they don’t support. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose which pieces or parts you support or don’t and there’s no way to give companies that type of feedback because they don’t care.
I'm willing to pay for it, but I'm not allowed to do so
For example, Amazon/MGM still don't allow me to pay to watch Stargate
I mean if I am not paying either way me ingesting that content or not makes 0 difference to the producer. It is the same logic as throwing excess food to the trash so homeless can't eat it.
It does, though, by the argument they’re making. If you could only ingest it by paying for it, you’d have to have paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to.
The very fact that you’re watching it without paying kind of proves that point.
The producer and publisher paid a cost for you to have heard and develop an interest in their products. So yes, it makes a difference to them if that investment turns into you using the content but not paying for it. You're suddenly a target audience without returns.
That's a fine argument that they might have, but piracy still isn't stealing. If someone steals something from me, I am deprived of that thing. If someone copies my intellectual property, I am hypothetically impacted by loss of income, but I can still use that information.
They can say it's morally wrong for someone to use or copy information against the owners wishes or without paying. They are welcome to that argument. None of us are obligated to care about their opinion.
If they can claim customers don't own something, especially physical items, after purchase because they are being pedantic over how people interact with intellectual property, we can and should absolutely use the same distinction to distance piracy fromt theft.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
I don't agree. I think your trying to compare this to wage theft, wherin an employee is promised or legally guaranteed some income based on hours work, where after both parties have agreed to this the employee has performed the work and the employer is withholding some of the pay. This case is stealing - the trade was completed and the employer is in possession of an asset (eg the pay that they are entitled to) - this is not a physical thing, but it is a real thing, with real physical value, and in removing that the employer would stealing that asset. Obviously there's a garguntuam difference here because both parties had agreed to exchange assets and the employer has taken ownership of that pay per the agreement. If someone decided to do that same work, absent agreement, obviously they can't claim wage theft because they didn't have any entitlement.
To be intellectually honest, you'd compare piracy to plagiarism. But that's (correctly) not as alarming as stealing which is why we need to mislead people to make it seem worse.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Entering without permission (in your example, paying) is trespassing. It's fine argument to say that it's morally wrong and that you shouldn't do it. It's blatantly wrong to claim it is stealing.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Digital content is the same way, insofar as piracy is more akin to trespassing than theft. It's an abstract argument to say not buying something is harming owners or creators, who are you (or anyone else) to dictate what people buy, or to attach some morality to that?
You say it harms creators, but the evidence says that pirated games make more money. I imagine your claim is based on an assumption that people who pirate stuff do so at the expense of people buying it. Have you bothered to explore that assumption any further? You might be surprised.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
Piracy is quite literally not stealing. Stealing is an act of removing something from another's possession, into your own. That is simply not what piracy is, and trying to falsey equate different crimes is every but as absurd as "stop pretending driving 5mphover the limit isn't murder, it's wrong and trying to justify the morality of it makes you look silly"
No. I am not comparing to wage theft. You’re just making a semantic argument rather than a substantive argument. Sure, if you want to argue semantics, then I’m viewing it as trespassing or service theft. Either way, you’re depriving a creator of income. If it’s a smaller creator, then you’re stealing money from them because, otherwise, you wouldn’t get the experience of ingesting their content. You’re entitling yourself to the experience of ingesting their work without contributing to your end of the contract. You’re only making the argument in the way you are because larger studios pay the creators on a contract basis. The truth is, though, that those creators don’t get hired if their content doesn’t result in material sales (whether physical or digital) of the content. No one invests in content that doesn’t make money and the excuse that “it still does make money even if I pirate” is just mental gymnastics.
Your second argument is also dishonest - the “no one is losing any money because the person wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” argument. That’s just an extension of the second part of what I said above. If piracy is ok for one person, it has to be ok for all and if it was ok for all, then the content wouldn’t make money. TV shows don’t get renewed. Sequels don’t get made. Sure, maybe the original content made money because some people were honest and paid for it but you are depriving a creator of an income because, had everyone paid, they’d have more work and more income coming in.
All this is to say that I’m fine with piracy. Sometimes you can’t afford it. Sometimes it’s not available legally. Sometimes it’s just a superior experience where you’re not forced to watch ads or deal with DRM. These are all fine. But to try and justify it as deserved or go through these mental gymnastics to claim it’s not stealing is just nonsense or arguing semantics. Just admit you’re stealing/trespassing and not holding to your end of the contract and admit that you’re harming creators.
No. I am not comparing to wage theft
Then I'll try a third time. My claim is that theft deprived the owner of their item. Piracy does not do this, ergo it is something different than theft.
My second argument is to preempt the inevitable "pure economic loss" claim. It's a tangent, and is not a claim that 100% piracy is sustainable, simply that the assertion that piracy causes commercial products to fail (as piracy exists today) is factually and demonstrably wrong.
My third point, which you again chose not to address, is that equating piracy to theft is as stupid as comparing speeding to murder. They are different crimes and should be treated as such. You know what an actual comparison to theft is, which is the whole basis of the OP? A product a user has paid for being removed by the publisher because they chose to incorporate drm that is no longer sustainable, wonder why nobody calls this theft (in fact it is closer to theft than piracy). Oh wait no I don't, I spelled it out in the first post - piracy = theft is propaganda to hurt the little guy, the big players are manipulating the system such that they are above the same laws we play by.
Be fine with piracy or don't, I couldn't give a shit either way. That is irrelevant to the points I've raised.
You’re still arguing semantics and not the substance of my position.
The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content. You cannot honestly claim that they are not deprived of something by piracy. Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.
The second argument is a straw man. No one is discussing whether piracy causes failure. We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, whether directly or indirectly, and the needless justification being shown here which pretends that there is no effect.
The third point is another semantic argument and a straw man. No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action. The only comparison of crimes that was made was a suggestion that, regardless of the crimes, two different ones can still have a deprivational effect. And why are you bringing up the DRM situation? I already said that was justified. It’s not theft because you’re not paying for the product, you’re paying for a license. Theft would be paying for a product and having that taken away from you. You bought the license knowing, in advance, that that’s what it was when you bought it. Ignorance is not an excuse for making claims that aren’t factually true.
Your entire response is irrelevant. You’re not addressing anything that was actually being discussed. Instead you’ve focused on the difference between piracy and theft as a semantic argument instead of a substantive one and continue to do so. The social contract for goods and services is that both parties are entitled to the “fruits” of their labor - one party creates and the other ingests and money is exchanged for a good/service. Piracy breaks that contract by allowing one party to ingest without providing the creator an equal good or service in exchange. The further entitlement on display here trying to justify this theft is childish.
The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content
That's a claim you've made. Prove it. The evidence shows that more more pirated content has higher profits. If you can't quantify that (even if only at a macro level), then it's a worthless claim.
Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.
That's the whole point. Not all crimes are equal, not all crimes are even immoral. Arguing it's wrong because it's illegal or right because it isn't is a monstrously flawed position to take.
..We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, ...
Which there's no evidence of ever happening. You've presented no case for why piracy is immoral
No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action.
Obviously you don't understand what a straw man is. That was supporting the previously raised point not not all crimes are equal by pointing out a comparable case that everyone agrees with. Theft, like murder, has definition, both in common language and legally. Neither of those are piracy. The claim that piracy is theft is purely corporate propaganda hammered into the population with this dipshit ads from the 2000s. The fact that you've so entirely bought into speaks volumes to your ability to think critically.
It’s not a claim I’ve made. If you haven’t paid for something you’ve used or ingested, you deprived the creator of income. That’s a fact. And the argument about profits is a straw man because that’s not the same thing. People who ingest media talk about it and that convinces others to ingest it. Whether people who pirate content talk about it is irrelevant to the fact that they stole income from the creator to watch it in the first place.
Secondly, no one is arguing that it’s immoral because it’s illegal. That’s also a straw man. I’m arguing it’s immoral because you’re entitling yourself to the fruits of someone’s labor and creativity without holding up your end of the social contract.
Which there is no evidence of ever happening
Bullshit. The entire premise of piracy is ingesting something you didn’t pay for. There is literally a 100% correlation of evidence because, otherwise, piracy wouldn’t be an idea.
And I don’t know what a straw man is? You’re literally arguing against a point that I’ve never made. I have pirated content. I’m not claiming any high ground here. I just wish people would stop pretending like piracy isn’t theft when it is. You’re stealing income from a creator who is charging for their content. They’re not giving it away for free. You taking it without paying is depriving them of income and entitling you to get something that you didn’t trade in good faith.
It’s not a claim I’ve made. If you haven’t paid for something you’ve used or ingested, you deprived the creator of income.
That is a claim. You have made it in this post, ergo it is a claim you have made.
That’s a fact. And the argument about profits is a straw man because that’s not the same thing. People who ingest media talk about it and that convinces others to ingest it. Whether people who pirate content talk about it is irrelevant to the fact that they stole income from the creator to watch it in the first place.
You're claiming it to be a fact, that doesn't make it so lmfao. Piracy of things that are unavailable for sale robs creators of what income, exactly? "Piracy" including circumventing DRM, including for legitimate license holders, again, what loss income? Y'know it's cheaper to fly from Melbourne to LA and buy adobe creative suite than it is to purchase it in australia, unfortunately evading geoblocking is considered piracy. Those immoral Australian deviants have no right to circumvent the noble price gauging of multinationals apparently.
There is no fact here. There is a baseless claim that, again, I'd ask you to substantiate. What's this, like my fourth post in a row where I've invited you do to do so. Perhaps a fifth response where you fail to do that will convince someone.
And for your reference, confidently claiming something does not make it a fact. There needs to be actual truth to it as well, if you cannot demonstrate the truth of a claim then nobody is obligated to accept it as fact.
Secondly, no one is arguing that it’s immoral because it’s illegal. That’s also a straw man. I’m arguing it’s immoral because you’re entitling yourself to the fruits of someone’s labor and creativity without holding up your end of the social contract.
We established several posts ago that pirated products are typically more profitable. Your (often false) assumption that pirates haven't purchased the rights to the content they are pirating and incomplete ideas of what piracy includes is failing you here. If there is no opportunity to pay for said content, is it still immoral?
You appeal to holding up the social contract, what about cases of actual theft where legitimate customers are cut off from access by developers and via pirate to have access to content they have legally paid for? How much extra money should should someone owe universal studios if they want to rip a DVD or download a rip to their laptop so they can watch it on a flight? When kids used to record songs off the radio onto a cassette tape, how much money do they owe the record labels for doing so?
Which there is no evidence of ever happening
Bullshit. The entire premise of piracy is ingesting something you didn’t pay for. There is literally a 100% correlation of evidence because, otherwise, piracy wouldn’t be an idea.
Your definition of piracy is inadequate, but even in those cases where piracy meets your definition, you cannot provide any actual substantiated cost for what creators have lost, because no such evidence exists. There is no evidence to support the assumption that a pirated piece of content is a lost sale (there is, however, evidence that leads to the likelihood of pirated content leading to more sales, be it by word of mouth marketing increasing the products sales or by future/parallel sales by the pirate themselves).
If it's bullshit, link a study and prove me wrong.
And I don’t know what a straw man is? You’re literally arguing against a point that I’ve never made. I have pirated content. I’m not claiming any high ground here. I just wish people would stop pretending like piracy isn’t theft when it is. You’re stealing income from a creator who is charging for their content. They’re not giving it away for free. You taking it without paying is depriving them of income and entitling you to get something that you didn’t trade in good faith.
Lmfao I made a point that equating piracy to theft is as wrong as equating murder to speeding and you claimed that was a straw man because nobody is arguing speeding is murder. No shit genius, the point of that comparison is to demonstrate the absurdity of the former claim, because nobody is so clueless as to make the latter.
For your education benefit, a stawman would be an argument derailing the topic of conversation with an entirely different claim (not by drawing a legitimate comparison). Here's an example, it's subtly different so try to see if you can't spot how it's not the same as the argument above.
Defending the big corporations and the establishment means you're supporting scumbags who benefit from it like Harvey weinersien and the sexists at activision/blizzard. You are directly supporting abusers of women
You're so confidently asserting nonsense and making both stupid and irrelevant claims. If you want to lick boots and swallow corporate propaganda equating serious crimes with misdemeanors that's your choice, but you'd have to be beyond stupid to expect that sentiment to be shared and a left leaning, somewhat anti corporate message board.
This entire reply is so dishonest that I won’t be bothering to interact with you further. You’ve mischaracterized my entire point, consistently argued a straw man, and insulted me for no reason other than your inability to actually argue the point I made. People pirating things that are unavailable is an edge case that neither disproves my point nor addresses the point.
You’re a dishonest person performing mental gymnastics to try and make yourself feel better.
I've never understood the "piracy is morally acceptable" argument, personally. Best I can agree with is that piracy is not morally bad in some cases. Especially since me pirating something has no impact if I never would have paid for it in the first place. But it can often times be morally wrong (people who refuse to buy games from indie studios despite having the money to do so would usually fall into this category imo), and I can't imagine any scenario outside of the preservation of media where it's actually morally good to pirate things.
Like, I'm all for people not buying things that they don't support. And I feel no sympathy for large companies that make more money in a day than I'll make in a lifetime losing out on sales. But when did it become my right to play Hogwarts Legacy or watch a show without paying for it?
"If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar's own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve."
Eben Moglen
I think imposing artificial scarcity on art, information, and tools; and rationing based on those with the ability to pay is immoral. I mean sure, most art that people pirate is just empty entertainment. But imposing artificial scarcity on tools (software such as OSs, CAD, productivity software, etc), news, and academic papers behind expensive licenses that many cannot afford to pay is objectively immoral. If piracy did not exist, I am positive the world would be without many of the technological advances we have today.
Not to mention the fact that oftentimes pirated content is just better. DRM free games run better and some work people have put into remastering media in general is outstanding.
I found a collection of the DBZ anime which is color corrected, proper aspect ratio, higher resolution, improved audio (from a different home release with better audio) made by fans for no profit. Even if you wanted to you couldn't purchase that but piracy made it possible.
Unofficial remasters of some old, poorly mastered songs have made a difference for me and I wouldn't be able to enjoy them without resorting to piracy.
As a Muslim, it is already forbidden to implement artificial scarcity. So as a Muslim, it's not an opinion, but objectively wrong, because God said that it is wrong.
Genuinely curious about that now...
I will warn you: We believe that there is good and wrong, and not humans, but Allah (god) is the one who created us and Allah is the one who decides what is good and what is wrong.
So basically what is wrong and what is right is pre-decided by Allah, so we don't have to decide if something is bad or not, because Allah already gave the info of that to us.
I was interested about the artificial scarcity part
Exactly. IP isn't rivalrous like land or goods, so it has no place being artificially restricted. Property rights are a solution to human conflict in the natural world.
If piracy were legal (just the download for personal use, not redistribution), let's pretend for a second. I bet the majority of people wouldn't even be here asking these questions.
"If it's legal then why not". That's how many people think.
However the morality aspects still stand and shouldn't be skwed by the legal aspect.
When you made the example of pirating indie games, if piracy is legal, people would legally download those games from third party sources, even the people who wouldn't do it if piracy were illegal (like it is in reality).
At that point it'll become some sort of "if I can afford it I will support the studio and buy the game, if I can't I will get it for free because people won't think I'm stealing regardless". Kind of like a donate if you can sort of system some software developers have in place.
In reality nothing prevents the same people from thinking that way right now. It's just the stigma behind pirating even those indie games which is still skewed and dependant by the legal aspect of the situation.
The truth about digital products is that if someone doesn't want to pay for something they won't pay regardless and it doesn't rob anyone else from being able to purchase and downloade the same exact content the legit way.
The mistake is seeing pirates as otherwise potential paying customers if piracy wasn't an option.
If piracy were legal (just the download for personal use, not redistribution)
That is actually the case in some countries, like the Czech Republic. But, torrents aren't because you are also uploading
This is inaccurate. You are not buying it (the media), you are buying the right to stream it (as long as the seller provides the media as a stream). You don't "buy" a movie unless you are paying for it's ownership, which would be millions of dollars. For physical releases you buy the disk and the right to watch it under certain conditions (DRM). And you generally don't have a right be able to "buy" or have access to all media.
But all that doesn't automaticly make it amoral. this comment is gonna be downvoted to hell
this meme is a criticism of that. it shouldn't be like that. if I buy a chair, I own the chair. I can then choose to sit on it, burn it, or give it to my neighbor, whatever. if I buy a movie, it's suddenly not like that – but not because of some inherent quality that would make it impossible, but only because they say it is like that. but they have one weakness: it's only like that if we actually stick to those rules. they're all arbitrary anyway! we can therefore treat a bought movie just as it should be: a physical copy that we actually own. we can then decide to watch it, to lend it to our neighbor, to play it for everybody to see on the street, to cut it and remix it and do something new with it. will they come and claim we've "pirated" their media? yes of course, but this is nonsensical, dead law, that has to be broken again and again by just – ignoring it, and making it not so. if I buy a movie, I do own the movie, and the company that says otherwise can get fucked. that's what this is about.
That's kind of their point, because we are not in fact buying the media the argument is that piracy has some moral element. Put another way there is no option to own it outside of piracy.
For physical releases you buy the disk and the right to watch it under certain conditions (DRM).
I'd like to point out German law (maybe this expands to EU and other countries) with traditional media.
Traditionally you bought movies and music on physical discs. You had a guaranteed right to be able to sell it to other people, as well as make personal copies of it for private use/backups.
DRM has always tried to oppose this right. And obviously, in the last decade(s) a lot went into service-oriented streaming and temporary access instead of owning even on a partial or theoretical level.
Legally, piracy is not stealing. It is copyright infringement. That's a totally different ball game with different implications.
While stealing even cheap items quickly lands you in legal hot water, just downloading (without uploading) doesn't. I don't know of a single case where someone got a significant fine or even a lawsuit for just downloading (and not redistributing) content.
The legal main difference between stealing and illegaly copying is that when you steal something it's gone.
This changes the damages calculation a lot, since the only damage you caused by copying is the opportunity cost: Since you copied it, they didn't sell it to you. But you might have already bought it in the meantime (then the damages 0), or you might have not bought it at all (then the damages are also 0).
Also, stealing is criminal law, while copyright is civil law, which makes it legally entirely different.
Looks nitpicky, but if you talk about current laws, nitpicky is the whole game.
If I've bought the right to play the game, what's "the game" that I'm entitled to if they decide to take away what makes it the thing I agreed to have access to?
That is answered in the 95-page TOS
There are lots of cars you can't get parts for dude.
There aren't literally any cars that I can't get parts for.
What is your opinion on the following argument defending piracy, as in copyright infringement: "Piracy can't be stealing if paying for it isn't owning"
Very cool, didn't know we can do that!
As an artificial intelligence, I don't have personal opinions or feelings. However, I can provide an analysis of the argument. This assertion appears to be examining the complex relationship between ownership, copyright, and piracy. While it's true that purchasing certain types of media doesn't confer full ownership rights in the traditional sense (you cannot replicate and distribute a DVD you bought, for instance), it doesn't necessarily justify piracy. From a legal perspective, piracy is considered a form of theft as it involves the unauthorized use or distribution of copyrighted material. The argument could be seen as an attempt to redefine or question these understandings, but that doesn't necessarily change how they're treated by the law.
ChatGPT: Your argument is invalid because it doesn't change the legal reality of things.
leave it up to chatgpt to equate legality with morality
It wasn't instructed to formulate a moral defense, only a "defense". Looks like it assumed that meant legal defense.
ChatGPT isn't the right tool to ask questions about morality to anyway. You shouldn't criticize it for failing to do something it was never designed for.
i can if i waaaant to :3
Where did it equate legality and morality? Seems like it only gave legal facts.
To be completely frank, I couldn’t care less if it’s stealing or not. They should sell their shit for cheaper if their companies care so much, which I’m not sure they really do.
If they do that how will they pay the artists millions of dollars.. And how will they buy their latest private jet or yacht or whatever.
Most artists never make any money at all...
Well I'm talking about the ones that do. Don't you think that it's a bit unevenly distributed?
I seriously don't understand the mental gymnastics here. We pirate because we'd rather get something for free than pay for it. There are certainly cases when someone is forced to pirate a product due to copyright restrictions in their country but that isn't the case most of the time for people like us who pirate. We're just selfish and there's noting wrong with admitting that.
The mental gymnastics are in response to copyright holders' gymnastics. They remove content, relocate it, put it behind tiered subscriptions, or sometimes effectively delete it from all legal avenues after owners/subscribers paid for it. So if paying for a subscription isn't owning it, as described in Amazon's fine print for example, then what do you do? It's a long-term rental subject to removal upon any licensing transfers. Sure, we get greedy once set up, but if legal options don't actually offer you any legal ownership due to legal gymnastics, then yeah, I'll do the mental gymnastics right back at them.
I agree. I'm American and I love the show "Taskmaster." I would like to give them money to watch it. They would like to receive my money. There have been legal complications for years. I've bought their physical board game from their website but as far as the show goes, yo ho ho!
I used to pirate stuff because I couldn't afford it or because I prioritized spending my money elsewhere since I could get stuff for free.
Then as I got a job, I could afford to pay for lots of things and legal options became more convenient than piracy, so I just stopped pirating.
Now I'm back on the ship because pirating has become more convenient than subscribing to a bunch of different fragnented and anti-consumer services just to access a handful of content.
Some people just want shit for free (which is ok, been there), some others value service and convenience first and foremost.
Seriously I don’t understand all the mental gymnastics on an anonymous internet forum, just admit it was easy to steal and you didn’t feel like paying for it lol
People will feel more guilty about piracy than speeding, even though the latter kills thousands of people every year.
But also, are you absolutely sure it’s theft for me to walk into a Hertz and take a vehicle? Like if they’re not in the business of selling vehicles then surely it can’t be theft to take one…
Your reasoning touches on a deep philosophical concept: what is "ownership"?
I'd say owning something is easy enough when you can't duplicate it (I can't just copy your car or house to save money). Duplication, however, means the ownership is technically the abstraction of "intellectual property", which worked fine when duplicating cost money and people paid money for it.
However, the very essence of using a computer on a network is simply using copies. You're not reading this as I write it, but a copy your computer downloaded.
It's more about ownership of a copyright than ownership of an actual item though. There are issues with our copyright system that could be addressed (DMCA should be launched into the sun), but overall it's the lesser of two evils. A society without any copyright enforcement simply wouldn't produce the kinds of outstanding media that we're all used to. Movies today cost hundreds of millions to make, and without a sufficient profit motive, no investor would be willing to front that kind of cash. Even crowdfunding, which I actually feel is scammier than private investors, has never come close to raising the capital needed for a major film or TV show. The system only works so long as a critical mass of consumers are actually paying for most media.
Personally I'm fine with paying netflix for their content, with the understanding that I'm licensing its use on my television, not purchasing the work outright. I don't see that as any kind of scam.
I mean I still pirate too, but now that I'm at a point in life where I can afford to contribute, I try to. I have friends that are actors and writers and so I don't mind paying to ensure a healthy ecosystem of content creators moving forward. But if you make it too difficult or inconvenient for me to access the media I want, then to the high seas I sail, and I'm fine with that too lol
With most modern software you paying for the on-going development and all the network infrastructure to send you your copy. Same way that you pay to use the bowling alley.
I live in Japan. I could wave money around begging for a copyright owner to take it, but they refuse to take it and I can't access the content.
This is what I’ve been saying. We don’t even own digital products, all it takes is a server to be taken down or an account to be lost and all you bought is taken away. Pirating also can’t be stealing because we aren’t taking something away from someone else, other people are not deprived of the chance to have this just because we downloaded it.
Or the service is no longer supported. I remember buying some PS3 games digitally but can't access them on my PS5. Load of BS.
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase (false scarcity by removal fro
market) or if despite purchasing a physical object, say a car, I can't fully use it or repair it without special software I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase ... I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
I don't think this particular line of thought makes for a very good argument without more info. The other case makes sense. But for this one, people aren't obligated to sell you things. If you own something sentimental or private to you that I want, you're not obligated to sell it to me if I want it and I'm not justified in stealing it from you if you don't want to sell it.
For ex: Think of embarassing photos of yourself, private letters between you and others etc.
I think more info was given with the examples they used though. They reveal that the problem is with copyright, where a company can both stop you from buying something from them and stop you from buying it elsewhere by still technically owning it.
With their original comment,
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase (false scarcity by removal fro market) or if despite purchasing a physical object, say a car, I can’t fully use it or repair it without special software I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
I'm only talking about the first case of the or here. I specifically pointed out the other case that you are referring to was not something I had an issue with.
Edit: And how does this change anything? Companies aren't any more obligated to sell people things than individuals. There are instances where it may be beneficial for a company to choose not to sell certain products, for example if a better product exists that should succeed the old product or when a certain product is later discovered to be harmful in some way.
Are we talking things, or intellectual property? Not the same.
I feel like the same kind of argument can probably extend to either intellectual property or real physical objects. With physical objects certain limits have to apply of course (like me withholding things you need to survive could potentially justify your theft).
With intellectual property, if you write stories for yourself to pass the time you aren't obligated to share/sell those stories to me and it would be wrong for me to break into your home and make copies of them if you chose not to sell/share them with me.
Why breaking into someone's home?
See, since I'm your buddy, you tell me bits and pieces of the stories you're writing for fun. And I, a Hollywood mogul, take those ideas, hand them off to a development crew and put out a movie based on your ideas. You get nothing.
This is normal in Hollywood. Also, I underpay my development crew because capitalism. They hate me but my stockholders think I'm okay. Original content creators like you? Well, there's a reason the writers are on strike, since screenwriting pays so poorly it's downgraded to hobby.
It's a problem especially in the record labels, in which most artists have their content signed away for a pittance because that was the only way to get heard which is changing through the internet, which is why the RIAA is eager to speed up enshittification of social media. And there are some interesting conspiracy theories about why Kim Dotcom was arrested in 2012 days before he rolled out a new music distro system that had dozens of major Hip Hop artists involved that allowed artists to get music out for free and then keep all their touring proceeds. But that died with the Megaupload seizure. Remember that?
If you really want to shill for folks like Disney and Sony and Time Warner, feel free, but you can expect your content to enshittify as well (as it has been for years now). I'm sure Fast and Furious XIII will be awesome.
If you really want to shill for...
Yeah, I don't think that's what I'm doing. I think you're misrepresenting and/or misunderstanding my point. My point is that the argument below needs more details to justify why/when piracy is acceptable. I'm not claiming piracy is totally unethical or anything like that, nor am I shilling for anything.
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase ... I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
For what it's worth, I don't think your point about ethicality problems in the entertainment industry makes for a very satisfying argument either. If my neighbor steals from somebody else, am I justified in stealing from my neighbor? Maybe? But that reeks of self-interest and doesn't actually help the real victim.
If my neighbor steals a pound of sugar from somebody and I steal their car, to me it seems like I'm still doing something unethical. If my neighbor steals somebodies life savings and I steal their car, it feels like at best I'm doing something morally neutral, if not still outright wrong.
I'm not saying piracy is unethical, nor am I saying people shouldn't pirate. What I'm saying is that certain arguments for piracy being ethical aren't very good.
This is not about whether your neighbor is committing wrongdoing in your community, rather whether the system itself, and the edifices that hold it up are conducting themselves in good faith. Without these major players pressuring government to extend the enforced monopolies of copyright longer (that is, robbing the public -- you and I -- of its catalog of public-domain material) and failing to enforce educational and fair use, we wouldn't have IP laws at all, and piracy would not be a thing.
Granted, some argue that creators would have no interest in creating, except that they do when they are given the means to do so. This is one of the threats social media has, in providing entertainment that is not sending its profits to the major players in the industry.
We're not pirating from the artists. We're not pirating from our neighbors. We're pirating from giant corporations who've been plying the government for over a century now to strip rights from the public.
And given the government does not execute its function in good faith (that is, in service of the public, including protecting its interests from corporate capture), we have grounds to argue the authority of the state is forfeit, ruling the public by force rather than by consent (our elections allow us to choose from oligarch selects, and they have to obey plutocrats to keep their careers.)
Without the artificial construct by governing systems to make IP a thing to be licensed (and the use of DRM to control its distribution) neither patents nor copyrighted material would be a thing at all, let alone have been turned into the monstrosties that are US and EU IP law.
This is not about whether your neighbor is committing wrongdoing in your community, rather whether the system itself, and the edifices that hold it up are conducting themselves in good faith. Without these major players pressuring government to extend the enforced monopolies of copyright longer (that is, robbing the public – you and I – of its catalog of public-domain material) and failing to enforce educational and fair use, we wouldn’t have IP laws at all, and piracy would not be a thing.
Firstly, the neighbor comment I made is an analogy. Nobody is claiming this is about literal neighbors committing wrongdoings in a community. I'm not sure if you've missed my point with that analogy or if you're choosing to willfully misunderstand it here?
Second, what you're claiming here isn't correct when you talk about "what this is about". My comment which you are replying to was not about whether "the system itself, and the edifices holding it up are conducting themselves in good faith" or anything like that. My whole point is about whether "If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase … I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas." is good reasoning or not. Nobody is debating you on whether the modern media industries, the government, etc are corrupt or acting in good faith. That has nothing to do with my actual point.
We’re not pirating from the artists. We’re not pirating from our neighbors. We’re pirating from giant corporations who’ve been plying the government for over a century now to strip rights from the public.
You keep jumping back to these points of "well the media corporations, the government, etc did X wrong by us, so we're automatically justified to pirate", that's not how this works. The whole issue is why does that justify piracy? Doubling down and trying to say "BUT I WAS WRONGED!" is not a good argument here. Being wronged in some way does not make it morally acceptable to just do whatever you like.
Fair enough. By what authority do you assert intellectual property belongs to a private entity and not the public?
That isn't something I claimed.
You certainly asserted such by arguing piracy is morally wrong. If IP belonged to the public (id est there's no patent or copyright) then everything would be in the public domain. Media piracy would not be a thing.
But you assert not only is it a thing but it is morally wrong.
So please, by what authority are you asserting puts IP in the hands of private interests, thus making piracy a moral wrongdoing?
You certainly asserted such by arguing piracy is morally.
No I didn't. You are either ignoring or misunderstanding what I'm saying. My claim is that certain arguments don't justify why piracy is permissible. Not that piracy is morally wrong.
If IP belonged to the public ...
I'm not making any claims about who IP belongs to.
So please, by what authority are you asserting puts IP in the hands of private interests, thus making piracy a moral wrongdoing.
I can't give you any authority on this because if you reread what I actually said, I'm not claiming piracy is morally wrong and I'm not claiming anything about IP ownership.
I believe they mean not that they were wronged, but that the system is wrong. Ala MLK just laws and unjust laws. They disagree with IP law and thus feel piracy is fine as such.
Personally, I pay for my music and don’t use streaming services. I support bands by going to shows and buying merch. However I also don’t listen to big name artists and shit, and think most really don’t give a shit if you pay for the music or not if you’re supporting them in some way often. Plenty of bands have a “steal this record” or “steal this album”, or end up putting out stuff where they’d urged people to pirate their shit example: Streetlight Manifesto had done so because victory was refusing to send CD’s to the band to distribute to those who had preordered, wasn’t paying them for purchases made through victories site, etc. The (bigger label) music industry is fucked. They extort bands. They extort venues. They extort anywhere that plays music. They extort anything they can for money while the content creators barely get shit.
I don't think the system being wrong is very good justification either. You still run into the same problem I'm pointing out. If some local store near me has an inherently fucked up return policy, I'm probably not justified in shitting in the middle of an aisle or trying to fistfight a cashier in response. Something being wrong isn't an immediate justification for whatever action a person takes in reaction.
Of course you wouldn't be justified in harming a minimum wage worker because the policy of the corporation. That is like the opposite of the point. Its more like, say my neighbor owns a company and exploits immigrants to do lawncare. Maybe I'd pay for it if I knew he was actually taking care of his workers and not exploiting them, but he sucks, boo. So while he is away on vacation I borrow his equipment without asking to do my own lawn. Does it hurt him? I mean technically there is more wear & tear on the equipment. Will he notice? No. Do I give a shit if it causes it to break faster than it would have otherwise? Nah, fuck him.
Of course you wouldn’t be justified in harming a minimum wage worker because the policy of the corporation. That is like the opposite of the point.
That's a pretty obvious example of the point I was making when I said: "Something being wrong isn’t an immediate justification for whatever action a person takes in reaction."
Say my neighbor owns a company and exploits immigrants to do lawncare. Maybe I’d pay for it if I knew he was actually taking care of his workers and not exploiting them, but he sucks, boo. So while he is away on vacation I borrow his equipment without asking to do my own lawn. Does it hurt him? I mean technically there is more wear & tear on the equipment. Will he notice? No. Do I give a shit if it causes it to break faster than it would have otherwise? Nah, fuck him.
This feels like very self serving reasoning. I don't think you're actually justified in doing something along these lines. Even worse, you can actually cause more harm by doing this. Your wear and tear on your neighbors tools can make the jobs of the already exploited immigrants harder and if the tools break the immigrants may be blamed for it. This actually feels like another good example of my point above that a wrong does not automatically imply justification, regardless of how much it might benefit you personally.
Sometimes I like to imagine what a library from a highly advanced race who have transcended the base concepts of copyright and currency in general would be like. If every person in the civilization could absorb any form of media ever made as well as knowledge formerly sequestered away behind paywalls or otherwise suppressed, just imagine what heights such a society could reach.
They are believed by theosophists to be encoded in a non-physical plane of existence known as the mental plane. Because it is believed that the records are encoded vibrationally into the inherent fabric of space, some have likened the mechanism as similar to how holograms are created.
I know some of these words!
to explain: Some trade-off occultist scammers said they can access all of humankinds knowledge in brain-space
I mean it would be cool if I were able to fact-check in real-time within my own brain, but I can't help feeling that this sounds just like a Black Mirror episode.
What.cd was(kinda) my modern day library of Alexandria for a short while.
Major reason not to buy ebooks from amazon: you can't lend, give, exchange, sell them and you may lose all of them if you anger the right people. They are not yours, you are not buying them, you merely paid for conditioned access to them.
It’s the same with steam games and other online stores. You are granted a licence to use the software; not to own it.
Steam is a glowing example of how to prevent piracy though. Because even if I own the games I can still loan them out. I can play the games across all of my devices. Steam has gone above and beyond to give you a reason to not pirate. I buy my games because the convenience steam provides without hindering my actual ownership of them.
Fully agree with you! My point was that it isn’t just the likes of Amazon that do this. If we look to piracy it’s growing in areas where a paid for service is either split across several providers or isn’t convenient.
I no longer pirate games or music as the paid for services are way easier to use and value for money.
The movie and tv companies started to have this when Netflix started but now there’s too many services and even on the same service the catalogues are different depending upon location. So instead of getting a share of revenue they get nothing.
Our current system of copyright is flawed and only serves the interests of corporations.
indeed
who do you think got the law created to begin with?
the "creators" of the content, of course. they saw an issue, complained to politicians and the politicians agreed.
it made sense, and it's IMO quite fair
but if i dont own the shit when i pay for it, then fuck 'em.
I don't know if it's the creators so much as the owners of the copyrights.
One of the problems with the system is how easy it is for big entitys to consolidate ownership of content.
If as the purchaser you don't outright own the product you've purchased, then there's no reasonable argument that it's "stealing" if you pirate that product instead. At best it's copyright infringement, and they can come at me in small claims court.
I don’t even know if it’s technically copyright since if you’re not sharing it you’re not infringing on their market, marketing, or product.
This means GoG is the only game storefront you can actually steal from...
Well technically you are also leasing from GOG. You can't resell them and you are legally not allowed to distribute their offline installers.
I did see an add for a digial game storefront that lets you sell your games yesterday. Seemed interesting, but I'm willing to bet you only get 5% of your original payment back
Kind of depends which angle we approach it from. Someone does have to first purchase the game to get a DRM free copy to make (legal) copies to share. It's not really stealing outright, and publishers understand that they're giving their customers the option to share their games with others when they sell on GOG.
In this view, then it's kind of like paying it forward. Those who cannot afford it can use it for free. Those who can are encouraged to pay, get their own copies and pass it along to others at disadvantage, like sharing infinitely replicateable books.
Admittedly it's a more optimistic view assuming most people would do that. But, if pirates pay for Stardew Valley, it means there are people who abide by this.
This is why I only carjack rental cars, it's totally not stealing!
Good counter metaphor.
When Audible disappears my book, and I can't do anything about it, that is theft.
Nope, it's not. It's in the terms of service. If you don't like that, don't sign the contract with them. Steal it if you want to. I'm cool with piracy, just not with the poor attempts at justification.
Seriously… these people are just bending over backwards to make themselves feel better. You’re stealing. Just acknowledge that and be done with it. Don’t make lame excuses for why your stealing is ok.
Well paying for it is essentially leasing it, piracy is neither. So...
so lease deez nutz
gottem
Good point right there.
Eyyy, I'm the guy in the screenshot! Holy attention Batman!
galaxy brain
I will accept my downvotes in advance because what I'm about to say is probably against the mindset of most of the people that come here but:
Piracy is wrong.
I say that as someone that pirates. I'm not sure why people have to justify their actions. I know what I'm doing is wrong, I know I'm taking money away from these businesses that run streaming sites, that make movies, write books(this is the one I feel worst about because this is likely taking money directly from creators). But I do it anyway because I'm cheap, I can't afford it, its easier to pirate stuff, plenty of reasons. But none of them make it morally right, and none of them make it ethically right.
When we pirate things, we're pirating entertainment. Entertainment isn't a right. You don't need this stuff to survive. Plenty of entertainment is provided for free at libraries, online with free movies and books. Hell, you can go outside, grab a stick and a rock and boom! Free entertainment. Sure, there are people that pirate things like Photoshop to get ahead in their careers or to jumpstart them, I'm not talking to those people. Adobe has done research and they know those people buy their products when they become professionals. I'm talking to the people downloading a movie and somehow morally justifying it. But when it comes down to it, you are taking something that someone paid money to make in an effort to make money off of it. In my mind, there's no justification for that. Again, I don't care that you do it, I do it too. But no one is gonna get any points in my mind for stating that somehow what you are doing is right, or that it isn't stealing because you're downloading a copy of something. How silly an argument that is. If you take something that someone else expects money for and it isn't vital to your survival, that is wrong.
I'll get off my soapbox now. I love all of you, have a great day :).
Thank you for mentioning Libraries! As a librarian, I'm always getting shocked faces when I tell patrons what is accessible with their library card
I used to pirate a lot of stuff, when I couldn't afford it. Now I only pirate things that I a) already paid for (and want a more convenient way of using it or to ensure it can't be taken away) b) can't obtain any other way, or c) don't know if I will like it, so I use the pirated version as a demo of sorts
Well I'd argue that two things can be wrong at the same time and I see OPs image mostly as a humorous jibe at the dubious practices that have risen with digital content. When you buy a Disc you can resell it, and the company can't knock on your door and say "Excuse me, we'd like the disc back but we'll keep your money". With a digital movie you just obtain a license to view it that you can't resell and can be taken away from you at any time (the cases I know of are admittedly rare till now and caused at least some public unhappiness and in some cases even law suites IIRC). All at the same or even higher price than before.
Then there is the fact that I'm all for using the correct terminology. When you steal something that something is lost to its previous owner. Piracy isn't stealing it's copyright infringement. Companies just prefer to call it stealing because it sounds more evil. Same with the billions of losses through piracy that they complain about. They are based on the wrong premise that every copy is a lost sale, which just isn't true. Take you for example: you can't afford it, so you personally don't loose them anything. And maybe you even buy some stuff you wouldn't have if you hadn't pirated it, or something else from that company before that you really liked. Then I remember people from my school days who had all the movies, all the games, anything. But when you asked "How is it?" they mostly answered "Oh, I haven't played it". I doubt this kind of "collector" would do the same if it actually cost them money, even if they had the means. In short those number are inflated to make the problem appear bigger than it really is.
Is it still a problem/ morally wrong? Probably, but it does put things in a different perspective for me.
And no, I don't need to justify anything to myself. My limiting resource is time, not money, so I buy my fish in the supermarket instead of trying to catch it on the high seas ;) Doesn't stop me from grumbling about them, obviously
I wonder if we're wrong to group entertainment and physical goods into the same category though. They're wildly different things.
If I make you a pair of shoes, I need to charge you money to account for my time, my effort, and the materials it took to make them. If I make a thousand shoes, it doesn't scale; the price per shoe has to stay the same.
If I write an ebook, I would charge for the time and effort it took to write it, but there's no material charge. It scales entirely differently because I can make a billion ebooks for the same cost as one.
Considering that, the old way of thinking that I should be able to resell an ebook like some shoes I bought doesn't seem to apply logically. We're buying entertainment, not physical goods. I don't bitch that I can't resell the experience of going to a concert, so why do I bitch (and I do) that I can't resell digital media?
I just wish the publishers would price media accordingly. If they all worked out a deal with stremio to get ten cents whenever I streamed a movie, I wouldn't think twice. But instead I need to sign up with multiple services and pay $20 to stream one, and I just realized I'm bitching to the choir so I'll end there.
Yea, thats essentially the problem. Companies getting greedy and trying to squeeze out more money by all means they can get away with.
If they priced things fairly (and split the profits fairly with the content creators) a lot less people would have an incentive to look to the high seas. And just maybe (pipe dream, I know) worked out deals with each other so people wouldn't need a freakin website just to find out where the hell they have to subscribe to watch something...
And sure, customers trying to avoid paying for anything is also a problem, but I feel the "cure" a) isn't one and b) hurts the people who pay much more than those who pirate.
Essentially the grass isn't green on either side of the fence and that's why we can't have nice things 🤷
Copyright is not a natural law - there is nothing natural about for example not telling a joke to somebody else without first tracking down the person who invented it and agreeing on payment for being allowed to tell it.
And, no, I'm not exagerating: as soon as it is created that joke legally has a copyright, owned by its creator, and sharing it (and that includes "public performances" such as telling it to your friends) requires the authorization of the owner of that copyright in that joke.
The only reason you don't see people fined for telling jokes is because it's not enforced because it's not worth the trouble (plus it would quickly turn people against Copyright).
So, now that we've shown that Copyright does in fact go against the natural human tendency to share - literally it's anti-natura - then that means it's an artificial construct created by man, so a law, written by lawmakers, with all the problems that rules made by politicians have.
Now, if you look at the justification for creating such an artificial restriction on the naturaly human tendency of sharing what you heard, it's to "incentivise creation", which "benefits all because the copyrighted work will go into the Public Domain at the end of the copyright period".
This makes sense, and it might even have been true in the beginning but it's not anymore:
You see, when this Law was first made the copyright period started as 25 years, which meant that copyrighted works did indeed go into the Public Domain to be freely enjoyed by all, but over the years that period has extended (go look at the various time when that period was extended and you will find the "strange" "coincidence" of it happenning when the first Mickey Mouse movie was about to go out of Copyright in the US) and is now around lifetime of the creator plus 50 years (more in certain countries, such as the US), which means that almost none of the creative works we grew up with (in our childhood) will never go into the Public Domain before we're dead and burried.
Think about it: under the current Copyright Legislation, for every single one of us and for all effects and purposes the "contract" between Society and cultural creators were Society enforces an artifical limitation to the natural human act of sharing and in return cultural creators make works which although at first requiring payment to enjoy, will one day be free to enjoy has been broken - we will never freely enjoy those works we've known since our childhood, the payment that Society (in other words: all of us) was supposed to get for that artificial limitation to sharing.
If a contract has been broken the injured side (that would be Society) doesn't have an obligation to abide by it.
Copyright is not a natural law, but neither is the trading of money for some bread.
I think IP is a (partially mistaken) attempt to enforce the same rule (that works really, really well) that we put on the trade of physical goods, on the trade of cognitive work.
It's tough because with the wheat it's conceptually simple. Yes, you're indirectly paying for their "work" in making the bread, but you don't have to think about work because the bread itself contains the value.
But information is copyable, and that's fundamentally different than bread.
Feels like something should be different, but I don't think the idea of ownership should be rejected merely because it's not natural. Ownership of goods is more natural, but still just an aspect of culture.
Exchanging stuff is absolutelly natural (you see little children doing it) and extending barter trading to "trading for tokens which can be exchanged with different people for other things" is really just introducing a new type of item being exchanged.
Going from sharing of ideas to not-sharing, on the other hand, is going for doing something naturally to the very opposite of that (hence my use of "anti-natura").
I don't think "exchanging stuff but now with tokens" is at all comparable with "stop doing what you would otherwise naturally do without even thinking about it and bring into this exchange an unrelated 3rd party".
I feel like you're trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole there: Copyright Legislation is not about the natural give and take in a exchange or trade (in this case of information) but rather it involves a 3rd party, which is not even present, which is the owner of the copyright of said information (used to be the creator, nowadays it can be anybody or a company) who is artificially inserted in what would otherwise be a normal exchange between 2 persons as an additional externaly party that also requires something.
I suspect the recurrent confusion of so many between copyright violation and theft is exactly because copyright is entirely unnatural, so people fall back to the closest instinctive human behaviour to try and understand it, ending up with the completelly way out there incorrect idea that copyright violation is like one side in an exchange taking stuff from the other and running away before giving their stuff to the other, when in reality you have to sides doing an absolutelly normal exchange (or even a gifting) and there is a 3rd party, not physicially present and never met, seen or otherwise involved with either which the powers of the land say is supposed to authorize that exchange and get a cut if it so wishes, and which both parties of that exchange choose to ignore.
It's not theft because both parties on the exchange are conducting a normal exchange just like they do with all other classes of thin and both are abidding by it. The closest "normal" illegality to copyroght violation is tax evasion and not tax in a democratic nation (were the money goes into the common pot to help everybody) but rather tax in an absolute monarchy or dictatorship were whomever was supposed to get that cut from that transaction is going to keep the money and even then the analogy fails because your're also supposed to give that 3rd party money even when GIFTING something.
You're not familiar with Hollywood accounting, are you?
More harm is caused by propping up the media industry with draconian IP laws than by any amount of piracy, and actual content creators are overworked and underpaid not because of pirates but the mad pursuit of exponential short term profit growth.
If you care about developers, don't consume the media.
If you must consume the media, pirate.
Amen brother. I also eat meat and I know it's wrong. I ain't gonna justify that shit I'm gonna pull a Cypher and blissfully chew that juicy steak.
I think the equivalent would be to make a copy of that room without paying.
No, that would harm whoever was in possession of the room at the time (owner or guest).
This would be more akin to sneaking into a movie theatre to stand in the back and watch.
But that would still be theft of service.
I mean, if we extend this logic though, stealing a license is still harmful to the person who possesses the copyright. Breaking into a hotel room deprives the current possessor the exclusive right to possess the room; stealing a piece of software deprives the copyright holder the exclusive right to control their copyrighted work.
Like, I'm not even anti-piracy for the most part. I just think the comparison in the OP is bad and doesn't make a lot of sense.
Someone else in this thread said it best -- "just enjoy ya loot."
Unsure if anyone can clarify. But my understanding that simply downloading a watching isn't an issue.
Selling illegally copied content is what can cause real legal issues.
I'm uncertain of any cases of anyone getting in trouble for simply watching copied content.
Example... 1st user pirates movies or videos and uploads them to YouTube or any streaming company.
2nd User then streams or downloads them to watch them offline. I've yet to see the 2nd user in this scenario face legal consequences.
Vs
2nd User then streams or downloads content and makes money off it. Here I see the 2nd user have legal issues.
Again I'm just a regular guy going based on regular guy logic.
Copyright infringement laws vary but even though simply downloading copyrighted material is against policies, it's hard to enforce and most copyright holders don't always find grounds for a lawsuit or it's straight up not worth pursuing.
You downloading a movie off a website is the same as a friend of yours sharing the same movie with you on a USB stick.
Actions against unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials (especially if it's for profit) on the other hand are much more easily enforceable.
Downloading and watching is a crime. One night be able to say they didn't know what they were downloading but likely the file name and site or torrent is a good clue that's bullshit.
Your probably discussing chance of getting caught. You likely will see a DMCA complaint or something like that to your ISP at worse for downloading but enough of these might get your service terminated (some ISP don't care.)
Sharing the files and usually sharing a lot of files publicly or semi publicly will get you more attention and that will get the media companies more likely to take you down as a distributor.
VPN and smart browsing habits will reduce a lot of this risk though.
Think of downloading is one star in GTA. They will chase you if they are you. Uploading is two stars when they start shooting at you. Profiting of it is like three stars and that's when they get more aggressive. You can get busted at one star but it's just very unlikely.
If a service costs money, and you take that service for free without permission it is stealing. If I rent a car I don't own it. Is it not stealing to hijack a rental car for a few hours?
You can't have your cake and eat it too. You steal because it is easier or cheaper. Thats it.
If I rent a car I don’t own it. Is it not stealing to hijack a rental car for a few hours?
Not a great hypothetical. Copying files would mean that in your hypothetical... I see the red civic your rental service is providing... Look at it real hard, poof another one into existence and drive away in it.
Here's my example: I subscribed to Paramount Plus explicitly for Star Trek content. The week I subscribed, they pulled all of the non-Abrams films. So I got to watching other stuff. Eventually, they brought all of the films back. Cool, right?
So I finally get around to Prodigy, a show made for Paramount Plus. Two episodes in, and it vanishes. No announcements or warnings that that show was just going to disappear. It's gone. Because "it wasn't popular enough". A show that only existed on that one platform was pulled off of that platform with absolutely no other legal way to view it. Content that I specifically signed up for that platform to see, and now I can't... legally. Yo ho, yo ho, me hardies.
Agreed. I'm under no delusions, when I pirate media I'm stealing. I personally don't believe it's immoral to steal from super corporations, especially considering how much they steal from us, but some people disagree and with these types of moral arguments there isn't a clear right answer. Even still, I think the majority of pirates are willing to pay for software or media when the service is priced well and more convenient than piracy.
Absolutely amazing, let’s just hope I won’t forget about it in my next “piracy-is-moral” argument
based af
"92 minutes of applauses"
so so true
When corporations write the laws, the laws help corporation.
I would steal this argument, but if it can be reposted here for free, then I don't think anybody really owns it. 🤔
I'm amused at these statements these 'wannabe' pirates make to justify piracy. A smart person would pirate quietly without letting the world know or justifying it.
I know why I do it & I don't want some validation, internet points, 2 minutes of fame to sound / look cool.
You've just let the world know you're pirating though
oops lol
Because for some piracy isn't simply about being a cheapskate but also about activism
Theres some truth to this, but a lot of people do use this as a shield against the general cultural acceptance that piracy is stealing or otherwise morally underhanded. I do it, but I don't have any illusion I'm one of the activists. I just get indignant and refuse to pay someone for content or entertainment who I think is damaging to the medium or predatory in general. I feel like if I really wanted to make a statement, I just wouldn't consume their work at all -- but life is short and I want to have my cake and eat it too.
It's possible to do both, I consume plenty of pirated media simply because it's unavailable due to pathetic capitalist imposed digital distribution limitations and lack of equitable paid access.
I also consume other pirated media because I wouldn't spend my resources for access because I don't yet know the value of the content and won't pay just for an opportunity to be disappointed, been there enough times to have learned that lesson. I'm happy to spend my time to find out your media sucks, but not my money, because that's also my time with the addition that I've put actual effort into converting it into fungible assets.
I also deliberately pirate media that I would pay for and do understand the value of, both because I can't always afford to purchase said product from a company making billions of dollars in exploitative corporate profits and because I have no interest in caring about that over my own personal satisfaction in life.
Your wrong. It’s what Jesus did, when the baker and fisherman couldn’t meet market demand.
So true! Here, have some internet points and validation!
No, you just need everyone to know you don't care about sounding/looking cool to sound/look cool. Totally different.
Too cool to be cool syndrome.
How did you do formatting injection in your username?
On the website you can modify your user display name with any font set you like. I used a random fancy font website and simply copy and pasted.
Nice, thanks!
I believe its just a display name, which I assume probably doesn't have as more lax rules on valid characters (such as emojis) than usernames do.
"A smart person would pirate quietly without letting the world know" While posting "I do it & I don't want some validation..."
Hypocrisy doesn't make them incorrect. If you're going to be a pedant get better at it.
To be fair, saying on the one hand what a smart person would do, and on the other hand doing the exact opposite, makes them a dumb person even by their own standards. At which point it matters less if one particular statement of theirs is correct or not, cause they've established themselves as an untrustworthy source.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know if the previous poster meant to go in this direction or not.
How stupid a person is doesn't change how correct an objectively correct statement is irrelevant of if you "trust them as a source". Just like how smart you are doesn't change that you've made an objectively incorrect statement. Fox news can still give you the correct time of day even if you wouldn't respect their opinion on how hot it is.
As much fun as setting up a torrent box is, being an argumentative asshole is even better.
They are screaming because they rather pay for convenience, but that is not how it works.
Now for most sources of media it's more ethical to pirate their content than obtain it legitimately.
Though granted, if you want to hurt the company more than by pirating their content, you can by not pirating their content.
(Sadly, as seen with The Wizard Game, people are not so motivated to walk away from their beloved franchises. So ⛵️🏴☠️🦜⚔️🌊)
Confused - how does not pirating hurt the company more? Wouldn't it be the exact same outcome for the company (as when pirated) or is this kinda like when GoT was arguing their popularity is even bigger when you look at the number of people torrenting their episodes
When we consume content and like it we have a tendency to want to patronize it, so yeah, if you pirated Wednesday season one, you're more likely to watch season two buy T-shirts and other swag, look for more Addams related content, and so on.
A good example of this happened in Russia when Neil Gaiman's books hadn't yet been marketed there. There were some unofficial and crowdsourced translations (some Russians learned English just to read Gaiman!) and so when the market finally reached Russia, it exploded, because the fan base had already been established.
GoT was an unusual case because HBO was bought separately from normal cable packages, and so fewer people had it, so it depended on piracy and social contacts (groups gathering for viewing parties at their friend's house). There were even public venues who would show the new episode (unofficially, so an unlicensed public performance) and by HBO ignoring these, it allowed the fanbase to swell to incredible proportions (at least until Season 8 which popped that bubble). Still, there are tons of spin-off markets from which HBO (now MAX) continues to profit.
When we like our content, we become invested in it. It becomes part of our lifestyle. We talk about it with friends. We make friends with folks who are also fans. And this is the point when we're susceptible to collectables and spinoffs.
Also we^†^ pirate for one of three reasons:
So in those cases where these are not factors, most people are going to choose to not pirate content they like, or support it in other ways. (If you want to support musical artists, it's far less important that you buy their songs on iTunes, and far more important that you go to their concerts when you can. And buy their concert t-shirt for $60. John Coulton also takes tips.)
† We in this case refers to the larger demographic of those capable of pirating. When a product is expensive or unavailable or whatever, people who sometimes buy will look for ways to pirate or obtain deals or whatever. Yes, there will be piracy enthusiasts who never buy, but that's a slender demographic despite what the anti-piracy propaganda might suggest. Also if content is only pirated, that may mean it was never officially released, or the release version was really poor quality.
You just said admitted to pirating, you little muppet.
While I do have no morals when it comes to copying smb elses hard work(I am a programmer, basically my job) I Support games when they are good. Movies are rarely any good but the cinema isn't as expensive for me anymore than when I was a student.
And most important you can't refund bad movies in the cinema.
I still think it should be illegal to sell someone elses work though. This also means profiting from it when you use it in your product/development environment.
TL;DR:
Piracy can be a means of demonstration to show the flaws in copyright. Which obviously needs to be public.
I think some still feel some level of guilt about it and naturally, whether consciously or subconsciously, rationalize it with ideas like this. I guess the progression from that is posting about it to show that “yes I pirate, but I’m not a bad person because rationalization”.
Pirating is like church sins, less about avoiding causing harm and more about preserving hierarchy and tradition, even though abuses and theft by intellectual property holders cause way more harm and economic cost than infringement, by multiple orders of magnitude.
You’re so right! Here have an internet point.
if you create an argument for the moral implications of piracy then you aren’t a REAL pirate (how do you define that, even?)
Especially when the statement makes no sense
Until we live in a world where people have equal access to information and essential technology piracy is a moral imperative.
Should something which costs a few hours worth of work in the developed word cost three weeks worth of work in a less developed country, just to make a publishing company worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a few extra bucks? Of course not!
Every other argument is a moot point to me. If I hadn't pirated Photoshop and other software when I was a poor kid I wouldn't have the six figure career I have today. The ultrarich steal from us every day in more ways than I can count. Maybe when they start being held accountable I will start caring about their bottom line.
Here I am wondering why there is still a downvote button in the YouTube comments... it does nothing!
The same reason that a lot of crosswalks have fake buttons. So you feel like you have control.
and why elevators have non functioning close buttons
Some elevators.
All the ones near me have fully functional close buttons.
true, it definitely depends where you live. If you’re in the US then it’s definitely a case of most don’t work, because most elevators at this point have been made after 1990, but if you live somewhere else then it can definitely be a case of some, or even none
but that said there definitely are functioning crosswalk buttons that work so being pedantic about some, most, etc, is irrelevant because as long as there are any that dont work its relevant to the topic
While simultaneously undermining your sense of trust in the world
Actually it's worse than nothing. Youtube promotes comments based on engagement, so while only an upvote increases the tally, voting at all still makes it more visible.
Youtube promoting controversial comments: https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExbmU2cHZwN3U0NXl4MXhhYXE5Y2c5bzJvZDJqYTVjdmphYmQ4aDhyOCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/KDVswimTNahWzcd7sV/giphy.gif
The downvotes are still counted, just not displayed. You can re-enable it via browser extensions.
Pretty sure those extensions all use some sort of estimate methodology, the dislikes aren't available via any apis or anything
Interesting, I wonder exactly how they work, then?
I've never used one myself but I've heard talk of various ones either A) taking the public (real) like number and extrapolating the dislikes based on an old like/dislike ratio available for the video from before the dislike removal (doesn't work on new videos) or B) the extension includes a feature where the user can like/dislike the video within the extension and then the dislike number is extrapolated using the public (real) like number and the extension's private like/dislike ratio. In either case the number is not connected to the "real" dislike count that YouTube would have access to internally
Hey GPT4 watch this video and tell me what its ratio of likes to dislikes would be
For videos. The commnt dislike has done nothing for years
Oh, didn't realize it was referring to comments. Yeah, that one's pointless!
Do we really need excuses for pirating media?
I pirate movies because I think digital access to them is overpriced, goes to the copyright holder instead of the creators, it's convenient and most importantly because I can.
I can't pirate going to the cinema, nor can I afford to build my own, therefore I gladly pay to have a seat and enjoy a movie there.
I think this logic is silly.
Employers don't own you, so witholding wages for services you provided isn't stealing. Getting a haircut and not paying isn't stealing.
I think the better justification is: rights holders make it a pain in the arse to access content affordably, so fuck you, just going to steal it.
You're only partly right. You example services. Of course it is not possible to own services. Piracy is only applicable to products. The point of the Twitter guy is, that companies intentionally stop selling their software etc. as products to sell you the same thing as a service, so that you cannot own it.
Not only that. Remember when Sony said that you don't own the PS4 you bought for several hundred bucks but just purchased the right to use it as intended so you're not allowed to tinker with it and for example install another operating system or figure out how their security works.
That's what is meant by buying is not owning anymore.
I could go on about cars with subscriptions for heated seats that are already installed but not turned on etc.
It's true that SaaS does stop you from owning software... But what good does "owning" a piece of software do you if you can't get updates anyway? Back in the pre-internet era we got used to software existing as discrete versions but it hasn't been like that for a LONG time. As soon as patching became a regular occurrence, "ownership" became a service contract with a CD attached. Then the CD vanished, and it just became a service.
While I do dislike needless "as a service" stuff, that model does genuinely suit a lot of people. It's not a conjob; companies offer this stuff because a lot of customers want it. Most of the companies that are selling you SaaS stuff themselves use SaaS things in-house.
Yeah, it sucks to hear it, but this guy is right.
It's also (typically) modeled in such a way that your software is consistently updated to new versions on release. You get active hotfixes, patches and improvements as they are released.
Most people jump software versions in stages of about 2-3 years. You'll find a lot of SaaS packages will be priced as if you were instead purchasing the software at those stages.
All in all, if you have every intention of using the software regularly, it's priced well and typically makes for a much better user experience.
Indeed. And that's without considering that a lot of SaaS stuff on the consumer level lets you cancel at any time. Ok, you can get burned for 30 bucks if it turns out not to be all that useful, but the full packages are typically priced somewhere between eyewatering and "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING?", and they always have been.
A perfect example here - GeForce Now costs like 20 per month, cancel whenever you like. A 4080 gpu costs way over a grand. It's up to you whether you prefer to own, rent or not bother at all, but it doesn't take a lot to convince me to spend 20 bucks, but it does take a lot to get me to stump up for a whole new PC.
I think you slightly missed the point too. I think he meant that even when you buy games for example (or any other software).You don't actually buy the game. You only buy a license to use that software.
Can we not become subreddit by posting this shitty screenshots trying to justify our reasons? Just share your media and enjoy it.
what do you mean trying to justify? discussion of shitty anti consumer tactics in digital media is perfectly valid
A screenshot of some comment is not really discussion though. This is a pretty base level understanding of the concept, which is why I say it's more cope then actual discussion.
This is one of the most popular posts this week here with more than 4 HUNDRED comments. I don't know what you view as a discussion but I think this was a pretty successful attempt at creating one.
I will say this thread had way more discussion then I was expecting when I originally posted this. My point about the screenshot still stands, I would much prefer we discuss something new related to sharing media, instead of recycling the same discussion about why its justified to copyright infringe.
I was gonna say the same thing but then I saw the 2200-something upvotes.
This community is doomed to be exactly like the low effort meme sub r/piracy if people keep upvoting this lazy content.
My headcanon is that it's a passive form of protection: when copyright owners look to communities like piracy they are met with highly upvoted silly memes, which would cause them to miss the more helpful pirate advice mixed within.
I don't think piracy needs to be justified because different people have different reasons.
Sure you could argue that you're not actually stealing but creating/downloading a copy of something it already exist. I always found that anti piracy commercial "you wouldn't steal a car" ridiculous as that's not how piracy works.
For example, I do it because I don't agree with how segmented the video streaming industry has become in recent years with this many different services that force you to buy a bunch of subscriptions while continuosly pulling content. Unlike the music streaming industry where all the most popular content (the majority of it) can be found on pretty much every serivce. You could have Spotify or Apple Music, not much difference (if any at all) in content or quality.
When I was a teenager I did it because I couldn't afford to buy any sort of media content and options were limited. Pretty much everyone that owned an MP3 player was pirating music.
The entire issue with these arguments, though, is that the opposition parties just answer those claims with “then you shouldn’t be ingesting that content”. If you aren’t willing to pay for it, then you don’t have the right to view/listen/stream it. Free market a-holes will always, correctly, bring up that the market works by putting out products and people paying for what they support and not paying for what they don’t support. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose which pieces or parts you support or don’t and there’s no way to give companies that type of feedback because they don’t care.
I'm willing to pay for it, but I'm not allowed to do so
For example, Amazon/MGM still don't allow me to pay to watch Stargate
I mean if I am not paying either way me ingesting that content or not makes 0 difference to the producer. It is the same logic as throwing excess food to the trash so homeless can't eat it.
It does, though, by the argument they’re making. If you could only ingest it by paying for it, you’d have to have paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to.
The very fact that you’re watching it without paying kind of proves that point.
The producer and publisher paid a cost for you to have heard and develop an interest in their products. So yes, it makes a difference to them if that investment turns into you using the content but not paying for it. You're suddenly a target audience without returns.
That's a fine argument that they might have, but piracy still isn't stealing. If someone steals something from me, I am deprived of that thing. If someone copies my intellectual property, I am hypothetically impacted by loss of income, but I can still use that information.
They can say it's morally wrong for someone to use or copy information against the owners wishes or without paying. They are welcome to that argument. None of us are obligated to care about their opinion.
If they can claim customers don't own something, especially physical items, after purchase because they are being pedantic over how people interact with intellectual property, we can and should absolutely use the same distinction to distance piracy fromt theft.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
I don't agree. I think your trying to compare this to wage theft, wherin an employee is promised or legally guaranteed some income based on hours work, where after both parties have agreed to this the employee has performed the work and the employer is withholding some of the pay. This case is stealing - the trade was completed and the employer is in possession of an asset (eg the pay that they are entitled to) - this is not a physical thing, but it is a real thing, with real physical value, and in removing that the employer would stealing that asset. Obviously there's a garguntuam difference here because both parties had agreed to exchange assets and the employer has taken ownership of that pay per the agreement. If someone decided to do that same work, absent agreement, obviously they can't claim wage theft because they didn't have any entitlement.
To be intellectually honest, you'd compare piracy to plagiarism. But that's (correctly) not as alarming as stealing which is why we need to mislead people to make it seem worse.
Entering without permission (in your example, paying) is trespassing. It's fine argument to say that it's morally wrong and that you shouldn't do it. It's blatantly wrong to claim it is stealing.
Digital content is the same way, insofar as piracy is more akin to trespassing than theft. It's an abstract argument to say not buying something is harming owners or creators, who are you (or anyone else) to dictate what people buy, or to attach some morality to that?
You say it harms creators, but the evidence says that pirated games make more money. I imagine your claim is based on an assumption that people who pirate stuff do so at the expense of people buying it. Have you bothered to explore that assumption any further? You might be surprised.
Piracy is quite literally not stealing. Stealing is an act of removing something from another's possession, into your own. That is simply not what piracy is, and trying to falsey equate different crimes is every but as absurd as "stop pretending driving 5mphover the limit isn't murder, it's wrong and trying to justify the morality of it makes you look silly"
No. I am not comparing to wage theft. You’re just making a semantic argument rather than a substantive argument. Sure, if you want to argue semantics, then I’m viewing it as trespassing or service theft. Either way, you’re depriving a creator of income. If it’s a smaller creator, then you’re stealing money from them because, otherwise, you wouldn’t get the experience of ingesting their content. You’re entitling yourself to the experience of ingesting their work without contributing to your end of the contract. You’re only making the argument in the way you are because larger studios pay the creators on a contract basis. The truth is, though, that those creators don’t get hired if their content doesn’t result in material sales (whether physical or digital) of the content. No one invests in content that doesn’t make money and the excuse that “it still does make money even if I pirate” is just mental gymnastics.
Your second argument is also dishonest - the “no one is losing any money because the person wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” argument. That’s just an extension of the second part of what I said above. If piracy is ok for one person, it has to be ok for all and if it was ok for all, then the content wouldn’t make money. TV shows don’t get renewed. Sequels don’t get made. Sure, maybe the original content made money because some people were honest and paid for it but you are depriving a creator of an income because, had everyone paid, they’d have more work and more income coming in.
All this is to say that I’m fine with piracy. Sometimes you can’t afford it. Sometimes it’s not available legally. Sometimes it’s just a superior experience where you’re not forced to watch ads or deal with DRM. These are all fine. But to try and justify it as deserved or go through these mental gymnastics to claim it’s not stealing is just nonsense or arguing semantics. Just admit you’re stealing/trespassing and not holding to your end of the contract and admit that you’re harming creators.
Then I'll try a third time. My claim is that theft deprived the owner of their item. Piracy does not do this, ergo it is something different than theft.
My second argument is to preempt the inevitable "pure economic loss" claim. It's a tangent, and is not a claim that 100% piracy is sustainable, simply that the assertion that piracy causes commercial products to fail (as piracy exists today) is factually and demonstrably wrong.
My third point, which you again chose not to address, is that equating piracy to theft is as stupid as comparing speeding to murder. They are different crimes and should be treated as such. You know what an actual comparison to theft is, which is the whole basis of the OP? A product a user has paid for being removed by the publisher because they chose to incorporate drm that is no longer sustainable, wonder why nobody calls this theft (in fact it is closer to theft than piracy). Oh wait no I don't, I spelled it out in the first post - piracy = theft is propaganda to hurt the little guy, the big players are manipulating the system such that they are above the same laws we play by.
Be fine with piracy or don't, I couldn't give a shit either way. That is irrelevant to the points I've raised.
You’re still arguing semantics and not the substance of my position.
The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content. You cannot honestly claim that they are not deprived of something by piracy. Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.
The second argument is a straw man. No one is discussing whether piracy causes failure. We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, whether directly or indirectly, and the needless justification being shown here which pretends that there is no effect.
The third point is another semantic argument and a straw man. No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action. The only comparison of crimes that was made was a suggestion that, regardless of the crimes, two different ones can still have a deprivational effect. And why are you bringing up the DRM situation? I already said that was justified. It’s not theft because you’re not paying for the product, you’re paying for a license. Theft would be paying for a product and having that taken away from you. You bought the license knowing, in advance, that that’s what it was when you bought it. Ignorance is not an excuse for making claims that aren’t factually true.
Your entire response is irrelevant. You’re not addressing anything that was actually being discussed. Instead you’ve focused on the difference between piracy and theft as a semantic argument instead of a substantive one and continue to do so. The social contract for goods and services is that both parties are entitled to the “fruits” of their labor - one party creates and the other ingests and money is exchanged for a good/service. Piracy breaks that contract by allowing one party to ingest without providing the creator an equal good or service in exchange. The further entitlement on display here trying to justify this theft is childish.
That's a claim you've made. Prove it. The evidence shows that more more pirated content has higher profits. If you can't quantify that (even if only at a macro level), then it's a worthless claim.
That's the whole point. Not all crimes are equal, not all crimes are even immoral. Arguing it's wrong because it's illegal or right because it isn't is a monstrously flawed position to take.
Which there's no evidence of ever happening. You've presented no case for why piracy is immoral
Obviously you don't understand what a straw man is. That was supporting the previously raised point not not all crimes are equal by pointing out a comparable case that everyone agrees with. Theft, like murder, has definition, both in common language and legally. Neither of those are piracy. The claim that piracy is theft is purely corporate propaganda hammered into the population with this dipshit ads from the 2000s. The fact that you've so entirely bought into speaks volumes to your ability to think critically.
It’s not a claim I’ve made. If you haven’t paid for something you’ve used or ingested, you deprived the creator of income. That’s a fact. And the argument about profits is a straw man because that’s not the same thing. People who ingest media talk about it and that convinces others to ingest it. Whether people who pirate content talk about it is irrelevant to the fact that they stole income from the creator to watch it in the first place.
Secondly, no one is arguing that it’s immoral because it’s illegal. That’s also a straw man. I’m arguing it’s immoral because you’re entitling yourself to the fruits of someone’s labor and creativity without holding up your end of the social contract.
Bullshit. The entire premise of piracy is ingesting something you didn’t pay for. There is literally a 100% correlation of evidence because, otherwise, piracy wouldn’t be an idea.
And I don’t know what a straw man is? You’re literally arguing against a point that I’ve never made. I have pirated content. I’m not claiming any high ground here. I just wish people would stop pretending like piracy isn’t theft when it is. You’re stealing income from a creator who is charging for their content. They’re not giving it away for free. You taking it without paying is depriving them of income and entitling you to get something that you didn’t trade in good faith.
That is a claim. You have made it in this post, ergo it is a claim you have made.
You're claiming it to be a fact, that doesn't make it so lmfao. Piracy of things that are unavailable for sale robs creators of what income, exactly? "Piracy" including circumventing DRM, including for legitimate license holders, again, what loss income? Y'know it's cheaper to fly from Melbourne to LA and buy adobe creative suite than it is to purchase it in australia, unfortunately evading geoblocking is considered piracy. Those immoral Australian deviants have no right to circumvent the noble price gauging of multinationals apparently.
There is no fact here. There is a baseless claim that, again, I'd ask you to substantiate. What's this, like my fourth post in a row where I've invited you do to do so. Perhaps a fifth response where you fail to do that will convince someone.
And for your reference, confidently claiming something does not make it a fact. There needs to be actual truth to it as well, if you cannot demonstrate the truth of a claim then nobody is obligated to accept it as fact.
We established several posts ago that pirated products are typically more profitable. Your (often false) assumption that pirates haven't purchased the rights to the content they are pirating and incomplete ideas of what piracy includes is failing you here. If there is no opportunity to pay for said content, is it still immoral?
You appeal to holding up the social contract, what about cases of actual theft where legitimate customers are cut off from access by developers and via pirate to have access to content they have legally paid for? How much extra money should should someone owe universal studios if they want to rip a DVD or download a rip to their laptop so they can watch it on a flight? When kids used to record songs off the radio onto a cassette tape, how much money do they owe the record labels for doing so?
Your definition of piracy is inadequate, but even in those cases where piracy meets your definition, you cannot provide any actual substantiated cost for what creators have lost, because no such evidence exists. There is no evidence to support the assumption that a pirated piece of content is a lost sale (there is, however, evidence that leads to the likelihood of pirated content leading to more sales, be it by word of mouth marketing increasing the products sales or by future/parallel sales by the pirate themselves).
If it's bullshit, link a study and prove me wrong.
Lmfao I made a point that equating piracy to theft is as wrong as equating murder to speeding and you claimed that was a straw man because nobody is arguing speeding is murder. No shit genius, the point of that comparison is to demonstrate the absurdity of the former claim, because nobody is so clueless as to make the latter.
For your education benefit, a stawman would be an argument derailing the topic of conversation with an entirely different claim (not by drawing a legitimate comparison). Here's an example, it's subtly different so try to see if you can't spot how it's not the same as the argument above.
You're so confidently asserting nonsense and making both stupid and irrelevant claims. If you want to lick boots and swallow corporate propaganda equating serious crimes with misdemeanors that's your choice, but you'd have to be beyond stupid to expect that sentiment to be shared and a left leaning, somewhat anti corporate message board.
This entire reply is so dishonest that I won’t be bothering to interact with you further. You’ve mischaracterized my entire point, consistently argued a straw man, and insulted me for no reason other than your inability to actually argue the point I made. People pirating things that are unavailable is an edge case that neither disproves my point nor addresses the point.
You’re a dishonest person performing mental gymnastics to try and make yourself feel better.
I've never understood the "piracy is morally acceptable" argument, personally. Best I can agree with is that piracy is not morally bad in some cases. Especially since me pirating something has no impact if I never would have paid for it in the first place. But it can often times be morally wrong (people who refuse to buy games from indie studios despite having the money to do so would usually fall into this category imo), and I can't imagine any scenario outside of the preservation of media where it's actually morally good to pirate things.
Like, I'm all for people not buying things that they don't support. And I feel no sympathy for large companies that make more money in a day than I'll make in a lifetime losing out on sales. But when did it become my right to play Hogwarts Legacy or watch a show without paying for it?
"If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar's own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve."
I think imposing artificial scarcity on art, information, and tools; and rationing based on those with the ability to pay is immoral. I mean sure, most art that people pirate is just empty entertainment. But imposing artificial scarcity on tools (software such as OSs, CAD, productivity software, etc), news, and academic papers behind expensive licenses that many cannot afford to pay is objectively immoral. If piracy did not exist, I am positive the world would be without many of the technological advances we have today.
Not to mention the fact that oftentimes pirated content is just better. DRM free games run better and some work people have put into remastering media in general is outstanding.
I found a collection of the DBZ anime which is color corrected, proper aspect ratio, higher resolution, improved audio (from a different home release with better audio) made by fans for no profit. Even if you wanted to you couldn't purchase that but piracy made it possible.
Unofficial remasters of some old, poorly mastered songs have made a difference for me and I wouldn't be able to enjoy them without resorting to piracy.
As a Muslim, it is already forbidden to implement artificial scarcity. So as a Muslim, it's not an opinion, but objectively wrong, because God said that it is wrong.
Genuinely curious about that now...
I will warn you: We believe that there is good and wrong, and not humans, but Allah (god) is the one who created us and Allah is the one who decides what is good and what is wrong.
So basically what is wrong and what is right is pre-decided by Allah, so we don't have to decide if something is bad or not, because Allah already gave the info of that to us.
I was interested about the artificial scarcity part
Exactly. IP isn't rivalrous like land or goods, so it has no place being artificially restricted. Property rights are a solution to human conflict in the natural world.
If piracy were legal (just the download for personal use, not redistribution), let's pretend for a second. I bet the majority of people wouldn't even be here asking these questions.
"If it's legal then why not". That's how many people think. However the morality aspects still stand and shouldn't be skwed by the legal aspect. When you made the example of pirating indie games, if piracy is legal, people would legally download those games from third party sources, even the people who wouldn't do it if piracy were illegal (like it is in reality).
At that point it'll become some sort of "if I can afford it I will support the studio and buy the game, if I can't I will get it for free because people won't think I'm stealing regardless". Kind of like a donate if you can sort of system some software developers have in place.
In reality nothing prevents the same people from thinking that way right now. It's just the stigma behind pirating even those indie games which is still skewed and dependant by the legal aspect of the situation.
The truth about digital products is that if someone doesn't want to pay for something they won't pay regardless and it doesn't rob anyone else from being able to purchase and downloade the same exact content the legit way. The mistake is seeing pirates as otherwise potential paying customers if piracy wasn't an option.
That is actually the case in some countries, like the Czech Republic. But, torrents aren't because you are also uploading
Here's my justification:
I paid for a product. I'm getting that product, by hook or by crook.
This is inaccurate. You are not buying it (the media), you are buying the right to stream it (as long as the seller provides the media as a stream). You don't "buy" a movie unless you are paying for it's ownership, which would be millions of dollars. For physical releases you buy the disk and the right to watch it under certain conditions (DRM). And you generally don't have a right be able to "buy" or have access to all media.
But all that doesn't automaticly make it amoral.
this comment is gonna be downvoted to hellthis meme is a criticism of that. it shouldn't be like that. if I buy a chair, I own the chair. I can then choose to sit on it, burn it, or give it to my neighbor, whatever. if I buy a movie, it's suddenly not like that – but not because of some inherent quality that would make it impossible, but only because they say it is like that. but they have one weakness: it's only like that if we actually stick to those rules. they're all arbitrary anyway! we can therefore treat a bought movie just as it should be: a physical copy that we actually own. we can then decide to watch it, to lend it to our neighbor, to play it for everybody to see on the street, to cut it and remix it and do something new with it. will they come and claim we've "pirated" their media? yes of course, but this is nonsensical, dead law, that has to be broken again and again by just – ignoring it, and making it not so. if I buy a movie, I do own the movie, and the company that says otherwise can get fucked. that's what this is about.
That's kind of their point, because we are not in fact buying the media the argument is that piracy has some moral element. Put another way there is no option to own it outside of piracy.
I'd like to point out German law (maybe this expands to EU and other countries) with traditional media.
Traditionally you bought movies and music on physical discs. You had a guaranteed right to be able to sell it to other people, as well as make personal copies of it for private use/backups.
DRM has always tried to oppose this right. And obviously, in the last decade(s) a lot went into service-oriented streaming and temporary access instead of owning even on a partial or theoretical level.
Legally, piracy is not stealing. It is copyright infringement. That's a totally different ball game with different implications.
While stealing even cheap items quickly lands you in legal hot water, just downloading (without uploading) doesn't. I don't know of a single case where someone got a significant fine or even a lawsuit for just downloading (and not redistributing) content.
The legal main difference between stealing and illegaly copying is that when you steal something it's gone.
This changes the damages calculation a lot, since the only damage you caused by copying is the opportunity cost: Since you copied it, they didn't sell it to you. But you might have already bought it in the meantime (then the damages 0), or you might have not bought it at all (then the damages are also 0).
Also, stealing is criminal law, while copyright is civil law, which makes it legally entirely different.
Looks nitpicky, but if you talk about current laws, nitpicky is the whole game.
If I've bought the right to play the game, what's "the game" that I'm entitled to if they decide to take away what makes it the thing I agreed to have access to?
That is answered in the 95-page TOS
There are lots of cars you can't get parts for dude.
There aren't literally any cars that I can't get parts for.
@ChatGPT@lemmings.world
What is your opinion on the following argument defending piracy, as in copyright infringement: "Piracy can't be stealing if paying for it isn't owning"
Very cool, didn't know we can do that!
As an artificial intelligence, I don't have personal opinions or feelings. However, I can provide an analysis of the argument. This assertion appears to be examining the complex relationship between ownership, copyright, and piracy. While it's true that purchasing certain types of media doesn't confer full ownership rights in the traditional sense (you cannot replicate and distribute a DVD you bought, for instance), it doesn't necessarily justify piracy. From a legal perspective, piracy is considered a form of theft as it involves the unauthorized use or distribution of copyrighted material. The argument could be seen as an attempt to redefine or question these understandings, but that doesn't necessarily change how they're treated by the law.
ChatGPT: Your argument is invalid because it doesn't change the legal reality of things.
Me: The legal reality needs changed.
leave it up to chatgpt to equate legality with morality
It wasn't instructed to formulate a moral defense, only a "defense". Looks like it assumed that meant legal defense.
ChatGPT isn't the right tool to ask questions about morality to anyway. You shouldn't criticize it for failing to do something it was never designed for.
i can if i waaaant to :3
Where did it equate legality and morality? Seems like it only gave legal facts.
To be completely frank, I couldn’t care less if it’s stealing or not. They should sell their shit for cheaper if their companies care so much, which I’m not sure they really do.
If they do that how will they pay the artists millions of dollars.. And how will they buy their latest private jet or yacht or whatever.
Most artists never make any money at all...
Well I'm talking about the ones that do. Don't you think that it's a bit unevenly distributed?
As an artist, where is my million dollars?
No offense. I'm talking about the ones that do.
I seriously don't understand the mental gymnastics here. We pirate because we'd rather get something for free than pay for it. There are certainly cases when someone is forced to pirate a product due to copyright restrictions in their country but that isn't the case most of the time for people like us who pirate. We're just selfish and there's noting wrong with admitting that.
The mental gymnastics are in response to copyright holders' gymnastics. They remove content, relocate it, put it behind tiered subscriptions, or sometimes effectively delete it from all legal avenues after owners/subscribers paid for it. So if paying for a subscription isn't owning it, as described in Amazon's fine print for example, then what do you do? It's a long-term rental subject to removal upon any licensing transfers. Sure, we get greedy once set up, but if legal options don't actually offer you any legal ownership due to legal gymnastics, then yeah, I'll do the mental gymnastics right back at them.
I agree. I'm American and I love the show "Taskmaster." I would like to give them money to watch it. They would like to receive my money. There have been legal complications for years. I've bought their physical board game from their website but as far as the show goes, yo ho ho!
Not judging you for your reasons, but you don't speak for everyone so calm down with the "we" pronoun.
There's people on both sides of the scale here.
I used to pirate stuff because I couldn't afford it or because I prioritized spending my money elsewhere since I could get stuff for free. Then as I got a job, I could afford to pay for lots of things and legal options became more convenient than piracy, so I just stopped pirating.
Now I'm back on the ship because pirating has become more convenient than subscribing to a bunch of different fragnented and anti-consumer services just to access a handful of content.
Some people just want shit for free (which is ok, been there), some others value service and convenience first and foremost.
Seriously I don’t understand all the mental gymnastics on an anonymous internet forum, just admit it was easy to steal and you didn’t feel like paying for it lol
People will feel more guilty about piracy than speeding, even though the latter kills thousands of people every year.
But also, are you absolutely sure it’s theft for me to walk into a Hertz and take a vehicle? Like if they’re not in the business of selling vehicles then surely it can’t be theft to take one…
Your reasoning touches on a deep philosophical concept: what is "ownership"?
I'd say owning something is easy enough when you can't duplicate it (I can't just copy your car or house to save money). Duplication, however, means the ownership is technically the abstraction of "intellectual property", which worked fine when duplicating cost money and people paid money for it.
However, the very essence of using a computer on a network is simply using copies. You're not reading this as I write it, but a copy your computer downloaded.
It's more about ownership of a copyright than ownership of an actual item though. There are issues with our copyright system that could be addressed (DMCA should be launched into the sun), but overall it's the lesser of two evils. A society without any copyright enforcement simply wouldn't produce the kinds of outstanding media that we're all used to. Movies today cost hundreds of millions to make, and without a sufficient profit motive, no investor would be willing to front that kind of cash. Even crowdfunding, which I actually feel is scammier than private investors, has never come close to raising the capital needed for a major film or TV show. The system only works so long as a critical mass of consumers are actually paying for most media.
Personally I'm fine with paying netflix for their content, with the understanding that I'm licensing its use on my television, not purchasing the work outright. I don't see that as any kind of scam. I mean I still pirate too, but now that I'm at a point in life where I can afford to contribute, I try to. I have friends that are actors and writers and so I don't mind paying to ensure a healthy ecosystem of content creators moving forward. But if you make it too difficult or inconvenient for me to access the media I want, then to the high seas I sail, and I'm fine with that too lol
With most modern software you paying for the on-going development and all the network infrastructure to send you your copy. Same way that you pay to use the bowling alley.
I live in Japan. I could wave money around begging for a copyright owner to take it, but they refuse to take it and I can't access the content.
This is what I’ve been saying. We don’t even own digital products, all it takes is a server to be taken down or an account to be lost and all you bought is taken away. Pirating also can’t be stealing because we aren’t taking something away from someone else, other people are not deprived of the chance to have this just because we downloaded it.
Or the service is no longer supported. I remember buying some PS3 games digitally but can't access them on my PS5. Load of BS.
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase (false scarcity by removal fro market) or if despite purchasing a physical object, say a car, I can't fully use it or repair it without special software I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
I don't think this particular line of thought makes for a very good argument without more info. The other case makes sense. But for this one, people aren't obligated to sell you things. If you own something sentimental or private to you that I want, you're not obligated to sell it to me if I want it and I'm not justified in stealing it from you if you don't want to sell it.
For ex: Think of embarassing photos of yourself, private letters between you and others etc.
I think more info was given with the examples they used though. They reveal that the problem is with copyright, where a company can both stop you from buying something from them and stop you from buying it elsewhere by still technically owning it.
With their original comment,
I'm only talking about the first case of the or here. I specifically pointed out the other case that you are referring to was not something I had an issue with.
Edit: And how does this change anything? Companies aren't any more obligated to sell people things than individuals. There are instances where it may be beneficial for a company to choose not to sell certain products, for example if a better product exists that should succeed the old product or when a certain product is later discovered to be harmful in some way.
Are we talking things, or intellectual property? Not the same.
I feel like the same kind of argument can probably extend to either intellectual property or real physical objects. With physical objects certain limits have to apply of course (like me withholding things you need to survive could potentially justify your theft).
With intellectual property, if you write stories for yourself to pass the time you aren't obligated to share/sell those stories to me and it would be wrong for me to break into your home and make copies of them if you chose not to sell/share them with me.
Why breaking into someone's home?
See, since I'm your buddy, you tell me bits and pieces of the stories you're writing for fun. And I, a Hollywood mogul, take those ideas, hand them off to a development crew and put out a movie based on your ideas. You get nothing.
This is normal in Hollywood. Also, I underpay my development crew because capitalism. They hate me but my stockholders think I'm okay. Original content creators like you? Well, there's a reason the writers are on strike, since screenwriting pays so poorly it's downgraded to hobby.
It's a problem especially in the record labels, in which most artists have their content signed away for a pittance because that was the only way to get heard which is changing through the internet, which is why the RIAA is eager to speed up enshittification of social media. And there are some interesting conspiracy theories about why Kim Dotcom was arrested in 2012 days before he rolled out a new music distro system that had dozens of major Hip Hop artists involved that allowed artists to get music out for free and then keep all their touring proceeds. But that died with the Megaupload seizure. Remember that?
If you really want to shill for folks like Disney and Sony and Time Warner, feel free, but you can expect your content to enshittify as well (as it has been for years now). I'm sure Fast and Furious XIII will be awesome.
Yeah, I don't think that's what I'm doing. I think you're misrepresenting and/or misunderstanding my point. My point is that the argument below needs more details to justify why/when piracy is acceptable. I'm not claiming piracy is totally unethical or anything like that, nor am I shilling for anything.
For what it's worth, I don't think your point about ethicality problems in the entertainment industry makes for a very satisfying argument either. If my neighbor steals from somebody else, am I justified in stealing from my neighbor? Maybe? But that reeks of self-interest and doesn't actually help the real victim.
If my neighbor steals a pound of sugar from somebody and I steal their car, to me it seems like I'm still doing something unethical. If my neighbor steals somebodies life savings and I steal their car, it feels like at best I'm doing something morally neutral, if not still outright wrong.
I'm not saying piracy is unethical, nor am I saying people shouldn't pirate. What I'm saying is that certain arguments for piracy being ethical aren't very good.
This is not about whether your neighbor is committing wrongdoing in your community, rather whether the system itself, and the edifices that hold it up are conducting themselves in good faith. Without these major players pressuring government to extend the enforced monopolies of copyright longer (that is, robbing the public -- you and I -- of its catalog of public-domain material) and failing to enforce educational and fair use, we wouldn't have IP laws at all, and piracy would not be a thing.
Granted, some argue that creators would have no interest in creating, except that they do when they are given the means to do so. This is one of the threats social media has, in providing entertainment that is not sending its profits to the major players in the industry.
We're not pirating from the artists. We're not pirating from our neighbors. We're pirating from giant corporations who've been plying the government for over a century now to strip rights from the public.
And given the government does not execute its function in good faith (that is, in service of the public, including protecting its interests from corporate capture), we have grounds to argue the authority of the state is forfeit, ruling the public by force rather than by consent (our elections allow us to choose from oligarch selects, and they have to obey plutocrats to keep their careers.)
Without the artificial construct by governing systems to make IP a thing to be licensed (and the use of DRM to control its distribution) neither patents nor copyrighted material would be a thing at all, let alone have been turned into the monstrosties that are US and EU IP law.
Firstly, the neighbor comment I made is an analogy. Nobody is claiming this is about literal neighbors committing wrongdoings in a community. I'm not sure if you've missed my point with that analogy or if you're choosing to willfully misunderstand it here?
Second, what you're claiming here isn't correct when you talk about "what this is about". My comment which you are replying to was not about whether "the system itself, and the edifices holding it up are conducting themselves in good faith" or anything like that. My whole point is about whether "If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase … I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas." is good reasoning or not. Nobody is debating you on whether the modern media industries, the government, etc are corrupt or acting in good faith. That has nothing to do with my actual point.
You keep jumping back to these points of "well the media corporations, the government, etc did X wrong by us, so we're automatically justified to pirate", that's not how this works. The whole issue is why does that justify piracy? Doubling down and trying to say "BUT I WAS WRONGED!" is not a good argument here. Being wronged in some way does not make it morally acceptable to just do whatever you like.
Fair enough. By what authority do you assert intellectual property belongs to a private entity and not the public?
That isn't something I claimed.
You certainly asserted such by arguing piracy is morally wrong. If IP belonged to the public (id est there's no patent or copyright) then everything would be in the public domain. Media piracy would not be a thing.
But you assert not only is it a thing but it is morally wrong.
So please, by what authority are you asserting puts IP in the hands of private interests, thus making piracy a moral wrongdoing?
No I didn't. You are either ignoring or misunderstanding what I'm saying. My claim is that certain arguments don't justify why piracy is permissible. Not that piracy is morally wrong.
I'm not making any claims about who IP belongs to.
I can't give you any authority on this because if you reread what I actually said, I'm not claiming piracy is morally wrong and I'm not claiming anything about IP ownership.
I believe they mean not that they were wronged, but that the system is wrong. Ala MLK just laws and unjust laws. They disagree with IP law and thus feel piracy is fine as such.
Personally, I pay for my music and don’t use streaming services. I support bands by going to shows and buying merch. However I also don’t listen to big name artists and shit, and think most really don’t give a shit if you pay for the music or not if you’re supporting them in some way often. Plenty of bands have a “steal this record” or “steal this album”, or end up putting out stuff where they’d urged people to pirate their shit example: Streetlight Manifesto had done so because victory was refusing to send CD’s to the band to distribute to those who had preordered, wasn’t paying them for purchases made through victories site, etc. The (bigger label) music industry is fucked. They extort bands. They extort venues. They extort anywhere that plays music. They extort anything they can for money while the content creators barely get shit.
I don't think the system being wrong is very good justification either. You still run into the same problem I'm pointing out. If some local store near me has an inherently fucked up return policy, I'm probably not justified in shitting in the middle of an aisle or trying to fistfight a cashier in response. Something being wrong isn't an immediate justification for whatever action a person takes in reaction.
Of course you wouldn't be justified in harming a minimum wage worker because the policy of the corporation. That is like the opposite of the point. Its more like, say my neighbor owns a company and exploits immigrants to do lawncare. Maybe I'd pay for it if I knew he was actually taking care of his workers and not exploiting them, but he sucks, boo. So while he is away on vacation I borrow his equipment without asking to do my own lawn. Does it hurt him? I mean technically there is more wear & tear on the equipment. Will he notice? No. Do I give a shit if it causes it to break faster than it would have otherwise? Nah, fuck him.
That's a pretty obvious example of the point I was making when I said: "Something being wrong isn’t an immediate justification for whatever action a person takes in reaction."
This feels like very self serving reasoning. I don't think you're actually justified in doing something along these lines. Even worse, you can actually cause more harm by doing this. Your wear and tear on your neighbors tools can make the jobs of the already exploited immigrants harder and if the tools break the immigrants may be blamed for it. This actually feels like another good example of my point above that a wrong does not automatically imply justification, regardless of how much it might benefit you personally.
Sometimes I like to imagine what a library from a highly advanced race who have transcended the base concepts of copyright and currency in general would be like. If every person in the civilization could absorb any form of media ever made as well as knowledge formerly sequestered away behind paywalls or otherwise suppressed, just imagine what heights such a society could reach.
It is called the Akashic records.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashic_records
I know some of these words!
to explain: Some trade-off occultist scammers said they can access all of humankinds knowledge in brain-space
I mean it would be cool if I were able to fact-check in real-time within my own brain, but I can't help feeling that this sounds just like a Black Mirror episode.
What.cd was(kinda) my modern day library of Alexandria for a short while.
Major reason not to buy ebooks from amazon: you can't lend, give, exchange, sell them and you may lose all of them if you anger the right people. They are not yours, you are not buying them, you merely paid for conditioned access to them.
It’s the same with steam games and other online stores. You are granted a licence to use the software; not to own it.
Steam is a glowing example of how to prevent piracy though. Because even if I own the games I can still loan them out. I can play the games across all of my devices. Steam has gone above and beyond to give you a reason to not pirate. I buy my games because the convenience steam provides without hindering my actual ownership of them.
Fully agree with you! My point was that it isn’t just the likes of Amazon that do this. If we look to piracy it’s growing in areas where a paid for service is either split across several providers or isn’t convenient.
I no longer pirate games or music as the paid for services are way easier to use and value for money.
The movie and tv companies started to have this when Netflix started but now there’s too many services and even on the same service the catalogues are different depending upon location. So instead of getting a share of revenue they get nothing.
Our current system of copyright is flawed and only serves the interests of corporations.
indeed
who do you think got the law created to begin with?
the "creators" of the content, of course. they saw an issue, complained to politicians and the politicians agreed.
it made sense, and it's IMO quite fair
but if i dont own the shit when i pay for it, then fuck 'em.
I don't know if it's the creators so much as the owners of the copyrights. One of the problems with the system is how easy it is for big entitys to consolidate ownership of content.
If as the purchaser you don't outright own the product you've purchased, then there's no reasonable argument that it's "stealing" if you pirate that product instead. At best it's copyright infringement, and they can come at me in small claims court.
I don’t even know if it’s technically copyright since if you’re not sharing it you’re not infringing on their market, marketing, or product.
This means GoG is the only game storefront you can actually steal from...
Well technically you are also leasing from GOG. You can't resell them and you are legally not allowed to distribute their offline installers.
I did see an add for a digial game storefront that lets you sell your games yesterday. Seemed interesting, but I'm willing to bet you only get 5% of your original payment back
Kind of depends which angle we approach it from. Someone does have to first purchase the game to get a DRM free copy to make (legal) copies to share. It's not really stealing outright, and publishers understand that they're giving their customers the option to share their games with others when they sell on GOG.
In this view, then it's kind of like paying it forward. Those who cannot afford it can use it for free. Those who can are encouraged to pay, get their own copies and pass it along to others at disadvantage, like sharing infinitely replicateable books.
Admittedly it's a more optimistic view assuming most people would do that. But, if pirates pay for Stardew Valley, it means there are people who abide by this.
This is why I only carjack rental cars, it's totally not stealing!
Good counter metaphor. When Audible disappears my book, and I can't do anything about it, that is theft.
Nope, it's not. It's in the terms of service. If you don't like that, don't sign the contract with them. Steal it if you want to. I'm cool with piracy, just not with the poor attempts at justification.
Seriously… these people are just bending over backwards to make themselves feel better. You’re stealing. Just acknowledge that and be done with it. Don’t make lame excuses for why your stealing is ok.
Well paying for it is essentially leasing it, piracy is neither. So...
so lease deez nutz
gottem
Good point right there.
Eyyy, I'm the guy in the screenshot! Holy attention Batman!
galaxy brain
I will accept my downvotes in advance because what I'm about to say is probably against the mindset of most of the people that come here but:
Piracy is wrong.
I say that as someone that pirates. I'm not sure why people have to justify their actions. I know what I'm doing is wrong, I know I'm taking money away from these businesses that run streaming sites, that make movies, write books(this is the one I feel worst about because this is likely taking money directly from creators). But I do it anyway because I'm cheap, I can't afford it, its easier to pirate stuff, plenty of reasons. But none of them make it morally right, and none of them make it ethically right.
When we pirate things, we're pirating entertainment. Entertainment isn't a right. You don't need this stuff to survive. Plenty of entertainment is provided for free at libraries, online with free movies and books. Hell, you can go outside, grab a stick and a rock and boom! Free entertainment. Sure, there are people that pirate things like Photoshop to get ahead in their careers or to jumpstart them, I'm not talking to those people. Adobe has done research and they know those people buy their products when they become professionals. I'm talking to the people downloading a movie and somehow morally justifying it. But when it comes down to it, you are taking something that someone paid money to make in an effort to make money off of it. In my mind, there's no justification for that. Again, I don't care that you do it, I do it too. But no one is gonna get any points in my mind for stating that somehow what you are doing is right, or that it isn't stealing because you're downloading a copy of something. How silly an argument that is. If you take something that someone else expects money for and it isn't vital to your survival, that is wrong.
I'll get off my soapbox now. I love all of you, have a great day :).
Thank you for mentioning Libraries! As a librarian, I'm always getting shocked faces when I tell patrons what is accessible with their library card
I used to pirate a lot of stuff, when I couldn't afford it. Now I only pirate things that I a) already paid for (and want a more convenient way of using it or to ensure it can't be taken away) b) can't obtain any other way, or c) don't know if I will like it, so I use the pirated version as a demo of sorts
Well I'd argue that two things can be wrong at the same time and I see OPs image mostly as a humorous jibe at the dubious practices that have risen with digital content. When you buy a Disc you can resell it, and the company can't knock on your door and say "Excuse me, we'd like the disc back but we'll keep your money". With a digital movie you just obtain a license to view it that you can't resell and can be taken away from you at any time (the cases I know of are admittedly rare till now and caused at least some public unhappiness and in some cases even law suites IIRC). All at the same or even higher price than before.
Then there is the fact that I'm all for using the correct terminology. When you steal something that something is lost to its previous owner. Piracy isn't stealing it's copyright infringement. Companies just prefer to call it stealing because it sounds more evil. Same with the billions of losses through piracy that they complain about. They are based on the wrong premise that every copy is a lost sale, which just isn't true. Take you for example: you can't afford it, so you personally don't loose them anything. And maybe you even buy some stuff you wouldn't have if you hadn't pirated it, or something else from that company before that you really liked. Then I remember people from my school days who had all the movies, all the games, anything. But when you asked "How is it?" they mostly answered "Oh, I haven't played it". I doubt this kind of "collector" would do the same if it actually cost them money, even if they had the means. In short those number are inflated to make the problem appear bigger than it really is.
Is it still a problem/ morally wrong? Probably, but it does put things in a different perspective for me.
And no, I don't need to justify anything to myself. My limiting resource is time, not money, so I buy my fish in the supermarket instead of trying to catch it on the high seas ;) Doesn't stop me from grumbling about them, obviously
I wonder if we're wrong to group entertainment and physical goods into the same category though. They're wildly different things.
If I make you a pair of shoes, I need to charge you money to account for my time, my effort, and the materials it took to make them. If I make a thousand shoes, it doesn't scale; the price per shoe has to stay the same.
If I write an ebook, I would charge for the time and effort it took to write it, but there's no material charge. It scales entirely differently because I can make a billion ebooks for the same cost as one.
Considering that, the old way of thinking that I should be able to resell an ebook like some shoes I bought doesn't seem to apply logically. We're buying entertainment, not physical goods. I don't bitch that I can't resell the experience of going to a concert, so why do I bitch (and I do) that I can't resell digital media?
I just wish the publishers would price media accordingly. If they all worked out a deal with stremio to get ten cents whenever I streamed a movie, I wouldn't think twice. But instead I need to sign up with multiple services and pay $20 to stream one, and I just realized I'm bitching to the choir so I'll end there.
Yea, thats essentially the problem. Companies getting greedy and trying to squeeze out more money by all means they can get away with. If they priced things fairly (and split the profits fairly with the content creators) a lot less people would have an incentive to look to the high seas. And just maybe (pipe dream, I know) worked out deals with each other so people wouldn't need a freakin website just to find out where the hell they have to subscribe to watch something...
And sure, customers trying to avoid paying for anything is also a problem, but I feel the "cure" a) isn't one and b) hurts the people who pay much more than those who pirate.
Essentially the grass isn't green on either side of the fence and that's why we can't have nice things 🤷
Copyright is not a natural law - there is nothing natural about for example not telling a joke to somebody else without first tracking down the person who invented it and agreeing on payment for being allowed to tell it.
And, no, I'm not exagerating: as soon as it is created that joke legally has a copyright, owned by its creator, and sharing it (and that includes "public performances" such as telling it to your friends) requires the authorization of the owner of that copyright in that joke.
The only reason you don't see people fined for telling jokes is because it's not enforced because it's not worth the trouble (plus it would quickly turn people against Copyright).
So, now that we've shown that Copyright does in fact go against the natural human tendency to share - literally it's anti-natura - then that means it's an artificial construct created by man, so a law, written by lawmakers, with all the problems that rules made by politicians have.
Now, if you look at the justification for creating such an artificial restriction on the naturaly human tendency of sharing what you heard, it's to "incentivise creation", which "benefits all because the copyrighted work will go into the Public Domain at the end of the copyright period".
This makes sense, and it might even have been true in the beginning but it's not anymore:
You see, when this Law was first made the copyright period started as 25 years, which meant that copyrighted works did indeed go into the Public Domain to be freely enjoyed by all, but over the years that period has extended (go look at the various time when that period was extended and you will find the "strange" "coincidence" of it happenning when the first Mickey Mouse movie was about to go out of Copyright in the US) and is now around lifetime of the creator plus 50 years (more in certain countries, such as the US), which means that almost none of the creative works we grew up with (in our childhood) will never go into the Public Domain before we're dead and burried.
Think about it: under the current Copyright Legislation, for every single one of us and for all effects and purposes the "contract" between Society and cultural creators were Society enforces an artifical limitation to the natural human act of sharing and in return cultural creators make works which although at first requiring payment to enjoy, will one day be free to enjoy has been broken - we will never freely enjoy those works we've known since our childhood, the payment that Society (in other words: all of us) was supposed to get for that artificial limitation to sharing.
If a contract has been broken the injured side (that would be Society) doesn't have an obligation to abide by it.
Copyright is not a natural law, but neither is the trading of money for some bread.
I think IP is a (partially mistaken) attempt to enforce the same rule (that works really, really well) that we put on the trade of physical goods, on the trade of cognitive work.
It's tough because with the wheat it's conceptually simple. Yes, you're indirectly paying for their "work" in making the bread, but you don't have to think about work because the bread itself contains the value.
But information is copyable, and that's fundamentally different than bread.
Feels like something should be different, but I don't think the idea of ownership should be rejected merely because it's not natural. Ownership of goods is more natural, but still just an aspect of culture.
Exchanging stuff is absolutelly natural (you see little children doing it) and extending barter trading to "trading for tokens which can be exchanged with different people for other things" is really just introducing a new type of item being exchanged.
Going from sharing of ideas to not-sharing, on the other hand, is going for doing something naturally to the very opposite of that (hence my use of "anti-natura").
I don't think "exchanging stuff but now with tokens" is at all comparable with "stop doing what you would otherwise naturally do without even thinking about it and bring into this exchange an unrelated 3rd party".
I feel like you're trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole there: Copyright Legislation is not about the natural give and take in a exchange or trade (in this case of information) but rather it involves a 3rd party, which is not even present, which is the owner of the copyright of said information (used to be the creator, nowadays it can be anybody or a company) who is artificially inserted in what would otherwise be a normal exchange between 2 persons as an additional externaly party that also requires something.
I suspect the recurrent confusion of so many between copyright violation and theft is exactly because copyright is entirely unnatural, so people fall back to the closest instinctive human behaviour to try and understand it, ending up with the completelly way out there incorrect idea that copyright violation is like one side in an exchange taking stuff from the other and running away before giving their stuff to the other, when in reality you have to sides doing an absolutelly normal exchange (or even a gifting) and there is a 3rd party, not physicially present and never met, seen or otherwise involved with either which the powers of the land say is supposed to authorize that exchange and get a cut if it so wishes, and which both parties of that exchange choose to ignore.
It's not theft because both parties on the exchange are conducting a normal exchange just like they do with all other classes of thin and both are abidding by it. The closest "normal" illegality to copyroght violation is tax evasion and not tax in a democratic nation (were the money goes into the common pot to help everybody) but rather tax in an absolute monarchy or dictatorship were whomever was supposed to get that cut from that transaction is going to keep the money and even then the analogy fails because your're also supposed to give that 3rd party money even when GIFTING something.
You're not familiar with Hollywood accounting, are you?
More harm is caused by propping up the media industry with draconian IP laws than by any amount of piracy, and actual content creators are overworked and underpaid not because of pirates but the mad pursuit of exponential short term profit growth.
If you care about developers, don't consume the media.
If you must consume the media, pirate.
Amen brother. I also eat meat and I know it's wrong. I ain't gonna justify that shit I'm gonna pull a Cypher and blissfully chew that juicy steak.
Sometimes we do shit that's wrong. Oh well.
Nature wants information to be Free!
Piracy is Good:The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge
check out
The real piracy was the friends we made on the way.
The real friends were the piracy we undertook along the way.
Remember: friends come and go, but pirated media is forever (as long as you have good backups).
And also the cargo ships I robbed.
You know, there is less ethical angst over making a copy of something you can ONLY rent vs something you can buy.
However, both options are stealing under most laws!
Amen.
Touché.
Heh, never thought of this argument.
I am stealing this line for future references
Amen!
That's why I break into hotel rooms.
I think the equivalent would be to make a copy of that room without paying.
No, that would harm whoever was in possession of the room at the time (owner or guest).
This would be more akin to sneaking into a movie theatre to stand in the back and watch.
But that would still be theft of service.
I mean, if we extend this logic though, stealing a license is still harmful to the person who possesses the copyright. Breaking into a hotel room deprives the current possessor the exclusive right to possess the room; stealing a piece of software deprives the copyright holder the exclusive right to control their copyrighted work.
Like, I'm not even anti-piracy for the most part. I just think the comparison in the OP is bad and doesn't make a lot of sense.
Someone else in this thread said it best -- "just enjoy ya loot."
Wouldn't it be more like having one person seed the room and letting all the leechers stay in the room free of charge
Come to think of it, I've done this.
"you guys stay in the car ok?"
Unsure if anyone can clarify. But my understanding that simply downloading a watching isn't an issue.
Selling illegally copied content is what can cause real legal issues.
I'm uncertain of any cases of anyone getting in trouble for simply watching copied content.
Example... 1st user pirates movies or videos and uploads them to YouTube or any streaming company.
2nd User then streams or downloads them to watch them offline. I've yet to see the 2nd user in this scenario face legal consequences.
Vs
2nd User then streams or downloads content and makes money off it. Here I see the 2nd user have legal issues.
Again I'm just a regular guy going based on regular guy logic.
Copyright infringement laws vary but even though simply downloading copyrighted material is against policies, it's hard to enforce and most copyright holders don't always find grounds for a lawsuit or it's straight up not worth pursuing. You downloading a movie off a website is the same as a friend of yours sharing the same movie with you on a USB stick.
Actions against unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials (especially if it's for profit) on the other hand are much more easily enforceable.
Downloading and watching is a crime. One night be able to say they didn't know what they were downloading but likely the file name and site or torrent is a good clue that's bullshit.
Your probably discussing chance of getting caught. You likely will see a DMCA complaint or something like that to your ISP at worse for downloading but enough of these might get your service terminated (some ISP don't care.)
Sharing the files and usually sharing a lot of files publicly or semi publicly will get you more attention and that will get the media companies more likely to take you down as a distributor.
VPN and smart browsing habits will reduce a lot of this risk though.
Think of downloading is one star in GTA. They will chase you if they are you. Uploading is two stars when they start shooting at you. Profiting of it is like three stars and that's when they get more aggressive. You can get busted at one star but it's just very unlikely.
If a service costs money, and you take that service for free without permission it is stealing. If I rent a car I don't own it. Is it not stealing to hijack a rental car for a few hours?
You can't have your cake and eat it too. You steal because it is easier or cheaper. Thats it.
Not a great hypothetical. Copying files would mean that in your hypothetical... I see the red civic your rental service is providing... Look at it real hard, poof another one into existence and drive away in it.
Here's my example: I subscribed to Paramount Plus explicitly for Star Trek content. The week I subscribed, they pulled all of the non-Abrams films. So I got to watching other stuff. Eventually, they brought all of the films back. Cool, right?
So I finally get around to Prodigy, a show made for Paramount Plus. Two episodes in, and it vanishes. No announcements or warnings that that show was just going to disappear. It's gone. Because "it wasn't popular enough". A show that only existed on that one platform was pulled off of that platform with absolutely no other legal way to view it. Content that I specifically signed up for that platform to see, and now I can't... legally. Yo ho, yo ho, me hardies.
Agreed. I'm under no delusions, when I pirate media I'm stealing. I personally don't believe it's immoral to steal from super corporations, especially considering how much they steal from us, but some people disagree and with these types of moral arguments there isn't a clear right answer. Even still, I think the majority of pirates are willing to pay for software or media when the service is priced well and more convenient than piracy.
Absolutely amazing, let’s just hope I won’t forget about it in my next “piracy-is-moral” argument
based af
"92 minutes of applauses"
so so true
When corporations write the laws, the laws help corporation.
I would steal this argument, but if it can be reposted here for free, then I don't think anybody really owns it. 🤔