I used to have a moral objection to piracy, I thought that if a piece of media is good enough that I enjoy it then the people that made it deserve to be paid for their work.
Iām increasingly of the opinion that even if I do pay for something there is no guarantee that the people that worked on it will get their fair share and paying for media is increasingly a worse user experience than piracy.
I feel similarly but one of those choices is guaranteed not to help the people youād like to see helped
Iām not so sure thatās true. What if normalizing and removing friction from piracy gets to the point where the streaming services have to react by providing better services and better payouts?
Thatās easy to say, but what can they actually do that provides a better service than piracy at this point? They canāt compete on price, number of shows, or quality of shows with piracy by a long shot. They can potentially provide a better ease of experience with quick downloads and casting, but they already have that and I donāt know that it can get any better.
As a general rule, Iād assume more piracy means less money into an industry, and less money in means fewer and less risky products that appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Thereās lots they can doā¦
- cheaper prices (by lowering the % of rent-seeking),
- better pay distribution for creators (Especially so that I pay to support the shows I watch rather than a global pool),
- interoperability (to allow new businesses which provide frontends to multiple streaming services),
- social (clipping and sharing, group watching, etc)
- more equal promotion of shows/movies (instead of based on royalty rates)
I already said, they canāt compete on price. Cheaper prices will always be more than free. Same with interoperability, if you have the actual file you can run on anything. Group watching already exists.
More equal promotion of shows/movies and pay distribution donāt actually help make the experience better for the consumer, thatās more relying on the consumer behaving ethically and that they believe piracy is wrong. It only helps for the people who think it was only sometimes wrong, which I donāt think is a huge group (although they are certainly the most vocal supporters of piracy)
Nor are you likely to get what you paid for
Or to keep it
On that note, the only relatively convenient exception I know of is Bandcamp Fridays. Theyāre specific days where Bandcamp doesnāt take any share of purchases.
I wish this were a more common practice, and I wish I could allocate my Netflix/HBO/prime/etc. subscription dollars to support specific titles. Instead, shows get cancelled because people didnāt stream it enough on day 1. I want a s2 of Tales From the Loop, but itās still in limbo with no way for fans to show support.
I felt like I was the only one that liked Tales From The Loop.
It absolutely depends. Iām an indie game developer. Iāve worked at various studios as an employee, contractor, and as an owner. Depending on the setup if you pay for a game I worked on I could potentially get a bonus, I could see that money directly as profits, or I could see nothing at all. Sometimes just continued survival of the studio in working at is reason enough for me to encourage people to buy the game but sometimes Iāve not liked where Iāve worked and encouraged people to pirate from a studio that rips off its employees.
So really, the best bet is to ask. The best way to support a game developer is to ask how to send the money directly and buy the game on itch.io if available.
In fairness, games are still something Iām willing to pay for and books. I think probably because Kindle and Steam are better user experiences than pirating those.
Yeah those 2 are exactly the ones I pay for too. Games in particular (I buy most books but not all).
But video content, nope :P
Piracy isnāt stealing anyway. Youāre not removing the data from the original owner.
But the original creation cost time and money, which youāre not reimbursing the creator for. The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesnāt cost anything.
Itās like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure itās not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldnāt even happen if everyone acted like this, or the organizers would have to pay for it all by themselves.
If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you āboughtā. Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.
Would you call it Piracy if I lend a bluray from a friend? I didnāt pay for it and yet Iāve watched it.
No, because itās so widespread and natural that it should be expected and already accounted for in the price. But there is no hard line imo, and simplified examples often fail to capture all the aspects that go into the decision. E.g. Iād say paying for one person at a concert and sneaking in another would basically be piracy, even though the two situations are very similar on a surface level.
I think itās about reasonable expectations both parties of the agreement can have, based on established social norms. If you buy a movie for personal consumption you should be able to expect that you can watch it whenever you want, and also share that experience with friends and family. And at the same time the seller should be able to expect that you limit it to a reasonable number of personal contacts, and donāt start to sell it to strangers or run a movie theater, because that expectation was used to set the price.
So if piracy was āwidespread and naturalā itād be bueno?
If that would be possible then yes, or course.
Thatās bascially the Start Trek future, where everybodyās needs are met and people can just do whatever they want. It doesnāt ācostā anything to create stuff, so itās fine to copy everything for free. But thatās not the reality we are living in. In ourās somebody has to pay for things, and if everyone pirated everything then things couldnāt be made anymore.
An example where it kinda works is open source software. People donāt charge for copies, because they expect to get help with their work and also be allowed to use other OS software without paying for it. As long as that balance holds it works out fine, but there are a lot of projects that required too much investment from the creatorās and didnāt provide enough back for them to keep going. And even there, companies profiting from OS projects are expected or even required to pay it back, by contributing code and paying for engineers and sponsorships.
To further the thought experiment. I digitize my Blu-ray and put it on a private tracker to share with ONLY my friends. Is that piracy?
Copywrite laws are antiquated at best and need to be destroyed at worst.
If you need more proof look at bullshit like how Paramount+ until recently couldnāt show flagship shows like Picard in Canada because the rights were given to Crave.
So as a consumer I want to go to the owner of the property and I canāt watch it because the owner told me they gave a copy of it to someone else.
Trust me, theyāre working on ways to prevent that too as we speak.
The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesnāt cost anything.
under what ethical system?
Mine, obviously. But feel free to correct me if you disagree with something.
thereās no reason to believe what you claimed. a claim made without justification can be dismissed without justification.
They made a justification. They showed you how people couldnāt make these things without people paying for them.
They showed you how people couldnāt make these things without people paying for them.
but thatās not true. people make things all the time without being paid.
people make things all the time without being paid.
Less people make things without being paid than those who make things to get paid. That is a common fact we can both agree on. If you need the number of open source games compared to the number of paid games then I recommend you grab those numbers yourself.
What unjustified claim did I make that you disagree with? Seems all rather uncontroversial to me.
The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesnāt cost anything.
i donāt need to disagree to disbelieve. i do disagree, but without establishing your justification for this claim, itās kind of hard to argue against it.
The justification was that creating things has a cost, even if a copy doesnāt, and that we should distribute that cost as fairly as possible among the people benefiting from the creation.
Itās like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure itās not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldnāt even happen if everyone acted like this
Thatās a systemic problem, something I wouldnāt personally care about. The āsystemā is just so horribly screwed up and skewed against us that I just no longer care if it works or not.
If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you āboughtā. Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.
This rubs me the wrong way too, yes. Though Iām really beyond moral justifications, I just stopped caring.
Same here. The world is unjust so act accordingly.
Which doesnāt mean be an asshole to everybody and steal everything you can but be an asshole to assholes and steal from franchises.
How do you feel about jumping the turnstile at a train station?
Counter question: Do you think that running libraries is theft?
Public Lending Right programs exist in 35 countries to compensate authors whose works are in libraries.
Great! Letās do that for any type of media!
They do already.
Some countries have a blank media fee on writable casettes, discs and hard drives that are paid to music and movie studios for this purpose.
And yet: Netflix prevents me from recording any of their shows and sharing the recording with my friends and family.
I get that the economy weāre in means a bunch of people, like yourself, feel justified in entertaining themselves using whatever means they can afford. Iād be lying if I said I never pirated music when I was a broke highschooler.
But the reality is, if the funding isnāt there, it doesnāt happen. I donāt think DRM is the ethical way to squeeze money out of your audience, nor do I think not compensating people who worked hard to create something you enjoy is the ethical way to consume media.
If you liked it, and you can afford it, pay them a fair price for your experience. Artists are already starving without society having a ācopying isnāt stealingā mentality. It doesnāt matter if itās Netflix, or a busker; youāre not paying them for a physical thing that they hand you, youāre paying them for the effort they went to craft an experience for you.
Amoral at worst. Public transportation shouldnāt have a fee at use. Tax the rich, invest in transport
Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?
A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being āremovedā in that situation either.
Ah, in that case, no that is also not stealing.
What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.
Who is losing resources when you hop a turnstile?
The transportation authority who maintains the trains and stations.
Jumping a turnstile and taking a physical, actually scarce resource is not comparable to duplicating a digital, artificially scarce resource.
The train requires ongoing maintenance and can only hold a finite amount of people. Taking the train seat for free takes away something from another person. Downloading media does not use any ongoing resources, and does not take anything away from another consumer.
Comparing the morality of physical goods to digital goods are not really a good comparison specifically because of the artificial scarcity brought on by making something digital to try to make it more expensive doesnāt map to the real scarcity of physical goods.
Again, I have to ask: How do you think those digital goods are made in the first place? Somebody labored to create it. They deserve to be paid for it.
Not sure why this is such a hot take.
How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
How much should they be paid for it?
However much theyāre asking. They put a price tag on it for exactly this question.
In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
Not really. Civil disobedience is about refusing to follow a law, not choosing to break a law. Thereās a difference between the two concepts; one involves going about your day as normal and ignoring laws, and the other is going out of your way to break a law. Piracy is no more a form of civil disobedience than looting a grocery store is.
That is a false equivalency.
The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you havenāt paid for.
Pirating takes away a possible purchase. You havenāt actually used any of their resources or cost them anything.
If I wasnāt going to buy it anyway they havenāt lost anything.
If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as youāve actually cost them resources.
I donāt get this logic at all. Piracy doesnāt take away a possible purchase. There is an assumption that the media downloaded was ever going to be paid for. In 100% of the cases where I downloaded pirated content, I was never going to pay for the product, even if it was available to me by other means. Further I cannot remove a sale from someone when I never possessed the money to pay for it anyway.
I believe most people that pirate cannot afford to buy digital releases or pay for streaming services etcā¦ (not all cases of course). In these situations nobody loses. The media companies didnāt lose anything because I was never going to buy it, and it wasnāt stolen because they still possess the media.
Edit - I agree with you Lmaydev I replied to the wrong comment.
The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you havenāt paid for.
And media costs money to make.
If I wasnāt going to buy it anyway they havenāt lost anything.
If you werenāt going to buy it, why would you pirate it? Thatās the thing, if youāre interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as youāve actually cost them resources.
How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
And media costs money to make.
But not to copy, which is what you are asserting is being āstolenā. No one is claiming that turnstile jumpers are taking away money from train manufacturers. Youāre having to mix analogies, because copying something isnāt theft.
I feel like youāre being intentionally obtuse. The point is that in both examples, somebody is exploiting somebody elseās labor without paying.
If you werenāt going to buy it, why would you pirate it? Thatās the thing, if youāre interested enough in a product to want it then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
I donāt agree with this at all. There are tons of things someone might want to use or have but not enough that theyād be willing to pay for it. Or over a certain amount of money.
The fact is that the person in question is still taking something without paying for it. A sense of entitlement (I want it badly enough that I should have it for free) doesnāt change anything in this equation.
The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
Rips do exist, ya know?
And physical mediaās never stolen, right?
The data to validate this is scarce, but Iād wager that most rips come from stolen physical media. I donāt think thereās too many people out there going āI just paid $20 of my hard-earned money for this Blu-ray, so now Iām going to give it away to strangers for freeā. The whole āpaying for somethingā thing is kinda antithetical to piracy in the first place. But again, thereās no real way to quantify this.
The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
The origins of most of all western countriesā wealth comes from theft, full stop.
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do.
Thatās only the case for pre-Bluray release content. Most of it was just captured from rips, Amazon Prime or Netflix.
Depends on the circumstances I guess, but no matter how I feel about it people jumping the turnstile arenāt stealing the train.
Are they stealing a ride?
I donāt like this analogy, because thereās a real, albeit small, cost to the subway of that free ride, in terms of fuel and increased maintenance. Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous ālost sale.ā
It should be a free service anyway. Without free public transport, democracy does not exists. Same reason healthcare and education should be. So sure, you are āstealingā a ride - something that should be yours anyway because people are not born with the ability to travel kilometers of cityscapes, something that is now mandatory to survive and thrive.
Youāre also potentially blocking a seat that could be used by a paying passenger, and the operator will statistically run more/longer trains at higher cost to cope with increased demand.
Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous ālost sale.ā
You know that the pirated files were stolen in the first place, right? Movies and video games arenāt just sitting out in the open free for somebody to snatch up like apples on a tree. They end up in the hands of scene groups by somebody in the studio taking an unauthorized copy of the product and distributing it.
Lost sales are damages, as demonstrated by the courts hundreds and hundreds of times over now.
Ever heard of ārippingā a disk, a stream, or a download? Movies, series, and video games get paid for by someone who then proceeds to make unauthorized copies, they very rarely come from anyone at the studio.
Lost sales are ālegalā damages, which doesnāt mean theyāre actual loss of anything, since people who were not going to pay, are worth exactly $0.
Itās different when bootleg copies get sold, since then there is an actual payment that isnāt going to the right person.
Does you license plate say āPRIVATEā? Because this is some real sovereign citizen logic, using definitions of terms that the rest of the world doesnāt agree with.
Ever read the message at the beginning of a rip? You know, the one with the FBI logo on it. Remind me what it says?
using definitions of terms that the rest of the world doesnāt agree with.
Like which one exactly?
Ever read the message at the beginning of a rip? You know, the one with the FBI logo on it. Remind me what it says?
There is none. Some rips used to come with a āRipped by [some nick]ā and a scene group logo, but theyāve grown out of fashion.
Just kidding, I know you meant this one: https://youtu.be/CXca40Z01Ss
Many scene groups actually purchased the games and cracked them, Iāve read NFOs that say ābuy the game, we did tooā.
People recording in movie theatres have to either sneak into the theatre or buy a ticket themselves.
Someone scanning a book to post online had to have bought it or borrowed it.
Yes some games are cracks of illegitimate obtained leaked copies or other unscrupulous methods.
I have played pirated games in the past but my Steam library has thousands of dollars worth of games I bought, many of which I wouldnāt have if I werenāt interested in these type of games to begin had pirating games not been possible.
Sure, the opportunity cost from piracyās ālost salesā to the publisher/licensor is non-zero. But how many sales that would have happened varies greatly on the perceived value vs. price of the product, and how available it is. If itās not in stores anymore and can only be bought from scalpers on eBay, the publisher cough Nintendo cough doesnāt see that money anyway vs. pirating it.
I have hundreds of CDs, which are bought and paid for. Tell me, again, how making copies and (hypothically, of course) giving them to friend[1] incurs a direct cost to the CD producer?
Nearly all pirated content was most likely originally purchased once, and ripped. Thereās no evidence that much of it is from shoplifted DVDs.
Nearly all pirated content was most likely originally purchased once, and ripped. Thereās no evidence that much of it is from shoplifted DVDs.
Thereās no evidence that āmuchā of it is from purchased DVDs, either.
100% of the dozens of DVDs in this household were purchased. You have a few in your house that were shoplifted as a counter data point, maybe?
No, theyāre just stealing the fuel and wages the employees should be getting for maintaining the train.
The employees donāt get paid less if some jumps the turnstile, the fuel cost to carry a single person is completely trivial, and I didnāt say nobody should care about turnstile jumpers. I said its not stealing. If you damage the tracks and cause the train to derail youāre a monster, and there are financial costs, but you still didnāt steal the train. Your argument doesnāt make any sense.
āTrivialā is not āzeroā.
Maybe, but itās also closer to the price saved on less wear and tear on the turnstile than it is the price of the ticket.
So are you arguing that turnstile jumpers are harming the company, but they are not stealing the service / train / ride? Like the literal word āstealā.
Yes. That is in fact what I am arguing. I would also argue that the harm is tiny and can sometimes be justifiable, depending on the circumstances, but yes. It absolutely does do some non-zero harm, and yes there is no thing being stolen. That is the argument I am making.
Yeah alright makes sense. Sometimes it hard to know what people are exactly arguing about.
Ok, then make the trains a public service, collect taxes for it and make puplic transport free.
Analogous to the whole āpiracyā discourse: Manage more media like libraries.
That would be a great idea, and could even help combat climate change.
I dunno, I mean are the train company allowed to take my money and then go āsorry we fell out with the fuel company so weāre just gonna keep your money and not take you to your destination. Soz babe xā
You wouldnāt download a train?
You wouldnāt 3D print it?
In that case youāre actually using a limited resource: space on a train. And by occupying it youāre preventing someone else from using it (assuming a full train). Copying media doesnāt cost any resources (ignoring the tiny amounts of electricity) or interfere with anyone elseās ability to use that resource.
They donāt compare.
What if that train is regularly running under capacity, or you are just standing?
Youāre technicall still using the companyās resources (it costs some energy to run the empty train), so I still donāt think it really compares to piracy.
But since they are miniscule compared to what they are wasting by running largley empty trains I think itās morally ok in that case.
I donāt see how that compares. Trains need human labour and lots of resources to function.
How do you think movies, music, games, books, or any form of media is produced?
Operating a train is not creating a train. And media does not require resources to operate, so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.
so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.
Using, no. Acquiring, yes.
No, nothing was lost when the copy was acquired, because copying does not remove the original. Literally, nothing is lost.
Lost sales are considered damages, so yes something is lost.
EDIT: This is worse than arguing with SovCits.
This post seems to be largely about the value of product ownership and the harm that DRM brings to the end user, and does a great job at making that point. However, the title seems to have caused a different discussion to spawn in the comments about whether piracy of digital content is justified. This is just a casual reminder to read the article before replying in the comments.
This is just a casual reminder to read the article before replying in the comments.
This should anyway be a sticky to every post about third party content.
If you can own nothing, then nothing is theft.
YOU canāt own anything, Big Corp however do own a lot š
You can own it though.
Physical media still exists.
which also has DRM on it
True but you can easily rip it.
Which they claim is illegal and a violation of the DMCA
Which used to be considered piracy
IP in general is a very difficult idea to support. In theory, itās supposed to reward innovation, but in practice it results in stagnation and price gouging.
This shit again? have people never heard of lending? the thing you get to use for a short duration at a fraction of the cost to buy it outright or create it yourself? The thing you donāt actually own and have to give it back? renting?
is this some kind of alternate universe where people think they own every movie or game simply by paying $$. is this kindergarten mathematics? and this is coming from people who canāt code for shit and donāt realize the scale of things bts.
Get a physical copy that doesnāt require internet activation then, assholes.
but but butā¦ that requires actual physical movement and getting out of my basement. š
Get a physical copy that doesnāt require internet activation then, assholes.
I think the point was, it is increasingly hard to find such products.
And even once you think youāve bought such product, DRM makes sure itās still not really yours.They where using words like āpurchasingā, and asking just as much for the digital files as for the DVDās. If they where even available.
So it makes sense people where seeing it as āowningā. And then looking puzzled when Sony decided to break into their own devices and delete filesā¦
I have family that FINALLY see that DRM is a thing in their lives, and they DO NOT like it.
Yeah, and as the article links, this is just not about media, CDs, DVDs and games. Itās also about very physical products that we immediately associate as āownedā - like printers, phones, cars, tractors or even, (lol) trains. Theyāre all locked to manufacturers parts and repair services and increasingly difficult to circumvent.
It being increasingly difficult to do that doesnāt change the meaning of the word stealing, it just changes whether or not you think itās morally acceptable to do
Serving my car with 3rd party parts is stealing?
Where did I say that now
Get a physical copy that doesnāt require internet activation then, assholes.
Just a little bit closer, youāre almost getting the point!
Hi @[email protected], please remember Beehawās primary founding principal when commenting here: Be(e) Nice.
It is possible to disagree with someone without using abusive language. If you think they are wrong, attack their arguments (civilly), not the person.
Or I can pay nothing and get a plain video file that I can do anything I want with, and play on any device without needing a player. And as long as I keep that file backed up somewhere, Iāll always have a copy of it.
The TV business is struggling to learn the lesson the music industry learned a long time ago.
And you provide what return, besides snark
Get a physical copy that doesnāt require internet activation then
I cannot speak about movies. But physical games now are also just āusage licensesā, they are encrypted and if the console is connected to the internet at any momento, your rights to play the game may be revoked (just like digital games or, in this case, digital TV series)
Granted, I only skimmed through the article, and overall I agree with, but that headline is a nonsensical statement. This coming from someone who pirates every movie and show that isnāt on Disney+. Whether you own, rent, or lend, you still had to pay for access to it. Piracy circumvents that. I donāt own the rental car. If I drove off with it, is that not stealing?
There are plenty of ways to justify piracy. Thereās a few good reasons listed in the article. I do it because switching between a dozen streaming services is too inconvenient. But even putting morality aside, that headline is just plain dumb, itās illogical.
Edited in case this came on too harsh
Driving off with the rental car is a fine analogy if we were comparing this to not returning a DVD you rented.
But this is not that. And that is kind of the point.
Piracy is a breach of contract for sure. The point the author is trying to make is that our current licensing contracts around media are out of touch with the social contract (you pay for something, you get it).
Hence the moral hazard. So companies will flaunt the social contract (like in the case of Sony) with impunity but will get rightous as soon as people flaunt the legal contract. Itās a double standard, where all the power is in the hands of those with the biggest legal department.
You canāt define ātheftā untill you first define justice. And if consumers and media holders canāt even agree to a just system, then why bother categorizing anything as theft at all?
Oh I agree with the article as I already stated in my previous comment, and I hope people read it, because my only argument really is that it has a poor headline. The headline says that taking media that you wouldnāt have owned isnāt piracy (which is nonsense), the article says that piracy is justified when ownership is as nebulous as it often is with a lot of digital media these days (which I agree with).
No no, that is not what the headline says.
The headline says āyouāre told that what youāre doing is buying by the people selling you the media, but thatās not what youāre actually doing. So, if theyāre lying to you about what youāre buying, then pirating a different thing isnāt stealing the thing they are trying to sell you.ā
Itās definitely tongue in cheek and has some hyperbole in it, but that is the gist of the statement.
then pirating a different thing isnāt stealing the thing they are trying to sell you.
Maybe not that version of the thing specifically, but itās still stealing if they ultimately created it and you obtained it ignoring their conditions for sale.
Donāt get me wrong, you have a really good point. A lot of times the bootleg version of a good is better than the legal version because of the legal versionās tos and spyware enforcing them. I just donāt see how obtaining the bootleg isnāt piracy/stealing. Thereās good justification for stealing it imo (as a pirate myself), but thatās all it is, justification. Itās still stealing.
So I guess Iām just being pedantic when I say I disagree with you, but realize I see where youāre coming from, and that we basically agree in spirit
I get ya. I think thereās also a petulant sentiment of āyou donāt want to play fair? Then fuck you, I wonāt eitherā
The car goes away when you drive it off. Replacing the car would take power to run multiple assembly and formation machines, and resources for each part.
When you download a movie, it doesnāt go anywhere, you simply use a miniscule amount of power to make a copy.
No one has lost anything and the product is still available where it was. Copying is not theft. When you steal, you leave one less left.
How many lemmy commenters can make the same false equivalence analogy in one week?
I know, I know, I figured someone was going to bring this up, and personally thatās part of the reason I justify my own piracy (cause Iām broke and movie studios arenāt), but two things:
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The cost of creating, copying, and distributing a good isnāt strictly relevant to the transaction of said good. If the original owner doesnāt want me to have access to a good without paying for it, and I take it anyway, thatās stealing. The labor and capital required to create, copy, and distribute that good isnāt relevant to that transaction, only my moral justification for stealing it anyway. Which is fine, imo, just be honest with yourself. Youāre stealing, and itās justified. Stick it to the man
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Assuming that it is relevant, making digital media isnāt free. I can get away with piracy only because thereās enough people paying for the media to make it worth it for the studio. At least one other commenter pointed this out, but if everyone pirated, who would be making movies and video games? So to keep the system going, imo, only pirate if you werenāt going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.
At least one other commenter pointed this out, but if everyone pirated, who would be making movies and video games? So to keep the system going, imo, only pirate if you werenāt going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.
Youāre missing another optionā¦ And one that most people seem to continue to purposefully forget. When Netflix first startedā¦ It was a good product at a worthwhile price. Lots of people gave up pirating. Music was the same thing with Spotify and such services. Piracy is only getting worse again because the companies that āproduceā the content canāt keep their heads out of their asses and the services that cut back on piracy are now worse than what we left originally. As someone who had purchased these services for YEARSā¦ Thereās nothing but greed on their endā¦ They canāt be mad when people respond with their own form of greed, they made the first move here. They could have continued making money from people who otherwise wouldnāt have paid. They chose this path to some extent.
I think my last sentence includes your āmissing optionā, actually. Take streaming for example, Iām not paying for 6 different streaming services. I canāt, I wonāt, and Iām not going to juggle them every couple months either. So I pirate. Even if for some reason I couldnāt pirate their stuff, I just wouldnāt watch it. Either way, they donāt get my money.
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If everyone who would buy a digital product pirates it instead, then itās clear that they have been harmed by the piracy. This whole āownā vs ārentā vs etc argument is completely tangental as is the definition of āstealā, unless pedantry is the purpose of this post. Itās clear that piracy can be harmful.
āBut they lost nothing physicalā is an extremely shallow argument that ignores that not everything with value is physical. If I copy your idea as-is and make a product out of it before you, you can always come up with new ideas, right? Itās not like you lost something physical. Clearly you havenāt been harmed, right?
If someone who wouldnāt purchase a digital product pirates it, then itās less obvious whether the creator got harmed by it. Also, to be clear, the discussion over digital ownership is still important.
Itās got nothing to do with whether itās physical. Cars are different from movies because the movie can be reproduced infinitely without resource cost (or, very minimal). If you steal a rental car, they have to buy a new one. If you pirate a movie, they havenāt lost anything.
If you pirate a movie, they havenāt lost anything.
Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value? Otherwise if everyone pirates the movie, then they lose nothing and have no incentive to enforce that people purchase it before watching it.
There are a lot of ways to justify pirating digital content. Pretending as though digital content has no value is not one of them, unless you really and truly believe that creators of digital content deserve no compensation.
First off, I was specifically addressing your concern about the car & itās physicality. Value of physical objects is directly related to the scarcity of the resources; digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.
Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value
Secondly (and thirdly in a sec), this is the fundamental misapprehension that surrounds piracy. Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale. In terms of music (I read a study about music piracy a few years ago), this is rarely the case, and in fact, it was the opposite: the study found that the albums that were pirated more resulted in more sales, since the albumās reach was extended.
Thirdly, one of the core issues with the entertainment industry at the moment is that the streaming services have no way to gauge the draw of a specific show, movie, or song, since subscribers just donāt approach their subscription that way - you donāt subscribe to Spotify because your want to hear Virtual Cold by Polvo; you subscribe because you want to have access to their entire collection, as well as all the other awesome 90s noise/math rock - even though, letās be honest, you really just listen to Virtual Cold over and over.
As a result of this clusterfuck, streaming services canāt correctly apportion payment to their content - they do an elaborate split of the profits. So - the best way for the ācontent providersā (ie copyright holders) to increase profits is to reduce the amount of content on the streaming service - so the profits are spread over fewer titles.
This is massively hurting the production companies - please note none of these fuckers are getting any sympathy from me, this is just an explanation - theyāre having a hard time finding a balance between how much they can spend given that half of their productionsā profits are pennies. (Oops, forgot one element: because of streaming tech, no one buys films in tape or DVD or whatever - which was half of a filmās profit.) Do they make a bunch of huge budget action movie sequels that fill the theater seats? Or do they make smaller-budget films with smaller profit margins?
Itās a shitty situation, and I donāt know what the answer is - but I know that the answer isnāt whatever the fuck this is. And, until they figure their shit out, Iām just going to step outside the market for a bit.
Iām not living in some dream world where piracy doesnāt reduce profits. I know that the underground bands that I like are usually supportive of piracy because it helps them more than it hurts - and when it comes to film and TV, when those companies complain about piracy , itās just like those bullshit shoplifting claims - attempts to turn their āline not go upā on poor people. Piracy is a grain of sand in the Sahara - they have way bigger problems than that - though I do think increased piracy metrics might help encourage them in the right direction.
Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.
To be clear, Iām not against piracy as a whole, but at its core if a potential buyer pirates something, then that is an opportunistic loss, and thus there exists a value to what was pirated (or rather the sale of it).
digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.
There are a number of ways to price digital content. You could price it based on cost of production split among an estimated number of sales plus a premium, or based on what others in the industry price it at. Regardless, to the creator of that digital content, each sale of that content has value, and while the copy itself might not, the transaction does.
Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale.
I ādemoedā Minecraft before buying it, and you can bet I recommended it to others as well. There are plenty of instances where piracy can be a good thing, however I was never trying to state otherwise. In my original response, I had called out that piracy by people who would not otherwise purchase a product was less clear. There are also people who āpirateā content theyāve already purchased, and those who pirate like I did to demo a product before buying it later. In your case, you also have a justification for it when it comes to music. However, the point was that piracy can be harmful (as is shown by my extreme example of everyone pirating something), and therefore the sale of the content being pirated has value. They arenāt charging just because they feel like it, theyāre charging because theyāre selling a product, and the product had a cost to produce, even if it was mostly just an initial cost.
The debate around digital product ownership is an important one, and if youāre voting with your wallet by pirating the content, then by all means I wonāt stop you. However, the idea that you arenāt āstealingā because you pirated digital content rather than purchasing a license to it is a distraction from the real problems of digital ownership that the article covers extremely well, most of which stem from lack of control over your copy of the product. Using piracy to try to effect change makes sense, but only because that piracy can harm the creators/distributors. If it didnāt harm them, then they wouldnāt care about the piracy and wouldnāt be interested in changing.
Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.
So by that logic, if I were to hack your computer, copy the data, and put sell it to some group for them to use, would that be theft. You still have your data, you havenāt lost anything directly, and while the group I sold it to may use a saved credit card or password to harm you I didnāt, so would what I did be considered theft?
Similarly, if I just sold the information gained by it to advertisers, marketers, your friendly neighborhood stalker, etcā¦ Would that have been theft? You werenāt harmed, the demonstrably valuable information was just taken without your consent and given to a third party that wanted it.
I just wrote like a 10 page response to another comment on that same post I made so I donāt think I have the energy to go too deep on this - so, to keep it short:
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I was just rebutting that personās claim that a car and a digital object have the same relationship to value, and they donāt; physicality requires resources that ādigitalityā doesnāt.
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I feel like you mightāve agreed with me in the second part? Or, if not, I think you managed to destabilize the entire data economy in like 2 sentences, so, fuck yeah.
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If itās not theft then itās fraud I guess
Some are more equal than others
