Yeah, when you steal something from someone then he does not have it anymore. With indefinitely replicable virtual goods that is not the case.
.... therefore we need to build and violently enforce a legal regime to ensure that content profiteers can extract 100% profit from every transaction?
I don't make the rules. Blame shareholder fiduciary responsibilities or the spineless politicians. Corporations are gonna corporate
By that logic you can't blame the politicians because they got bribed, and you can't blame the citizens because of corporate propaganda and voila! No one has moral responsibility for anything
Politicians' fiduciaries are their constituents though, so they are the failure there though if they allow corporations to get away with long term harm
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for some abstract shame or morality to guide politicians' actions when all the systemic incentives point in the other direction
If I steal your bicycle
you have to take the bus,
but if I just copy it
there's one for each of us!
But the creator can't afford a bike now that you copied instead of buying. So kinda bad analogy.
I pirate because it's more convenience than having 10+ separate streaming apps, but I also don't pretend that the monetary losses from piracy don't trickle down.
I just don't care. Offer me a good service please, and I'll pay.
You can support creative people directly. Acting like the money paid to Netflix is trickling down to them is laughable.
Sometimes it’s really hard to do that though. Like, with most Japanese animation studios you can only buy cels from their site, it’s often all in Japanese and some studios don’t even have that.
Between marketing, producers, distribution and everything it’s become pretty damn hard to actually give the money to who you want.
It does. The streaming services won't order more seasons etc if ratings are shit. That new season is lots of money for the people working, from set hands to camera men, writers etc.
That said, I've not subscribed to any service since 2013 because none works like, say, Spotify.
Netflix, in particular, won't order more seasons if the show didn't get them more users. They don't care about popularity itself. The shows are supposed to get more people to subscribe. Which is stupid. I've honestly never heard of anyone subbing to Netflix for one show.
Exactly what I'm talking about, but some people don't realize the thing that if everyone pirates, the services stop spending money.
But it's their responsibility to make the service enticing
Streaming services notoriously won't order more seasons of shows that are popular, either. More seasons are more expensive than new shows.
If I steal food from the store, I'm both robbing the store, and a community that would have paid good money for that food.
If I go to the store and magically have the items on the shelves be duplicated into my cart, and I don't have to pay for them. That is not a crime that is a miracle
Exactly true, and as applied to patents: if I steal your fish you go hungry, if I watch how you fish and do the same we both eat.
'I wonder who this ship belongs to anyway,' said Arthur.
'Me,' said Zaphod.
'No. Who it really belongs to.'
'Really me,' insisted Zaphod. 'Look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore this ship is mine, okay?'
Just a few days ago I was re-reading the Restaurant at the end of the universe, and was going to try and look up this quote before reading the comments. I've really got to get around to reading the rest of the books by Douglas Adams, as I loved his hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy series.
The thing I love about zephod is that he was basically the "it was me. I did it like this." Meme before the Heavy is Dead video came out.
If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to remove a man's mind, will, and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?
Also if buying isn't owning than wtf did I buy. In any other time period this corporate shit would be considered a scam.
You didn't buy anything, we rent now...
Landlords everywhere, even on the internet... It's disgusting. They get to own, we get to borrow...
So to OP, it's still stealing as they own everything, we just rent. Fucking scam for sure :(
At the risk of sounding like a landlord here, there are far wealthier people to be disgusted by.
Yeah, I think it's backwards to still focus our ire on "landlords" when it's oligarch (yes, some of whom are also landlords) that are the real enemy.
In modern society, many landlords are just middle-class folks who bought an apartment building as their retirement fund.
"YoU BoUgHt a lIcEnSe tO UsE ThE PrOdUcT"
Funny how the word license never comes up until you read the fine print. Colloquially you're buying the product. If we're going by legal technicalities then legally I ain't stealing shit.
You are renting the software forever, until it's no longer supported (I'm looking at you Nintendo)
Services like massages are paying directly for someone's active labor, buying a book, a song, or an (offline) game is one a time transaction for an already completed work
What you're paying for when there's a license or other kind of agreement is more akin to a service. Like permission to use it, renting it. Paying for labor is just renting someone's body and skills. The seller making the offer gets to determine the terms, and then you have just as much power to walk away.
It's the theft of profit they don't like, they don't care if you watch it, just that you give them money for the opportunity to watch.
No, they still don't like it when I buy a copy of a video game and then pirate it as well
yup. anti-piracy is about control, not profits. this is trivial to deduce from the simple fact that no one ever measures a drm solution's performance in total sales recovered, they only ever whine about hypothetical lost ones, which is the corporate equivalent of sideways for attention, long way for effect
I can't wait to see the split in the next decade or so between AI films from the giants and boutique offerings that feature all-human casts.
In sure the former will be dazzling crap/profit machines, and the latter to be a slow death as people begin to come of age without any particular desire to watch real people when they can see the craziest shit created using AI. I wonder how long before the CGI will be so good that it will become impossible to tell the difference? I wonder how long before you can tailor the characters in a movie like you can tailor your own game avatars? How long before piracy isn't stealing IP but actually creating your own versions of movies that can riff of the original and even improve upon them, creating a subculture of film creators that are hunted and aggressively prosecuted by the major content creators?
I'm a bit apprehensive about that world, but it's exciting to be on the cusp of such a potential reorganizing of the film world we know.
"Don't like a dark skinned Ariel? Here at Disney+++ you can configure your movie to have the ethnicity and sexuality you want to see, for just $49.99 per month extra"
I do Wonder, if we possible for me to one day tell an AI that I want a CGI pornographic movie about furry transformation and breast expansion. With a story even, because I know I'm sure as hell not getting that from Hollywood. And I don't just mean a scene that make cater to that, I want the movie to be specifically about that
In a world where people’s lives are sustained by a model that diminishes their income when copying instead of buying, you can’t exactly call it “perfectly ethical”.
You can make an argument that your copying isn’t preventing a sale and that probably works most of the time, but not all the time.
I think “it’s complicated” is a more true statement of the conundrum.
The issue is that there exists some sort of digital Bourgeoisie, people that just make their money by owning digital data, while the digital proletariat, the artists and programmers, that creates the data aren't well financially compensated or might not even be employed at the company anymore.
Pirates should be mindful who they are hurting, and that depends on the piece of work they are pirating, the time when they are doing it and many other circumstances. That decides if is ethical or not.
Creators should be well compensated for their time and effort, so that they continue to create and if that is the case piracy doesn't matter.
Self published indie game that you really like? Pay for it, support the creator(s)
Music written/recorded by long dead people whose rights are owned by some massive faceless corporation to line the pockets of CEOs and shareholders? Fuck them, pirate away
Future generations will cringe at how much creative innovation has been stifled by our repressive copyright laws, extending it past 20 years flat was a major mistake
We all stand on the shoulders of giants!
when it was black music or achievements, where were those property rights then? chuck berry was robbed, so were many others. Where was the outrage then? seems to me property is only respected if it comes to the belongings of those in power, but if you are a native american your entire country is up for grabs... how come?
The actual damage is done to the billions of people that are excluded from education, from science and from just books, by property and copy rights. The damage done to mankind done by patent law far exceeds any damage done to individuals holding patents.
We artificially live in a world that is less educated than it could be. I would like to live in the world with the most possible education.
Think about who is damaged by our lack of education? think about who benefits from our ignorance?
Who's interests outweigh the ability of all of mankind to educate themselves? Our taxes paid for the science, the articles should be gratis.
The artificial scarcity around books, science and generally information and education is affecting the trajectory of mankind.
If all had free access to all information meaning scientific papers, books, plays, literature, musical scores and recordings, then we may have already lived in a start trek style utopia.
How much has mankind's advancement already been hampered by the sorry state of affairs?
Ummm, actually infinity is just a pure mathematical concept that does not exist in real life 🤓
God damn right!
....I mean... PIRACY IS WRONG AND IMORRAL!
stealing from billionaires is bad! How are they supposed to afford their giant mansions and gold Hummers if we pirate things?!
Edit: I just don't have the attention span to read all that.
I don't agree with some of that stuff.
I think if you buy something it should be yours forever.
And if you want someone to work for you, you need to pay them...and you need to pay them more than enough to live. I'd say the minimum wage needs to be double what a living wage would be.
I don’t agree with some of that stuff.
How do you know before you read the entire argument? 🤔
I don’t agree with some of that stuff.
How do you know before you read the entire argument?
By reading some of it, I suppose.
read the linked text if you are interested in debating me 😁😂🤣😅 I am not gonna make the same argument but worse than proudhon if you don't care or have time or attention span for that but then you probably shouldn't say it's bullshit without knowing what you are talking about 😘
It's something about how working for a shitty wage that can't allow you to afford a life is bad, right? How it's basically the same thing as slavery?
But then it goes into how property, just having property at all is somehow theft? That's where I disagree. People need to be able to own things and have things that only they can control. You can't and shouldn't be allowed to do whatever you want with other people's things.
People should always have autonomy over their own lives and their own property. And people should be given a UBI equivalent to a living wage and the minimum wage needs to be double what a living wage would be on top of benefits
No. The first argument is that the author can equate slavery to murder without being misunderstood. They then expound further on that meaning. They say nothing about wages.
The second argument says that in contrast one cannot equate property to robbery without being grossly misunderstood, which you have so eloquently demonstrated.
No, it is from a 19th century socialist, this sort of language isn't easily understood by most people in the modern day. And to act like it should be so insightful to them is sophistry.
I'm not taking offense that they didn't understand the argument. I'm taking offense that they openly admitted to not reading it, and then attempting to summarize what it said, poorly. If that's sophistry, so be it. They're being willfully ignorant.
Okay, well. I don't have the attention span to read all that. And I can't tell if there's any subtext in what you said.
A line break or paragraphs or literally any formatting at all would have helped. I suspect it's an artifact of how the full quote was done as the link, though.
In case you or anyone else is curious, it's a reaction gif of Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy from Anchorman saying, "I can't argue with any of those points."
It's just a reaction gif (in webm format, which is probably why it's not showing for us)
On the Firefox instance I'm running now, it doesn't show inline in this page. But opening the context menu and "open video in new tab" works.
Meh, piracy wouldn't equal stealing even if buying did mean owning. Piracy is duplicating without removing the original and doesn't take away any existing thing from the current owner. I count potential sells as a hypothetical thing that doesn't currently exist. Therefore, piracy is nothing even close to stealing.
Terms of Service would like to speak with you.
ToC wielding guns we just wanna talk!
By that token, if someone is punching you in the face repeatedly, don't defend yourself.
You aren’t stealing from the person you’re getting it from, you’re stealing from the person who created it
Not in the US. Unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work for any reason is copyright infringement.