- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
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Piracy was never stealing. It’s copyright infringement, but that’s not the same as stealing at all. People saying it’s stealing have always been wrong.
One of the great modern scams, was to convince society that unauthorized copying of data is somehow equivalent to taking away a physical object.
Jesus didn’t ask for permission to copy bread and fish. It’s a clear moral precedent that if you can copy you should.
What would the Jesus do?
Checkmate Atheists!
Jesus was the first pirate.
Nah, that would be Prometheus.
Wasn’t the idea and origin story of Jesus stolen from previous texts and religions lol
They forked Judaism
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Still not theft.
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Not a lawyer, but most of what you said is true, except:
then it’s not possible to copy that data without depriving the creator of its value.
We’re talking about the theoretical value the creator might get if you decide to pay for something. If you never had any intention of paying to access something if you couldn’t find a pirated copy, no value has been lost by the creator due to copying the data and therefore no harm has been done. The requirement for criminal liability should be that a harm has been inflicted by you beyond any reasonable doubt. Piracy as a deprivation of monetary value can not ever meet this requirement. Of course, the actual requirement is that you have committed a crime beyond reasonable doubt, so if corrupt legislators make piracy a crime, the justice system can obviously charge you with it despite it being victimless, hence the scam.
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Literally no one thinks that. But you know that already, don’t you?
It’s theft of intellectual property…
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Honestly that’s only because people are intimidated by big words.
Don’t know, never heard of it.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/HmZm8vNHBSU?si=wlEnYZKREf8L_E-o
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
My guy I think maybe you don’t realize how old you are because that campaign is 25+ years old 🤣
That is just typical corporate disinformation and not reflective of modern opinions held by real people.
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There is no such thing as intellectual property - you can not own a thought.
Once again with the strawman.
Intellectual property is not a thought that you own. It’s an idea or digital creation. Something that actually takes time to make, often a whole lot of time. Something you never would have dedicated as much time to if you couldn’t be compensated for it.
I love how you guys play these mental gymnastics to justify this shit to yourselves.
You seem to not understand what the word own means and the difference between material and not material goods.
You seem to not understand what “theft” means.
I have a thing and than someone takes it away, so I can’t use it anymore. If somebody copies that thing - it’s not really theft.
My point is more - concepts from physical world don’t nessessary apply to digital world.
Intellectual property is a scam, the term was invented to convince dumb people that a government-granted monopoly on the expression of an idea is the same thing as “property”.
You can’t “steal” intellectual property, you can only infringe on someone’s monopoly rights.
Imagine if startrek was written with IP in mind. Instead of all these wunderkinds being all gung ho about implementing their warp field improvements on your reactor you’d get some ferengi shilling the latest and greatest “marketable” blech engine improvements.
Fiction is much better without reality leeching in.
Star Trek was set in a future utopia. One of the key things about the show is that it’s a post-scarcity world where even physical objects can be replicated.
They definitely wrote the series with IP in mind… in that their view of a future utopia was one where not only did copyright etc. not exist, but nobody cared much about the ownership of physical objects either.
That is absolutely 100% a completely insane position. The fact that you feel entitled to literally everything someone else creates it’s fucking horrific and you are a sad person.
For someone who bitches all over this thread about people strawmanning their position, this is a pretty fucking great reply.
Hint: one can be pissed about people throwing around the not-based-in-legal-reality term “intellectual property.” One can be pissed about people using it as part of a strategy to purposely confuse the public into thinking that copyright infringement is the same as theft, a strategy which has apparently worked mightily well on you. One can be all of those things, and yet still feel that copyright infringement is wrong and no one should be entitled to “literally everything someone else creates.”
What you posted was a textbook definition of a straw man.
One can be pissed about people using it as part of a strategy to purposely confuse the public into thinking that copyright infringement is the same as theft
No, you have it wrong, one is part of a strategy to confuse the public into thinking it’s not, because it justifies doing whatever they want.
still feel that copyright infringement is wrong and no one should be entitled to “literally everything someone else creates.”
But they don’t feel that copyright infringement is wrong. How closely did you read the previous statements?
They literally said “Intellectual property is a scam”. I don’t know how else you could possibly interpret that
I don’t know how the original poster meant it, but one possible way to interpret it (which is coincidentally my opinion) is that the concept of intellectual property is a scam, but the underlying actual legal concepts are not. Meaning, the law defines protections for copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets, and each of those has their uses and are generally not “scams,” but mixing them all together and packaging them up into this thing called intellectual property (which has no actual legal basis for its existence) is the scam. Does that make sense?
So you also believe people shouldn’t need a ticket for a concert, for example?
The performers time is not infinitely reproducible so your argument is apples to oranges.
But it is though: via the power of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television?wprov=sfti1
Though you could charge for the experience of other sweaty humans, bad ventilation in some cases, and the thrill of potentially being trampled
But the time to create a novel, a videogame, or a news story is not infinitely reproducible, either. So when you are pirsting one of those things, you are actively reaping the benefits of someone’s time for free, like going to a concert without a ticket
I don’t see anything wrong with paying for software or music or digital media. I don’t think that not doing so is theft - like I also don’t think that getting into a concert without paying is theft. By the way a concert is also not digital data, at least an irl one.
Why do you hate libraries?
A library card is your ticket there and libraries are paid via taxes, which is why they’re free at point of use.
Attending a free concert is not stealing. Breaking into the Eras tour is.
The library buys once and allows multiple people to read/watch each item without each person needing to individually purchase. Just like one person buying something and sharing it with others.
The main point is that digitization distribution is not a concert
Digital distribution is a service. You can steal a service.
If you fuck a prostitute and then don’t pay them, you are stealing from them.
If the prostitute uses a technique, and then you use the same technique without paying hem for reuse, is that stealing or does their direct involvement matter?
YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A PURSE
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
-Character from some movie I pirated
In this economy with this level of corporate greed, I will download all the purses
I would infringe all over its copyright tho
You wouldn’t steal a baby!
You wouldn’t shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet.
But I would definitely take a shit in that helmet
…and then return it to his grieving wife?
And then steal it again?
You wouldn’t download fish and bread!
Jesus: hold my wine……
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I bet you aren’t a software developer.
I’m a software developer, and I endorse the grandparent comment.
And you all just were happy and bro fisted people who ignored the licensing terms?
Yes.
Well, not literally, both because I’m more inclined to “high five” and you can’t do either gesture over the Internet. But figuratively, yes.
Why don’t you just gift away your software than? That’s an honest question. You obviously aren’t expecting to be paid for it, do you think in general developers shouldn’t earn money with software or is it just you?
Why don’t you just gift away your software than?
Because I don’t make those decisions; my employer does. They ought to give it away, but they don’t.
(The software I’ve worked on has tended to be either (a) tools for internal company use or (b) stuff used by the government/large companies where the revenue would definitely have come from a support contract even if the code itself were free.)
I am a system engineer who works on a project that is open source, AMA
If I made software that people cared enough about to crack and pirate, I’d be happy that it’s popular enough for that to happen.
I am a software developer but I’ve only worked on SaAS and open source projects.
I work on software which is pirated. It is even sold by crackers, who make money off my work. This does not make me proud.
What does make me proud is when a paying customer says they love a specific feature, or that our software saves them a lot of manual work.
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Did you intentionally misunderstand the comment you replied to?
I think I replied to the wrong comment
Pride unfortunately doesn’t pay the bills. It’s terrific that you contribute to open source, but not all commercial software can be open sourced.
Tell me which so I can develop a competing service and steal your userbase!
I’d be happy that it’s popular enough for that to happen.
of course you would. you would actually give them your house and wife, because you’re so proud now. right?
Ah yes, because downloading Shark_Tale.mp4 is exactly the same as someone taking your house away from you and obtaining your wife and owning them as personal property.
Get some fucking perspective. I usually try to be polite online but this is just straight up moronic and you need to be told so bluntly.
Lmao
You need to disconnect the badness with the term stealing because you’re just wrong. Yeah it’s ip infringement. Yes it’s illegal. Yes people are impacted. And still… Not stealing.
You aren’t.
Yes I am. And the two companies I worked for both were small, offered their products for cheap and still had people pirating the modules or circumvent licensing terms. It’s a legit problem that a lot of people don’t see why they should pay for software simply because it’s sometimes easy to steal it.
circumvent licensing terms
So to be clear: was it possible to purchase and own the software? Or did users have to pay a subscription for a license? Because personally I’m getting sick of every piece of software thinking it’s appropriate to require a subscription.
How about you don’t use it if it is to be paid by subscription? How is it justified to go against an agreement just because you don’t like it?
If something is wrong you have a moral obligation to go against it. Be it legal or not.
Naa, I’d just pirate it. Fuck the rent-seekers.
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I have been for over 20 years actually! What do I get for winning the bet?
Edit:
One of our games we actually ended up supporting a form of piracy. A huge amount of our user base ended up using cheat tools to play our game which meant that they could get things that they would normally have to purchase with premium currency. Instead of banning them, we were careful to not break their cheat tools and I even had to debug why their cheat tool stopped working after a release.
BINGPOT.
If there is no easy way to own what you buy, then piracy becomes a moral obligation to preserve culture for future generations.
You want something, but you don’t want to pay the cost (either monetarily or because they have made it too hard) and so you take take it. Fuck these assholes companies who try to milk people for every last penny, so I have no moral qualms with piracy, I do it myself.
But, fuck, can we stop trying to paint it as some noble thing? Effectively zero pirates are doing it to perseve culture, instead it’s fulfilling personal desire.
This is chaotic neutral at best, not neutral good.
I think there’s an exception to be made in your argument for abandonware. There are classic arcade games that wouldn,'t exist any more but are widely available due to MAME support.
The Nintendo eShop shutdown is another example of preserving software through piracy.
See also: The Despecialized Edition of the Star Wars Original Trilogy
Internet archive, and a chunk of r/datahoarders, is built for that purpose. Just as people have saved old paintings (aka media) it’s also good for us to save significant pieces of our current culture. Old VHS tapes and CDs are already disappearing. Sometimes finding something is just a little bit more difficult and it’s only going to get worse.
Like the latest controversy with the internet archives
Forget about features and prices, how about actual content?
2017 I buy this space shooter game called “Destiny 2”. It has some problems, but it’s decent enough. $60 buy in. The single player story missions took you through four initial planets/moons, the European Dead Zone, Titan, Nessus, and Io, recovering your power and kicking the asses of the space turtles who tried to kill everyone.
Expansion 1, 2, 3 and 4 come out widening the story, adding more locations, Mercury, Mars, The Tangled Shore and the Dreaming City, the Moon… with all the associated story missions, strikes, raids…
And I bought in on those too. Some hundreds of dollars.
Roll forward to 2020, almost 2,000 hours in game. Bungie decides they’re done with story missions and removes them from the game. They also decide that the game is “too big” for new players to get into, and seeking a Fortnite, free to play style audience, removes 1/2 of the content from the game.
Existing players like me drop the game because content we paid good money for and hours we spent exploring, collecting and curating gear, just went up in smoke.
New players now have no onboarding point and are incredibly confused because there’s no story and no real way to get into the game.
So Bungie managed to completely alienate both their existing user base, and the one they hoped to attract.
Oh, and they have now promised not to do it again, but at the same time, haven’t brought the content back either.
It’s an online service as a game too, so piracy is not an option. The only way to experience the original content is through YouTube videos.
This is exactly me. Started in d1 beta. I quit cold the day the removed my purchased content
I feel like I got scammed by Bungie with the shit they pulled with Destiny 2. I will never give them a single dime ever again. I loved that game and they completely ruined it.
The thing that absolutely kills me is that they did so much RIGHT with the first game, and then it was like they completely forgot how to design a game between 1 and 2.
For example:
In Destiny 1 you picked the story missions off the map and each story mission was marked with a light level so you knew the order to do them in. When you finished all the normal missions, there was a Strike to finish off the planet.
Destiny 2? Yeah, story missions, you can’t see them on the map, you have no idea how many there are or if you’re the appropriate level, and while there are strikes, you can only access them from a playlist and MAYBE it’s the one from the planet you’re on, maybe it’s not. Maybe you’ll get the same strike 4 times in a row because fuck you if there’s a specific one you want to play.
Everyone was talking about how good The Pyramidion was, I could never get it to come up. Bungie finally relented after a YEAR(!) and put them on the map, a feature D1 had on DAY 1.
That sounds awesome! Too bad I never played D1.
You still can, it’s up and running right now. Backwards compatible even.
Like I said, Bungie isn’t getting a dime from me.
Buy a used disc for $5. :) Bungie gets nothing.
I don’t exactly recall when or where I heard/read this quote, but man it is dope
- “it should not be a concern when people pirate your content, it should be when people don’t even want to pirate your content”
I remember this from the hip hop scene. You know you’ve fallen off when nobody is sharing/pirating your album
Netflix and Amazon prime simply won’t work with VPNs active, which I use for work and privacy towards my ISP.
I won’t compromise my security for their bad services. Living in a non US country, we are also always several years behind on content being offered.
Yeah, nah. The paying customer always pays for the percieved sins of non customers.
Set sail.
- When you take 5 eur from my pocket - you are stealing.
- When you take 5 eur from my pocket, make a copy and put my original 5 eur back to my pocket - this is not stealing.
Further to that, paying for a product then the seller taking that product away from you without refunding your payment is stealing.
Don’t forget adjusting for inflation and real money being given back not some shitty gift card
That’s not a fair example, because 5 Euros has an intrinsic value. The theft here is of intellectual property. Here’s an analogy:
- When you take a book from a book store without paying for it, you are stealing.
- When you take a book from a book store without paying for it, make an exact replication of it and return the original, you are stealing intellectual property.
Stealing involves depriving the original owner of access or possession of the item. Duplication is not stealing because the item being duplicated is not taken away.
Even if you consider it stealing, then what defense do you have for the people who paid the price that would supposedly allow them to have it permanently and suddenly it still gets taken away? That’s not stealing? Even if we accepted that piracy by people who didn’t pay is theft, why should people who already paid for the media not be able to access it from somewhere else if their original access is denied?
By duplicating, you’re depriving the company to the exclusive right to copy that thing. But I don’t think stealing some nebulous concept of a monopoly like that is wrong.
The keywords: company and monopoly.
There is more nuance to it than that. The copyright holder still owns whichever copies are made, whether or not they are made with their permission. One could argue that by making a duplicate, you have taken possession of a copy without consent from its owner.
As for your other example about a copyright owner revoking access; this is completely subject to the terms of sale of that item. Without details of the license agreement it’s impossible to say if the terms were breached.
There is more nuance to it than that. The copyright holder still owns whichever copies are made, whether or not they are made with their permission. One could argue that by making a duplicate, you have taken possession of a copy without consent from its owner.
That is an extremely recent construct largely promoted by the big media companies themselves. For the vast majority of human history, intellectual property was not a thing and works could be freely copied, modified, redistributed, etc and it was considered normal. When copyright first came into effect, it was for a fixed period that was relatively short, after which anyone could use the work however they wanted. That was the original intent of copyright, which was only to give artists an exclusive period to profit from their work without competition, not exclusive rights for all eternity. Disney was the one that lobbied for copyright terms to be extended, then extended again, then again, and critically, extended to include the life of the “person” that created it, but since corporations are also “persons” under the law and just so happen to not have bodies that can die, effectively corporate media is copyrighted forever.
Also, those media companies claim to be such big proponents of intellectual property protection, they would never, ever do the exact same goddamn thing to independent artists, with the only difference being that they actually profit from it when the vast majority of “piracy” is for personal use, and that they know for a fact that independent artists rarely have the resources or time to actually do anything about it, right? Riiiiiiight?
https://mashable.com/article/disney-art-stolen-tiki
https://insidethemagic.net/2023/12/disney-under-fire-for-allegedly-stealing-furry-fanart-ld1/
https://insidethemagic.net/2021/01/super-nintendo-world-stolen-art-ad1
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/27/dbrand-is-suing-casetify-over-stolen-designs/
https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-joins-sony-in-stealing-art-for-commercials/
https://gamerant.com/sony-stolen-art-playstation-network/
https://ganker.com/sega-stole-from-an-artist-608965/
If anything, shouldn’t small independent artists get more protection under the law if copyright was really meant to benefit artists and safeguard the creative process like it claims it does? The FBI can arrest and jail you for pirating a movie, but when a corporation commits the same crime there isn’t even a whiff of consequences. At this point we really ought to ask what the real purpose of copyright is after all the changes made to it and who it’s actually meant to protect.
As for your other example about a copyright owner revoking access; this is completely subject to the terms of sale of that item. Without details of the license agreement it’s impossible to say if the terms were breached.
Gee, it almost sounds like the laws regarding what they can and can’t put in those terms of sale are nowhere close to fair and were specifically written by the giant media holding companies to exclusively benefit them and screw over the consumer! Laws and regulations can’t possibly be immoral and corrupt right?
real purpose of copyright
To separate the worker from owning the means of production?
Especially telling when it’s the corporation that owns the copyright, and not the actual artists and other workers that actually created it.
Accidentally deleted my comment. Spelling…
real purpose of copyright
To separate the worker from owning the means of production?
I mean, at the low level, sure. “Bart Simpson”, the concept, was created by a person. Bart Simpson, the character, was developed and built as a collaborative effort of several people spanning the course of decades, and continues to be developed by teams of people.
The copyright shouldn’t belong to an individual. The rights to the intellectual property need to be protected, but so too do the rights of everyone who contributed to building it.
Unfortunately, corporations are really the closest proxy we really have.
Thats what’s really exciting about new media, and small time collaborators, and niche content. HomeStar Runner doesn’t belong to Disney, or Fox, or Viacom. He belongs to the small group of people who created him and his friends. The same could be said for Kurzgesagt, or The Lockpicking Lawyer, or both the Nostalgia and Angry Video Game nerds.
Dude, thank you for reminding me I’m not fucking insane.
In a strict legal sense I think you are right. There is some good rationale for copyright, going all the way back to the 1700s, I think. Most artists pretty much need copyright in order to survive. Also, yes, companies should have the ability to freely negotiate contracts, and to have legal protection against someone breaking those contracts. And, yes, these slogans about piracy not being stealing are legally unsophisticated and facile. That said, you can probably sense the “however” coming…
HOWEVER, the context is important. All law is based on an implied social context. When companies engage in practices that poison the market, they break the implied social contract underlying the laws that protect them. The result is retaliatory behavior by consumers. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about media and games or food prices. People will steal when they feel the law, as applied in a particular social context, is no longer fair. It isn’t morally right, but it isn’t exactly wrong either. It’s more of an inherent market mechanism to curtail shitty corporate behaviour, and that’s why governments tend not to interfere too much with individual downloading.
When there is no easy way for consumers to fight back, that’s when governments need to get involved. Ridiculously high drug prices being a good example.
The action is still harmless. Information should be free.
Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.
How is creating a popular a novel any different than creating a popular object? Hundreds of hours of labor go into both and the creators are entitled to the full value of said labor.
Say you have an amazing story about the vacation you took last year, and told all your friends about it. You would justifiably be pissed if you later found out one of your friends was telling that story as if they had done it. It’s the same for someone who writes a book or any other form of media.
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Piracy can only be considered to be depriving someone of some good if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the pirate would have paid for access to the content had they not had a pirated copy available. Not only is this not true in the majority of cases, it’s also completely impossible to prove in 99.9% of the cases where it is true.
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So if I share that book with 50 friends over the course of the year that’s not taking income, but if it copy it 50 times and share it in a day it is? I could also sell it to my friends or even rent it out to them, that’s all money in My pocket and legal, until I copy it instead.
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There is a difference here between lending or resale of a physical product. Can you sell a second hand book? Typically, yes. Can you do mental gymnastics to draw a parallel to reselling a digital version? Evidently, also yes.
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We aren’t talking about plagiarism, the friend would be telling the story about you still.
Spoken word narratives are such an integral part of culture, imagine if your grandpa told you to never repeat any of the stories of his childhood because “he owns the copywrite”. Insane. That’s what you are suggesting.
Ideas are not objects. Having good ideas shared incurs no loss to anybody, except imagined “lost potential value”.
if information is free, the action would be harmless.
FTFY.
Including your personal information?
Strawman. Is intellectual property the same as personally identifiable information? Can you doxx a director using their movie?
Comment I replied to said information.
No reasonable person who says “information should be free” is also lumping in PII with that. It’s clear from the context in this thread that they are referring to media and knowledge (seeing how the post itself was about media and everyone has been discussing the justifiability of things like piracy amid the erosion of digital ownership), not about posting where people live and shit, so you bringing up personal information is at best a misunderstanding of what the saying “information should be free” actually means or at worst a logical fallacy and deliberate attempt to derail the conversation.
Also, just saying, personal information is currently free regardless of whether or not it should be or whether it’s legal or ethical. There are thousands of websites indexable by search engines that list people’s information for anyone to take, mostly from data breaches or otherwise scraped from the internet. It’s one of the main ways scammers get your contact info. There are even websites specifically dedicated to archiving doxxes, hosted in jurisdictions with no privacy laws so the victim can never get it removed. Search your own phone number or email, I bet you’ll find it listed somewhere possibly with a ton of your other information. Unlicensed movies are immediately struck off the internet as soon as they’re discovered though, funny how the law takes pirating movies more seriously than the posting of private information that can literally ruin people’s lives and make them a target of assault, stalking, vandalism, etc.
Taking a product from the shop without paying and returning the item later is still stealing.
There was a history on Reddit where man stole a few grands of $ in products over a few years at his local grocery shop, and one day when he wanted to return what he stole he was arrested on site.
Taking a product from the shop without paying and returning the item later is still stealing.
The issue here is that there is a period of time where the shop does not have the item.
Some people would call it counterfeiting but we won’t do that , right ?
Depends on the intention. Most “illegal” copies are distributed for free so that’s not counterfeiting (there’s no intention to deceive or defraud)
That’s probably going into semantics and what the law says, it’s different for every country.
What’s happening with games and softwares are cracks and repacking, it’s manipulating few parts of the original product to provide partial or sometimes full functionality. This is an infringement of intellectual property and not a counterfeit.
For podcasts, music and movies it’s usually a rip, out of vinyls, lossless or a high definition source. These are copies, not manipulated in any way.
Maybe camrips are truly a counterfeit.
I have yet to see country that doesn’t mind copying their currency unofficially but I’m open to suggestions 🫡
Correct, that would be counterfeiting if you would copy money with the intention to deceive or defraud others. That doesn’t contradict what I said.
IMHO it does contradict what you say. Intention doesn’t matter. If you copy currency , you either have to make apparent its fake currency or you are might get in trouble with law. Intention, aka motive is hard to prove and if proven doesn’t make it legal to copy official currency.
Put 5 eur in my pocket and i have to dance
If you have sex with, but don’t pay a prostitute, are you stealing?
Did they consent to the free sex?
No because the entire metaphor is built on the concept of prostitution
The irony of hiding a pro-piracy post behind this 🤦
Thanks, but I was actually referring to the Tyler James Hill post Cory links at the end…
You’re completely right, bluesky is trash
The fact that no product is missing anywhere means it’s not stealing.
If you rent your car from Mercedes and I make a copy of it, the only change is that I’ve not copied your car, I’ve copied Mercedes’.
By this logic no services should be paid. Are you really just hung up on the word “steaming”? It is wrong to go against an agreement or to take the work of others and not pay for it simply because it’s easy to do that when the work isn’t tangible.
Are people really that fucked up today?
I’m not talking about payment, I’m talking about if it’s stealing or not. It might be copyright infringement depending on local law, but it’s not stealing. Selling a copy might be counterfeiting.
Normally people pay to see the circus, but you could just sneak in though. It’s not exactly stalling, so what do you call that? The circus is still there, but you didn’t pay for it.
If lots of people start doing that, the circus probably won’t have enough money to keep on performing. Maybe they’ll get rid of the more expensive bits and just keep the cheaper ones in the future.
What would you call it if you buy a piece of art and hang it on your wall, then a couple months later the company that sold you the art comes into your home, takes the art away, and says you don’t own it anymore?
If enough companies do that people are going to stop paying for art.
People are pirating products that can be purchased and owned.
People are also “buying” products that are being taken away from them by the license holders of the purchased work. The article explains this with several examples in different markets.
Of course they do, there will always be people who pirate. Most people dont mind paying for stuff and services if it respects them.
There is Baldurs Gate 3 for example, you can buy it on GOG without DRM, and I highly doubt it made a dent in their sales.
If you pay for the circus and they take away the circus so you can’t see it, and then replace it for Circus2, did you own a ticket for the circus?
That would depend on the terms of sale.
Unlikely as what you’re implying sounds like a get-out clause in favor of the trader which is not valid.
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Without details of the hypothetical scenario made here, we cannot know if that’s the case. If the ticket purchaser was unable to see the circus because their flight home was delayed, the circus has no obligation to refund them. If attendance of “Circus 2” is offered to the purchaser due to the cancellation of “Circus 1” under the conditions of the original ticket purchase, then it’s unlikely to be an unfair contact.
There are all kinds of details missing here that we can freely speculate about.
I’m legit unsure whether your argument is purposely bad or you just don’t know that it is.
It’s a thousand times better than this empty garbage. How does this have any upvotes?
Why is the argument bad? Please elaborate.
Because the issue at hand is more like if you bought tickets to the circus, but when you went to go see it you were told the circus isn’t there anymore and you don’t get a refund.
That I would definately call stealing, and if I wanted to see the circus the next time it was in town I would absolutely sneak in.
A more honest analogy for the situation was that there are very few incidents of circuses doing that and now people demand it’s morally justified to get free entrance to every circus, concert, fair, museum, …
“Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” though, right?
It’s not just a few circusses. Every major circus company seems to consistently pull this trick.
Not enough workers exploitation.
People are always on here arguing about whether pirating is stealing or not. I do think it’s stealing I just can’t bring myself to give a fuck about these large corporations. They have been stealing from the people for years.
Pirated valheim, played 20 hours, bought the game.
Pirated baldurs gate 3 on early access, bought the game with only act 1, that’s how good it is.
Pirated Valhalla, played 5 hours, uninstalled that trash forever.
Started pirating streaming services when they told me that I can’t watch shit anymore because streaming service b and c took the shows, and now I have to pay two different streaming services if I want to keep watching.
We pay for three video streaming services plus Spotify plus Kobo’s monthly plan for audiobooks plus a monthly Microsoft tax for apps and cloud storage plus regular Steam purchases.
Anyway, I just got back into piracy after a 15-year hiatus due to the enshittification of video streaming. It reminds me of how cable TV got ridiculous back in the 90s and so people figured out how to hack the satellite feeds and make pirated VHS tapes to pass around. As Gaben has said, piracy is always a service problem.
I’m still happy with Spotify and Steam. I’m mostly okay with audiobooks, too. However, Amazon is fucking with that service too by making some books Audible-only. For example, you can get Books 2 and 3 of Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time books on various platforms, but not Book 1 because Book 1 is Audible-only! Am I going to reward Audible for that kind of malicious licensing? Haha, no, of course not.
Just for curiosity, how do you find Kobos selection compared to Libby/Overdrive (or similar), if that’s an option in your area?
I really can’t be happier with either, for audiobooks or ebooks, considering their price (free, through your public library). Drawback being that selections are limited depending on your library (but you can be linked to several, and you may be eligible for several…here in Massachusetts, anybody in the state is eligible for BPL plus the regional networks and colleges (I.e. COFAN). And there are libraries in other states that accept patrons from anywhere. And you can be on multiple waitlists
But, the limiting selection or not being able to get instant access when you want to scratch that itch. I bought my wife and I kindles on Prime day. Those each came with free Kindle Unlimited months. And then there’s Prime Reading as a benefit of being a prime member.
But, while I like ebooks, my wife greatly prefers audiobooks (she’s at 140-something for the year, and rarely uses her kindle because the phone is way more convenient for audiobooks. That’s entirely through Libby, but she’s also counting the Harry Potter books on her friends Audible account that we’ve been listening to with the kids). And the audiobook selection on kindle unlimited is terrible and clunky…they really want to push you to Audible. Though I do really like being able to toggle between reading and book in the same app. But while I do enjoy the occasional sales (been on waitlist for months for “To sleep in a sea of stars”, and then found it on prime sale for 99¢ or something), I can’t justify a “subscription” to “own” an ebook.
Would love a service that had a good selection of ebooks and audiobooks, and compatible with kindle and IOS
It’s probably worth pirating games just to test play them before buying the good ones for online play
It’s also great to check if my aging pc is even capable of running it somewhat smoothly.
You can just return steam games within 2 hrs tho
True, which again brings us back to “piracy is a service problem” which imho it totally is. I never pirate steam games.
Heads up! Plex media server with the Plex clients on all your devices is such a smooth experience. Highly recommended. And their “Watch together” feature is so nice for people that prefer to stay in bed and spend the winter binge watching next to a warm body.
Use Jellyfin. Stop relying on corps’ services.
Jellyfin is majorly based. I use it with Syncthing for all my media except games
Or Kodi
There’s a Jellyfin plug-in for Kodi and it’s pretty awesome
deleted by creator
Just started my switch last weekend! Jellyfin is amazing so far. Just need to figure out how to export all the Plex metadata and posters to .nfo files.
I would if it had most of the features that Plex does.
It does.
It doesn’t work on Samsung TVs, I tried
Can you browse web on your tv? That would work.
I was curious and tried that on my Samsung TV from 2016, it loads a grey background and does nothing
Maybe, I put it into dev mode to install the app, but it seems that it’s not functional in the current version
You’re inputs broken? Who the fuck cares about TV OS support?
Who the fuck cares about TV OS support?
Me with my limited budget
I spent 30 dollars on an orange pi zero 2 and installed android TV on it.
Can you afford 30 dollars? The privacy alone is worth the cost. Those samsung TVs are spyware central.
Ok.
So it has a dedicated music app?
It has music filtering?
Good 4k/x265 performance?
Has a third party (or built in) utility that shows me streaming usage?
Allows me to limit remote users to streaming from a single IP address at a time?
Let’s me watch something together with another remote user?
Has an app for most any device (like Plex or Emby) that does NOT require sideloading?
Has built in native DVR steaming/recording support?
And they recently added a feature where they tell your friends on the platform what kind of porn you’ve been watching ✌🏾 I think I’ll stick to Jellyfin.
Heads up! Plex is garbage and enshitefying their own services to make more money.
Heads up! Jellyfin is a great alternative!
It is working well for my purposes, but I suppose I may have recommended something without knowing this part of the story.
Don’t feel bad. Plex is working wonders for me. Yea, there are things that annoy me about it, like the volume issues. But all in all, it passes the “wife test”.
99.9% of the people here who trip over themselves to shit on Plex and recommend any other service that requires IT knowledge to consistently and easily give access to family members, don’t have to deal with the “wife test”. Substitute “wife” with husband or mom, or grandma.
Piracy was never stealing, it was only copyright infringement.
Stealing is a crime that goes back to the 10 commandments, it’s old. When you steal something you take it from someone else, depriving them of it.
Copyright infringement is a newish crime where the government has granted a megacorporation a 120 year monopoly on the expression of an idea. If you infringe that copyright, they still have the original, and can keep selling copies of that original to everyone else, but they might miss out on the opportunity to make a sale to you. Obviously, that’s very different from stealing something.
The irony is, you pirating today has been shown to influence you buying it later on in a sale. And there’s a good argument to be made about your word of mouth praise helping their sales.
I’ve seen this quote repeated over and over these past few weeks, while noone brothers to actually explain what it means and why. This article is no different unfortunately.
When you spend money on something, let’s say one of those movies from PlayStation, you don’t actually own that movie, there is no file given to you that is yours. You are just given access to it. And then, out of no where, they can take that away from you.
When you pirate something, you are just creating a copy of the file, you aren’t taking away the original file.
So, the argument here is that morally pirating is okay because no one is losing anything, aside from potential sales for the company I guess. But on the flip side, the company is essentially stealing from you because they took your money, and you aren’t allowed access to what you bought.
The most morally just position in this case would be that if you were one of those customers who paid for and then lost access to said movies, and then you pirated them back, you could say that the company had already made their money on you, and you’re owed those movies.
In my opinion, I don’t think pirating from any million / billion dollar company is bad even if you didn’t “own” it originally.
And then, out of no where, they can take that away from you.
Which would also be less bad if they reimbursed you for it in some way. But of course they don’t.
What brought this quote into the limelight most recently is Louis Rossmann’s coverage of Sony pulling all Discovery channel content not just from their storefront, but also from people’s libraries.
Sony essentially stole content from people’s libraries that they’d already paid for, not just rented content. Sony argued against this that you only had a licence to the content, you didn’t own what you bought, hence the quote’s meaning…
If buying isn’t owning [because it’s all just a copy of their content], then piracy isn’t stealing [because it’s also just a copy of their content].
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This seems like it’s very specific to that one incident. But people try to use it on all digital products.
It’s not just Sony. All the digital library providers have done this. Apple, Amazon, and Google have all had similar instances that resolved the same way; the consumer got fucked.
Ohh yeah, Microsoft. I own Forza 7 Motorsport. It’s installed on my hard drive. Microsoft killed the servers so I can’t even play single player because the tracks weren’t included in the game. You have to download the track every time you play single player or multiplayer.
Ohh yeah, Microsoft. I own Forza 7 Motorsport. It’s installed on my hard drive. Microsoft killed the servers so I can’t even play single player because the tracks weren’t included in the game. You have to download the track every time you play single player or multiplayer.
That is not the same thing. You still own the game, wherever or not it is playable is not the same as not owning. Legal bs but that’s how most Western societies are built.
When you “buy” digital content, be it music, movies, software or games, you almost never actually buy the product. What you get is a limited license to view or use the product for an undefined amount of time.
Generally, companies reserve the right to, at any moment, restrict how can access the content (e.g. force you to use a specific device and/or program) or remove your ability to use or view the product entirely.
For example, a movie or song you’ve “bought” might get removed from whatever streaming service you’re using. A game or program might stop working due to changes in the DRM system.
Actual example from less than half a year ago: Autodesk disabled people’s supposedly perpetual licenses for Autocad and other software, forcing anyone wishing to continue to use their software into a subscription.
Imagine buying a house, only for the seller to show up 10 later and state that they change their might and staring from this point in time the house is no longer yours - despite the fact that you’ve paid for it in full - and you own them rent, if you want to keep living in it.
The architectural design is Intellectual Property and you’ve got a time-limited license to use it.
Absolutelly, the land is yours, as are the materials the house is made from, but you’ll have to pay extra for continued use of that design once your license expires.
PS: This is how I imagine the argument would be made.
Companies selling software and other digital goods tend to pull back parts of their library for all kinds of reasons, which in turn takes these goods away from paying customers who thought they bought something. Since the company defends itself by saying they never bought those goods outright, customers defend themselves by saying that if paying for it isn’t buying, then not paying isn’t stealing.
watch the recent Louis Rossmann videos if the first part is what you don’t understand
I’m interested in where I can hear this explanation from the Noone Brothers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/a71_BespSCY?si=sM3DLjzLnpSZjKNL
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
People want at the same time that wages are higher but they also do not want to pay, for example, software developers appropriately.
No one wants to be part of the problem, though. So some people justify their copyright infringing by claiming it’s some sort of movement for justice and rebellion against corporations.
Have you ever bought something online (movies, games) that you can’t save/download and then the company you have the money to removed that? That is stealing from you. Simple.
No, actually I never was in that situation. Is there another incident like that apart from Sony and the Discovery channel?
And how does that mean all digital products are now okay to pirate?
If Sony openly stole from these people, a class action case against them should be a no brainer.
But you won’t see one because we both know it isn’t theft. They’re still garbage and trash, and so I have no problem pirating content, but calling what they did “stealing” is either incredibly ignorant or incredibly disingenuous.
Pirating software is stealing as well. That’s pretty simple. I know people who have stolen their entire gaming library. That’s thousands of hours of work and dedication people put in. Why don’t they deserve to get money for it?
The same goes for other software, music and movies.
They deserve to get money for it. No pirate is against that.
If we would exchange money for the product all would be fine. Some people would still pirate because they have no money or just don’t want to pay but the majority would pay.
But as we buy just a license that can be revoked for any reason consumers feel that the system is rigged against them.
So it is a natural reaction to try to fuck over a system that is fucking you over.
People pirate software that is buyable on GoG, itch.io or movies that are on disc all the time. Just because some platforms offer the product with just a license shouldn’t mean it’s now morally justified to pirate it.
But I see people bringing the statement because of platform like Steam or Netflix.
Why shouldn’t it mean that? Seems fair to me.
And it is not just about licenses. Often the pirated version is just better because they took out things like DRMs that make a Game run slower or movies where you don’t have to wait trougth CSI warnings and the likes.
Piracy is a service problem. People will always choose the way of least resistance and that seems to be piracy for the moment.
And as i said, some people will pirate stuff anyway no matter what. But those are people we don’t need to talk about because they wouldn’t pay anyway.
With what money do you suggest people who make the games or the movies should be paid? The way of least resistance is an incredible weak argument to justify taking the work of others without paying for it.
I do agree that the workers should be paid, but they have absolutely no say in what the company does at the top. It might be that a lot of them don’t agree with the company’s actions. Only way to remedy that is to democratize companies.
When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.
In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.
Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.
But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.
Edit: spelling.
I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.
In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.
Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.
I don’t have a problem with it morally because for things like what happened with Sony where people reasonably believe they bought something and would have access to it forever, but no. So fuck these companies I don’t give a shit about them.
But you’re absolutely right, and you’ll be downvoted for it. I want a luxury good and don’t want to pay the price, so I take it. It’s the same for virtually every other pirate. It’s not justified, it’s just morally ambiguous. But people need to convince themselves that they are justified, because they don’t want to admit they are commiting a bad act. Literally someone else in this thread is arguing its moral imperative to pirate. Lol
the way i see it, on big budget productions anyone who is relying on their paycheck to survive already got paid for their work, and the ones collecting royalties or sales percentages are rich enough that i couldnt care less. smaller independent studios or individual creators are the ones that i will always support, and in cases like itch.io games that are pwyw i will take the free download and figure out how much i will pay based on how much i like the game.
