• 0ops@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    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 isn’t on Disney+. Whether you own, rent, or lend, you still had to pay for access to it. Piracy circumvents that. I don’t own the rental car. If I drove off with it, is that not stealing?

    There are plenty of ways to justify piracy. There’s 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, it’s illogical.

    Edited in case this came on too harsh

    • SkyNTP@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      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. It’s a double standard, where all the power is in the hands of those with the biggest legal department.

      You can’t define “theft” untill you first define justice. And if consumers and media holders can’t even agree to a just system, then why bother categorizing anything as theft at all?

    • homicidalrobot@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      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 doesn’t 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?

      • 0ops@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        I know, I know, I figured someone was going to bring this up, and personally that’s part of the reason I justify my own piracy (cause I’m broke and movie studios aren’t), but two things:

        1. The cost of creating, copying, and distributing a good isn’t strictly relevant to the transaction of said good. If the original owner doesn’t want me to have access to a good without paying for it, and I take it anyway, that’s stealing. The labor and capital required to create, copy, and distribute that good isn’t relevant to that transaction, only my moral justification for stealing it anyway. Which is fine, imo, just be honest with yourself. You’re stealing, and it’s justified. Stick it to the man

        2. Assuming that it is relevant, making digital media isn’t free. I can get away with piracy only because there’s 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 weren’t going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.

        • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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          9 months ago

          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 weren’t going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.

          You’re missing another option… And one that most people seem to continue to purposefully forget. When Netflix first started… 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 “produce” the content can’t 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 YEARS… There’s nothing but greed on their end… They can’t 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 wouldn’t have paid. They chose this path to some extent.