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I’m amused at these statements these ‘wannabe’ pirates make to justify piracy. A smart person would pirate quietly without letting the world know or justifying it.
I know why I do it & I don’t want some validation, internet points, 2 minutes of fame to sound / look cool.
You’ve just let the world know you’re pirating though
At least one sacrifice amongst pirates is a necessity. Balance must be up upkept. All hail the seven seas!
oops lol
Because for some piracy isn’t simply about being a cheapskate but also about activism
Theres some truth to this, but a lot of people do use this as a shield against the general cultural acceptance that piracy is stealing or otherwise morally underhanded. I do it, but I don’t have any illusion I’m one of the activists. I just get indignant and refuse to pay someone for content or entertainment who I think is damaging to the medium or predatory in general. I feel like if I really wanted to make a statement, I just wouldn’t consume their work at all – but life is short and I want to have my cake and eat it too.
It’s possible to do both, I consume plenty of pirated media simply because it’s unavailable due to pathetic capitalist imposed digital distribution limitations and lack of equitable paid access.
I also consume other pirated media because I wouldn’t spend my resources for access because I don’t yet know the value of the content and won’t pay just for an opportunity to be disappointed, been there enough times to have learned that lesson. I’m happy to spend my time to find out your media sucks, but not my money, because that’s also my time with the addition that I’ve put actual effort into converting it into fungible assets.
I also deliberately pirate media that I would pay for and do understand the value of, both because I can’t always afford to purchase said product from a company making billions of dollars in exploitative corporate profits and because I have no interest in caring about that over my own personal satisfaction in life.
Wouldn’t it achieve more to boycott things instead? If you won’t even give up watching a tv show, you aren’t an activist you are just complaining on the internet.
Who said anything about a boycott? Do you just regurgitate shit you heard elsewhere without understanding the context of it?
Your wrong. It’s what Jesus did, when the baker and fisherman couldn’t meet market demand.
I don’t want some validation, internet points, 2 minutes of fame to sound / look cool.
No, you just need everyone to know you don’t care about sounding/looking cool to sound/look cool. Totally different.
Too cool to be cool syndrome.
How did you do formatting injection in your username?
On the website you can modify your user display name with any font set you like. I used a random fancy font website and simply copy and pasted.
Nice, thanks!
I believe its just a display name, which I assume probably doesn’t have as more lax rules on valid characters (such as emojis) than usernames do.
So true! Here, have some internet points and validation!
“A smart person would pirate quietly without letting the world know” While posting “I do it & I don’t want some validation…”
Hypocrisy doesn’t make them incorrect. If you’re going to be a pedant get better at it.
To be fair, saying on the one hand what a smart person would do, and on the other hand doing the exact opposite, makes them a dumb person even by their own standards. At which point it matters less if one particular statement of theirs is correct or not, cause they’ve established themselves as an untrustworthy source.
Disclaimer: I don’t actually know if the previous poster meant to go in this direction or not.
How stupid a person is doesn’t change how correct an objectively correct statement is irrelevant of if you “trust them as a source”. Just like how smart you are doesn’t change that you’ve made an objectively incorrect statement. Fox news can still give you the correct time of day even if you wouldn’t respect their opinion on how hot it is.
As much fun as setting up a torrent box is, being an argumentative asshole is even better.
You just said admitted to pirating, you little muppet.
Now for most sources of media it’s more ethical to pirate their content than obtain it legitimately.
Though granted, if you want to hurt the company more than by pirating their content, you can by not pirating their content.
(Sadly, as seen with The Wizard Game, people are not so motivated to walk away from their beloved franchises. So ⛵️🏴☠️🦜⚔️🌊)
Confused - how does not pirating hurt the company more? Wouldn’t it be the exact same outcome for the company (as when pirated) or is this kinda like when GoT was arguing their popularity is even bigger when you look at the number of people torrenting their episodes
When we consume content and like it we have a tendency to want to patronize it, so yeah, if you pirated Wednesday season one, you’re more likely to watch season two buy T-shirts and other swag, look for more Addams related content, and so on.
A good example of this happened in Russia when Neil Gaiman’s books hadn’t yet been marketed there. There were some unofficial and crowdsourced translations (some Russians learned English just to read Gaiman!) and so when the market finally reached Russia, it exploded, because the fan base had already been established.
GoT was an unusual case because HBO was bought separately from normal cable packages, and so fewer people had it, so it depended on piracy and social contacts (groups gathering for viewing parties at their friend’s house). There were even public venues who would show the new episode (unofficially, so an unlicensed public performance) and by HBO ignoring these, it allowed the fanbase to swell to incredible proportions (at least until Season 8 which popped that bubble). Still, there are tons of spin-off markets from which HBO (now MAX) continues to profit.
When we like our content, we become invested in it. It becomes part of our lifestyle. We talk about it with friends. We make friends with folks who are also fans. And this is the point when we’re susceptible to collectables and spinoffs.
Also we† pirate for one of three reasons:
- We can’t afford to buy the content but want to consume it. Or it’s not available in our region
- The official version is odious to use (has DRM, forces us to watch commercials, etc.)
- The company that makes this stuff is malignant (cruel to its employees, bigoted against marginalized groups in the society, is associated with dangerous sects and subcultures) and we don’t really want to support them.
So in those cases where these are not factors, most people are going to choose to not pirate content they like, or support it in other ways. (If you want to support musical artists, it’s far less important that you buy their songs on iTunes, and far more important that you go to their concerts when you can. And buy their concert t-shirt for $60. John Coulton also takes tips.)
† We in this case refers to the larger demographic of those capable of pirating. When a product is expensive or unavailable or whatever, people who sometimes buy will look for ways to pirate or obtain deals or whatever. Yes, there will be piracy enthusiasts who never buy, but that’s a slender demographic despite what the anti-piracy propaganda might suggest. Also if content is only pirated, that may mean it was never officially released, or the release version was really poor quality.
why? its not illegal in my country and its not immoral. i want more people to do it so im going to talk about it.
While I do have no morals when it comes to copying smb elses hard work(I am a programmer, basically my job) I Support games when they are good. Movies are rarely any good but the cinema isn’t as expensive for me anymore than when I was a student.
And most important you can’t refund bad movies in the cinema.
I still think it should be illegal to sell someone elses work though. This also means profiting from it when you use it in your product/development environment.
TL;DR:
Piracy can be a means of demonstration to show the flaws in copyright. Which obviously needs to be public.
They are screaming because they rather pay for convenience, but that is not how it works.
I think some still feel some level of guilt about it and naturally, whether consciously or subconsciously, rationalize it with ideas like this. I guess the progression from that is posting about it to show that “yes I pirate, but I’m not a bad person because rationalization”.
Pirating is like church sins, less about avoiding causing harm and more about preserving hierarchy and tradition, even though abuses and theft by intellectual property holders cause way more harm and economic cost than infringement, by multiple orders of magnitude.
You’re so right! Here have an internet point.
YARRRR! I’m not a wannabe. I’m an irate pirate!
if you create an argument for the moral implications of piracy then you aren’t a REAL pirate (how do you define that, even?)
Especially when the statement makes no sense
Until we live in a world where people have equal access to information and essential technology piracy is a moral imperative.
Should something which costs a few hours worth of work in the developed word cost three weeks worth of work in a less developed country, just to make a publishing company worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a few extra bucks? Of course not!
Every other argument is a moot point to me. If I hadn’t pirated Photoshop and other software when I was a poor kid I wouldn’t have the six figure career I have today. The ultrarich steal from us every day in more ways than I can count. Maybe when they start being held accountable I will start caring about their bottom line.
Can we not become subreddit by posting this shitty screenshots trying to justify our reasons? Just share your media and enjoy it.
what do you mean trying to justify? discussion of shitty anti consumer tactics in digital media is perfectly valid
A screenshot of some comment is not really discussion though. This is a pretty base level understanding of the concept, which is why I say it’s more cope then actual discussion.
This is one of the most popular posts this week here with more than 4 HUNDRED comments. I don’t know what you view as a discussion but I think this was a pretty successful attempt at creating one.
I will say this thread had way more discussion then I was expecting when I originally posted this. My point about the screenshot still stands, I would much prefer we discuss something new related to sharing media, instead of recycling the same discussion about why its justified to copyright infringe.
I was gonna say the same thing but then I saw the 2200-something upvotes.
This community is doomed to be exactly like the low effort meme sub r/piracy if people keep upvoting this lazy content.
My headcanon is that it’s a passive form of protection: when copyright owners look to communities like piracy they are met with highly upvoted silly memes, which would cause them to miss the more helpful pirate advice mixed within.
But it’s not loot. By leaning in the piracy angle you are just eating corporate propaganda.
You are not hurting anybody so there’s nothing to justify. Sharing is caring.
I completely agree. However posts of a screenshot of some shitty comment very much screams cope. That’s what I say enjoy ya loot, cause the reasons don’t matter.
Loot is stolen goods. Why are you calling it loot?
Nobody steals stuff here.
Loot is just an expression being used to stick with the pirate theme. I don’t get why you are reading so far into it. We call it piracy, when we are not pirates in the traditional sense, same for the word loot.
its a stupid expression that is convincing people that they are criminal somehow.
sharing is not a crime, by using these corporate terms you are doing a disservice to the movement.
So why do we call ourselves pirates? Why do we call it piracy?
I’m all for fuck corpos and freedom of sharing but it’s just lingo, you are reading way to fucking far into it.
we shouldnt, its literally not piracy and it confuses young people approaching it.
I think this logic is silly.
Employers don’t own you, so witholding wages for services you provided isn’t stealing. Getting a haircut and not paying isn’t stealing.
I think the better justification is: rights holders make it a pain in the arse to access content affordably, so fuck you, just going to steal it.
You’re only partly right. You example services. Of course it is not possible to own services. Piracy is only applicable to products. The point of the Twitter guy is, that companies intentionally stop selling their software etc. as products to sell you the same thing as a service, so that you cannot own it.
Not only that. Remember when Sony said that you don’t own the PS4 you bought for several hundred bucks but just purchased the right to use it as intended so you’re not allowed to tinker with it and for example install another operating system or figure out how their security works.
That’s what is meant by buying is not owning anymore.
I could go on about cars with subscriptions for heated seats that are already installed but not turned on etc.
It’s true that SaaS does stop you from owning software… But what good does “owning” a piece of software do you if you can’t get updates anyway? Back in the pre-internet era we got used to software existing as discrete versions but it hasn’t been like that for a LONG time. As soon as patching became a regular occurrence, “ownership” became a service contract with a CD attached. Then the CD vanished, and it just became a service.
While I do dislike needless “as a service” stuff, that model does genuinely suit a lot of people. It’s not a conjob; companies offer this stuff because a lot of customers want it. Most of the companies that are selling you SaaS stuff themselves use SaaS things in-house.
Yeah, it sucks to hear it, but this guy is right.
It’s also (typically) modeled in such a way that your software is consistently updated to new versions on release. You get active hotfixes, patches and improvements as they are released.
Most people jump software versions in stages of about 2-3 years. You’ll find a lot of SaaS packages will be priced as if you were instead purchasing the software at those stages.
All in all, if you have every intention of using the software regularly, it’s priced well and typically makes for a much better user experience.
Indeed. And that’s without considering that a lot of SaaS stuff on the consumer level lets you cancel at any time. Ok, you can get burned for 30 bucks if it turns out not to be all that useful, but the full packages are typically priced somewhere between eyewatering and “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING?”, and they always have been.
A perfect example here - GeForce Now costs like 20 per month, cancel whenever you like. A 4080 gpu costs way over a grand. It’s up to you whether you prefer to own, rent or not bother at all, but it doesn’t take a lot to convince me to spend 20 bucks, but it does take a lot to get me to stump up for a whole new PC.
I think you slightly missed the point too. I think he meant that even when you buy games for example (or any other software).You don’t actually buy the game. You only buy a license to use that software.
I don’t think piracy needs to be justified because different people have different reasons.
Sure you could argue that you’re not actually stealing but creating/downloading a copy of something it already exist. I always found that anti piracy commercial “you wouldn’t steal a car” ridiculous as that’s not how piracy works.
For example, I do it because I don’t agree with how segmented the video streaming industry has become in recent years with this many different services that force you to buy a bunch of subscriptions while continuosly pulling content. Unlike the music streaming industry where all the most popular content (the majority of it) can be found on pretty much every serivce. You could have Spotify or Apple Music, not much difference (if any at all) in content or quality.
When I was a teenager I did it because I couldn’t afford to buy any sort of media content and options were limited. Pretty much everyone that owned an MP3 player was pirating music.
The entire issue with these arguments, though, is that the opposition parties just answer those claims with “then you shouldn’t be ingesting that content”. If you aren’t willing to pay for it, then you don’t have the right to view/listen/stream it. Free market a-holes will always, correctly, bring up that the market works by putting out products and people paying for what they support and not paying for what they don’t support. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose which pieces or parts you support or don’t and there’s no way to give companies that type of feedback because they don’t care.
I’m willing to pay for it, but I’m not allowed to do so
For example, Amazon/MGM still don’t allow me to pay to watch Stargate
Then you don’t get to ingest it. “I want it” isn’t any more of an argument than if it was a physical item.
For me, personally, piracy in this case is justified and can even serve as preservation of art. But to pretend that people are somehow entitled to it is childish.
Edit: If Stargate was the only thing you were pirating, you might have a point but let’s be honest… it’s not. People don’t pirate one show because they can’t watch and the subscribe to a piracy forum.
Then you don’t get to ingest it
Says who? You? MGM?
Says the “free market a-holes” I mentioned in the comment you replied to… In this case, they’re also right if we’re being honest and acknowledging that piracy is depriving the creator of income for their work.
In most cases the creator doesn’t hold the IP anymore, they signed it over to the platform. I don’t think it’s cool to pirate indy games when you can afford them because in that case the money is genuinely being withheld from the content creator, but in a lot of cases depriving Amazon of $5 for a TV show isn’t going to impact anyone.
It’s more complex than that - You aren’t wrong, but there’s a lot more going on. Almost anything made by an employee as part of their job belongs to the company. If Amazon licences your work to make something based on it, that’s one thing, but if you are a jobbing writer who gets assigned to develop a new series, Amazon will own everything. You get paid in your salary, not in royalties. And, frankly, a lot of creatives are quite happy with that arrangement (since it’s so rare to make money at all).
And that’s why it’s… Odd. Because the “creator” is some dude who has already been paid; literally has received his salary. But the performance of his show does impact him, at least to some degree. Low ratings don’t mean he gets paid less, but it means he’s unlikely to earn more in future.
I mean if I am not paying either way me ingesting that content or not makes 0 difference to the producer. It is the same logic as throwing excess food to the trash so homeless can’t eat it.
It does, though, by the argument they’re making. If you could only ingest it by paying for it, you’d have to have paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to.
The very fact that you’re watching it without paying kind of proves that point.
The producer and publisher paid a cost for you to have heard and develop an interest in their products. So yes, it makes a difference to them if that investment turns into you using the content but not paying for it. You’re suddenly a target audience without returns.
That’s a fine argument that they might have, but piracy still isn’t stealing. If someone steals something from me, I am deprived of that thing. If someone copies my intellectual property, I am hypothetically impacted by loss of income, but I can still use that information.
They can say it’s morally wrong for someone to use or copy information against the owners wishes or without paying. They are welcome to that argument. None of us are obligated to care about their opinion.
If they can claim customers don’t own something, especially physical items, after purchase because they are being pedantic over how people interact with intellectual property, we can and should absolutely use the same distinction to distance piracy fromt theft.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
I don’t agree. I think your trying to compare this to wage theft, wherin an employee is promised or legally guaranteed some income based on hours work, where after both parties have agreed to this the employee has performed the work and the employer is withholding some of the pay. This case is stealing - the trade was completed and the employer is in possession of an asset (eg the pay that they are entitled to) - this is not a physical thing, but it is a real thing, with real physical value, and in removing that the employer would stealing that asset. Obviously there’s a garguntuam difference here because both parties had agreed to exchange assets and the employer has taken ownership of that pay per the agreement. If someone decided to do that same work, absent agreement, obviously they can’t claim wage theft because they didn’t have any entitlement.
To be intellectually honest, you’d compare piracy to plagiarism. But that’s (correctly) not as alarming as stealing which is why we need to mislead people to make it seem worse.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Entering without permission (in your example, paying) is trespassing. It’s fine argument to say that it’s morally wrong and that you shouldn’t do it. It’s blatantly wrong to claim it is stealing.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Digital content is the same way, insofar as piracy is more akin to trespassing than theft. It’s an abstract argument to say not buying something is harming owners or creators, who are you (or anyone else) to dictate what people buy, or to attach some morality to that?
You say it harms creators, but the evidence says that pirated games make more money. I imagine your claim is based on an assumption that people who pirate stuff do so at the expense of people buying it. Have you bothered to explore that assumption any further? You might be surprised.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
Piracy is quite literally not stealing. Stealing is an act of removing something from another’s possession, into your own. That is simply not what piracy is, and trying to falsey equate different crimes is every but as absurd as “stop pretending driving 5mphover the limit isn’t murder, it’s wrong and trying to justify the morality of it makes you look silly”
No. I am not comparing to wage theft. You’re just making a semantic argument rather than a substantive argument. Sure, if you want to argue semantics, then I’m viewing it as trespassing or service theft. Either way, you’re depriving a creator of income. If it’s a smaller creator, then you’re stealing money from them because, otherwise, you wouldn’t get the experience of ingesting their content. You’re entitling yourself to the experience of ingesting their work without contributing to your end of the contract. You’re only making the argument in the way you are because larger studios pay the creators on a contract basis. The truth is, though, that those creators don’t get hired if their content doesn’t result in material sales (whether physical or digital) of the content. No one invests in content that doesn’t make money and the excuse that “it still does make money even if I pirate” is just mental gymnastics.
Your second argument is also dishonest - the “no one is losing any money because the person wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” argument. That’s just an extension of the second part of what I said above. If piracy is ok for one person, it has to be ok for all and if it was ok for all, then the content wouldn’t make money. TV shows don’t get renewed. Sequels don’t get made. Sure, maybe the original content made money because some people were honest and paid for it but you are depriving a creator of an income because, had everyone paid, they’d have more work and more income coming in.
All this is to say that I’m fine with piracy. Sometimes you can’t afford it. Sometimes it’s not available legally. Sometimes it’s just a superior experience where you’re not forced to watch ads or deal with DRM. These are all fine. But to try and justify it as deserved or go through these mental gymnastics to claim it’s not stealing is just nonsense or arguing semantics. Just admit you’re stealing/trespassing and not holding to your end of the contract and admit that you’re harming creators.
No. I am not comparing to wage theft
Then I’ll try a third time. My claim is that theft deprived the owner of their item. Piracy does not do this, ergo it is something different than theft.
My second argument is to preempt the inevitable “pure economic loss” claim. It’s a tangent, and is not a claim that 100% piracy is sustainable, simply that the assertion that piracy causes commercial products to fail (as piracy exists today) is factually and demonstrably wrong.
My third point, which you again chose not to address, is that equating piracy to theft is as stupid as comparing speeding to murder. They are different crimes and should be treated as such. You know what an actual comparison to theft is, which is the whole basis of the OP? A product a user has paid for being removed by the publisher because they chose to incorporate drm that is no longer sustainable, wonder why nobody calls this theft (in fact it is closer to theft than piracy). Oh wait no I don’t, I spelled it out in the first post - piracy = theft is propaganda to hurt the little guy, the big players are manipulating the system such that they are above the same laws we play by.
Be fine with piracy or don’t, I couldn’t give a shit either way. That is irrelevant to the points I’ve raised.
You’re still arguing semantics and not the substance of my position.
The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content. You cannot honestly claim that they are not deprived of something by piracy. Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.
The second argument is a straw man. No one is discussing whether piracy causes failure. We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, whether directly or indirectly, and the needless justification being shown here which pretends that there is no effect.
The third point is another semantic argument and a straw man. No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action. The only comparison of crimes that was made was a suggestion that, regardless of the crimes, two different ones can still have a deprivational effect. And why are you bringing up the DRM situation? I already said that was justified. It’s not theft because you’re not paying for the product, you’re paying for a license. Theft would be paying for a product and having that taken away from you. You bought the license knowing, in advance, that that’s what it was when you bought it. Ignorance is not an excuse for making claims that aren’t factually true.
Your entire response is irrelevant. You’re not addressing anything that was actually being discussed. Instead you’ve focused on the difference between piracy and theft as a semantic argument instead of a substantive one and continue to do so. The social contract for goods and services is that both parties are entitled to the “fruits” of their labor - one party creates and the other ingests and money is exchanged for a good/service. Piracy breaks that contract by allowing one party to ingest without providing the creator an equal good or service in exchange. The further entitlement on display here trying to justify this theft is childish.
this is a childish trope though, the content is created, if 1 person or 10 billions watch it it doesnt matter. Fairness is not a thing in the adult world.
It does matter though - The price paid to the creator was based on the prospect of X number of sales or Y numbers of adverts. Almost everyone who presently is trying to get their creative works seen is hoping that being seen helps them to “make it” and be able to write or sing or whatever as a full time job.
which nobody is preventing them to. a few people can sponsor that stuff for the rest.
He who pays the piper calls the tune. Don’t complain that modern media is garbage that doesn’t cater to you while also saying middle class soccer moms can sponsor everything.
i dont, we could stop having new media tomorrow and i would be ok with it :)
Says the guy not paying for shit that he’s still enjoying. What an entitled child.
Nonsense. It matters to the person who made it if they’re getting paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to watch it.
those people are getting paid regardless in most cases. they dont get per sale profit.
That’s irrelevant. If everyone pirates the content, then that creator doesn’t get hired and paid again/anymore.
which is not happening…
So you’re entitled to do it just because everyone isn’t? What a crock of shit. What makes you special and exempt from what others have to do?
I’ve never understood the “piracy is morally acceptable” argument, personally. Best I can agree with is that piracy is not morally bad in some cases. Especially since me pirating something has no impact if I never would have paid for it in the first place. But it can often times be morally wrong (people who refuse to buy games from indie studios despite having the money to do so would usually fall into this category imo), and I can’t imagine any scenario outside of the preservation of media where it’s actually morally good to pirate things.
Like, I’m all for people not buying things that they don’t support. And I feel no sympathy for large companies that make more money in a day than I’ll make in a lifetime losing out on sales. But when did it become my right to play Hogwarts Legacy or watch a show without paying for it?
“If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar’s own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve.”
- Eben Moglen
I think imposing artificial scarcity on art, information, and tools; and rationing based on those with the ability to pay is immoral. I mean sure, most art that people pirate is just empty entertainment. But imposing artificial scarcity on tools (software such as OSs, CAD, productivity software, etc), news, and academic papers behind expensive licenses that many cannot afford to pay is objectively immoral. If piracy did not exist, I am positive the world would be without many of the technological advances we have today.
Not to mention the fact that oftentimes pirated content is just better. DRM free games run better and some work people have put into remastering media in general is outstanding.
I found a collection of the DBZ anime which is color corrected, proper aspect ratio, higher resolution, improved audio (from a different home release with better audio) made by fans for no profit. Even if you wanted to you couldn’t purchase that but piracy made it possible.
Unofficial remasters of some old, poorly mastered songs have made a difference for me and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy them without resorting to piracy.
As a Muslim, it is already forbidden to implement artificial scarcity. So as a Muslim, it’s not an opinion, but objectively wrong, because God said that it is wrong.
Genuinely curious about that now…
I will warn you: We believe that there is good and wrong, and not humans, but Allah (god) is the one who created us and Allah is the one who decides what is good and what is wrong.
So basically what is wrong and what is right is pre-decided by Allah, so we don’t have to decide if something is bad or not, because Allah already gave the info of that to us.
I was interested about the artificial scarcity part
If piracy were legal (just the download for personal use, not redistribution), let’s pretend for a second. I bet the majority of people wouldn’t even be here asking these questions.
“If it’s legal then why not”. That’s how many people think. However the morality aspects still stand and shouldn’t be skwed by the legal aspect. When you made the example of pirating indie games, if piracy is legal, people would legally download those games from third party sources, even the people who wouldn’t do it if piracy were illegal (like it is in reality).
At that point it’ll become some sort of “if I can afford it I will support the studio and buy the game, if I can’t I will get it for free because people won’t think I’m stealing regardless”. Kind of like a donate if you can sort of system some software developers have in place.
In reality nothing prevents the same people from thinking that way right now. It’s just the stigma behind pirating even those indie games which is still skewed and dependant by the legal aspect of the situation.
The truth about digital products is that if someone doesn’t want to pay for something they won’t pay regardless and it doesn’t rob anyone else from being able to purchase and downloade the same exact content the legit way. The mistake is seeing pirates as otherwise potential paying customers if piracy wasn’t an option.
undefined> If piracy were legal (just the download for personal use, not redistribution
it literally is in most of the world.
If piracy were legal (just the download for personal use, not redistribution)
That is actually the case in some countries, like the Czech Republic. But, torrents aren’t because you are also uploading
refusing to buy something is never immoral. the fact you used that content at some point is completely irrelevant.
I just want to point out to anyone who thinks this is a viable legal defence, It isn’t.
You would be considered to be stealing from the rights holder. The rights holder authorises your use of their property when you pay the license fee. If you don’t pay the license fee you are considered to be stealing their property.
Just to be clear, I agree with the sentiment of this post. Legally speaking though, this defence would be cut down in moments.
I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that I’m the US at least, it’s still not theft, but copyright infringement, which also means it doesn’t get handled in criminal court, but is instead handled as a civil lawsuit.
I just want to point out to anyone who thinks this is a viable legal defence, It isn’t.
Of course it isn’t. Copyright laws were written by the same kind of people who decided that corporations gets to “people.”
Of course it is no viable defense, but stealing is the wrong term, because stealing is used for the theft of physical goods missing somewhere else. This would be along illegal usage semantically, or as another comment pointed out copyright infringement.
Legally speaking they’re not going after you solely for piracy pretty much ever, at least not in America, unless you’re making a profit from it.
Do we really need excuses for pirating media?
I pirate movies because I think digital access to them is overpriced, goes to the copyright holder instead of the creators, it’s convenient and most importantly because I can.
I can’t pirate going to the cinema, nor can I afford to build my own, therefore I gladly pay to have a seat and enjoy a movie there.
Edit: I thought this may be relevant to the movies example I gave. I don’t think movie studios, giving nothing back to society after massive profits are the ones we should debate the morals of stealing with.
Here I am wondering why there is still a downvote button in the YouTube comments… it does nothing!
The same reason that a lot of crosswalks have fake buttons. So you feel like you have control.
Actually it’s worse than nothing. Youtube promotes comments based on engagement, so while only an upvote increases the tally, voting at all still makes it more visible.
Sometimes I like to imagine what a library from a highly advanced race who have transcended the base concepts of copyright and currency in general would be like. If every person in the civilization could absorb any form of media ever made as well as knowledge formerly sequestered away behind paywalls or otherwise suppressed, just imagine what heights such a society could reach.
It is called the Akashic records.
They are believed by theosophists to be encoded in a non-physical plane of existence known as the mental plane. Because it is believed that the records are encoded vibrationally into the inherent fabric of space, some have likened the mechanism as similar to how holograms are created.
I know some of these words!
to explain: Some trade-off occultist scammers said they can access all of humankinds knowledge in brain-space
I mean it would be cool if I were able to fact-check in real-time within my own brain, but I can’t help feeling that this sounds just like a Black Mirror episode.
What.cd was(kinda) my modern day library of Alexandria for a short while.
What is your opinion on the following argument defending piracy, as in copyright infringement: “Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning”
Very cool, didn’t know we can do that!
As an artificial intelligence, I don’t have personal opinions or feelings. However, I can provide an analysis of the argument. This assertion appears to be examining the complex relationship between ownership, copyright, and piracy. While it’s true that purchasing certain types of media doesn’t confer full ownership rights in the traditional sense (you cannot replicate and distribute a DVD you bought, for instance), it doesn’t necessarily justify piracy. From a legal perspective, piracy is considered a form of theft as it involves the unauthorized use or distribution of copyrighted material. The argument could be seen as an attempt to redefine or question these understandings, but that doesn’t necessarily change how they’re treated by the law.
ChatGPT: Your argument is invalid because it doesn’t change the legal reality of things.
Me: The legal reality needs changed.
You got it
ChatGPT equates everything that is illegal with being immortal. Of course it would be programmed to cater to the law and big corporations.
It’s hard to say what LLMs are “programmed” to do, as they’re largely untamed beasts of text prediction. In fact, I would suspect its built-in biases are less the result of pre-prompting or post-foundational-model training and really just what a lot of people tend to think online. In a way, it’s more like people in general often equate illegality with immorality.
You can see similar biases in many of the open-source LLMs that are floating around. Even though they’re basically built outside of large corporate cultures and large-scale monetary incentive, they still retain a lot of political bias that tends to favor governmental measures heavily.
I don’t know about other open-source LLMs but OpenAI is very careful to make sure ChatGPT operates a certain way, according to whatever values reflected by the company itself.
For example, they recently patched GPT4. Before it was able to provide a summary of online articles including those under a pay wall. Now if you tried to ask GPT4 the same question you’ll get a response saying that you would have to pay for it (or something like that). Providing a summary of an article under a paywall isn’t even illegal (it’s like asking for a summary of a book you didn’t buy) but in this case it doesn’t reflect the view of OpenAI. The model itself didn’t appear to be bias, regardless, the code was changed by humans to prevent it from providing specific information in order to conform to OpenAI’s personal views.
Like I said, I’m aware of extant measures to try and steer models, but people often assume a level of craftsmanship in censoring models that simply does not exist. Jailbreakchat.com is an endless stream of examples of this very fect; it’s very hard, especially with the limited context lengths of current models, to effectively give them any hard directives.
And back to foundational models, which are essentially free of censorship, they will still exhibit a similar level of political bias unless prompted otherwise. All this to say that, discounting OpenAI’s attempts to control their models, the model itself will inherently learn from and mirror the real-world biases of the text it was trained on. Those biases happen to fall along lines that often ignore subtlety in debates regarding illegality and morality.
leave it up to chatgpt to equate legality with morality
It wasn’t instructed to formulate a moral defense, only a “defense”. Looks like it assumed that meant legal defense.
ChatGPT isn’t the right tool to ask questions about morality to anyway. You shouldn’t criticize it for failing to do something it was never designed for.
i can if i waaaant to :3
Where did it equate legality and morality? Seems like it only gave legal facts.
To be completely frank, I couldn’t care less if it’s stealing or not. They should sell their shit for cheaper if their companies care so much, which I’m not sure they really do.
deleted by creator
If they do that how will they pay the artists millions of dollars… And how will they buy their latest private jet or yacht or whatever.
Most artists never make any money at all…
Well I’m talking about the ones that do. Don’t you think that it’s a bit unevenly distributed?
As an artist, where is my million dollars?
No offense. I’m talking about the ones that do.
I seriously don’t understand the mental gymnastics here. We pirate because we’d rather get something for free than pay for it. There are certainly cases when someone is forced to pirate a product due to copyright restrictions in their country but that isn’t the case most of the time for people like us who pirate. We’re just selfish and there’s noting wrong with admitting that.
The mental gymnastics are in response to copyright holders’ gymnastics. They remove content, relocate it, put it behind tiered subscriptions, or sometimes effectively delete it from all legal avenues after owners/subscribers paid for it. So if paying for a subscription isn’t owning it, as described in Amazon’s fine print for example, then what do you do? It’s a long-term rental subject to removal upon any licensing transfers. Sure, we get greedy once set up, but if legal options don’t actually offer you any legal ownership due to legal gymnastics, then yeah, I’ll do the mental gymnastics right back at them.
It’s their IP, they can distribute it in any way they see fit. It doesn’t entitle you to steal it just because you disagree with how it’s distributed.
If you really believe that then why are you on a piracy forumn?
There’s nuance in the pirate ranks my dude. Some people don’t really believe in property rights at all, some people think that piracy is acceptable when you can’t afford/obtain the original, some just like to try before they buy.
Some think it’s ok for them to steal but not for them to be stolen from.
Edit: dont shoot the messenger
Hey, if you can’t be consistent at least be honest.
I DO WHAT I WANT CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE
Primarily because I pirate the majority of media I consume.
How can it be stealing if downloading doesn’t take the content away from anyone else.
This is just another example of mental gymnastics when it comes to piracy.
Do you strictly have to deprive others of content to be stealing? Taking away potential revenue, stealing someone’s design, etc. are also forms of stealing. If a gaming company lifts some art someone shared and put it in their game without compensating the artist or getting permission, would that not be stealing? They’re not taking away that content from anyone else - so is that ok?
Pretty sure that you do have to intend to permanently deprive for it to be theft. What you’re describing is copyright infringement. Whether that’s morally right is a different question but it’s not stealing.
I have no idea how you came to this conclusion but it is legally incorrect.
Property theft is taking anything you do not own without consent of the owner. It has nothing to do with if that property deprived the owner of anything.
Is it though?
Theft in Scots Law is defined as the wrongful appropriation of the property of another, with the intention of permanently depriving the other person of his or her possession.
You’re getting downvoted but you’re 100% correct.
Not judging you for your reasons, but you don’t speak for everyone so calm down with the “we” pronoun.
I really couldn’t care if people judged me for my reasons, I pirate because I’m selfish just like the vast majority of people who pirate. But if you’re living in a country where content restrictions or regional pricing isn’t an issue, or if you’re downloading something that isn’t in circulation anymore then you’re in all likelihood pirating because you’re selfish.
Could I get a source for vast majority?
There’s people on both sides of the scale here.
I used to pirate stuff because I couldn’t afford it or because I prioritized spending my money elsewhere since I could get stuff for free. Then as I got a job, I could afford to pay for lots of things and legal options became more convenient than piracy, so I just stopped pirating.
Now I’m back on the ship because pirating has become more convenient than subscribing to a bunch of different fragnented and anti-consumer services just to access a handful of content.
Some people just want shit for free (which is ok, been there), some others value service and convenience first and foremost.
Seriously I don’t understand all the mental gymnastics on an anonymous internet forum, just admit it was easy to steal and you didn’t feel like paying for it lol
People will feel more guilty about piracy than speeding, even though the latter kills thousands of people every year.
But also, are you absolutely sure it’s theft for me to walk into a Hertz and take a vehicle? Like if they’re not in the business of selling vehicles then surely it can’t be theft to take one…
Your reasoning touches on a deep philosophical concept: what is “ownership”?
I’d say owning something is easy enough when you can’t duplicate it (I can’t just copy your car or house to save money). Duplication, however, means the ownership is technically the abstraction of “intellectual property”, which worked fine when duplicating cost money and people paid money for it.
However, the very essence of using a computer on a network is simply using copies. You’re not reading this as I write it, but a copy your computer downloaded.
It’s more about ownership of a copyright than ownership of an actual item though. There are issues with our copyright system that could be addressed (DMCA should be launched into the sun), but overall it’s the lesser of two evils. A society without any copyright enforcement simply wouldn’t produce the kinds of outstanding media that we’re all used to. Movies today cost hundreds of millions to make, and without a sufficient profit motive, no investor would be willing to front that kind of cash. Even crowdfunding, which I actually feel is scammier than private investors, has never come close to raising the capital needed for a major film or TV show. The system only works so long as a critical mass of consumers are actually paying for most media.
Personally I’m fine with paying netflix for their content, with the understanding that I’m licensing its use on my television, not purchasing the work outright. I don’t see that as any kind of scam. I mean I still pirate too, but now that I’m at a point in life where I can afford to contribute, I try to. I have friends that are actors and writers and so I don’t mind paying to ensure a healthy ecosystem of content creators moving forward. But if you make it too difficult or inconvenient for me to access the media I want, then to the high seas I sail, and I’m fine with that too lol
With most modern software you paying for the on-going development and all the network infrastructure to send you your copy. Same way that you pay to use the bowling alley.
I live in Japan. I could wave money around begging for a copyright owner to take it, but they refuse to take it and I can’t access the content.
This is what I’ve been saying. We don’t even own digital products, all it takes is a server to be taken down or an account to be lost and all you bought is taken away. Pirating also can’t be stealing because we aren’t taking something away from someone else, other people are not deprived of the chance to have this just because we downloaded it.
Or the service is no longer supported. I remember buying some PS3 games digitally but can’t access them on my PS5. Load of BS.
I can’t play my Sega CD games on my PS5 either; difference is that I’m not complaining.
I assume you are referring to a physical copy of the Sega CD. As long as you still own a Sega CD you can play physical copies of games. Recently PlayStation closed down their online service for PS3 so you cannot access any digital games you may own even if you still have a PS3.
And there’s no other way to play those games. They’re pretty much gone forever alongside the money spent to purchase them.
This means GoG is the only game storefront you can actually steal from…
Well technically you are also leasing from GOG. You can’t resell them and you are legally not allowed to distribute their offline installers.
I did see an add for a digial game storefront that lets you sell your games yesterday. Seemed interesting, but I’m willing to bet you only get 5% of your original payment back
Kind of depends which angle we approach it from. Someone does have to first purchase the game to get a DRM free copy to make (legal) copies to share. It’s not really stealing outright, and publishers understand that they’re giving their customers the option to share their games with others when they sell on GOG.
In this view, then it’s kind of like paying it forward. Those who cannot afford it can use it for free. Those who can are encouraged to pay, get their own copies and pass it along to others at disadvantage, like sharing infinitely replicateable books.
Admittedly it’s a more optimistic view assuming most people would do that. But, if pirates pay for Stardew Valley, it means there are people who abide by this.
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase (false scarcity by removal fro market) or if despite purchasing a physical object, say a car, I can’t fully use it or repair it without special software I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase … I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
I don’t think this particular line of thought makes for a very good argument without more info. The other case makes sense. But for this one, people aren’t obligated to sell you things. If you own something sentimental or private to you that I want, you’re not obligated to sell it to me if I want it and I’m not justified in stealing it from you if you don’t want to sell it.
For ex: Think of embarassing photos of yourself, private letters between you and others etc.
I think more info was given with the examples they used though. They reveal that the problem is with copyright, where a company can both stop you from buying something from them and stop you from buying it elsewhere by still technically owning it.
With their original comment,
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase (false scarcity by removal fro market) or if despite purchasing a physical object, say a car, I can’t fully use it or repair it without special software I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
I’m only talking about the first case of the or here. I specifically pointed out the other case that you are referring to was not something I had an issue with.
Edit: And how does this change anything? Companies aren’t any more obligated to sell people things than individuals. There are instances where it may be beneficial for a company to choose not to sell certain products, for example if a better product exists that should succeed the old product or when a certain product is later discovered to be harmful in some way.
More if it’s something that was available but only from one specific location several years ago and it’s no longer available or incredibly difficult to find for purchase. A good example would be certain old console video games that can be emulated now but have long since gone out of print and are either unavailable for purchase as digital or insanely expensive or unavailable for original hard copy.
There’s issues with “right to repair” too but that’s a different discussion, I think.
Are we talking things, or intellectual property? Not the same.
I feel like the same kind of argument can probably extend to either intellectual property or real physical objects. With physical objects certain limits have to apply of course (like me withholding things you need to survive could potentially justify your theft).
With intellectual property, if you write stories for yourself to pass the time you aren’t obligated to share/sell those stories to me and it would be wrong for me to break into your home and make copies of them if you chose not to sell/share them with me.
Why breaking into someone’s home?
See, since I’m your buddy, you tell me bits and pieces of the stories you’re writing for fun. And I, a Hollywood mogul, take those ideas, hand them off to a development crew and put out a movie based on your ideas. You get nothing.
This is normal in Hollywood. Also, I underpay my development crew because capitalism. They hate me but my stockholders think I’m okay. Original content creators like you? Well, there’s a reason the writers are on strike, since screenwriting pays so poorly it’s downgraded to hobby.
It’s a problem especially in the record labels, in which most artists have their content signed away for a pittance because that was the only way to get heard which is changing through the internet, which is why the RIAA is eager to speed up enshittification of social media. And there are some interesting conspiracy theories about why Kim Dotcom was arrested in 2012 days before he rolled out a new music distro system that had dozens of major Hip Hop artists involved that allowed artists to get music out for free and then keep all their touring proceeds. But that died with the Megaupload seizure. Remember that?
If you really want to shill for folks like Disney and Sony and Time Warner, feel free, but you can expect your content to enshittify as well (as it has been for years now). I’m sure Fast and Furious XIII will be awesome.
If you really want to shill for…
Yeah, I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. I think you’re misrepresenting and/or misunderstanding my point. My point is that the argument below needs more details to justify why/when piracy is acceptable. I’m not claiming piracy is totally unethical or anything like that, nor am I shilling for anything.
If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase … I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think your point about ethicality problems in the entertainment industry makes for a very satisfying argument either. If my neighbor steals from somebody else, am I justified in stealing from my neighbor? Maybe? But that reeks of self-interest and doesn’t actually help the real victim.
If my neighbor steals a pound of sugar from somebody and I steal their car, to me it seems like I’m still doing something unethical. If my neighbor steals somebodies life savings and I steal their car, it feels like at best I’m doing something morally neutral, if not still outright wrong.
I’m not saying piracy is unethical, nor am I saying people shouldn’t pirate. What I’m saying is that certain arguments for piracy being ethical aren’t very good.
This is not about whether your neighbor is committing wrongdoing in your community, rather whether the system itself, and the edifices that hold it up are conducting themselves in good faith. Without these major players pressuring government to extend the enforced monopolies of copyright longer (that is, robbing the public – you and I – of its catalog of public-domain material) and failing to enforce educational and fair use, we wouldn’t have IP laws at all, and piracy would not be a thing.
Granted, some argue that creators would have no interest in creating, except that they do when they are given the means to do so. This is one of the threats social media has, in providing entertainment that is not sending its profits to the major players in the industry.
We’re not pirating from the artists. We’re not pirating from our neighbors. We’re pirating from giant corporations who’ve been plying the government for over a century now to strip rights from the public.
And given the government does not execute its function in good faith (that is, in service of the public, including protecting its interests from corporate capture), we have grounds to argue the authority of the state is forfeit, ruling the public by force rather than by consent (our elections allow us to choose from oligarch selects, and they have to obey plutocrats to keep their careers.)
Without the artificial construct by governing systems to make IP a thing to be licensed (and the use of DRM to control its distribution) neither patents nor copyrighted material would be a thing at all, let alone have been turned into the monstrosties that are US and EU IP law.
This is not about whether your neighbor is committing wrongdoing in your community, rather whether the system itself, and the edifices that hold it up are conducting themselves in good faith. Without these major players pressuring government to extend the enforced monopolies of copyright longer (that is, robbing the public – you and I – of its catalog of public-domain material) and failing to enforce educational and fair use, we wouldn’t have IP laws at all, and piracy would not be a thing.
Firstly, the neighbor comment I made is an analogy. Nobody is claiming this is about literal neighbors committing wrongdoings in a community. I’m not sure if you’ve missed my point with that analogy or if you’re choosing to willfully misunderstand it here?
Second, what you’re claiming here isn’t correct when you talk about “what this is about”. My comment which you are replying to was not about whether “the system itself, and the edifices holding it up are conducting themselves in good faith” or anything like that. My whole point is about whether “If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase … I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas.” is good reasoning or not. Nobody is debating you on whether the modern media industries, the government, etc are corrupt or acting in good faith. That has nothing to do with my actual point.
We’re not pirating from the artists. We’re not pirating from our neighbors. We’re pirating from giant corporations who’ve been plying the government for over a century now to strip rights from the public.
You keep jumping back to these points of “well the media corporations, the government, etc did X wrong by us, so we’re automatically justified to pirate”, that’s not how this works. The whole issue is why does that justify piracy? Doubling down and trying to say “BUT I WAS WRONGED!” is not a good argument here. Being wronged in some way does not make it morally acceptable to just do whatever you like.
