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Piracy is Good: The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge
(technomagnus.vercel.app)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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OK, so tell me what is the incentive for a large software company to hire hundreds of workers if they release software that will be sold once and copied infinetly?
Do you realize that the only reason people actually pay for said software is because pirating is illegal? If pirating was legal, nobody would pay, and companies would have no incentives to hire workers.
My brother in Christ, you really really live in an ideal bubble. That's not how reality works, you know? People need to get paid for their work, otherwise they won't work.
If they don't work, there's no content for you to pirate. So yeah, pirating needs to remain illegal and it is stealing, which is a crime, otherwise nothing would make sense.
This completely ignores the whole world of FOSS
The fact that you can't imagine any way to compensate workers does not mean it's not possible.
Look at the FOSS ecosystem (wich btw is the foundation of every private profitable piece of software). Donation and collective foundation can absolutely sustain and promote the creation of both software and cultural artefact. For god sakes, you are writing your comment on a free self-mantained instance of a social network that is running on a free open source software based on a free an publicly available comunication standard.
Do you think people are donating enough money to sustain the families of the instance admins? They obviously have jobs and Lemmy is a hobby or a project for them. They aren't depending on Lemmy for a living.
That can happen sometimes but expecting the world to work around donations for every piece of software, music or literature is just too naive.
Some instance admins have said that they need to create a monetization strategy because depending on donations isn't reliable.
I mean, what's the point of arguing if you have yet decided things cannot be different than how they are now?
There are tons of example of free open source software made by regular employer as a full time job. Tons of example of artist (writers, actors, filmmakers, game developer) that share all their works for free and rely on donations, patreons or other kind of strategy to sustain themselves while keeping access to their art free for everyone.
It's definitely possible, and it would be incredibly better if whole industries would shift to this and more people would shift from paying/services to other methods of contributing (accordingly to their availability).
Why do you think it can't be made? What we are going to loose? Million dollars budget movies/videogames? Million dollars marketing campaign? I don't see how is it a bad things.
Yes, exactly, you would lose the interest of high quality producers and artists that don't think donations are enough or reliable. Why can't people put a price on the shit they created? Just because you don't like the way the system works doesn't give you the right to dismiss its rules. Imagine if someone violated your fundamental rights because they don't agree with them in their personal world view.
They created that content BECAUSE they wanted to sell it. If there wasn't an incentive to sell, they wouldn't have created it, depriving people of the content anyways.
Keep pirating, I don't care, but don't pretend you're not harming the producers of the content or the industries that feed millions of people. You're probably also harming legal consumers because companies factor in the losses of piracy and increase prices to match their target revenue.
Agree to disagree
Yeha, I don't think an economy based on donations would work because I know how awful humanity is.
Same way people figured out how to exploit capitalism, they'd figure out how to exploit your proposed system....and it is the most exploitable system I've heard of. This isn't paradise, people aren't singing Kumbaya and holding their hands.
Your proposal is the equivalent of putting a passed out girl and a rapist in a dark room and asking him to please behave. The rapist is humanity and the girl is a donations based economy, in case that wasn't clear.
There are instances of communities in which communism works, but it never does at large scale. Idealism doesn't always match reality, specially considering how evil and power hungry humans are.
The problem of capitalism isn't capitalism itself, it is a decent system. The problem of the system is their users, power hungry and corrupted users. And any system will get twisted as long as humanity doesn't change its nature.
What's next? A government that relies on donations instead of taxes? Workers that rely on donations from their employers?
You are right, albeit a little rude, but that’s not the point of this debate. Piracy is a necessary “evil” to either get paywalled digital products or to preserve and archive deprecated media.
Wether society deems it immoral and illegal or not is irrelevant. The keypoint in piracy is to operate and remain in the shadows to minimize awareness and action taken against us.
To publicly glorify it is counterintuitive. The people that do so are compromising us all. The best course of action to take for piracy is to do nothing. Nothing that further alerts other adversaries to take action against us.
Sail in the night.
Yes, exactly, piracy is fine as long as it isn't widespread. But these wackos are saying that everything should be free because copying isn't stealing.
A little piracy? Nobody cares. A lot of piracy? No good, industries collapse.
It is immoral because it is stealing, even if they can take the loss, it is still stealing. Stealing is wrong in most cases.
Exactly. Some people are a little ignorant, and that’s completely fine and understandable. Humans aren’t all the same. Some like to educate themselves about a certain topic, while others learn something else.
That is perfectly okay. We should ultimately respect everyone’s opinions (Only reasonable opinions based on their current level of knowledge) because it’s not in everyone’s interest to know everything about, say, pirating.
Some like to glorify it and publicy fight for it, because they don’t know any better or are just like that.
Furthermore, you and I know that the vast majority of us, pirates, sails discreetly. Most know that for the system to remain easily pirate-able, it’s prudent to do so hidden in the shadows.
The key is to blend in with the crowd. You are just one ordinary person among many. You don’t draw attention to yourself.
“That’s the [Pirate Sailor] way to learn.”