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Piracy isn't stealing because you don't take the original away from the creator, you just create a copy which doesn't detract at all from the original copy. In fact, copyright is more a tool for stealing than piracy, as large corporations will get small creators to sign over the rights to the content they created, consolidating 'ownership' rights in the hands of a bunch of greedy corporations (Disney, Microsoft, etc) rather than the people that actually created them.
To add (kinda what you said but from slightly different angle)
Intellectual property is a crime.
Just think about it, just because someone was first to fill the paper work for an idea means you have to ask their permission to express any similar idea you had yourself.
If you want to support creators there are other ways which are often more direct without middle men taking a cut.
I bet you wouldn’t be happy if something you made and that you’re trying to sell get copied and shared completely for free. Many people would use that without giving you a penny. It is not stealing in a stricter sense, but it would hurt your finances for sure.
I'm not a large company. As long as I'm credited appropriately I would be fine and hoping this newfound attention brings more customers to me to offset any "losses" from people who would have paid had they not pirated it.
As a real-life example, did you know that papers available on Sci-Hub receive statistically significantly more citations than those unavailable there? source
I wouldn't try to sell information. Physical products, services, support, sure. But you can't sell information which has no scarcity. Maybe you could pay for someone to create something they otherwise wouldn't have, but not for something that already exists.
To play devil's advocate, would you be happy if you spent a long time writing a novel and as soon as you published it a company copied all the text and started printing cheap copies, or just releasing free ebooks of it? As far as I'm aware that's what IP law is "supposed" to protect against.
If I wrote a book, I would release free epub files myself.
And this is the same logic that big companies are using when they rip off small scale creators to feed their AI algorithms.
The argument is more nuanced than "it isn't stealing because it is just copying".
With the AI stuff, they are not just copying the work, they are stealing small creators livelihoods as well as the efforts of their labour.
I know, it's cool to say the catch phrase, "of buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing", but ultimately this benefits the massive mega corporation's more than the little guys.
They're also distributing the work and making profit off of it. This isn't really comparable to someone pirating a game in the age where digital ownership is near dead and every other new game is $60 with game breaking glitches on release
I agree, it isn't the same, but is still a fact that this rehetoric masks the damage to the little guy whilst fuelling the rights of big companies.
No one likes that, but it remains the truth.
I'd argue it does more damage to directly contribute to triple A gaming companies by buying the crap they release than to abstain from paying for games altogether. People deserve to enjoy things without having to contribute to corporations to do so.
I know you're probably referring mostly to indie developers though. The thing is that this feels like a moot point to argue because we have no real way of knowing how much piracy directly harms a game developer. Maybe an indie game would have performed better had someone not "cracked" it. Maybe it would have performed worse due to people who are unwilling to gamble by spending their money on a revokable game license not discovering & publicly praising it. In reality I think if it's a good game with effort put into it, people are going to pay for it regardless - not everyone, but the vast majority of people who would be playing it, even if just because they don't know how to pirate
I'm not thinking about indie developers... At least not just indie developers.
I'm talking about musicians, comic artists, illustrators, designers, voice over actors, animators... Whole industries that are being treated like they are disposable.
And the upshot is that the small producers will all leave and we'll only be left with the big producers. This rhetoric around piracy plays into their hands.
I'm not against sticking it to the greedy, just in my experience they have always got a way of mitigating it at the expense of the little guy.