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Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
(pluralistic.net)
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Technology
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But the original creation cost time and money, which you're not reimbursing the creator for. The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn't cost anything.
It's like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure it's not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldn't even happen if everyone acted like this, or the organizers would have to pay for it all by themselves.
If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you "bought". Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.
Would you call it Piracy if I lend a bluray from a friend? I didn't pay for it and yet I've watched it.
No, because it's so widespread and natural that it should be expected and already accounted for in the price. But there is no hard line imo, and simplified examples often fail to capture all the aspects that go into the decision. E.g. I'd say paying for one person at a concert and sneaking in another would basically be piracy, even though the two situations are very similar on a surface level.
I think it's about reasonable expectations both parties of the agreement can have, based on established social norms. If you buy a movie for personal consumption you should be able to expect that you can watch it whenever you want, and also share that experience with friends and family. And at the same time the seller should be able to expect that you limit it to a reasonable number of personal contacts, and don't start to sell it to strangers or run a movie theater, because that expectation was used to set the price.
So if piracy was "widespread and natural" it'd be bueno?
If that would be possible then yes, or course.
That's bascially the Start Trek future, where everybody's needs are met and people can just do whatever they want. It doesn't "cost" anything to create stuff, so it's fine to copy everything for free. But that's not the reality we are living in. In our's somebody has to pay for things, and if everyone pirated everything then things couldn't be made anymore.
An example where it kinda works is open source software. People don't charge for copies, because they expect to get help with their work and also be allowed to use other OS software without paying for it. As long as that balance holds it works out fine, but there are a lot of projects that required too much investment from the creator's and didn't provide enough back for them to keep going. And even there, companies profiting from OS projects are expected or even required to pay it back, by contributing code and paying for engineers and sponsorships.
To further the thought experiment. I digitize my Blu-ray and put it on a private tracker to share with ONLY my friends. Is that piracy?
Copywrite laws are antiquated at best and need to be destroyed at worst.
If you need more proof look at bullshit like how Paramount+ until recently couldn't show flagship shows like Picard in Canada because the rights were given to Crave.
So as a consumer I want to go to the owner of the property and I can't watch it because the owner told me they gave a copy of it to someone else.
Trust me, they're working on ways to prevent that too as we speak.
under what ethical system?
Mine, obviously. But feel free to correct me if you disagree with something.
there's no reason to believe what you claimed. a claim made without justification can be dismissed without justification.
They made a justification. They showed you how people couldn't make these things without people paying for them.
but that's not true. people make things all the time without being paid.
Less people make things without being paid than those who make things to get paid. That is a common fact we can both agree on. If you need the number of open source games compared to the number of paid games then I recommend you grab those numbers yourself.
"snake game" returns over one hundred twenty thousand results on github.
You are equating someone's terrible hobby project to paid games like it's 1 to 1. You are simply arguing in bad faith. Have a good day though, hopefully, one day we can converse properly.
you're moving the goalposts.
Not at all. I just assumed you understood the basics of quality.
you never mentioned 'quality' until you wanted to disqualify data that didn't support your position.
Yes, because there is a basic assumption. Those projects aren't consumer-facing games. Those are hobbies. You know it and you are simply arguing in bad faith. I know actual game developers who released their games for free or under a pay-what-you-want model. They refuse to do so again because they can't support themselves by doing it. I am a game developer and I won't release my games for free because I need to support myself. There is all the data you need. Find me other data saying otherwise.
the plural of "anecdote" is not "data"
It's more relevant data than you are providing.
your insistence on relevance is giving the lie to your denial about moving the goalposts.
this is rich coming from someone who is moving the goal posts.
this doesn't prove anyone ever needs to be paid to make something. a single counter example disproves the claim.
github shows a hundred thousand repositories for the query "hangman". assuming 10% of them are false positives it's still a great number.
What unjustified claim did I make that you disagree with? Seems all rather uncontroversial to me.
i don't need to disagree to disbelieve. i do disagree, but without establishing your justification for this claim, it's kind of hard to argue against it.
The justification was that creating things has a cost, even if a copy doesn't, and that we should distribute that cost as fairly as possible among the people benefiting from the creation.
that's doesn't follow
Idk what to tell you but: Yes it does. We can't really argue if you refuse to elaborate your point.
That's a systemic problem, something I wouldn't personally care about. The "system" is just so horribly screwed up and skewed against us that I just no longer care if it works or not.
This rubs me the wrong way too, yes. Though I'm really beyond moral justifications, I just stopped caring.
Same here. The world is unjust so act accordingly.
Which doesn't mean be an asshole to everybody and steal everything you can but be an asshole to assholes and steal from franchises.