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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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By that logic, creating a competitor and wooing over customers would also be theft.
Note they are not saying piracy is legal, or that it's not a tort. They are saying it's not theft, and it should be discussed separately, as we criminalize theft because someone loses their property, not because the thief gets free shit.
Creating a competitor is not the same logic at all. That competitor gets paid when someone buys their product.
The issue is that time and effort are put into something that is being made to get compensation for that time and effort, not to be given away for free. If you’re going to a competing product, you’re not ingesting the initial product without paying for it.
I’m not arguing legal definitions. I’m arguing against the bullshit mental gymnastics that piracy is not stealing. It is. Just admit it and move on. I don’t care if people pirate. I just can’t stand the dishonesty of trying to justify theft. If you ingest something that an artist made to try and make a livelihood and don’t pay them, you’re stealing that livelihood.
No, it's exactly the same logic.
The argument that digital piracy is theft is predicated on the idea that pirating is depriving the creator of their rightful property: the money from a sale. In the absence of said sale, that money wasn't their property to begin with, however. The only way to reconcile this is by treating potential income as property.
In doing so, a number of stupid things can be argued for:
Creating a new product is theft because it deprives the competition of their potential income.
Boycotting a company is theft because it deprives them of potential income.
Not purchasing a new phone is theft because it deprives the manufacturer of potential income.
Not hiring Tom because Bob was a better candidate is theft because it deprives Tom of potential income.
There's a reason that piracy legally falls under copyright infringement rather than theft. You aren't depriving the creator of property by making a new digital copy of their media, but you are violating their copyright by creating an unauthorized copy.
It is not the same logic. You are not ingesting the work of the creator by going to a competitor. The issue is that you are gaining something from the labor of the creator without compensating them for that labor (which they gain from). It is an unequal exchange that both parties have not agreed to. It is theft. Going to a competitor and buying from them is an equal exchange - you're paying money for the product of their labor.
Everything else you've said continues to be dishonest because it is based on this very simple, fundamental flaw in your original argument.
You are still off the mark. Profiting off someone else's work is not theft. Maybe a crime, maybe immoral, but it's a separate concept. Theft specifically is bad because you lose something you have. Copyright infringement is considered bad because we want people to be incentivised to create original stuff, and we want people to feel like if they create original stuff, they get to have special rights over it.
You don't steal an IP by piracy, you infringe on it. If you stole it, the original owner would not have it. The whole argument around theft and piracy is that by equating theft with piracy, we get to a false dichotomy that if we don't prosecute the random pirate or OpenAI for infringing on copyright, we can't prosecute car thieves or wage thieves or whatever either in all fairness. Which is not true. Societies with the concept of property but without the concept of copyright did and do exist.
It's all fair if you say copyright should be protected, and infringement punished, but it's as much not theft as it is not murder. I mean, since you harm IPs by piracy, and one can argue excessive piracy can "kill" an IP, would making a pirate copy be assault with a deadly weapon? Or vandalism? That's why words have meanings, and different things have different names.
What if I don't sell it? If someone opts to use FreeCAD instead of Fusion360, did FreeCAD steal income from Autodesk?
Another dishonest argument. FreeCAD is explicitly granting people use of its product for free. They are not selling it. If someone opts to use a free product instead of a paid one, that is not stealing income from the creator of the paid product because you're not using their product. The entire issue at hand is that people are using the product and not paying for that use.
What about Autodesk pissing in the face of users who bought a "lifetime" license, not only superceding their product but degrading it such that it doesn't work anymore?
You should pick your examples more carefully.
You should also take an objective position and consider that not all rightsholders are acting in good faith. But then, in order to do that, you would have to be acting in good faith.
That's wrong and fucked up but also has nothing to do with the argument and point I'm making. It's a total straw man.
I didn't pick it, so... 🤷♂️
How am I not acting in good faith? I am taking an objective position. Please point out how anything I've said is not objective or not in good faith?
Not a straw man at all, but I'll let it slide.
Fair point.
You may well be arguing in good faith, I've started to see that. You're still wrong, though. Copyright infringement is not theft, the two are distinctly different.
It is a straw man. It is arguing a point that I never made.
I don't understand how you can reconcile this with what you just said above.
Only in a legal sense and I'm not arguing the legality or legal distinction between the two things. This is another straw man. "Copyright infringement" only exists as a legal concept because of intangible goods and ideas and how they different from physical, tangible items. Both types have enormous amounts of labor/effort/time required to create them and yet we have to make a distinction because it is different from a legal perspective.
It isn't a reconciliation, it's an admission that you are right on that point, and that I was mistaken.
It's not just the legal sense, it's the core definition of the term you're misassociating.
You just said that it wasn't a straw man (a term whose definition is 'arguing against a point that wasn't made') and then admitted that I never made that point. If I never made that point, then it is, by definition, a straw man argument.
It is not. We're simply disagreeing on what is being stolen. You're arguing that, because the media itself isn't stolen (it is infinitely reproducible), it's not theft. I'm arguing that it's income that's being stolen.
We are disagreeing on the definition of "stolen". Your argument is insane because it implies you can steal potential in a real way. This is incredibly problematic as you are now saying anytime some entity does not make all the money/trade/exposure someone has stole that from them.
We were talking about CAD software, I pointed out how the most prominent player in the CAD market (AutoDesk) have screwed over their customers. People bought permanent lifetime licenses, now those licenses have been degraded and they cannot use their product in the industry. It's not simply the case that AutoCAD is now an annual subscription priced at a higher cost, but the older product as provided by the manufacturer isn't the same as what was paid for.
If you pirate earlier versions of AutoCAD, you sidestep these issues (for the most part, new versions still pop up with a warning if the .dwg has been edited in an older version).
It's not a strawman argument, it's a tangental argument that is very relevant to the subject at hand. Pirated versions are sometimes better than the official versions.
No, you're misunderstanding the term "stolen" and "theft". You should really look it up.
It is a straw man because I never made that argument. I never stated or made any kind of position about pirated versions and how they compare to official versions. In fact, I've argued elsewhere in this thread that piracy can be justified in any number of situations. Whether it's justified or not doesn't change that it's stealing.
I am not. In fact, people have posted the definitions here. Again, we're just disagreeing on what is being stolen.
Either way, I'm done here because you're continuing to argue straw men, ignore the most central idea of my argument, and then claiming that I'm misunderstanding something when the entire point of my argument is how the two things are fundamentally the same and result in the creator not being paid for their work.
I didn't say you made any sort of argument. I just introduced a tangential point to put things in perspective.
My argument wasn't contradicting yours. It just provided better framing to the argument overall. You're far too narrow in your perspective here.
Yes, sure, because you're claiming that things were stolen when you never had them to begin with, and wouldn't have had them if the action hadn't occurred. Thus, no theft has occurred.
You eating data?
Ingesting something doesn't only mean eating it. It literally means "to bring into".