Piracy was never stealing. It’s copyright infringement, but that’s not the same as stealing at all. People saying it’s stealing have always been wrong.
One of the great modern scams, was to convince society that unauthorized copying of data is somehow equivalent to taking away a physical object.
Jesus didn’t ask for permission to copy bread and fish. It’s a clear moral precedent that if you can copy you should.
What would the Jesus do?
Checkmate Atheists!
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A PURSE
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
-Character from some movie I pirated
In this economy with this level of corporate greed, I will download all the purses
If there is no easy way to own what you buy, then piracy becomes a moral obligation to preserve culture for future generations.
You want something, but you don't want to pay the cost (either monetarily or because they have made it too hard) and so you take take it. Fuck these assholes companies who try to milk people for every last penny, so I have no moral qualms with piracy, I do it myself.
But, fuck, can we stop trying to paint it as some noble thing? Effectively zero pirates are doing it to perseve culture, instead it's fulfilling personal desire.
This is chaotic neutral at best, not neutral good.
I think there's an exception to be made in your argument for abandonware. There are classic arcade games that wouldn,'t exist any more but are widely available due to MAME support.
The Nintendo eShop shutdown is another example of preserving software through piracy.
Piracy was never stealing, it was only copyright infringement.
Stealing is a crime that goes back to the 10 commandments, it's old. When you steal something you take it from someone else, depriving them of it.
Copyright infringement is a newish crime where the government has granted a megacorporation a 120 year monopoly on the expression of an idea. If you infringe that copyright, they still have the original, and can keep selling copies of that original to everyone else, but they might miss out on the opportunity to make a sale to you. Obviously, that's very different from stealing something.
The irony is, you pirating today has been shown to influence you buying it later on in a sale. And there’s a good argument to be made about your word of mouth praise helping their sales.
Forget about features and prices, how about actual content?
2017 I buy this space shooter game called "Destiny 2". It has some problems, but it's decent enough. $60 buy in. The single player story missions took you through four initial planets/moons, the European Dead Zone, Titan, Nessus, and Io, recovering your power and kicking the asses of the space turtles who tried to kill everyone.
Expansion 1, 2, 3 and 4 come out widening the story, adding more locations, Mercury, Mars, The Tangled Shore and the Dreaming City, the Moon... with all the associated story missions, strikes, raids...
And I bought in on those too. Some hundreds of dollars.
Roll forward to 2020, almost 2,000 hours in game. Bungie decides they're done with story missions and removes them from the game. They also decide that the game is "too big" for new players to get into, and seeking a Fortnite, free to play style audience, removes 1/2 of the content from the game.
Existing players like me drop the game because content we paid good money for and hours we spent exploring, collecting and curating gear, just went up in smoke.
New players now have no onboarding point and are incredibly confused because there's no story and no real way to get into the game.
So Bungie managed to completely alienate both their existing user base, and the one they hoped to attract.
Oh, and they have now promised not to do it again, but at the same time, haven't brought the content back either.
It's an online service as a game too, so piracy is not an option. The only way to experience the original content is through YouTube videos.
This is exactly me. Started in d1 beta. I quit cold the day the removed my purchased content
I don't exactly recall when or where I heard/read this quote, but man it is dope
I remember this from the hip hop scene. You know you've fallen off when nobody is sharing/pirating your album
People are always on here arguing about whether pirating is stealing or not. I do think it’s stealing I just can’t bring myself to give a fuck about these large corporations. They have been stealing from the people for years.
Netflix and Amazon prime simply won't work with VPNs active, which I use for work and privacy towards my ISP.
I won't compromise my security for their bad services. Living in a non US country, we are also always several years behind on content being offered.
Yeah, nah. The paying customer always pays for the percieved sins of non customers.
Set sail.
Further to that, paying for a product then the seller taking that product away from you without refunding your payment is stealing.
Don't forget adjusting for inflation and real money being given back not some shitty gift card
That's not a fair example, because 5 Euros has an intrinsic value. The theft here is of intellectual property. Here's an analogy:
Stealing involves depriving the original owner of access or possession of the item. Duplication is not stealing because the item being duplicated is not taken away.
Even if you consider it stealing, then what defense do you have for the people who paid the price that would supposedly allow them to have it permanently and suddenly it still gets taken away? That's not stealing? Even if we accepted that piracy by people who didn't pay is theft, why should people who already paid for the media not be able to access it from somewhere else if their original access is denied?
Pirated valheim, played 20 hours, bought the game.
Pirated baldurs gate 3 on early access, bought the game with only act 1, that's how good it is.
Pirated Valhalla, played 5 hours, uninstalled that trash forever.
Started pirating streaming services when they told me that I can't watch shit anymore because streaming service b and c took the shows, and now I have to pay two different streaming services if I want to keep watching.
We pay for three video streaming services plus Spotify plus Kobo's monthly plan for audiobooks plus a monthly Microsoft tax for apps and cloud storage plus regular Steam purchases.
Anyway, I just got back into piracy after a 15-year hiatus due to the enshittification of video streaming. It reminds me of how cable TV got ridiculous back in the 90s and so people figured out how to hack the satellite feeds and make pirated VHS tapes to pass around. As Gaben has said, piracy is always a service problem.
I'm still happy with Spotify and Steam. I'm mostly okay with audiobooks, too. However, Amazon is fucking with that service too by making some books Audible-only. For example, you can get Books 2 and 3 of Tchaikovsky's Children of Time books on various platforms, but not Book 1 because Book 1 is Audible-only! Am I going to reward Audible for that kind of malicious licensing? Haha, no, of course not.
The fact that no product is missing anywhere means it’s not stealing.
If you rent your car from Mercedes and I make a copy of it, the only change is that I’ve not copied your car, I’ve copied Mercedes’.
I think piracy is copyright infringement. But like who cares if some big corpos get infringed upon by some dudes.
Good topic, good point, terrible writing. I couldn't finish the article with the author's ego and personal bias butting into his great story.
Normally people pay to see the circus, but you could just sneak in though. It’s not exactly stalling, so what do you call that? The circus is still there, but you didn’t pay for it.
If lots of people start doing that, the circus probably won’t have enough money to keep on performing. Maybe they’ll get rid of the more expensive bits and just keep the cheaper ones in the future.
What would you call it if you buy a piece of art and hang it on your wall, then a couple months later the company that sold you the art comes into your home, takes the art away, and says you don't own it anymore?
If enough companies do that people are going to stop paying for art.
If you pay for the circus and they take away the circus so you can't see it, and then replace it for Circus2, did you own a ticket for the circus?
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