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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This rubs me the wrong way too, yes. Though I’m really beyond moral justifications, I just stopped caring.
Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?
A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being “removed” in that situation either.
What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.
I think I figured out the disconnect here. Yes, hopping a turnstile is against the law. It is still not considered theft. It is called fare evasion, and it is more akin to a traffic violation. The reason I was confused, and why I assumed you meant morality, is that nobody is saying piracy isn’t against the law. The article never said that either.
Jumping a turnstile and taking a physical, actually scarce resource is not comparable to duplicating a digital, artificially scarce resource.
The train requires ongoing maintenance and can only hold a finite amount of people. Taking the train seat for free takes away something from another person. Downloading media does not use any ongoing resources, and does not take anything away from another consumer.
Comparing the morality of physical goods to digital goods are not really a good comparison specifically because of the artificial scarcity brought on by making something digital to try to make it more expensive doesn’t map to the real scarcity of physical goods.
How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
However much they’re asking. They put a price tag on it for exactly this question.
In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
Not really. Civil disobedience is about refusing to follow a law, not choosing to break a law. There’s a difference between the two concepts; one involves going about your day as normal and ignoring laws, and the other is going out of your way to break a law. Piracy is no more a form of civil disobedience than looting a grocery store is.
Ah, that’s not my understanding of civil disobedience. I prefer this definition: “civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/)
I suppose the piracy aspect might not be public enough to count as civil disobedience though, unless you count as public the noticeable cumulative effects of all piracy.
I don’t get this logic at all. Piracy doesn’t take away a possible purchase. There is an assumption that the media downloaded was ever going to be paid for. In 100% of the cases where I downloaded pirated content, I was never going to pay for the product, even if it was available to me by other means. Further I cannot remove a sale from someone when I never possessed the money to pay for it anyway.
I believe most people that pirate cannot afford to buy digital releases or pay for streaming services etc… (not all cases of course). In these situations nobody loses. The media companies didn’t lose anything because I was never going to buy it, and it wasn’t stolen because they still possess the media.
Edit - I agree with you Lmaydev I replied to the wrong comment.
The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven’t paid for.
And media costs money to make.
If I wasn’t going to buy it anyway they haven’t lost anything.
If you weren’t going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That’s the thing, if you’re interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you’ve actually cost them resources.
How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
But not to copy, which is what you are asserting is being “stolen”. No one is claiming that turnstile jumpers are taking away money from train manufacturers. You’re having to mix analogies, because copying something isn’t theft.
You are trying to blur the line between the media/art/music/film, etc, and the reproductions of it.
Artists do deserve to be paid for their work, but artists do not deserve to maintain ownership over the already-sold assets, nor whatever happens to those assets afterwards (like copies made). If you want to say they should retain commercial rights for reproduction of it, sure, but resell of the originally-sold work (e.g. the mp3 file), and non-commercial reproductions from that sold work? Nah.
They didn’t put in labor towards that. To say they did expands “labor” far beyond any reasonable definition.
If you weren’t going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That’s the thing, if you’re interested enough in a product to want it then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
I don’t agree with this at all. There are tons of things someone might want to use or have but not enough that they’d be willing to pay for it. Or over a certain amount of money.
The fact is that the person in question is still taking something without paying for it. A sense of entitlement (I want it badly enough that I should have it for free) doesn’t change anything in this equation.
Sure, they are procuring something worth money without paying for it. But this is a very different argument than you would not pirate something if you would not also be prepared to pay it.
The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
The origins of most of all western countries’ wealth comes from theft, full stop.
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do.
That’s only the case for pre-Bluray release content. Most of it was just captured from rips, Amazon Prime or Netflix.
The employees don’t get paid less if some jumps the turnstile, the fuel cost to carry a single person is completely trivial, and I didn’t say nobody should care about turnstile jumpers. I said its not stealing. If you damage the tracks and cause the train to derail you’re a monster, and there are financial costs, but you still didn’t steal the train. Your argument doesn’t make any sense.
So are you arguing that turnstile jumpers are harming the company, but they are not stealing the service / train / ride? Like the literal word “steal”.
Yes. That is in fact what I am arguing. I would also argue that the harm is tiny and can sometimes be justifiable, depending on the circumstances, but yes. It absolutely does do some non-zero harm, and yes there is no thing being stolen. That is the argument I am making.
Operating a train is not creating a train. And media does not require resources to operate, so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.
Bruh, no one in here is arguing about legality, we’re arguing about morality, and no one but corporate shills buy into “potential sales” having value.
You’re trying to argue against what people just fundamentally, intuitively understand; copyright is a legal construct (not a moral one) that is 99% bullshit.
Piracy isn’t stealing anyway. You’re not removing the data from the original owner.
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.
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.
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
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.
there are over one hundred fifty thousand results on github for “tictactoe”.
just how many paid games do you think there are, by the way?
github shows a hundred thousand repositories for the query “hangman”. assuming 10% of them are false positives it’s still a great number.
this doesn’t prove anyone ever needs to be paid to make something. a single counter example disproves the claim.
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.
How do you feel about jumping the turnstile at a train station?
Amoral at worst. Public transportation shouldn’t have a fee at use. Tax the rich, invest in transport
Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?
A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being “removed” in that situation either.
Ah, in that case, no that is also not stealing.
What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.
Who is losing resources when you hop a turnstile?
The transportation authority who maintains the trains and stations.
I think I figured out the disconnect here. Yes, hopping a turnstile is against the law. It is still not considered theft. It is called fare evasion, and it is more akin to a traffic violation. The reason I was confused, and why I assumed you meant morality, is that nobody is saying piracy isn’t against the law. The article never said that either.
Jumping a turnstile and taking a physical, actually scarce resource is not comparable to duplicating a digital, artificially scarce resource.
The train requires ongoing maintenance and can only hold a finite amount of people. Taking the train seat for free takes away something from another person. Downloading media does not use any ongoing resources, and does not take anything away from another consumer.
Comparing the morality of physical goods to digital goods are not really a good comparison specifically because of the artificial scarcity brought on by making something digital to try to make it more expensive doesn’t map to the real scarcity of physical goods.
Again, I have to ask: How do you think those digital goods are made in the first place? Somebody labored to create it. They deserve to be paid for it.
Not sure why this is such a hot take.
How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
However much they’re asking. They put a price tag on it for exactly this question.
Not really. Civil disobedience is about refusing to follow a law, not choosing to break a law. There’s a difference between the two concepts; one involves going about your day as normal and ignoring laws, and the other is going out of your way to break a law. Piracy is no more a form of civil disobedience than looting a grocery store is.
Ah, that’s not my understanding of civil disobedience. I prefer this definition: “civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/)
I suppose the piracy aspect might not be public enough to count as civil disobedience though, unless you count as public the noticeable cumulative effects of all piracy.
That is a false equivalency.
The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven’t paid for.
Pirating takes away a possible purchase. You haven’t actually used any of their resources or cost them anything.
If I wasn’t going to buy it anyway they haven’t lost anything.
If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you’ve actually cost them resources.
I don’t get this logic at all. Piracy doesn’t take away a possible purchase. There is an assumption that the media downloaded was ever going to be paid for. In 100% of the cases where I downloaded pirated content, I was never going to pay for the product, even if it was available to me by other means. Further I cannot remove a sale from someone when I never possessed the money to pay for it anyway.
I believe most people that pirate cannot afford to buy digital releases or pay for streaming services etc… (not all cases of course). In these situations nobody loses. The media companies didn’t lose anything because I was never going to buy it, and it wasn’t stolen because they still possess the media.
Edit - I agree with you Lmaydev I replied to the wrong comment.
And media costs money to make.
If you weren’t going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That’s the thing, if you’re interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
But not to copy, which is what you are asserting is being “stolen”. No one is claiming that turnstile jumpers are taking away money from train manufacturers. You’re having to mix analogies, because copying something isn’t theft.
I feel like you’re being intentionally obtuse. The point is that in both examples, somebody is exploiting somebody else’s labor without paying.
There is no labor in making digital copies.
You are trying to blur the line between the media/art/music/film, etc, and the reproductions of it.
Artists do deserve to be paid for their work, but artists do not deserve to maintain ownership over the already-sold assets, nor whatever happens to those assets afterwards (like copies made). If you want to say they should retain commercial rights for reproduction of it, sure, but resell of the originally-sold work (e.g. the mp3 file), and non-commercial reproductions from that sold work? Nah.
They didn’t put in labor towards that. To say they did expands “labor” far beyond any reasonable definition.
I don’t agree with this at all. There are tons of things someone might want to use or have but not enough that they’d be willing to pay for it. Or over a certain amount of money.
The fact is that the person in question is still taking something without paying for it. A sense of entitlement (I want it badly enough that I should have it for free) doesn’t change anything in this equation.
Sure, they are procuring something worth money without paying for it. But this is a very different argument than you would not pirate something if you would not also be prepared to pay it.
The origins of most of all western countries’ wealth comes from theft, full stop.
That’s only the case for pre-Bluray release content. Most of it was just captured from rips, Amazon Prime or Netflix.
Depends on the circumstances I guess, but no matter how I feel about it people jumping the turnstile aren’t stealing the train.
No, they’re just stealing the fuel and wages the employees should be getting for maintaining the train.
The employees don’t get paid less if some jumps the turnstile, the fuel cost to carry a single person is completely trivial, and I didn’t say nobody should care about turnstile jumpers. I said its not stealing. If you damage the tracks and cause the train to derail you’re a monster, and there are financial costs, but you still didn’t steal the train. Your argument doesn’t make any sense.
So are you arguing that turnstile jumpers are harming the company, but they are not stealing the service / train / ride? Like the literal word “steal”.
Yes. That is in fact what I am arguing. I would also argue that the harm is tiny and can sometimes be justifiable, depending on the circumstances, but yes. It absolutely does do some non-zero harm, and yes there is no thing being stolen. That is the argument I am making.
Yeah alright makes sense. Sometimes it hard to know what people are exactly arguing about.
“Trivial” is not “zero”.
Maybe, but it’s also closer to the price saved on less wear and tear on the turnstile than it is the price of the ticket.
I don’t see how that compares. Trains need human labour and lots of resources to function.
How do you think movies, music, games, books, or any form of media is produced?
Operating a train is not creating a train. And media does not require resources to operate, so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.
Using, no. Acquiring, yes.
No, nothing was lost when the copy was acquired, because copying does not remove the original. Literally, nothing is lost.
Lost sales are considered damages, so yes something is lost.
EDIT: This is worse than arguing with SovCits.
Bruh, no one in here is arguing about legality, we’re arguing about morality, and no one but corporate shills buy into “potential sales” having value.
You’re trying to argue against what people just fundamentally, intuitively understand; copyright is a legal construct (not a moral one) that is 99% bullshit.
What if you were never going to buy it?