this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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That's why I claim ownership of every hotel room I've ever stayed in and every car I've ever rented.
I'm not comparing renting to owning, I'm pointing out that they are different things, and each has an appropriate place. The image in the OP makes a blanket statement implying that all payment equals permanent ownership.
It is certainly true that there are things people pay for that they should have more rights of ownership over, but don't (even, and maybe especially, if they are led to believe they have ownership rights that they do not).
But even ownership of, for example, my car, does not extend to me the right to reverse engineer my car and build another identical one, and then sell that.
When you enter into a contract, where you pay for a product or service, there are a wide variety of rights you do or don't receive, depending on the agreement.
Edit: Since your employer pays you for your labor, they own you, right?
Let me restate the thing I was originally responding to:
This statement is so childishly oversimplified that it's just wrong. It might make people "feel better" about piracy (in particular, their own piracy actions), but it does so based on a plainly invalid argument. That's what I have been trying to point out.
Are there problems with the way media sales are handled? Absolutely. When Amazon is able to pull your purchases back out of your access that they made consumers feel that they would have unlimited and perpetual access to (even if the very fine print said otherwise), that's a huge problem. If a particular piece of media just isn't available anywhere except for via streaming (or, frankly, anywhere at all outside of piracy), that's also a problem.
OP's post doesn't address any of that. The suggestion is that "If I have paid for something, I (edit: should) have full, unlimited, and perpetual ownership rights to it." That's just not true; the landscape of commerce is far more complicated than that, and it's a mistake to just join into a weird hug boc about it.
Piracy in this context refers to copying data, not paying to rent physical items or places, and it's a strawman argument to say it doesn't.
Besides which, rent-seeking (which taps from an economy without contributing) is a more harmful act than piracy. (I hesitate to use crime since the state has commonly shown to have sucky opinions on right and wrong.)
When you rent a hotel room or car you're preventing others from using that hotel room or car.
I also believe in free housing and transit access as a right.