this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Dafuq, man, do whatever illegal activity you want as long as you're ready to face the consequences... But don't pretend you're acting ethically...
I have pirated shit too. Chances they'll catch me are very low, so I don't care. I also target corporations, never small businesses. But pretending I'm a saint because I'm "sharing information"? That's delusional.
At least learn to accept what you are without sugarcoats and coping mechanisms.
It's only illegal/unethical if you view it from the perspective of capitalism. On most fronts it's actually ethical. I know it's difficult to grasp due to heavy advertisement on IP law, but IP barely provides more than it takes away. Shit 3d printing exploded once IP was no longer in effect. Coronavirus vaccine would be available for 3rd countries (Now they pay way more per shot than they should)
Not to mention piracy actually preserves media that is culturally significant. (insert monopoly IP story here) Piracy does seem like a way to protest against a broken system.
Except piracy peaks at the recent releases. That isn't about media preservation, it's about seeing the new shit for free.
For some hard to impossible find stuff it can be useful but that's not what it's mostly used for.
The media preservation is a side-effect from it, you can't exactly have it both ways. :) Also seeing new shit for free is not the same as losing profits. People who would pay yet pirate are not the majority. Media is fucking expensive.
So what you're saying is that people should create content and expect no money in return?
Please explain why content creators, like Hollywood, would create content they can't monetize.
Software developers should work tirelessly for months to deliver software that they should just give away because fuck capitalism?
You can create content and you can monetize. No one is taking that away. Even FOSS licenses allow it (look up Krita on Microsoft Store as an example). The problem everyone sees is when you take a piece of information as hostage, just to monopolize on it. There are of-course other reasons why people create, not just money. Think about thousands of indie game developers, bands, artists etc. A lot of them are passionate about an idea, hobby and wish to share that with the world. A lot are fame attracted. It's a pity they are forced to work a shitty job and can't allow themselves to truly embrace their hobbies.
I know little about hollywood and it's inner workings, or the scene of indie video creators, so have no argument about it what so ever. Years ago I do remember reading on EU research which showed that music sales and movie sales drop while game sales increase due to pirating. Also I love seeing when pirates encourage to purchase from the creators they enjoy to additionally support them.
Yes. You're literally using Lemmy which is exactly what you just described. FOSS has used this model forever. Is it so hard to believe that people will make things because they want to, not because of money?
Yes, they can work for free on Lemmy because they have other jobs that are paying them actual money.
And those jobs can pay them actual money because their software is protected by laws that make pirating illegal and unethical.
In your mind FOSS developers had a net income of $0?
For one laws don't decide what is ethical or not. But for two you can still make money working on FOSS. There are donations and companies like Valve for instance pay for the development of proton and DXVK. Etc.
Yes, and Valve can pay for the development of FOSS software because their main products are protected from piracy by laws.
You see, the money always comes from products people buy... Not from products people share for free.
And people can still pay for the product if they want to. I pirate every game and then buy it if it's good. You can have free software and still make money these things are not mutually exclusive. You don't need piracy laws for money to change hands.
How is it delusional?
Digital product are duplicable for free, and we artificially limit that in order grant more money to publisher.
It's like we could duplicate food for free, jesus-like, and we should say "mh no no, I don't care if people is dying from hunger, you can't copy my food without paying".
And don't start with the "compensating the creator" argument. It's a necessity, of course, but there are thousands of ways to do it better than how we are doing today (where basically all the profit goes to publisher and IP owner).
There are a lot of other arguments to make about ethics of Piracy, like the fact that IP owner stop taking care and making available valuable cultural artifacts as soon as they are not profitable anymore (lots of thing would be lost forever without piracy), and the fact that price are set in western standards so that a game or an ebook is like half the monthly averages salary of some countries. The list go on.
Piracy is THE ethical way. The collective benefit are huge, and you can easily compensate for the individual loss (e.g. making donation and direct purchase for small creators in order to support them anyway).
OK, so tell me what is the incentive for a large software company to hire hundreds of workers if they release software that will be sold once and copied infinetly?
Do you realize that the only reason people actually pay for said software is because pirating is illegal? If pirating was legal, nobody would pay, and companies would have no incentives to hire workers.
My brother in Christ, you really really live in an ideal bubble. That's not how reality works, you know? People need to get paid for their work, otherwise they won't work.
If they don't work, there's no content for you to pirate. So yeah, pirating needs to remain illegal and it is stealing, which is a crime, otherwise nothing would make sense.
The fact that you can't imagine any way to compensate workers does not mean it's not possible.
Look at the FOSS ecosystem (wich btw is the foundation of every private profitable piece of software). Donation and collective foundation can absolutely sustain and promote the creation of both software and cultural artefact. For god sakes, you are writing your comment on a free self-mantained instance of a social network that is running on a free open source software based on a free an publicly available comunication standard.
Do you think people are donating enough money to sustain the families of the instance admins? They obviously have jobs and Lemmy is a hobby or a project for them. They aren't depending on Lemmy for a living.
That can happen sometimes but expecting the world to work around donations for every piece of software, music or literature is just too naive.
Some instance admins have said that they need to create a monetization strategy because depending on donations isn't reliable.
I mean, what's the point of arguing if you have yet decided things cannot be different than how they are now?
There are tons of example of free open source software made by regular employer as a full time job. Tons of example of artist (writers, actors, filmmakers, game developer) that share all their works for free and rely on donations, patreons or other kind of strategy to sustain themselves while keeping access to their art free for everyone.
It's definitely possible, and it would be incredibly better if whole industries would shift to this and more people would shift from paying/services to other methods of contributing (accordingly to their availability).
Why do you think it can't be made? What we are going to loose? Million dollars budget movies/videogames? Million dollars marketing campaign? I don't see how is it a bad things.
This completely ignores the whole world of FOSS
You are right, albeit a little rude, but that’s not the point of this debate. Piracy is a necessary “evil” to either get paywalled digital products or to preserve and archive deprecated media.
Wether society deems it immoral and illegal or not is irrelevant. The keypoint in piracy is to operate and remain in the shadows to minimize awareness and action taken against us.
To publicly glorify it is counterintuitive. The people that do so are compromising us all. The best course of action to take for piracy is to do nothing. Nothing that further alerts other adversaries to take action against us.
Sail in the night.
Yes, exactly, piracy is fine as long as it isn't widespread. But these wackos are saying that everything should be free because copying isn't stealing.
A little piracy? Nobody cares. A lot of piracy? No good, industries collapse.
It is immoral because it is stealing, even if they can take the loss, it is still stealing. Stealing is wrong in most cases.
The people who hired hundreds of workers to develop that media. The workers that depend on that business to be productive in order for their jobs to be on demand. The families of those workers that need money to buy food and pay rent.
Are pirates wearing two eye patches now, are they blind and can't see how the world operates?
Yeah, wow, is this sub satire? These ridiculously superficial arguments shouldn’t convince anyone past a teenager who is stoned out of their mind.
It's like communisn had sex with piracy and a bunch of people with messiah complex were born.
I want my good ol' piracy back, in which we all knew we were criminals downloading shit because we didn't want to pay, I could use that money to buy a burger or something.
You're just mad with that fact that other people might have different reasons to pirate content other than just being a cheapskate lol