this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Piracy explicitly is not stealing. Theft requires denying the owner of the ability to use the thing that is stolen. Copyright infringement does not meet this bar, and is not a crime in the vast majority of cases. Commercial copyright infringement is the only offense classed as a crime, which in a nutshell is piracy for profit ie selling pirated material.
Piracy is attacking ships at sea and is usually done in order to rob them.
Piracy is midnight oyster and clam harvesting without a license to break the oyster cartel, making restaurant oysters and clams more available and cheaper to customers.
It is from this grand tradition along the US West Coast that the notion of media piracy rose, and much like the Golden Age of Piracy robbing the Spanish Silver Train, piracy is associated with snatching ill-gotten gains from those who don't deserve it, sometimes benefiting communities that do. (YMMV).
This is why you get a letter of marque to give you legitimacy. I've been letioning my government for one endlessly so I can attack Russian shipping in the balkans.
A letter of marque means you can find safe port at colonies of the issuing state so long as you are attacking its enemies (usually Spanish vessels during the Golden Age).
And privateering is piracy when you have the consent of a government to attack ships belonging to another government
Privateering usually meant the state's navy issued the ship and demanded a substantial share of the prize leading to creative accounting at sea. It was a deal taken typically by naval officers who might otherwise be tempted to desert when going on the account is offering better prizes and career options. (Desertion to piracy was a big problem in the Queen's Navee.)
Yes it is
Regardless of the semantics of what we call theft, or whether theft requires denying somebody access to some good, there's an ethical issue with copying other people's stuff without permission. If a person breaks into another persons home and makes copies of all of the documents in their home private or otherwise, they've at least committed a crime in the form of breaking and entering. But if a person is invited into another persons home, and then without pemission copies all of the documents in the house, that still feels like a wrong act? Like, if you invite me into your house and I start copying down your personal journal, your family photos and other stuff you have lying around, to me that sounds like I'd be doing something wrong by you?
Edit: I do want to point out here that I'm not saying piracy is inherently wrong/bad or never justified.
Corporations are not people, no matter what the Supreme Court says.
Literally nothing in my post claimed that, or even really implied that so I'm not sure what your point with this is?
You are discussing piracy in the context of media and copyright infringement, in which the owner of the pirated material is a corporation and the pirate is an actual person.
By comparing the act of pirating corporate owned digital material to a fictional scenario in which one person is copying another person's physical possessions very much implies that you see the corporate owners of digital material as people.
EDIT: I understand your point by the way. Is it ethical to pirate things? Maybe or maybe not, but I think the stance of most people here is that pirating stuff that is produced by giant, obscenely wealthy media conglomerates is generally okay.
Sure, but breaking and entering is a crime - just like theft. Copying someone's documents is wrong, but it's not a crime (not unless you commit a crime with those documents, eg fraudulently take out credit). In that case, it's a civil offense against the victim - just like copyright infringement.
Crimes are prosecuted by the government. To be convicted of a crime you have to be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt - in other words, it's more than 99% likely you did it.
Civil offenses are prosecuted by the victim. The burden of proof is "the balance of probabilities", ie it's more than 50% likely you did it. The victim must also show actual damages.
In the US, media companies have perverted the law around copyright infringement, and they manage to get awarded statutory damages well in excess of any actual damages they incur. This is why we had all those ridiculous Napster lawsuits where people were fined hundreds of thousands for downloading a handful of songs. In the rest of the world, they could only be awarded actual damages, and the lawsuits weren't really worth anything.
Media companies would really like copyright infringement to be theft, and they've lobbied hard for that. However they haven't managed it, not yet anyway. They did manage to establish a crime of commercial copyright infringement, though, where if you pirate a significant amount of material or do it for profit you could be criminally charged.
My issue is mostly just to do with the moral status of piracy rather than the criminality of it. It feels like in some cases piracy should be justified and in others it shouldn't be. The criminality of an act is a separate thing. I think I was kind of explaining things poorly with my examples. The distinction between breaking into a home vs not in my example was meant to show the act of copying somebodies personal documents could still be wrong whether or not a crime had taken place under current laws.
This is very interesting. Establishing damages over reproduction of ones personal documents seems like it would be almost impossible to establish unless an actual crime had also taken place.
This train of thought for me seems to lead towards the most satisfying justifications I can think of for why media piracy is probably morally justifiable.
That's pretty much exactly right. However I think there is something to be said along the lines of "What reason would you have for copying the documents, if not to commit an offense?"
I feel like the main reason some businesses are completely against piracy is because it helps keep their prices in check. Many businesses take the piss with pricing, however when it gets bad enough people look to alternatives. If there is no alternative, if piracy wasn't an option, then businesses would get away with ripping off people even more than they currently do.
People do all sorts of nosy invasive things solely for the sake of curiosity and keeping tabs on others I guess? But at a certain point maybe it could just be shoved under some kind of stalking offense?
Kinda sounds like it might be easier to get away with if it was a crime and the burden of proof was higher
"I didn't know the router Comcast gave me came with an unprotected 'Guest' network enabled by default. Someone in one of the other apartments must have been using it to download torrents"
Sounds like a reasonable doubt to me, I'm sure there'd be plenty of other explanations. Plus the work to retrieve everyone's computers to investigate who actually downloaded it would be prohibitively intensive in anything other than the most extreme cases
In that case it would be less about reasonable doubt that you did it, and more about whether an IP address proves the identity of a user. I would say it doesn't meet the bar of 50%, however it's a bit of a grey area that hasn't been properly tested in court.
The ethical issue here has nothing to do with damaging any property at all.
Piracy is stealing- but so is capitalism so it’s fine.
It may sound the same but making a copy of something is absolutely not the same as taking something. It’s an important distinction.
You're taking away the profit they deserve for the work and effort it took them to create the information.
They only deserve what people are willing to pay. It's like those scammers in foreign countries who push bracelets on you and then demand money for them. If people aren't willing to pay $600 for your software, you don't automatically deserve that money just because you said you do.
Push bracelets on you? Who is forcing you to use their software? Please let me know, we can call the police man, that's fucked up.
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And if I never intended to buy the product?
So you never intended to buy the product but you intended to use it?
Do you understand they are charging you for the usage, not for your intentions or moral views?
Yes. If I don't think it's worth paying the price they're asking, I will download and play it for free. It if were not available to download for free, I would simply not play it. They lose nothing either way.
If I would have paid for it, but downloaded it for free simply because I could, you're correct they would be losing profits. But that's not always the case as you seem to be claiming.
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Exactly. They are twisting reality to justify their shirty actions.
They say there's no moral argument yet they try to defend themselves with more arguments, even as I say nothing about morality lol
No, it very much isn't. Don't buy into the media companies trying to rewrite the law in their favour. Copyright infringement is not theft.
Property is theft.
that's an interesting definition, and one that appeals to me especially as a fan of "harmless" theft (taking something that the owner will never notice is gone, nor be inconvenienced by the lack of)
It's literally the legal definition. Copyright infringement has never been theft. Media companies have been trying to change the definition of theft, though.
It used to never be a crime, only a civil offense. This means the rightsholder has to sue you, rather than the state prosecute you, but also that the burden of proof is "the balance of probabilities", ie whichever side tips the scale past 50/50 with their argument, rather than "beyond reasonable doubt" which is more like >99%. However in the last decade many countries have introduced "commercial copyright infringement" as a criminal offense. Off the top of my head, in the US I think the threshold for that is like $1,000 or something.
It's not about it being "harmless" but the fact that you're not taking something away from someone. If I steal your laptop and sell it, you no longer have a laptop. If I copy data, you still have your original copy.
This is also why there's a different crime for "joyriding" instead of just stealing a car. If you steal a car, you might argue that you were just taking it for a drive, and never intended to permanently deprive the owner. In that case it's easier to convict you for joyriding instead of theft.
Piracy is best compared to riding a bus without a ticket.