Agree 100% and I've been seeing this "debate" in other instances and communities recently
Piracy is moral and ethical. Small businesses are not the targets. I would download a car, I would download a better life if I could
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
320 points (100.0% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
54050 readers
1080 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
💰 Please help cover server costs.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
You guys are deranged... Every movie you download had huge amounts of work behind it, those people need money too.
Sure, a studio makes hundreds of millions making a shitty marvel movie, but it does still legitimately cost them tens of millions to make - they just make revolting middle of the road crap so it sells to idiots everywhere.
That's why there's no good movies any more - it's too risky to tell a good story, now that we're all pirating them
The instant there's no money in it, you'll see there will be no movies made (and that's precisely why the last 20 years of movies have generally been rubbish).
The studios are fine, and by all means steal Deadpool 53 or whatever off them, but don't pretend you're being noble in the process.
At least own up that it's theft.
Similarly - It takes real skill and experience to make and record music (and if anything that's gotten a while lot cheaper than it used to be!), but the artists that aren't in the radio would be gutted to hear your downloading it.
That's also why merch is so important to a bands bottom line - it's got away less middle men in the line taking a cut
Theft is when you deprive someone of one of their possessions. How is sharing content the same as doing that? The only "theft" going on here is content producers trying to steal the meaning of the word theft.
If people need compensation for their content production (and they really should) then that can be provided for by patronage, by donations, by society in general. Putting the round peg of that responsibility into the square hole of each person "consuming" the content makes zero sense in the grand scheme of things.
Absolutely agree. I did audio engineering work briefly a few years back, and cannot in good conscience say that piracy is theft when these producers are robbing the masses blind with predatory pricing and unnecessarily restrictive "fair-use" regulations.
Those who create good products will benefit from it, all things considered piracy isn't going to be a vessel for the destruction of that anytime soon.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Theft is taking somebody’s property. It doesn’t require that you “deprive” the owner or that the “property” is a possession.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Businesses who want to make money need a way to make a product that can't be trivially reproduced on any basic computer. Or at least a way to distribute their product more conveniently. Everyone always pointed to how piracy declined when streaming was affordable. That was because it was more convenient to stream than make copies and host content yourself. Now that's reversing again.
Maybe it will be good if the only movies and music that are made are the ones from people with true inspiration. I wonder if Homer only wrote the Odyssey because he knew the state had strong copyright protections?
load more comments
(1 replies)
@flambonkscious @RedCanasta And the people who made that work earn approximately 0.1% of what you pay for the work. The other 99.9% goes to shareholders. Wouldn't it make more sense to give the workers 100%, or even 10% of the normal price?
So I agree with piracy, however one thing to keep in mind is that our economy and productivity are only in existence because of the land and equipment (as well as the labor) that it takes to produce them.
If 100% of income went to the workers, there's nothing to pay for equipment and land that is also necessary for production. Ugly as capitalism is, the end result is a productive economy. A lot of the wealth is captured in land and equipment.
Now, you can argue that the workers should own the land and means of production. That I could agree with. But you simply can't produce anything without paying for land and equipment plus labor.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
The article is well written and all, but that "Copyright © 2023, all rights reserved" at the end is ultimate hypocrisy.
Have to change the footer part. Sorry :(
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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(43 replies)
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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
This completely ignores the whole world of FOSS
load more comments
(3 replies)
Yeah, wow, is this sub satire? These ridiculously superficial arguments shouldn’t convince anyone past a teenager who is stoned out of their mind.
load more comments
(6 replies)
I'm not going to argue for/against the article. However,
we need laws and policies promoting open access and sharing of knowledge, not maximizing profits through contrived scarcity
As a fan of FOSS (and the Open Source community in general), I completely agree with this. Sharing knowledge can do a lot of good.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Copyright has evolved from a limited monopoly on a work of a handful of years, into an entitlement which has diverged sharply from the original intent of the law. It's time to bring the law back into balance with its intentions of promoting the creation of new works, while granting the public free access to those works after a reasonable time. Lifetime plus seventy years is not reasonable.
Edited to add - consider the number of great artists whose works never commercially benefited them. Not because of "piracy", but because their work was not known or recognized. Still, they made their great works because they were compelled to do so by their existence.
How can I pirate Adobe Lightroom, if it's impossible for me to own it by paying for it?
Honestly, I would pay some decent mulah for a standalone current version of Adobe Lightroom that doesn't try to suck me up into the cloud. It's silly event pirators and cracker teams can put a pretty fully featured yearly version, and Adobe does not.
Hard to argue against piracy with the current system of copyright that only serves giant corporations. Guess it's human nature to try to consolidate power...
view more: next ›