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I used to have a moral objection to piracy, I thought that if a piece of media is good enough that I enjoy it then the people that made it deserve to be paid for their work.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that even if I do pay for something there is no guarantee that the people that worked on it will get their fair share and paying for media is increasingly a worse user experience than piracy.
I feel similarly but one of those choices is guaranteed not to help the people you'd like to see helped
I'm not so sure that's true. What if normalizing and removing friction from piracy gets to the point where the streaming services have to react by providing better services and better payouts?
That's easy to say, but what can they actually do that provides a better service than piracy at this point? They can't compete on price, number of shows, or quality of shows with piracy by a long shot. They can potentially provide a better ease of experience with quick downloads and casting, but they already have that and I don't know that it can get any better.
As a general rule, I'd assume more piracy means less money into an industry, and less money in means fewer and less risky products that appeal to the lowest common denominator.
There's lots they can do...
Nor are you likely to get what you paid for
Or to keep it
On that note, the only relatively convenient exception I know of is Bandcamp Fridays. They're specific days where Bandcamp doesn't take any share of purchases.
I wish this were a more common practice, and I wish I could allocate my Netflix/HBO/prime/etc. subscription dollars to support specific titles. Instead, shows get cancelled because people didn't stream it enough on day 1. I want a s2 of Tales From the Loop, but it's still in limbo with no way for fans to show support.
It absolutely depends. I'm an indie game developer. I've worked at various studios as an employee, contractor, and as an owner. Depending on the setup if you pay for a game I worked on I could potentially get a bonus, I could see that money directly as profits, or I could see nothing at all. Sometimes just continued survival of the studio in working at is reason enough for me to encourage people to buy the game but sometimes I've not liked where I've worked and encouraged people to pirate from a studio that rips off its employees.
So really, the best bet is to ask. The best way to support a game developer is to ask how to send the money directly and buy the game on itch.io if available.
In fairness, games are still something I'm willing to pay for and books. I think probably because Kindle and Steam are better user experiences than pirating those.
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.
Would you call it Piracy if I lend a bluray from a friend? I didn't pay for it and yet I've watched it.
No, because it's so widespread and natural that it should be expected and already accounted for in the price. But there is no hard line imo, and simplified examples often fail to capture all the aspects that go into the decision. E.g. I'd say paying for one person at a concert and sneaking in another would basically be piracy, even though the two situations are very similar on a surface level.
I think it's about reasonable expectations both parties of the agreement can have, based on established social norms. If you buy a movie for personal consumption you should be able to expect that you can watch it whenever you want, and also share that experience with friends and family. And at the same time the seller should be able to expect that you limit it to a reasonable number of personal contacts, and don't start to sell it to strangers or run a movie theater, because that expectation was used to set the price.
So if piracy was "widespread and natural" it'd be bueno?
If that would be possible then yes, or course.
That's bascially the Start Trek future, where everybody's needs are met and people can just do whatever they want. It doesn't "cost" anything to create stuff, so it's fine to copy everything for free. But that's not the reality we are living in. In our's somebody has to pay for things, and if everyone pirated everything then things couldn't be made anymore.
An example where it kinda works is open source software. People don't charge for copies, because they expect to get help with their work and also be allowed to use other OS software without paying for it. As long as that balance holds it works out fine, but there are a lot of projects that required too much investment from the creator's and didn't provide enough back for them to keep going. And even there, companies profiting from OS projects are expected or even required to pay it back, by contributing code and paying for engineers and sponsorships.
To further the thought experiment. I digitize my Blu-ray and put it on a private tracker to share with ONLY my friends. Is that piracy?
Copywrite laws are antiquated at best and need to be destroyed at worst.
If you need more proof look at bullshit like how Paramount+ until recently couldn't show flagship shows like Picard in Canada because the rights were given to Crave.
So as a consumer I want to go to the owner of the property and I can't watch it because the owner told me they gave a copy of it to someone else.
Trust me, they're working on ways to prevent that too as we speak.
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.
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.
They made a justification. They showed you how people couldn't make these things without people paying for them.
This post seems to be largely about the value of product ownership and the harm that DRM brings to the end user, and does a great job at making that point. However, the title seems to have caused a different discussion to spawn in the comments about whether piracy of digital content is justified. This is just a casual reminder to read the article before replying in the comments.
This is just a casual reminder to read the article before replying in the comments.
This should anyway be a sticky to every post about third party content.
If you can own nothing, then nothing is theft.
YOU can't own anything, Big Corp however do own a lot 😉
You can own it though.
Physical media still exists.
IP in general is a very difficult idea to support. In theory, it's supposed to reward innovation, but in practice it results in stagnation and price gouging.
This shit again? have people never heard of lending? the thing you get to use for a short duration at a fraction of the cost to buy it outright or create it yourself? The thing you don't actually own and have to give it back? renting?
is this some kind of alternate universe where people think they own every movie or game simply by paying $$. is this kindergarten mathematics? and this is coming from people who can't code for shit and don't realize the scale of things bts.
Get a physical copy that doesn't require internet activation then, assholes.
but but but… that requires actual physical movement and getting out of my basement. 😭
Get a physical copy that doesn’t require internet activation then, assholes.
Just a little bit closer, you're almost getting the point!
Hi @satan@r.nf, please remember Beehaw's primary founding principal when commenting here: Be(e) Nice.
It is possible to disagree with someone without using abusive language. If you think they are wrong, attack their arguments (civilly), not the person.
Or I can pay nothing and get a plain video file that I can do anything I want with, and play on any device without needing a player. And as long as I keep that file backed up somewhere, I'll always have a copy of it.
The TV business is struggling to learn the lesson the music industry learned a long time ago.
And you provide what return, besides snark
Get a physical copy that doesn't require internet activation then
I cannot speak about movies. But physical games now are also just "usage licenses", they are encrypted and if the console is connected to the internet at any momento, your rights to play the game may be revoked (just like digital games or, in this case, digital TV series)
If it's not theft then it's fraud I guess
Granted, I only skimmed through the article, and overall I agree with, but that headline is a nonsensical statement. This coming from someone who pirates every movie and show that isn't on Disney+. Whether you own, rent, or lend, you still had to pay for access to it. Piracy circumvents that. I don't own the rental car. If I drove off with it, is that not stealing?
There are plenty of ways to justify piracy. There's a few good reasons listed in the article. I do it because switching between a dozen streaming services is too inconvenient. But even putting morality aside, that headline is just plain dumb, it's illogical.
Edited in case this came on too harsh
Driving off with the rental car is a fine analogy if we were comparing this to not returning a DVD you rented.
But this is not that. And that is kind of the point.
Piracy is a breach of contract for sure. The point the author is trying to make is that our current licensing contracts around media are out of touch with the social contract (you pay for something, you get it).
Hence the moral hazard. So companies will flaunt the social contract (like in the case of Sony) with impunity but will get rightous as soon as people flaunt the legal contract. It's a double standard, where all the power is in the hands of those with the biggest legal department.
You can't define "theft" untill you first define justice. And if consumers and media holders can't even agree to a just system, then why bother categorizing anything as theft at all?
Oh I agree with the article as I already stated in my previous comment, and I hope people read it, because my only argument really is that it has a poor headline. The headline says that taking media that you wouldn't have owned isn't piracy (which is nonsense), the article says that piracy is justified when ownership is as nebulous as it often is with a lot of digital media these days (which I agree with).
No no, that is not what the headline says.
The headline says "you're told that what you're doing is buying by the people selling you the media, but that's not what you're actually doing. So, if they're lying to you about what you're buying, then pirating a different thing isn't stealing the thing they are trying to sell you."
It's definitely tongue in cheek and has some hyperbole in it, but that is the gist of the statement.
then pirating a different thing isn't stealing the thing they are trying to sell you.
Maybe not that version of the thing specifically, but it's still stealing if they ultimately created it and you obtained it ignoring their conditions for sale.
Don't get me wrong, you have a really good point. A lot of times the bootleg version of a good is better than the legal version because of the legal version's tos and spyware enforcing them. I just don't see how obtaining the bootleg isn't piracy/stealing. There's good justification for stealing it imo (as a pirate myself), but that's all it is, justification. It's still stealing.
So I guess I'm just being pedantic when I say I disagree with you, but realize I see where you're coming from, and that we basically agree in spirit
The car goes away when you drive it off. Replacing the car would take power to run multiple assembly and formation machines, and resources for each part.
When you download a movie, it doesn't go anywhere, you simply use a miniscule amount of power to make a copy.
No one has lost anything and the product is still available where it was. Copying is not theft. When you steal, you leave one less left.
How many lemmy commenters can make the same false equivalence analogy in one week?
I know, I know, I figured someone was going to bring this up, and personally that's part of the reason I justify my own piracy (cause I'm broke and movie studios aren't), but two things:
The cost of creating, copying, and distributing a good isn't strictly relevant to the transaction of said good. If the original owner doesn't want me to have access to a good without paying for it, and I take it anyway, that's stealing. The labor and capital required to create, copy, and distribute that good isn't relevant to that transaction, only my moral justification for stealing it anyway. Which is fine, imo, just be honest with yourself. You're stealing, and it's justified. Stick it to the man
Assuming that it is relevant, making digital media isn't free. I can get away with piracy only because there's enough people paying for the media to make it worth it for the studio. At least one other commenter pointed this out, but if everyone pirated, who would be making movies and video games? So to keep the system going, imo, only pirate if you weren't going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.
At least one other commenter pointed this out, but if everyone pirated, who would be making movies and video games? So to keep the system going, imo, only pirate if you weren’t going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.
You're missing another option... And one that most people seem to continue to purposefully forget. When Netflix first started... It was a good product at a worthwhile price. Lots of people gave up pirating. Music was the same thing with Spotify and such services. Piracy is only getting worse again because the companies that "produce" the content can't keep their heads out of their asses and the services that cut back on piracy are now worse than what we left originally. As someone who had purchased these services for YEARS... There's nothing but greed on their end... They can't be mad when people respond with their own form of greed, they made the first move here. They could have continued making money from people who otherwise wouldn't have paid. They chose this path to some extent.
If everyone who would buy a digital product pirates it instead, then it's clear that they have been harmed by the piracy. This whole "own" vs "rent" vs etc argument is completely tangental as is the definition of "steal", unless pedantry is the purpose of this post. It's clear that piracy can be harmful.
"But they lost nothing physical" is an extremely shallow argument that ignores that not everything with value is physical. If I copy your idea as-is and make a product out of it before you, you can always come up with new ideas, right? It's not like you lost something physical. Clearly you haven't been harmed, right?
If someone who wouldn't purchase a digital product pirates it, then it's less obvious whether the creator got harmed by it. Also, to be clear, the discussion over digital ownership is still important.
It's got nothing to do with whether it's physical. Cars are different from movies because the movie can be reproduced infinitely without resource cost (or, very minimal). If you steal a rental car, they have to buy a new one. If you pirate a movie, they haven't lost anything.
If you pirate a movie, they haven't lost anything.
Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value? Otherwise if everyone pirates the movie, then they lose nothing and have no incentive to enforce that people purchase it before watching it.
There are a lot of ways to justify pirating digital content. Pretending as though digital content has no value is not one of them, unless you really and truly believe that creators of digital content deserve no compensation.