Hi guys, first of all, I fully support Piracy. But Im writing a piece on my blog about what I might considere as “Ethical Piracy” and I would like to hear your concepts of it.
Basically my line is if I have the capacity of paying for something and is more convinient that pirating, ill pay. It happens to me a lot when I wanna watch a movie with my boyfriend. I like original audio, but he likes dub, so instead of scrapping through the web looking for a dub, I just select the language on the streaming platform. That is convinient to me.
In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something? And where is 100 justified and everybody should sail the seas instead?
If you’re not using it to make money it’s never not OK. I can’t see it as theft. It’s just a different method of obtaining the same thing that doesn’t harm anyone.
Not only are those making this choice unlikely to pay anyways, but all the regular people who worked creating it already got paid so nobody can say “oh the film crew, VFX artists etc will be out of a job”. No they already did their job and got paid. The investors maybe want more money but they aren’t hurting for it, I don’t feel anything for them.
Any instance in which I’m purchasing through a publisher or producer. Wherein I have no reasonable belief that my money is actually going to the people who developed the work.
Do just to dig into this a little, I’m assuming that’s the Apple itunes, Spotify, Amazon etc levels and probably ticketek, we’re it plausible (now there’s a fantasy!!).
Where do you sit with regards to the better players such as bandcamp or gog.com?
It really depends on the particular developer right? Like, CDPR for example, whose parent company owns gog.com, pays its employees based on contractual obligation and initial sales. Beyond that, however, all money gets fed into the publisher and into the pockets of executives. Executives don’t make games. Executives do next to nothing and make nothing for it. I personally consider it patently unethical to support parasites like that.
Suppose some dude on the street hands out books for free and gives you a copy. Does it make you unethical for accepting one? Would it be different online?
Suppose your government charges a “blank media tax” on storage devices to “compensate” creators with the assumption you already “illegally” download their content, didn’t you already pay for it anyway?
What if you’re downloading stuff as a hobby but you’d never pay for it if that would be the only other option, did anyone lose anything of value?
@Fleppensteijn@vis4valentine another thing to consider is whether the creators of the work actually receive anything. When you pay to watch Barbie, basically 100% of that money goes to Bob Iger or someone like that. That’s what the strikes are about. When you pay to play Factorio, a lot more of the money goes to the people who made it.
I don’t know about the first part. Copying isn’t illegal for your own use. Either way, when receiving a copy, you’re not the one doing the actual copying. This was protected by fair use until EU politicians got lobbied into banning it.
Physical media and digital media are different beasts. When he hands you that book, he no longer has it. I would also assume he didn’t steal that physical copy. Someone got paid initially for the physical media, which the person is now deprived of by giving it to you. It’s not quite “apples to oranges” but it’s definitely not a parallel situation.
This is assuming - like digital media - some one took the time to spend his own free time to make copies of a physical medium.
There is no way of knowing whether the person has copyright or stole the first copy.
Or compare school books: the whole class buys one copy together, makes copies for every person to share costs. Likewise, a whole family can chip in to buy a car - you wouldn’t force them to buy a car each.
The two examples in your later paragraph are wholly different cases: the second is a completely different use-case and the first one is actually less morally unambiguous than you think.
Whether someone spends their personal resources to copy a medium digitally or physically doesn’t really matter to the copyright holder or author. They won’t get paid either way
My take on this is summed up much better by Cory Doctorow, and best written up in the foreword of his book “Makers”, which he published for free online.
There’s a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What’s more, they’re powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.
I’m speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.
…
Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell print books. Because I copied my ass off when I was 17 and grew up to spend practically every discretionary cent I have on books when I became and adult. Because I can’t stop you from sharing it (zeroes and ones aren’t ever going to get harder to copy); and because readers have shared the books they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to the cause.
That’s a great excerpt and I’m now interested in this book but it doesn’t really address the issue of money not going to the creator. He’s just in a position where he can afford to go without the income. Millions of artists can not. I imagine neither of us wants art creation to be solely the domain of the wealthy. Reminds me of how in college the only people who could do “good” internships were those who could afford to go a summer (or longer after college) without income and live in D.C. and other expensive cities. It’s wrong to not pay people to do a job of course, but that was a major secondary issue. Only people with money could get the internships that got them jobs that made good money.
It wasn’t uncommon for me in my pirating days to buy a game or a CD if I downloaded it and really liked it. I wanted to support the creators, I just couldn’t afford to buy everything and learn that most of it was trash.
To run a storefront and do R&D to develop handheld PC’s, simple at-home streaming, and higher quality VR? Yes, it’s reasonable for them to charge an industry standard rate as a storefront
Steam offers rather valuable services to the developer in exchange for that fee though. You get to use Steam’s existing infrastructure for content delivery, payment processing, advertising, community management, authentication (not necessarily DRM), multiplayer services, etc. instead of having to implement and maintain it all on your own. Self-publishing is not easy nor is it cheap.
You have a physical copy, but want a digital version.
Kind of similar but I feel like pirating content you have legal access to (Steam, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, etc.) in a way to get around DRM is ethical.
For example wanting to listen to songs you have on Spotify on an iPod or reading ebooks purchased from Amazon on your PC.
Slightly more gray: content I’ve already paid for in one form or another. I spent like $100 going to the theater to see Mario with the family. I’m not losing sleep over adding it to my Plex when it hits VOD.
The entire “going to the movies” experience is terrible for me and my wife, only going to get worse with a runt on the way. It’s certainly a fault of the theater I try and attend, but I’m not driving 2 hours for a decent viewing experience.
I pirate like CRAZY. BUT if I find a film/TV show I really enjoy, I certainly do my part in word-of-mouth or digital marketing for them. It’s certainly once it’s left the theaters but I wasn’t going to that anyway. It also gives a chance for older films/series to get some funding that I may not have picked up otherwise.
Occasionally if there’s a film/show that’s a standout, I’ll buy a physical copy. Honestly I never open them as I have a more convenient digital copy on plex but I do put in some for it.
That said, watch Grave Encounters 1 (not 2…) and Cabin in the Woods. I believe they’re both on Netflix but absolute top tier movies if you’re into horror for GE or horror parody for CITW, cabin possibly being in my top 5 of all time.
Also that said, I’ve seen way too many episodes of MTV Cribs for me to care about it too much >:(
You say you don’t want 100 different services, but do we really want all media content to be under one roof or just a few players? Consolidation is also terrible for media/art. That’s basically why so many people are against the Actibliz acquisition.
It could also have music streaming style. Where the features of platform is the more pull then content.
Spotify supports far more range of devices. Tidal sounds so much better, deezer is slightly worse quality than tidal but for more country. YouTube music gives you add free YouTube etc.
I’d love that but it’s just not realistic because of how the media publishing landscape currently is. Happy to advocate for that but moving that needle will take decades. My response is it’s usually somewhere in the middle. 5-10 major players, maybe some smaller ones as well. I don’t need access to literally everything ever made. Libraries already have a wonderfully large free collection as it is (for anyone reading this Hoopla is amazing and countless libraries have massive catalogs on it)
Sure, it’s not an easy thing to achieve for sure, but I won’t lose sleep over them losing revenue because they can’t figure it out quickly enough.
Even moreso where it comes to media that’s just not available any more. If you, a content IP owner, don’t make that content available for purchase, then you have only yourself to blame if people pirate it.
This is doubly true for games, which tend to be re-released over and over again on different platforms. This is true to a lesser extent for things like movies, but it’s much worse with gaming where each console is a closed ecosystem that’s incompatible with other systems. At least with Blu-Ray, you can expect any Blu-Ray player to play the movie you’ve purchased. It’s not like a Toshiba player will only play Toshiba brand Blu-Ray discs.
Companies love to use the “you don’t own the game, you own a personal license to use the game” line when revoking rights to play games you’ve legally purchased… But that goes both ways; If you own a personal license to use the game, it shouldn’t matter what platform it’s on, because it’s the same game regardless of whether you’re playing on PlayStation or PC.
Paying for a ticket isn’t the same thing and I’d argue that’s not morally justified piracy. You went from a rental to ownership at a rental price.
I thought you were going to say something like “I already bought a copy of Star Wars thirty years ago, then THEY made the way I watch it obsolete, so I don’t feel as bad getting another copy since I already paid for it once.”
That would be closer to moral than “well I watched it in the theaters once, so I totally own a copy!”
Content that you cannot acquire by any “lawful” means.
Content that you already own a copy of (Yes, this includes “only” having a “license” to it; you own what you own).
Content that is outrageously priced, and/or from large companies where the people who worked on the product will receive nothing from sold copies. (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc)
Most TV shows in foreign countries, and a billion movies are like this. Since they refuse to take my money, I can’t feel guilty for getting it for free.
Third category also contains works so old that only the people hoarding rights to said works profit from giving out licenses to them bc they never worked on them.
if you owned a game but your license got pulled for no reason (assassin’s creed)
although pirating triple a titles is always ethical imo, devs usually get paid the same no matter how the game does
also pirating to try a game. steams 2 hour refund policy isnt enough, as 2 hours often is not enough to get into a game and see if u like it
pirating retro games
if the only way to play a game legitimately is to pay $500 for a cartridge, it’s ok to pirate
if you can’t afford a game (ex. low income countries), it’s ok to pirate. there are places where a full months salary isn’t enough for a single triple a titile
if you owned a game but your license got pulled for no reason (assassin’s creed)
I’m not quite sure what you mean. So you paid for it (not a physical copy I’m assuming) and when you woke up one day they took it away and you’d have had to pay again to get it? Just understanding what happened here.
There are games and software that check a server to see if you are entitled to use it when you run it. If that server goes down or they geo block you, or ban you then you may not use the game or software you purchased (unless you crack/pirate it).
Another example of terrible policy no doubt and a great justification for cracks. But I know what AC games he’s talking about and I believe that doesn’t apply here. Correct me if I’m wrong though!
In this case you can’t play your purchased dlc (or online multiplayer) but you can still play your game. Games affected:
Anno 2070, Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed 3, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD, Driver San Francisco, Far Cry 3, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Silent Hunter 5, Space Junkies, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist
For games if there is no way of buying it new and supporting the developers I’ll just download a ROM. It makes absolutely no difference to the developer or publisher whether I buy it used or pirate it. They aren’t getting any of the money either way.
Or if it’s a PC game and I’m not sure it will run on my system I’ll pirate it and if it runs they get my money.
As for movies and TV if it’s available to buy on physical on DVD, Blu Ray, 4K Blu Ray I’ll buy it. But if it’s only streaming or on VOD I’ll pirate it. There’s been too many cases of purchased content being removed from peoples accounts.
Basically if they want my money it needs to be available to buy brand new in a way that won’t just disappear one day.
Scientific articles. You’re not robbing the authors of a single penny, because they don’t get a cut of the sales by the publishing house anyway and the journal reviewers are volunteers.
That indeed should be the preferred route when you’re not in a hurry and the contact info is up-to-date, but when you want to binge very quickly through a dozen articles as I used to do a lot that becomes impractical. Sometimes authors are unresponsive too, or deceased in the case of old articles.
As some else said, you really should just reach out to the authors. You would be surprised at how many will gladly send you it. Plus, you now have a direct line to the person to ask questions and are showing them that people want to read their work. Academics really appreciate that generally.
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If you’re not using it to make money it’s never not OK. I can’t see it as theft. It’s just a different method of obtaining the same thing that doesn’t harm anyone.
Not only are those making this choice unlikely to pay anyways, but all the regular people who worked creating it already got paid so nobody can say “oh the film crew, VFX artists etc will be out of a job”. No they already did their job and got paid. The investors maybe want more money but they aren’t hurting for it, I don’t feel anything for them.
Any instance in which I’m purchasing through a publisher or producer. Wherein I have no reasonable belief that my money is actually going to the people who developed the work.
Do just to dig into this a little, I’m assuming that’s the Apple itunes, Spotify, Amazon etc levels and probably ticketek, we’re it plausible (now there’s a fantasy!!).
Where do you sit with regards to the better players such as bandcamp or gog.com?
It really depends on the particular developer right? Like, CDPR for example, whose parent company owns gog.com, pays its employees based on contractual obligation and initial sales. Beyond that, however, all money gets fed into the publisher and into the pockets of executives. Executives don’t make games. Executives do next to nothing and make nothing for it. I personally consider it patently unethical to support parasites like that.
I completely agree to the pyramid scheme of managers.
I’d like to believe they funded the development while it was happening, but I suspect that’s rather naiive…
If you couldn’t afford to pay for it in the first place, then they’re not losing any money.
Suppose some dude on the street hands out books for free and gives you a copy. Does it make you unethical for accepting one? Would it be different online?
Suppose your government charges a “blank media tax” on storage devices to “compensate” creators with the assumption you already “illegally” download their content, didn’t you already pay for it anyway?
What if you’re downloading stuff as a hobby but you’d never pay for it if that would be the only other option, did anyone lose anything of value?
@Fleppensteijn @vis4valentine another thing to consider is whether the creators of the work actually receive anything. When you pay to watch Barbie, basically 100% of that money goes to Bob Iger or someone like that. That’s what the strikes are about. When you pay to play Factorio, a lot more of the money goes to the people who made it.
But if you get it on VHS or DVD or whatever and sell it, or even give it away, Mr Bob won’t receive his cut and it’s not considered piracy or stealing
@Fleppensteijn what? They actually tried to make reselling VHSes and DVDs illegal. And of course we all know that copying them is illegal.
I don’t know about the first part. Copying isn’t illegal for your own use. Either way, when receiving a copy, you’re not the one doing the actual copying. This was protected by fair use until EU politicians got lobbied into banning it.
@Fleppensteijn even in more lenient countries, selling or giving away a copy that you made is illegal
Maybe, but I’m talking about receiving it. That’s why you have to be careful torrenting (uploading) whereas DDL is no problem
Physical media and digital media are different beasts. When he hands you that book, he no longer has it. I would also assume he didn’t steal that physical copy. Someone got paid initially for the physical media, which the person is now deprived of by giving it to you. It’s not quite “apples to oranges” but it’s definitely not a parallel situation.
This is assuming - like digital media - some one took the time to spend his own free time to make copies of a physical medium.
There is no way of knowing whether the person has copyright or stole the first copy.
Or compare school books: the whole class buys one copy together, makes copies for every person to share costs. Likewise, a whole family can chip in to buy a car - you wouldn’t force them to buy a car each.
The two examples in your later paragraph are wholly different cases: the second is a completely different use-case and the first one is actually less morally unambiguous than you think.
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Whether someone spends their personal resources to copy a medium digitally or physically doesn’t really matter to the copyright holder or author. They won’t get paid either way
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If it is not available to buy anywhere for me and the only way is piracy, I feel like piracy is justified. No one loses anything on this scenario.
Won’t someone please think of the poor corporations sitting on those IP rights hoping to squeeze them for profit someday?
You’re practically taking the bread out of the CEOs mouth
When the money goes to people who did not create the media. Support creators, not exploiters.
You are saying that you would prefer to get paid per sale instead of per hour?
I did both and prefer my money per hour. No matter if the sales are low or high. The fluctuation of payment is an insecurity that i don’t want.
That’s almost everything.
Correct.
That’s why I pirate almost everything
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My take on this is summed up much better by Cory Doctorow, and best written up in the foreword of his book “Makers”, which he published for free online.
…
That’s a great excerpt and I’m now interested in this book but it doesn’t really address the issue of money not going to the creator. He’s just in a position where he can afford to go without the income. Millions of artists can not. I imagine neither of us wants art creation to be solely the domain of the wealthy. Reminds me of how in college the only people who could do “good” internships were those who could afford to go a summer (or longer after college) without income and live in D.C. and other expensive cities. It’s wrong to not pay people to do a job of course, but that was a major secondary issue. Only people with money could get the internships that got them jobs that made good money.
When I subscribe to the service, but the app freezes up… Looking at you Paramount+.
Paying for the product after viewing/using it if you like it or it’s good.
My favorite refrain as a kid was “we’ll buy a copy at the show” lol. In our defense we often did!
It wasn’t uncommon for me in my pirating days to buy a game or a CD if I downloaded it and really liked it. I wanted to support the creators, I just couldn’t afford to buy everything and learn that most of it was trash.
I remember doing that a lot with music
IMO it’s better to not pirate small indie content (mostly games in my case).
Assuming they release on Steam of course
Steam really needs their 30% cut, good you’re here to provide it to them
Happy to
To run a storefront and do R&D to develop handheld PC’s, simple at-home streaming, and higher quality VR? Yes, it’s reasonable for them to charge an industry standard rate as a storefront
Steam offers rather valuable services to the developer in exchange for that fee though. You get to use Steam’s existing infrastructure for content delivery, payment processing, advertising, community management, authentication (not necessarily DRM), multiplayer services, etc. instead of having to implement and maintain it all on your own. Self-publishing is not easy nor is it cheap.
Or content you have purchased and have now lost access too, or shit if you buy something at all you can ethically pirate it. You already paid!!
Kind of similar but I feel like pirating content you have legal access to (Steam, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, etc.) in a way to get around DRM is ethical.
For example wanting to listen to songs you have on Spotify on an iPod or reading ebooks purchased from Amazon on your PC.
Slightly more gray: content I’ve already paid for in one form or another. I spent like $100 going to the theater to see Mario with the family. I’m not losing sleep over adding it to my Plex when it hits VOD.
Straight black but I still consider ethical:
The entire “going to the movies” experience is terrible for me and my wife, only going to get worse with a runt on the way. It’s certainly a fault of the theater I try and attend, but I’m not driving 2 hours for a decent viewing experience.
I pirate like CRAZY. BUT if I find a film/TV show I really enjoy, I certainly do my part in word-of-mouth or digital marketing for them. It’s certainly once it’s left the theaters but I wasn’t going to that anyway. It also gives a chance for older films/series to get some funding that I may not have picked up otherwise.
Occasionally if there’s a film/show that’s a standout, I’ll buy a physical copy. Honestly I never open them as I have a more convenient digital copy on plex but I do put in some for it.
That said, watch Grave Encounters 1 (not 2…) and Cabin in the Woods. I believe they’re both on Netflix but absolute top tier movies if you’re into horror for GE or horror parody for CITW, cabin possibly being in my top 5 of all time.
Also that said, I’ve seen way too many episodes of MTV Cribs for me to care about it too much >:(
I pay for a smattering of VoD services, I don’t lose sleep over watching something that isn’t available on them.
If corporate greed didn’t force a hundred different services on us, then it might be different.
You say you don’t want 100 different services, but do we really want all media content to be under one roof or just a few players? Consolidation is also terrible for media/art. That’s basically why so many people are against the Actibliz acquisition.
It could also have music streaming style. Where the features of platform is the more pull then content.
Spotify supports far more range of devices. Tidal sounds so much better, deezer is slightly worse quality than tidal but for more country. YouTube music gives you add free YouTube etc.
@hoodatninja @majestictechie @vis4valentine @Kushan @charles Isn’t it obvious? They want many players to have all of the content. Which is possible, because content doesn’t run out if one service plays it too much.
All media content under all services.
I’d love that but it’s just not realistic because of how the media publishing landscape currently is. Happy to advocate for that but moving that needle will take decades. My response is it’s usually somewhere in the middle. 5-10 major players, maybe some smaller ones as well. I don’t need access to literally everything ever made. Libraries already have a wonderfully large free collection as it is (for anyone reading this Hoopla is amazing and countless libraries have massive catalogs on it)
Sure, it’s not an easy thing to achieve for sure, but I won’t lose sleep over them losing revenue because they can’t figure it out quickly enough.
Even moreso where it comes to media that’s just not available any more. If you, a content IP owner, don’t make that content available for purchase, then you have only yourself to blame if people pirate it.
I don’t think we are entitled to someone creative work just because they made it. That opens way too many doors.
This is doubly true for games, which tend to be re-released over and over again on different platforms. This is true to a lesser extent for things like movies, but it’s much worse with gaming where each console is a closed ecosystem that’s incompatible with other systems. At least with Blu-Ray, you can expect any Blu-Ray player to play the movie you’ve purchased. It’s not like a Toshiba player will only play Toshiba brand Blu-Ray discs.
Companies love to use the “you don’t own the game, you own a personal license to use the game” line when revoking rights to play games you’ve legally purchased… But that goes both ways; If you own a personal license to use the game, it shouldn’t matter what platform it’s on, because it’s the same game regardless of whether you’re playing on PlayStation or PC.
Paying for a ticket isn’t the same thing and I’d argue that’s not morally justified piracy. You went from a rental to ownership at a rental price.
I thought you were going to say something like “I already bought a copy of Star Wars thirty years ago, then THEY made the way I watch it obsolete, so I don’t feel as bad getting another copy since I already paid for it once.”
That would be closer to moral than “well I watched it in the theaters once, so I totally own a copy!”
We’ve all got our lines, mate. That’s the point of this post.
Concerning the first point there is also the case of content getting altered. For example TV shows that switch songs because of licensing.
Doesn’t stuff like childporn fall under category 1?
That’s one way to self-report.
Lawful content and lawful aquisition are two different things. CSAM is never ethical, doesn’t matter how you aquired it.
3a. Nintendo.
Content that isn’t legally available in your geographic location
Most TV shows in foreign countries, and a billion movies are like this. Since they refuse to take my money, I can’t feel guilty for getting it for free.
Third category also contains works so old that only the people hoarding rights to said works profit from giving out licenses to them bc they never worked on them.
if you owned a game but your license got pulled for no reason (assassin’s creed)
although pirating triple a titles is always ethical imo, devs usually get paid the same no matter how the game does
also pirating to try a game. steams 2 hour refund policy isnt enough, as 2 hours often is not enough to get into a game and see if u like it
pirating retro games
if the only way to play a game legitimately is to pay $500 for a cartridge, it’s ok to pirate
if you can’t afford a game (ex. low income countries), it’s ok to pirate. there are places where a full months salary isn’t enough for a single triple a titile
I’m not quite sure what you mean. So you paid for it (not a physical copy I’m assuming) and when you woke up one day they took it away and you’d have had to pay again to get it? Just understanding what happened here.
no they pulled everyone’s license
to add on to that, they put it on sale to get some quick bucks before shutting it down
asdfasfsd
There are games and software that check a server to see if you are entitled to use it when you run it. If that server goes down or they geo block you, or ban you then you may not use the game or software you purchased (unless you crack/pirate it).
Another example of terrible policy no doubt and a great justification for cracks. But I know what AC games he’s talking about and I believe that doesn’t apply here. Correct me if I’m wrong though!
In this case you can’t play your purchased dlc (or online multiplayer) but you can still play your game. Games affected: Anno 2070, Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed 3, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD, Driver San Francisco, Far Cry 3, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Silent Hunter 5, Space Junkies, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist
For games if there is no way of buying it new and supporting the developers I’ll just download a ROM. It makes absolutely no difference to the developer or publisher whether I buy it used or pirate it. They aren’t getting any of the money either way.
Or if it’s a PC game and I’m not sure it will run on my system I’ll pirate it and if it runs they get my money.
As for movies and TV if it’s available to buy on physical on DVD, Blu Ray, 4K Blu Ray I’ll buy it. But if it’s only streaming or on VOD I’ll pirate it. There’s been too many cases of purchased content being removed from peoples accounts.
Basically if they want my money it needs to be available to buy brand new in a way that won’t just disappear one day.
Scientific articles. You’re not robbing the authors of a single penny, because they don’t get a cut of the sales by the publishing house anyway and the journal reviewers are volunteers.
many, if not most, authors of such papers are more than happy to provide a copy if you were to ask them directly.
That indeed should be the preferred route when you’re not in a hurry and the contact info is up-to-date, but when you want to binge very quickly through a dozen articles as I used to do a lot that becomes impractical. Sometimes authors are unresponsive too, or deceased in the case of old articles.
Isn’t there an archive site for scientific papers that are freely distributed? I forgot what it was called, should bookmark it.
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As some else said, you really should just reach out to the authors. You would be surprised at how many will gladly send you it. Plus, you now have a direct line to the person to ask questions and are showing them that people want to read their work. Academics really appreciate that generally.