It doesn’t matter if it’s a CD, a Film, or manual with the instructions to build a spaceship. If you copy it, the original owner doesn’t lose anything. If you don’t copy it, the only one missing something (the experience) is YOU.
Enjoy!
Of course, if you happen to have some extra money for donations to creators, please do so. If you don’t have that, try contributing with a review somewhere or recommending the content, spread the word. Piracy was shown to drive businesses in several occasions by independent and biased corps (trying to show the opposite).
I used to make music with a band. We had studio rent, transportation costs, etc. We would mostly break even on gigs between all our expenses. In the rare event we profited from a gig, it went back into the band. As a whole, we were losing money.
If someone pirated the music that I spent hours working on in the space I paid rent for, I am absolutely losing a sale that could really have helped me out and, with enough of them, even let us maybe do it full time. I was always fine with people wanting to try before buying, but liking and listening to the music we spent a ton of time and money to make and not paying me anything is shitty as a small band. Your argument basically ends with “BuT WE’rE PaYinG You In ExPOSure!!!” which is always shit.
You’re sharing a correct sentiment, but completely missing the point.
Your artistic work has value and you should be in the condition of making art while taking care of yourself economically. This is definitively true.
Don’t assume the only possible way to achieve that is to gatekeep your otherway easily replicable art (which is sad and completely agains art’s purpose if you want my opinion). It may be the most viable way now, but it’s not the only one (and it’s not working great, as your example underline).
It’s the same for tipping colture, if you want a parallel situation to look from outside. Is absolutely criminal that full-time worker has to rely on a mandatory charity donation in order to survive and we should all be against that.
The worker could say “I need the tips couse I can’t afford live without it, so if you are against tipping you are hurting me”, which is the same things you are saying about yourself.
If someone pirated the music that I spent hours working on in the space I paid rent for, I am absolutely losing a sale that could really have helped me out
You are assuming they would have bought your music had pirating not been an option instead of just going without
I hate opening this way, but, as an “artist,” DL everything. Art deserves to be pushed away from profit motives and i hate hearing, “but your fave musicians wont get ur money!” Theyre not getting money off of record sales anyway, they hardly ever did. Ill put out what i make for free download. If ever ppl seem crazy enough to wanna donate, ill look into opening up those avenues, but its not like thats happening anytime soon. Way i see it, its not like i could stop if i wanted to. Why ask for money and limit how many ppl i can reach?
Now ill add,
I learned everything i know off of being able to have free access to near infinite music. Any genre, any style, all available to be perused. My tastes were able to expand, my mind was allowed to be opened. All bc i could listen to anything i wanted to for free when affording any legal music was not possible.
Ive done the band shtick too, and i honestly put more time, money, and effort into my craft now as i have to do all instruments largely by myself. Everything i do is bc of my tastes and ability to listen to more music than i could ever handle. Anything i make is a result of that. Itd be hypocritical of me to try and deny others what has made me “successful” (able to make whatever music i wanna make). Even if i did seek commercial avenues of putting my shit out, i would still not stand opposed to piracy. Piracy is why i ever got to this point in the first place.
Eta: and for the record, when it wasnt pirated, it was listening to shit uploaded to YT. More free music that allowed me to broaden my horizens without worrying about money.
If someone pirated the music that I spent hours working on in the space I paid rent for, I am absolutely losing a sale that could really have helped me out and, with enough of them, even let us maybe do it full time.
Do you know that though? Is someone going to buy a song just to listen to it? There’s no guarantee that they would have bought it in the first place. Also, piracy literally can increase the exposure to your music and can lead to measurably increased sales. In fact, the YouTuber penguinz0 talked about how piracy actually helped sell more copies of his comic series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJVCDD2lhH0
I understand the feeling.
But when someone buys music from you and then puts it in house parties for tens of other people, those people are also listening to your music without paying.
And a lot of people these days will never pay for a specific artist’s music.
They’ll use a streaming service like Spotify, which barely pays anything to small artists (especially when free users listen to the music, and not premium users).
But I can use Spotify for free, listen to small artists’ music, share it with other people, and it will be considered legal and “ok”.
And personally, whatever I pirate, I wouldn’t have bought in the first place without being able to try it. So it isn’t a lost sale.
I can also buy a CD and if I live with family members / roomates, share it and let them play it whenever they want without them paying for it.
Or let people copy it.
Lol, love hearing this moronic argument. If you had the magical ability to point at an object and clone it out of thin air, that also wouldn’t be stealing.
If I pointed at a Rolex on a person’s wrist and magically an identical copy of that watch appeared on my wrist, nothing was stolen, because nobody was deprived of anything. The net amount of that thing in the world only increased, and nobody was dispossessed of their property.
I hope you’ve never walked past a concert venue and heard some of the music being performed without being in the venue, otherwise by your logic, you are literally a thief who robbed that artist of their intellectual property and should be arrested and imprisoned. At the very least, made to pay restitution to the artist and record company for the cost of the music you “stole” from them.
I’m not OP, but i think you’re being intentionally simple-minded here…
So following your argument further, if we all did this no one would produce anything because they’d never get paid.
Then what?
The point is, there’s hundreds of hours of work in most things. What you’re saying makes sense if we’re taking about a shitty NFT that was ‘someone drawing their cat in MS Paint’, but an album or movie that involved many people and lots of labour is different because they deserve to be compensated for their work.
Back to your example, no one measurers songs heard in the seconds they were experienced and seeing the performance is probably the key part if we were breaking it down… Waking past a venue isn’t taking in the show (sneaking in and getting the full experience would be. Admittedly, of it’s an outdoor venue the example gets muddier!)
So, what I’m arguing, is that what’s morally wrong about piracy is not fairly compensating the workers that produced it. They deserve their time and expertise to be traded for (sorry, in not finding the words I’m wanting…) and that’s where the theft lies
So following your argument further, if we all did this no one would produce anything because they’d never get paid.
You are literally saying this on Lemmy. A piece of software that is developed for free using other software/tools that are free, and run on servers that are hosted by others for free. Most open source projects work this way. People are fully capable of doing things because they want to. Not everything needs to be profit-driven.
If we all did this, what would happen is there would be way less slop and lazy cash-grabs. Because the only people left making things would be the ones who are actually passionate and believe in what they do.
…and crucially, don’t NEED to be paid for their work.
Yes, FOSS is ‘a thing’, but it doesn’t require complicated and expensive things like sets, locations and recording studios - because code is entirely abstract, it doesn’t have these constraints.
Yes, there will still be the occasional thing from a passionate story-teller, but without the budget to ensure the appearances are as intended we’ll be far more limited in what stories we can tell (however, I’d gladly live in a universe without the constant marvel drivel!). We’d still be excited about 70s era star trek-type stuff, not the recent Dune movies…
While there’s certainly shitty cash grabs going on, there’s still passionate story tellers and the reason everything these days is shitty cash grabs is because we’re all pirating everything the studios won’t take a risk on a genuine story
Millions of people create things all the time with zero compensation. That’s literally why the “starving artist” is a universal stereotype. Plenty of people create things out of passion and self-expression, for shared experiences, and for the good of others.
The idea that everything must have a profit motive behind it or nobody would do it is a Capitalist myth.
In most cases of large scale production, the vast majority of people involved are already compensated for their labor. Ironically, often it is the artist/group themselves that don’t receive compensation directly for their work, but as a conditional percentage based on overall profitability of the parent label corporation, (who are near universally nasty, scummy, and exploitative.)
Doing labor is not a sufficient condition for compensation. If it were, I could go through parking lots, washing people’s cars while they are inside, and then present them a bill for my labor. Then, if they refused to pay, I could take them to court for “stealing” my labor from me by enjoying a freshly washed car and not paying the bill.
I could create artwork and demand people buy it from me to compensate me for all the labor I put into making it. Both examples are obviously ridiculous, because while labor very well may be a necessary condition for compensation, it isn’t a sufficient condition.
You admit that my concert example, at least in certain circumstances works. Which means that it proves my argument. If consuming content without compensation is actually stealing, then people walking past and listening to some of the music in a concert are literally thieves and should be arrested and forced to pay restitution. A ridiculous conclusion to the vast majority of people, even, I would wager, to many anti-piracy folks.
I advocate compensating artists for their work if you can and if the artist is independent. I think its morally wrong to support the current exploitative entertainment structure by willingly paying for services and products that are designed to abuse the consumer and in many cases, the very artists that are under their banner.
You also never addressed my Rolex example, which is basically a perfect analogy to how digital media is replicated IRL.
You also ignore the idea that an action can become morally right in and of itself depending of the motive. Piracy itself can be an act of protest to support proper orientation of the markets and social norms around the creation and distribution of art.
History is filled with activists engaging in what was illegal and considered immoral at the time, but we look back on their actions now as good and upright. Just because many pirates are nerds that post dank memes doesn’t delegitimize their actions.
Labor rights activists a century ago read Socialist theory and distributed cartoons and media mocking rich tycoons and abusive bosses. In other words, they were also nerds that posted dank memes.
I’d love to be able to actually discuss this, because a wall of text isn’t at conducive to healthy discussion.
Your concert example is frankly ridiculous. A better one is people sneaking in without paying. Overhearing a few minutes of muffled bars of music does not compare with going to the show - what nonsense! That you claim it proves your point, well… You’re dreaming.
Not a wall of text, I spent quite a bit of time carefully breaking down all of my points by numbered section.
If it’s too much work for you to go through my post and address each point like I have been doing for yours, then I don’t think we have much else to discuss.
One last question: Is it wrong for you to go to a bookstore, read a book, and put it back on the shelf without buying it? What about reading just 75% of it? 50%? How about just the first chapter to see if you like it? Or do you think it would be wrong to even skim the first page without buying it?
I don’t have the energy to dissect your 20 part manifesto, sorry.I appreciate the effort, but got lost in the bullet points (the un-bulleted things felt like responses to the bullet and I wondered who you were replying to). It all felt like the crazed conspiracy theorist meme, sorry. I’m on a phone and it’s such a shitty interface to wade through complex argument
As for books - No way, it’s not wrong at all, and I regularly pirate music before I buy it, for example. We’re not that different, I’m probably just accepting more ‘guilt’ for what I pirate.
Do you agree that physical goods are a whole different set of circumstances to abstract things? (As in, how the rolex is fundamentally different to the concert experience)
So if you think the book example is fine even reading the whole thing and never paying for it, how is that any different from any other piracy examples? You consumed media that the artist created in its entirety without giving them any compensation.
I agree that physical goods are totally different, but in my magical wizard example, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
A real life example is if I take a digital scan of a 3D figurine, turn it into a 3D model, and let other people on the web download it and 3D print it.
Did I “steal” anything? Of course not. Nobody is being deprived of anything at all.
You’re initial closing statement criticizes people for “…hiding behind word definitions…” when the OP’s post is arguing that copying is not Stealing.
It’s very telling that your criticisms aren’t ever leveled at the system itself, but instead, the people who object to how it is structured.
You frame yourself as a pragmatist who just operates honestly, never raising issue with the exploitative and often abusive practices of these corpos, record labels, executives. I never said piracy doesn’t hurt anyone, I said it isn’t theft.
Piracy hurts exploitative corpos the most, which is a good thing. It’s good to cause harm to evil structures and subvert their authority and power. That’s literally the point of social activism.
The fact that some well-meaning and innocent folks are going to get caught in the crossfire is sad, but such is the cost of subverting abusive power structures. Remember, pirates never created those structures, the corpos, billionaires, and corrupt politicians did.
I respect some pirates, I despise others. I tip or buy merch from small time artists whenever I can, often far more than they would have gotten from me buying their art, and far far more than if I streamed their song a few times of Spotify, YT Music, or dutifully watched an ad that played on their channel.
Piracy can be done in an ethical way, or an unethical way, but it’s certainly not, “at best, morally grey.”
You better go out and buy fast food at every drive-thru you can find, you not buying food from them might contribute to lower sales for that chain, which could lose those workers their jobs. Obviously that’s ridiculous, but that argument uses the same reasoning you just used. If your argument is true, then you’re a morally grey person at best if you aren’t spending as much money as possible on fast food every month, or any other good/service in existence for that matter.
Nice thoughtful response to my comment, really compelling points!
Oh wait, you couldn’t think of any refutations to my arguments, so you just resorted to an ad hominem.
Weak and disappointing. Go somberly stare at your torrenting client, thinking of all the people you’re putting out on the streets by “stealing” from them, your darkened and evil soul too corrupted by piracy to ever be redeemed. Lol get over yourself.
Yeahhh, obvious you don’t have anything left to say.
You disputed the OP’s post where they stated that piracy wasn’t stealing by claiming that people like them “needed to hide behind word definitions”
Corpos are bad, Capitalism is bad…yes, I stand by those statements because they are true.
Yes, it would be better for society at large if everybody pirated from the corpos and stopped funding their monopolistic, anti-consumer, anti-repair, privacy-violating practices. Again, yes this is true, I stand by that, that’s the definition of “greater good.”
Never hand waved the moral implications away of innocent people getting hurt by piracy. What I actually did was contrast the moral bad of that harm, against the moral good of harming the corpos that abuse society at large. I determined that the overall moral good of harming the corpos outweighed the moral bad of harming innocents. I also pointed out the fact that the real harm has been perpetrated by the Capitalists, billionaires, and big media conglomerates, not the pirates.
You obviously lack the ability or at least the willingness to address my counterexample about what your philosophy entails. The fact that you thought that was an analogy instead of what it actually was, (a reductio ad absurdum) demonstrates that.
I don’t need to try, you clearly haven’t thought very hard or deep about your position, it’s shallow and filled with knee-jerk argumentation.
I suspect strongly that you feel very guilty about your actions, and instead of addressing those feelings, you project them onto others.
I think you do this because you cannot stand the idea that other people pirate things guilt-free, you are jealous of them, so you project your own feelings of shame onto those other people and claim (without any compelling reasons), that those people aren’t actually guilt-free, they are just lying to themselves to deal with the shame.
You rage and seethe at those with a clear sense of purpose and vision because you lack those things in your own endeavors, and it galls you.
Is there something I should be keeping an eye out for, or preparing for so everything goes smoothly at least with regards to this community?
On the 6th of May, 2028, travel to 2 Augusta Hills Drive, Bakersfield, Kern County, California, United States. At exactly 4 PM local time, place an orange traffic cone on top of the nearest garbage can and await further instructions.
Piracy has always been stealingᵢ. Violently. Using ships, or boatsᵢᵢ.
What you’re calling “piracy” — falling into the “intellectual property” mafia’s trap by borrowing their malicious misnomer — is just plain old sharing.
Copying what we like (sometimes changing and adding our own ideas to it) and sharing it with other people, so they can like, share, and change it too.
It’s how human culture works and has always worked!
Copyright (another intentional misnomer, since all it does is restrict the right to copy — and share, and modify — cultural works) is, at least in its current form, not only detrimental to culture (and its spread and preservation) but an attack on human nature itself.
As for the hypothetical profits we are supposedly “stealing”, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, sharing not only doesn’t cause a loss on profits, it increases themᵥ. It’s free advertising.
It’s not about profits. It’s not about authors’ rights. It’s never been. It is, and has always been, about control. About deciding who and when can have access to culture, and who can’t. When we can be human, and when we are not allowed to.
I — Well, sometimes mostly murdering, I suppose, if there was not enough to steal; and of course there was the whole letters of marque thing, which made it political and complicated. But mostly stealing, OK?
II — It being on navigable water is what distinguishes it from pillaging, if I’m not mistaken.
III — In the borrowed words of Sir Terry Pratchettᵥᵢ, “The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”; sharing stories, and any other form of culture, is what distinguishes us from other species. It’s what makes us human.
IV — And even before. “IP” wranglers have a long history of not being reliable custodians of the cultural works they claim responsibility for, and sharing has many times been the only way to preserve said works after their (often malicious) mismanagement.
V — There’s studies, too, if Gaiman’s account is too anecdotal for your liking.
Who cares? Why the reach for moral superiority? I don’t have an issue with stealing IP. Because the concept of IP is stupid. But I’m not going to rub myself off over what to call it.
Of course, if you happen to have some extra money for donations to creators, please do so. If you don’t have that, try contributing with a review somewhere or recommending the content, spread the word.
Why would you bother unless you feel you’ve taken something from the creator that you feel you need to atone for in some way? If you don’t feel you stole it, you surely don’t owe the creators anything, you deserve the content you attained without payment just the same as someone that paid money for the same content.
The world doesn’t (need to) run on giving only what you owe. People donate to creators not through moral obligation, but because they like what the creator has made and they want to reward them for it and/or enable them to make more of it.
Why do you think Patreon (and others) is so popular? Any cynic would surely point out that from a purely transactional outlook, the donors are getting a bad deal. And yet.
Tbh, I was just trying to point out that being grateful is possible. In the same way that you return a smile, or give some money when buying goods or services in a context of a solidarity event. For example the other day people were selling hotdogs for “pay what you want” whole raising money for refugee kids. That’s how I approach this, copying/ piracy is “pay what you want” (to creators, not platforms). They made some effort to create it, yes. You are not taking anything from them. Nonetheless, you can express economically your gratitude for what they did. Like, homage to celebs.
Using the term “piracy”, instead of “filesharing”, was always pro-corporate framing. In his 2010 essay “Ending the War on Sharing”, Richard Stallman wrote:
When record companies make a fuss about the danger of “piracy”, they’re not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term “piracy” is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
I used to make music with a band. We had studio rent, transportation costs, etc. We would mostly break even on gigs between all our expenses. In the rare event we profited from a gig, it went back into the band. As a whole, we were losing money.
If someone pirated the music that I spent hours working on in the space I paid rent for, I am absolutely losing a sale that could really have helped me out and, with enough of them, even let us maybe do it full time. I was always fine with people wanting to try before buying, but liking and listening to the music we spent a ton of time and money to make and not paying me anything is shitty as a small band. Your argument basically ends with “BuT WE’rE PaYinG You In ExPOSure!!!” which is always shit.
You’re sharing a correct sentiment, but completely missing the point.
Your artistic work has value and you should be in the condition of making art while taking care of yourself economically. This is definitively true. Don’t assume the only possible way to achieve that is to gatekeep your otherway easily replicable art (which is sad and completely agains art’s purpose if you want my opinion). It may be the most viable way now, but it’s not the only one (and it’s not working great, as your example underline).
It’s the same for tipping colture, if you want a parallel situation to look from outside. Is absolutely criminal that full-time worker has to rely on a mandatory charity donation in order to survive and we should all be against that. The worker could say “I need the tips couse I can’t afford live without it, so if you are against tipping you are hurting me”, which is the same things you are saying about yourself.
You are assuming they would have bought your music had pirating not been an option instead of just going without
Pasting my comment fron elsewhere"
Now ill add,
I learned everything i know off of being able to have free access to near infinite music. Any genre, any style, all available to be perused. My tastes were able to expand, my mind was allowed to be opened. All bc i could listen to anything i wanted to for free when affording any legal music was not possible.
Ive done the band shtick too, and i honestly put more time, money, and effort into my craft now as i have to do all instruments largely by myself. Everything i do is bc of my tastes and ability to listen to more music than i could ever handle. Anything i make is a result of that. Itd be hypocritical of me to try and deny others what has made me “successful” (able to make whatever music i wanna make). Even if i did seek commercial avenues of putting my shit out, i would still not stand opposed to piracy. Piracy is why i ever got to this point in the first place.
Eta: and for the record, when it wasnt pirated, it was listening to shit uploaded to YT. More free music that allowed me to broaden my horizens without worrying about money.
Do you know that though? Is someone going to buy a song just to listen to it? There’s no guarantee that they would have bought it in the first place. Also, piracy literally can increase the exposure to your music and can lead to measurably increased sales. In fact, the YouTuber penguinz0 talked about how piracy actually helped sell more copies of his comic series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJVCDD2lhH0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=jJVCDD2lhH0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
But did actually anyone actually pirate your music? Like is your music on a torrent indexer or shared on a site specific to music?
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I understand the feeling.
But when someone buys music from you and then puts it in house parties for tens of other people, those people are also listening to your music without paying.
And a lot of people these days will never pay for a specific artist’s music.
They’ll use a streaming service like Spotify, which barely pays anything to small artists (especially when free users listen to the music, and not premium users).
But I can use Spotify for free, listen to small artists’ music, share it with other people, and it will be considered legal and “ok”.
And personally, whatever I pirate, I wouldn’t have bought in the first place without being able to try it. So it isn’t a lost sale.
True, but that doesn’t grant them a copy they can play anytime. This is also why I’ve always been fine with listening before buying.
I can also buy a CD and if I live with family members / roomates, share it and let them play it whenever they want without them paying for it.
Or let people copy it.
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Ah I forgot it depends on the country.
In Canada for example, it’s legal to copy a borrowed CD.
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non-commercial file sharing is not piracy, the industry just re-defined it because they don’t want anyone to share stuff.
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If morality was tied to law, there wouldn’t be piracy because the greedy fucks at the top would all be imprisoned.
How cute how innocent you are.
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AntiAI bros raging at this
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Lol, love hearing this moronic argument. If you had the magical ability to point at an object and clone it out of thin air, that also wouldn’t be stealing.
If I pointed at a Rolex on a person’s wrist and magically an identical copy of that watch appeared on my wrist, nothing was stolen, because nobody was deprived of anything. The net amount of that thing in the world only increased, and nobody was dispossessed of their property.
I hope you’ve never walked past a concert venue and heard some of the music being performed without being in the venue, otherwise by your logic, you are literally a thief who robbed that artist of their intellectual property and should be arrested and imprisoned. At the very least, made to pay restitution to the artist and record company for the cost of the music you “stole” from them.
Miss me with that bullshit.
I’m not OP, but i think you’re being intentionally simple-minded here…
So following your argument further, if we all did this no one would produce anything because they’d never get paid.
Then what?
The point is, there’s hundreds of hours of work in most things. What you’re saying makes sense if we’re taking about a shitty NFT that was ‘someone drawing their cat in MS Paint’, but an album or movie that involved many people and lots of labour is different because they deserve to be compensated for their work.
Back to your example, no one measurers songs heard in the seconds they were experienced and seeing the performance is probably the key part if we were breaking it down… Waking past a venue isn’t taking in the show (sneaking in and getting the full experience would be. Admittedly, of it’s an outdoor venue the example gets muddier!)
So, what I’m arguing, is that what’s morally wrong about piracy is not fairly compensating the workers that produced it. They deserve their time and expertise to be traded for (sorry, in not finding the words I’m wanting…) and that’s where the theft lies
You are literally saying this on Lemmy. A piece of software that is developed for free using other software/tools that are free, and run on servers that are hosted by others for free. Most open source projects work this way. People are fully capable of doing things because they want to. Not everything needs to be profit-driven.
If we all did this, what would happen is there would be way less slop and lazy cash-grabs. Because the only people left making things would be the ones who are actually passionate and believe in what they do.
…and crucially, don’t NEED to be paid for their work.
Yes, FOSS is ‘a thing’, but it doesn’t require complicated and expensive things like sets, locations and recording studios - because code is entirely abstract, it doesn’t have these constraints.
Yes, there will still be the occasional thing from a passionate story-teller, but without the budget to ensure the appearances are as intended we’ll be far more limited in what stories we can tell (however, I’d gladly live in a universe without the constant marvel drivel!). We’d still be excited about 70s era star trek-type stuff, not the recent Dune movies…
While there’s certainly shitty cash grabs going on, there’s still passionate story tellers and the reason everything these days is shitty cash grabs is because we’re all pirating everything the studios won’t take a risk on a genuine story
The idea that everything must have a profit motive behind it or nobody would do it is a Capitalist myth.
In most cases of large scale production, the vast majority of people involved are already compensated for their labor. Ironically, often it is the artist/group themselves that don’t receive compensation directly for their work, but as a conditional percentage based on overall profitability of the parent label corporation, (who are near universally nasty, scummy, and exploitative.)
Doing labor is not a sufficient condition for compensation. If it were, I could go through parking lots, washing people’s cars while they are inside, and then present them a bill for my labor. Then, if they refused to pay, I could take them to court for “stealing” my labor from me by enjoying a freshly washed car and not paying the bill.
I could create artwork and demand people buy it from me to compensate me for all the labor I put into making it. Both examples are obviously ridiculous, because while labor very well may be a necessary condition for compensation, it isn’t a sufficient condition.
You admit that my concert example, at least in certain circumstances works. Which means that it proves my argument. If consuming content without compensation is actually stealing, then people walking past and listening to some of the music in a concert are literally thieves and should be arrested and forced to pay restitution. A ridiculous conclusion to the vast majority of people, even, I would wager, to many anti-piracy folks.
I advocate compensating artists for their work if you can and if the artist is independent. I think its morally wrong to support the current exploitative entertainment structure by willingly paying for services and products that are designed to abuse the consumer and in many cases, the very artists that are under their banner.
You also never addressed my Rolex example, which is basically a perfect analogy to how digital media is replicated IRL.
You also ignore the idea that an action can become morally right in and of itself depending of the motive. Piracy itself can be an act of protest to support proper orientation of the markets and social norms around the creation and distribution of art.
History is filled with activists engaging in what was illegal and considered immoral at the time, but we look back on their actions now as good and upright. Just because many pirates are nerds that post dank memes doesn’t delegitimize their actions.
Labor rights activists a century ago read Socialist theory and distributed cartoons and media mocking rich tycoons and abusive bosses. In other words, they were also nerds that posted dank memes.
I’d love to be able to actually discuss this, because a wall of text isn’t at conducive to healthy discussion.
Your concert example is frankly ridiculous. A better one is people sneaking in without paying. Overhearing a few minutes of muffled bars of music does not compare with going to the show - what nonsense! That you claim it proves your point, well… You’re dreaming.
Not a wall of text, I spent quite a bit of time carefully breaking down all of my points by numbered section.
If it’s too much work for you to go through my post and address each point like I have been doing for yours, then I don’t think we have much else to discuss.
One last question: Is it wrong for you to go to a bookstore, read a book, and put it back on the shelf without buying it? What about reading just 75% of it? 50%? How about just the first chapter to see if you like it? Or do you think it would be wrong to even skim the first page without buying it?
I don’t have the energy to dissect your 20 part manifesto, sorry.I appreciate the effort, but got lost in the bullet points (the un-bulleted things felt like responses to the bullet and I wondered who you were replying to). It all felt like the crazed conspiracy theorist meme, sorry. I’m on a phone and it’s such a shitty interface to wade through complex argument
As for books - No way, it’s not wrong at all, and I regularly pirate music before I buy it, for example. We’re not that different, I’m probably just accepting more ‘guilt’ for what I pirate.
Do you agree that physical goods are a whole different set of circumstances to abstract things? (As in, how the rolex is fundamentally different to the concert experience)
To each their own I guess.
So if you think the book example is fine even reading the whole thing and never paying for it, how is that any different from any other piracy examples? You consumed media that the artist created in its entirety without giving them any compensation.
I agree that physical goods are totally different, but in my magical wizard example, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
A real life example is if I take a digital scan of a 3D figurine, turn it into a 3D model, and let other people on the web download it and 3D print it.
Did I “steal” anything? Of course not. Nobody is being deprived of anything at all.
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You’re initial closing statement criticizes people for “…hiding behind word definitions…” when the OP’s post is arguing that copying is not Stealing.
It’s very telling that your criticisms aren’t ever leveled at the system itself, but instead, the people who object to how it is structured.
You frame yourself as a pragmatist who just operates honestly, never raising issue with the exploitative and often abusive practices of these corpos, record labels, executives. I never said piracy doesn’t hurt anyone, I said it isn’t theft.
Piracy hurts exploitative corpos the most, which is a good thing. It’s good to cause harm to evil structures and subvert their authority and power. That’s literally the point of social activism.
The fact that some well-meaning and innocent folks are going to get caught in the crossfire is sad, but such is the cost of subverting abusive power structures. Remember, pirates never created those structures, the corpos, billionaires, and corrupt politicians did.
I respect some pirates, I despise others. I tip or buy merch from small time artists whenever I can, often far more than they would have gotten from me buying their art, and far far more than if I streamed their song a few times of Spotify, YT Music, or dutifully watched an ad that played on their channel.
Piracy can be done in an ethical way, or an unethical way, but it’s certainly not, “at best, morally grey.”
You better go out and buy fast food at every drive-thru you can find, you not buying food from them might contribute to lower sales for that chain, which could lose those workers their jobs. Obviously that’s ridiculous, but that argument uses the same reasoning you just used. If your argument is true, then you’re a morally grey person at best if you aren’t spending as much money as possible on fast food every month, or any other good/service in existence for that matter.
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Nice thoughtful response to my comment, really compelling points!
Oh wait, you couldn’t think of any refutations to my arguments, so you just resorted to an ad hominem.
Weak and disappointing. Go somberly stare at your torrenting client, thinking of all the people you’re putting out on the streets by “stealing” from them, your darkened and evil soul too corrupted by piracy to ever be redeemed. Lol get over yourself.
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Yeahhh, obvious you don’t have anything left to say.
You disputed the OP’s post where they stated that piracy wasn’t stealing by claiming that people like them “needed to hide behind word definitions”
Corpos are bad, Capitalism is bad…yes, I stand by those statements because they are true.
Yes, it would be better for society at large if everybody pirated from the corpos and stopped funding their monopolistic, anti-consumer, anti-repair, privacy-violating practices. Again, yes this is true, I stand by that, that’s the definition of “greater good.”
Never hand waved the moral implications away of innocent people getting hurt by piracy. What I actually did was contrast the moral bad of that harm, against the moral good of harming the corpos that abuse society at large. I determined that the overall moral good of harming the corpos outweighed the moral bad of harming innocents. I also pointed out the fact that the real harm has been perpetrated by the Capitalists, billionaires, and big media conglomerates, not the pirates.
You obviously lack the ability or at least the willingness to address my counterexample about what your philosophy entails. The fact that you thought that was an analogy instead of what it actually was, (a reductio ad absurdum) demonstrates that.
I don’t need to try, you clearly haven’t thought very hard or deep about your position, it’s shallow and filled with knee-jerk argumentation.
I suspect strongly that you feel very guilty about your actions, and instead of addressing those feelings, you project them onto others.
I think you do this because you cannot stand the idea that other people pirate things guilt-free, you are jealous of them, so you project your own feelings of shame onto those other people and claim (without any compelling reasons), that those people aren’t actually guilt-free, they are just lying to themselves to deal with the shame.
You rage and seethe at those with a clear sense of purpose and vision because you lack those things in your own endeavors, and it galls you.
Who cares. Piracy is its own thing. People will still do it and creators will still hate it whether it’s classified as “stealing” or not.
OTT providers would withdraw as many choices. Piracy would preseve content you purchased.
So, please read this as serious and no ulterior-motivation.
I’m hoping to release a game in a few years, and naturally I would like to sell it.
I am also supportive of this community and understand somewhat about the release date underground release.
I’d rather either get the revenue from my work directly, or give it away in exchange for donations, trade, or even nothing at all.
All this especially in light of how often independent creators get their shit stolen by megacorps.
Is there something I should be keeping an eye out for, or preparing for so everything goes smoothly at least with regards to this community?
On the 6th of May, 2028, travel to 2 Augusta Hills Drive, Bakersfield, Kern County, California, United States. At exactly 4 PM local time, place an orange traffic cone on top of the nearest garbage can and await further instructions.
This better not be another attempt to reach me about my car’s extended warranty, godamnit!
Piracy has always been stealingᵢ. Violently. Using ships, or boatsᵢᵢ.
What you’re calling “piracy” — falling into the “intellectual property” mafia’s trap by borrowing their malicious misnomer — is just plain old sharing.
Copying what we like (sometimes changing and adding our own ideas to it) and sharing it with other people, so they can like, share, and change it too.
It’s how human culture works and has always worked!
Copyright (another intentional misnomer, since all it does is restrict the right to copy — and share, and modify — cultural works) is, at least in its current form, not only detrimental to culture (and its spread and preservation) but an attack on human nature itself.
Sharing, in these dark times when destroying cultural works seems to have somehow become more profitable than commercialising themᵢᵥ, has become not only an essential part of human nature, but a moral imperative for anyone who cares about art, culture, and social progress.
As for the hypothetical profits we are supposedly “stealing”, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, sharing not only doesn’t cause a loss on profits, it increases themᵥ. It’s free advertising.
It’s not about profits. It’s not about authors’ rights. It’s never been. It is, and has always been, about control. About deciding who and when can have access to culture, and who can’t. When we can be human, and when we are not allowed to.
I — Well, sometimes mostly murdering, I suppose, if there was not enough to steal; and of course there was the whole letters of marque thing, which made it political and complicated. But mostly stealing, OK?
II — It being on navigable water is what distinguishes it from pillaging, if I’m not mistaken.
III — In the borrowed words of Sir Terry Pratchettᵥᵢ, “The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”; sharing stories, and any other form of culture, is what distinguishes us from other species. It’s what makes us human.
IV — And even before. “IP” wranglers have a long history of not being reliable custodians of the cultural works they claim responsibility for, and sharing has many times been the only way to preserve said works after their (often malicious) mismanagement.
V — There’s studies, too, if Gaiman’s account is too anecdotal for your liking.
VI — GNU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
paraphrasing Neil Gaiman
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Great article you wrote there! Thank you very much.
It’s especially true if you do it for archival copies of content you’ve already purchased.
I wasn’t gonna buy it anyways. Unless I’m a big fan. Then I’ll buy it. But it needs to be a decent price and the merch has to be worth it.
Who cares? Why the reach for moral superiority? I don’t have an issue with stealing IP. Because the concept of IP is stupid. But I’m not going to rub myself off over what to call it.
Image from https://invidious.flokinet.to/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 by Nina Paley
Why would you bother unless you feel you’ve taken something from the creator that you feel you need to atone for in some way? If you don’t feel you stole it, you surely don’t owe the creators anything, you deserve the content you attained without payment just the same as someone that paid money for the same content.
The world doesn’t (need to) run on giving only what you owe. People donate to creators not through moral obligation, but because they like what the creator has made and they want to reward them for it and/or enable them to make more of it.
Why do you think Patreon (and others) is so popular? Any cynic would surely point out that from a purely transactional outlook, the donors are getting a bad deal. And yet.
Tbh, I was just trying to point out that being grateful is possible. In the same way that you return a smile, or give some money when buying goods or services in a context of a solidarity event. For example the other day people were selling hotdogs for “pay what you want” whole raising money for refugee kids. That’s how I approach this, copying/ piracy is “pay what you want” (to creators, not platforms). They made some effort to create it, yes. You are not taking anything from them. Nonetheless, you can express economically your gratitude for what they did. Like, homage to celebs.
Using the term “piracy”, instead of “filesharing”, was always pro-corporate framing. In his 2010 essay “Ending the War on Sharing”, Richard Stallman wrote: