Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
(pluralistic.net)
from kpw@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Dec 2023 05:07
https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/691405
from kpw@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Dec 2023 05:07
https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/691405
The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
threaded - newest
If there is no easy way to own what you buy, then piracy becomes a moral obligation to preserve culture for future generations.
You want something, but you don’t want to pay the cost (either monetarily or because they have made it too hard) and so you take take it. Fuck these assholes companies who try to milk people for every last penny, so I have no moral qualms with piracy, I do it myself.
But, fuck, can we stop trying to paint it as some noble thing? Effectively zero pirates are doing it to perseve culture, instead it’s fulfilling personal desire.
This is chaotic neutral at best, not neutral good.
I think there’s an exception to be made in your argument for abandonware. There are classic arcade games that wouldn,'t exist any more but are widely available due to MAME support.
The Nintendo eShop shutdown is another example of preserving software through piracy.
See also: The Despecialized Edition of the Star Wars Original Trilogy
Internet archive, and a chunk of r/datahoarders, is built for that purpose. Just as people have saved old paintings (aka media) it’s also good for us to save significant pieces of our current culture. Old VHS tapes and CDs are already disappearing. Sometimes finding something is just a little bit more difficult and it’s only going to get worse.
I pirated plenty when I was young and poor, I’m pretty sure that helped form a desire for that sort of stuff which I pay for now.
I bet if I had abstained when I couldn’t afford it, I wouldn’t have spent the money on all the content I buy now
I believe the bulk of pirates are people who wouldn’t have bought the content if they had to pay for it
It doesn’t need to have been a noble goal to be a noble result.
For something to be actually and reliable preserved and win against random decay, data loss, disaster, and whatever else will statistically destroy copies, a thing will need to be stored by at least thousands of people. But there is no way to know how many, only that you increase the likelihood of perseveration by storing a copy.
I agree, most people are downloading a thing because they want it. But by keeping that thing, they are also preserving it.
I have a Spotify subscription that I still pay, but built a library full of FLACs on the side specifically because I got fed up with “right holders” taking songs in and out of my playlists and having the right to deny me access forever.
It literally would be cheaper and easier for me to just use Spotify.
People who are doing porting work to make Windows-entwined Ubisoft games available on Linux are helping to preserve media for the future. People booting up Limewire are doing nothing.
Like the latest controversy with the internet archives
If you pay to own a movie then yes, you should be allowed to make copies of it and keep it forever, even if the seller goes bankrupt in future. You are paying to own the movie.
If you subscribe to Netflix you are not paying to own the content, you are paying for access to their content. Therefore you cannot legally download a movie from Netflix and keep a copy forever.
However, if Netflix don’t make it possible to buy their unique content for permanent ownership, then piracy is the inevitable result and they should address that.
But let’s be honest here, none of you are intending to buy anything.
I spend way more money on streaming services than I ever spent buying DVDs or CDs.
To say that “I don’t intend to buy anything” is a BS accusation. You have no clue about another persons motives.
The fact that no product is missing anywhere means it’s not stealing.
If you rent your car from Mercedes and I make a copy of it, the only change is that I’ve not copied your car, I’ve copied Mercedes’.
By this logic no services should be paid. Are you really just hung up on the word “stealing”? It is wrong to go against an agreement or to take the work of others and not pay for it simply because it’s easy to do that when the work isn’t tangible.
Are people really that fucked up today?
I’m not talking about payment, I’m talking about if it’s stealing or not. It might be copyright infringement depending on local law, but it’s not stealing. Selling a copy might be counterfeiting.
I never made an agreement but to copy things without paying. That agreement was made on my behalf, and if you look into the history of it, it’s really fucking shady. Copyright in the US originally lasted 20 years (IIRC), and I would be ok with that, but big copyright holders successfully bribed lawmakers to extend the term until now it’s effectively infinite.
So tell me, was it immoral to ignore copyrights after 20 years when that was the law? Did changing the law change what’s moral?
Netflix and Amazon prime simply won't work with VPNs active, which I use for work and privacy towards my ISP.
I won't compromise my security for their bad services. Living in a non US country, we are also always several years behind on content being offered.
Yeah, nah. The paying customer always pays for the percieved sins of non customers.
Set sail.
With the right VPN they do. Mostly no problems with Proton VPN
Forget about features and prices, how about actual content?
2017 I buy this space shooter game called “Destiny 2”. It has some problems, but it’s decent enough. $60 buy in. The single player story missions took you through four initial planets/moons, the European Dead Zone, Titan, Nessus, and Io, recovering your power and kicking the asses of the space turtles who tried to kill everyone.
Expansion 1, 2, 3 and 4 come out widening the story, adding more locations, Mercury, Mars, The Tangled Shore and the Dreaming City, the Moon… with all the associated story missions, strikes, raids…
And I bought in on those too. Some hundreds of dollars.
Roll forward to 2020, almost 2,000 hours in game. Bungie decides they’re done with story missions and removes them from the game. They also decide that the game is “too big” for new players to get into, and seeking a Fortnite, free to play style audience, removes 1/2 of the content from the game.
Existing players like me drop the game because content we paid good money for and hours we spent exploring, collecting and curating gear, just went up in smoke.
New players now have no onboarding point and are incredibly confused because there’s no story and no real way to get into the game.
So Bungie managed to completely alienate both their existing user base, and the one they hoped to attract.
Oh, and they have now promised not to do it again, but at the same time, haven’t brought the content back either.
It’s an online service as a game too, so piracy is not an option. The only way to experience the original content is through YouTube videos.
youtu.be/EVH865r2J8k
This is exactly me. Started in d1 beta. I quit cold the day the removed my purchased content
I feel like I got scammed by Bungie with the shit they pulled with Destiny 2. I will never give them a single dime ever again. I loved that game and they completely ruined it.
The thing that absolutely kills me is that they did so much RIGHT with the first game, and then it was like they completely forgot how to design a game between 1 and 2.
For example:
In Destiny 1 you picked the story missions off the map and each story mission was marked with a light level so you knew the order to do them in. When you finished all the normal missions, there was a Strike to finish off the planet.
Destiny 2? Yeah, story missions, you can’t see them on the map, you have no idea how many there are or if you’re the appropriate level, and while there are strikes, you can only access them from a playlist and MAYBE it’s the one from the planet you’re on, maybe it’s not. Maybe you’ll get the same strike 4 times in a row because fuck you if there’s a specific one you want to play.
Everyone was talking about how good The Pyramidion was, I could never get it to come up. Bungie finally relented after a YEAR(!) and put them on the map, a feature D1 had on DAY 1.
That sounds awesome! Too bad I never played D1.
You still can, it’s up and running right now. Backwards compatible even.
Like I said, Bungie isn’t getting a dime from me.
Buy a used disc for $5. :) Bungie gets nothing.
Hmm, interesting!
I’ve seen this quote repeated over and over these past few weeks, while noone brothers to actually explain what it means and why. This article is no different unfortunately.
watch the recent Louis Rossmann videos if the first part is what you don’t understand
When you "buy" digital content, be it music, movies, software or games, you almost never actually buy the product. What you get is a limited license to view or use the product for an undefined amount of time.
Generally, companies reserve the right to, at any moment, restrict how can access the content (e.g. force you to use a specific device and/or program) or remove your ability to use or view the product entirely.
For example, a movie or song you've "bought" might get removed from whatever streaming service you're using. A game or program might stop working due to changes in the DRM system.
Actual example from less than half a year ago: Autodesk disabled people's supposedly perpetual licenses for Autocad and other software, forcing anyone wishing to continue to use their software into a subscription.
Imagine buying a house, only for the seller to show up 10 later and state that they change their might and staring from this point in time the house is no longer yours - despite the fact that you've paid for it in full - and you own them rent, if you want to keep living in it.
The architectural design is Intellectual Property and you’ve got a time-limited license to use it.
Absolutelly, the land is yours, as are the materials the house is made from, but you’ll have to pay extra for continued use of that design once your license expires.
PS: This is how I imagine the argument would be made.
What brought this quote into the limelight most recently is Louis Rossmann's coverage of Sony pulling all Discovery channel content not just from their storefront, but also from people's libraries.
Sony essentially stole content from people's libraries that they'd already paid for, not just rented content. Sony argued against this that you only had a licence to the content, you didn't own what you bought, hence the quote's meaning...
If buying isn't owning [because it's all just a copy of their content], then piracy isn't stealing [because it's also just a copy of their content].
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Louis Rossmann’s coverage
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This seems like it’s very specific to that one incident. But people try to use it on all digital products.
It’s not just Sony. All the digital library providers have done this. Apple, Amazon, and Google have all had similar instances that resolved the same way; the consumer got fucked.
Ohh yeah, Microsoft. I own Forza 7 Motorsport. It’s installed on my hard drive. Microsoft killed the servers so I can’t even play single player because the tracks weren’t included in the game. You have to download the track every time you play single player or multiplayer.
That is not the same thing. You still own the game, whether or not it is playable is not the same as not owning. Legal bs but that’s how most Western societies are built.
Whenever a game or program or goes unplayable you can not go and fix it, despite "owning it".
Removal of any kind of DRM, even if for personal, even in products you've bought, is illegal.
And there's no lower-limit on how "secure" DRM has to be: even if the client-server communication is not encrypted in any way, doesn't include any identifying information, and you can perfectly re-implement server-side software, tricking the program into itself into talking to your server, instead of the original, is, at best, legally grey area.
I’m not sure what your point is? We’re taking about ownership, not whether you can reverse engineer sine DRM.
Being able to do things to your property is one of the basic concepts of, well, property.
Let's say your car's manufacturer fixed the wheels using security bolts and they're the only people who have the sockets.
With actual cars it would be, at most, annoying. You'd still be able to undo the bolts, either by buying or making a fitting socket, or just smacking a regular one until it fits.
In the digital world, however, just because it's called a "security" socket, you're forbidden, by law, from tampering with it. And if the licensed services stop servicing the model of your car one day... You're fucked. Because, even though you "own" the car, you are legally forbidden from doing basic maintenance required to use it.
What’s with the hundreds of thousands of other media that is shared?
What about them. I’m not talking about freely shared media, I’m talking about media companies repeatedly removing access to media that we paid for. It is a pattern of behavior from these “people” and if they won’t stop stealing from us, then I propose we nuke their headquarters.
Companies selling software and other digital goods tend to pull back parts of their library for all kinds of reasons, which in turn takes these goods away from paying customers who thought they bought something. Since the company defends itself by saying they never bought those goods outright, customers defend themselves by saying that if paying for it isn’t buying, then not paying isn’t stealing.
When you spend money on something, let’s say one of those movies from PlayStation, you don’t actually own that movie, there is no file given to you that is yours. You are just given access to it. And then, out of no where, they can take that away from you.
When you pirate something, you are just creating a copy of the file, you aren’t taking away the original file.
So, the argument here is that morally pirating is okay because no one is losing anything, aside from potential sales for the company I guess. But on the flip side, the company is essentially stealing from you because they took your money, and you aren’t allowed access to what you bought.
The most morally just position in this case would be that if you were one of those customers who paid for and then lost access to said movies, and then you pirated them back, you could say that the company had already made their money on you, and you’re owed those movies.
In my opinion, I don’t think pirating from any million / billion dollar company is bad even if you didn’t “own” it originally.
Which would also be less bad if they reimbursed you for it in some way. But of course they don’t.
People want at the same time that wages are higher but they also do not want to pay, for example, software developers appropriately.
No one wants to be part of the problem, though. So some people justify their copyright infringing by claiming it’s some sort of movement for justice and rebellion against corporations.
Have you ever bought something online (movies, games) that you can’t save/download and then the company you have the money to removed that? That is stealing from you. Simple.
Pirating software is stealing as well. That’s pretty simple. I know people who have stolen their entire gaming library. That’s thousands of hours of work and dedication people put in. Why don’t they deserve to get money for it?
The same goes for other software, music and movies.
I do agree that the workers should be paid, but they have absolutely no say in what the company does at the top. It might be that a lot of them don’t agree with the company’s actions. Only way to remedy that is to democratize companies.
When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.
In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.
Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.
But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.
Edit: spelling.
They deserve to get money for it. No pirate is against that.
If we would exchange money for the product all would be fine. Some people would still pirate because they have no money or just don’t want to pay but the majority would pay.
But as we buy just a license that can be revoked for any reason consumers feel that the system is rigged against them.
So it is a natural reaction to try to fuck over a system that is fucking you over.
People pirate software that is buyable on GoG, itch.io or movies that are on disc all the time. Just because some platforms offer the product with just a license shouldn’t mean it’s now morally justified to pirate it.
But I see people bringing the statement because of platform like Steam or Netflix.
Why shouldn’t it mean that? Seems fair to me.
And it is not just about licenses. Often the pirated version is just better because they took out things like DRMs that make a Game run slower or movies where you don’t have to wait trougth CSI warnings and the likes.
Piracy is a service problem. People will always choose the way of least resistance and that seems to be piracy for the moment.
And as i said, some people will pirate stuff anyway no matter what. But those are people we don’t need to talk about because they wouldn’t pay anyway.
With what money do you suggest people who make the games or the movies should be paid? The way of least resistance is an incredible weak argument to justify taking the work of others without paying for it.
The money that their employer gives them?
How is it weak? And why do you ignore the other thing i wrote about the better product?
And the money grows on trees? You do realise that the money comes from people purchasing the product?
Slower software because of DRM is an issue for, I estimate, perhaps 1 % of the software that is pirated on a regular basis. If even that.
The few seconds of a screen you “have to wait through”, no, I do not think that justifies not paying for an entire movie.
not all of it.
You estimate wrong.
Why not?
I said this elsewhere and there are many, many examples of this. For example, in the age of streaming music services where you can pick between a decent handful that have basically everything on each, and that are pretty reasonably priced, how many people are still pirating a ton of music? I know there are some, but if I had to guess, peak music piracy has been gone since the mid oughts. On the other hand, peak video piracy probably hasn’t happened yet and probably will continue to grow until a similar situation is reached. Like, there is no way that Sony/Discovery didn’t just create another wave of piracy.
And oft-overlooked, but lots of them couldn’t pay. Especially today, arbitrary spending is limited for a lot of people, and I’d hazard a guess again that the vast majority can’t afford eight streaming services. They’ll buy a couple they find the most value in, and then when they’re out of money, how is anyone harmed if they just download content on some of the others?
I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.
In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.
Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.
If Sony openly stole from these people, a class action case against them should be a no brainer.
But you won’t see one because we both know it isn’t theft. They’re still garbage and trash, and so I have no problem pirating content, but calling what they did “stealing” is either incredibly ignorant or incredibly disingenuous.
No, actually I never was in that situation. Is there another incident like that apart from Sony and the Discovery channel?
And how does that mean all digital products are now okay to pirate?
I don’t have a problem with it morally because for things like what happened with Sony where people reasonably believe they bought something and would have access to it forever, but no. So fuck these companies I don’t give a shit about them.
But you’re absolutely right, and you’ll be downvoted for it. I want a luxury good and don’t want to pay the price, so I take it. It’s the same for virtually every other pirate. It’s not justified, it’s just morally ambiguous. But people need to convince themselves that they are justified, because they don’t want to admit they are commiting a bad act. Literally someone else in this thread is arguing its moral imperative to pirate. Lol
There are certainly aspects of this, but the primary reason I pirate is not because of this, and I suspect there are quite a few people for whom this is also true. In the early oughts once I started getting some money and in basically the infancy of the digital media age, I did try to buy stuff the corporate way. And I got burned by it too many times (probably 3-4, but really once is probably enough.) So now I don’t ever even attempt to “buy” something that is digital and DRM encumbered, and I’m more than fine “demoing” a game or whatever. By the time iTunes started selling movies and TV, my purchasing of content I expected to own was limited only to places that released DRM-free.
These days, I have a little more money that I could be spending on this type of content, but Sony just demonstrated exactly why I -never- will (and they’re just the latest in a long line.) You know that there were people that bought stuff that were still in the middle of watching it or just bought it a few minutes ago who Sony/Discovery effectively just robbed. I’m sure Sony/Discovery just created a many, many pirates with this action.
Further, there is far more content than I could possibly purchase, so the money I do spend on digital goods, I do so either with the expectation it’s ephemeral (like a subscription service - it’s impossible guarantee they’ll even stay in business) or that I actually own it, eg: DRM free. If I’m out of money to spend, I can’t find a moral or ethical reason that makes piracy wrong, and I think actually it’s likely that it benefits everyone. When I was younger especially, I couldn’t afford much, but I pirated a lot. In Doctorow’s case specifically, I’ve bought some of his books, but that’s only because I was able to download some of the earlier work and then spend the money when I had it. With bands in particular, I can guarantee they have made far more money from me than in a world where piracy didn’t exist.
If you apply this type of concept to basically anything else, no one would buy it. If you go to Target and grab a t-shirt, and someone whips out a contract -after- you’ve paid which they demand you sign before you can have the shirt that they can come to your home and take it whenever they want, no one would do it. Or that you can’t wear that shirt into a Walmart without getting sued. Or that you can’t cut the sleeves off or turn it into a scarf later. If you went back a second time and bought another shirt and they come and take them both, everyone would look at you like the sucker.
So yeah, if by some magic piracy stopped existing tomorrow, I wouldn’t suddenly be a Sony/Discovery customer, I’d just take up woodworking or some shit. While some piracy is probably always going to exist that’s as you describe, piracy is a service problem.
That was just a long winded way - s very long winded way - of demonstrating my point. Don’t get me wrong, weve followed a similar path and probably a major reason why we both say “fuck these assholes” and don’t feel bad about it.
But at the end of the day you said nothing to change the point that this is a luxury good you want, but don’t want to pay the price, so you take it.
I’m interested in where I can hear this explanation from the Noone Brothers.
youtu.be/a71_BespSCY?si=sM3DLjzLnpSZjKNL
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/a71_BespSCY?si=sM3DLjzLnpSZjKNL
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Piracy was never stealing. It’s copyright infringement, but that’s not the same as stealing at all. People saying it’s stealing have always been wrong.
YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A PURSE
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
-Character from some movie I pirated
In this economy with this level of corporate greed, I will download all the purses
You wouldn’t download a trillion dollars
I would infringe all over its copyright tho
You wouldn’t steal a baby!
You wouldn’t shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet.
But I would definitely take a shit in that helmet
…and then return it to his grieving wife?
And then steal it again?
.
You wouldn’t download fish and bread!
Jesus: hold my wine……
I bet you aren’t a software developer.
BINGPOT.
If I made software that people cared enough about to crack and pirate, I’d be happy that it’s popular enough for that to happen.
I am a software developer but I’ve only worked on SaAS and open source projects.
Tell me which so I can develop a competing service and steal your userbase!
of course you would. you would actually give them your house and wife, because you’re so proud now. right?
Lmao
Ah yes, because downloading Shark_Tale.mp4 is exactly the same as someone taking your house away from you and obtaining your wife and owning her as personal property.
Get some fucking perspective. I usually try to be polite online but this is just straight up moronic and you need to be told so bluntly.
I work on software which is pirated. It is even sold by crackers, who make money off my work. This does not make me proud.
What does make me proud is when a paying customer says they love a specific feature, or that our software saves them a lot of manual work.
.
Did you intentionally misunderstand the comment you replied to?
I think I replied to the wrong comment
Pride unfortunately doesn’t pay the bills. It’s terrific that you contribute to open source, but not all commercial software can be open sourced.
Popularity opens other ways to make money. Open source is profitable for GNU. Cory Doctorow does fine.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every commercial product to find profitability through exposure. I can attest to this first hand as I had published an open source Android game that was republished without ads. This led me to ultimately make the repository private, because I could not find a way to remain profitable while offering the source code and bearing the costs of labor and various cloud services.
On the flip side I guess I can take credit for the millions of installs from the other app… except they didn’t publicly acknowledge me.
Was it under a “copyleft” licence (like GPL) that forces the other one to also be open source? Did you use a licence that requires you are acknowledged?
If you did the first, you at least pulled someone else into open source work
Yes, GPL.
At the time I had seen that it had been forked into numerous private repositories, I believe roughly 100 or so. Perhaps I could have made a claim to have the other app taken down through Google Play, but I had no faith that this would be resolved, and even if it would be, it would be an ongoing problem.
As for whether they would have made open source contributions or not is in the end a moot point for me, because the only change that I observed was that they changed the colors and typeface and extracted the in-game menu into a separate welcome screen. I would not have merged this back into my repository.
While I myself violated the copyleft of my project by taking it closed source, I felt that it was my only resort. I’ve continued to develop the game over the past few years and by modernizing it and adding additional content, I’ve been able to significantly outpace my competitor.
For me, this ordeal had been a bit of an eye opener. I came out of university fully supportive of open source and when I discovered how this affected a real world project, I genuinely approached this situation understanding that it was just a risk I needed to accept. However, in the three years that it was available on GitHub, I received only two small PRs, and combined with the license violations, I felt that there was really no advantage to keeping it open source.
While this is just my anecdote, it has changed my perspective on how open source can realistically work more broadly. I honestly can’t envision any kind of business that needs to offset large production costs able to publish that content viably as open source.
Most people who work on open source projects have a lucrative job and work on Open Source on the side. I also volunteer, but I still need a job that actually pays me as well.
Reading some of the comments here it feels like speaking to little children who believe money magically appears on their account.
I’m a software developer, and I endorse the grandparent comment.
And you all just were happy and bro fisted people who ignored the licensing terms?
Yes.
Well, not literally, both because I’m more inclined to “high five” and you can’t do either gesture over the Internet. But figuratively, yes.
Why don’t you just gift away your software than? That’s an honest question. You obviously aren’t expecting to be paid for it, do you think in general developers shouldn’t earn money with software or is it just you?
Because I don’t make those decisions; my employer does. They ought to give it away, but they don’t.
(The software I’ve worked on has tended to be either (a) tools for internal company use or (b) stuff used by the government/large companies where the revenue would definitely have come from a support contract even if the code itself were free.)
ParsnipWitch seems to have been eaten by a grue.
That’s what happens when you forget to cast Frotz.
So, you would work for free for your employer?
That question is a red herring. My employer isn’t paying me to write software; they’re paying me to write the software they want instead of the software I want to make.
I am a system engineer who works on a project that is open source, AMA
The writer whose article is the subject of this post releases his books without DRM. He ends his podcast with a quote encouraging piracy. I found him because of an earlier book he released under a share alike licence
He has found that piracy increases the reach of his message, and increases his sales
That doesn’t answer my questions.
Your question is irrelevant as claiming “you either support 100% paid or you support 100% free distribution” is a false dichotomy.
Software developer who gives away my software for free as Free and Open Source Software. I agree with the grand-grand-parent comment.
You aren’t.
Yes I am. And the two companies I worked for both were small, offered their products for cheap and still had people pirating the modules or circumvent licensing terms. It’s a legit problem that a lot of people don’t see why they should pay for software simply because it’s sometimes easy to steal it.
.
So to be clear: was it possible to purchase and own the software? Or did users have to pay a subscription for a license? Because personally I’m getting sick of every piece of software thinking it’s appropriate to require a subscription.
How about you don’t use it if it is to be paid by subscription? How is it justified to go against an agreement just because you don’t like it?
If something is wrong you have a moral obligation to go against it. Be it legal or not.
All hail the Grand Nagus!
That’s why I am against indiscriminately pirating all digital goods. Because it’s morally wrong to have people work for you and then not pay them.
Naa, I'd just pirate it. Fuck the rent-seekers.
Are you against employees getting good wages?
So either way I’m not paying for it. In that case pirating is not a lost sale.
You need to disconnect the badness with the term stealing because you’re just wrong. Yeah it’s ip infringement. Yes it’s illegal. Yes people are impacted. And still… Not stealing.
I have been for over 20 years actually! What do I get for winning the bet?
Edit:
One of our games we actually ended up supporting a form of piracy. A huge amount of our user base ended up using cheat tools to play our game which meant that they could get things that they would normally have to purchase with premium currency. Instead of banning them, we were careful to not break their cheat tools and I even had to debug why their cheat tool stopped working after a release.
How did your employer pay your salaries? Or did your money perhaps came from those people who actually do pay for in-game currency in your games?
I am.
One of the great modern scams, was to convince society that unauthorized copying of data is somehow equivalent to taking away a physical object.
So you also believe people shouldn’t need a ticket for a concert, for example?
The performers time is not infinitely reproducible so your argument is apples to oranges.
But it is though: via the power of the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television?wprov…
Though you could charge for the experience of other sweaty humans, bad ventilation in some cases, and the thrill of potentially being trampled
But the time to create a novel, a videogame, or a news story is not infinitely reproducible, either. So when you are pirsting one of those things, you are actively reaping the benefits of someone’s time for free, like going to a concert without a ticket
There’s a difference between the performer’s time to create not being infinitely reproducible, and an user’s time to use the product being or not infinitely reproducible. Whether I’m pirating or buying a TV show, the actors were already compensated for their time and use for the show; my payment for buying actually goes to the corporate fat: licensors, distributors, etc.
Whereas when pay a ticket into a live concert, I’m actually paying for something to be made.
And where do you think that money comes from…?
It just magically appears /s Its disingenuous to try and justify piracy on the basis that the performers have already been paid. I don’t agree with studios either of course, customers are being scammed
From the investors who are paying the cheques of course. They are corporations, they can afford to spend some coins on [checks notes] living wages.
That’s exactly it. Investors. They are not donations. They expect a return on their investments.
And such “return” comes after the work, not before. So there’s no reason to condition the wages to do the work, on the potential that the work might be sold or not and to what amount of people. Now that would be air-quotes “stealing”!
And once again, where do you suppose it comes from?
How does one “condition wages”?
Is your argument simply that theft is a-ok 👌 when the person you’re stealing from is wealthy?
This only applies to cases where the artist/actor/whatever gets paid upfront. Most of the times, that does not happen. The creator of something only gets money when somebody buys what they have created (books, videogames, music, etc)
Even if they were paid upfront, they were paid off the idea that the company could make bank on their (ready yourself for the word in case it triggers): Intellectual Property.
In a future world where people have achieved their wish and the concept no longer exists, companies have no reason to pay creators ahead of time.
I can get that they’d not necessarily be paid upfront, but there is no possible legal contract in which they are to be paid only in the future, in causality, according to the performance of a ~~third~ ~ fourth party who is not in the contract. What, are the actors paying their weekly groceries with IOUs?
Every artist in every field get MAYBE paid a tiny bit upfront, and then a percentage of the sales. That’s how books and music work, for instance
Yeah, this is the real issue. That said it is a shame and a waste for the results of these efforts to be artificially restricted. I do really hope that one day we can find a way to keep people fed and happy while fully utilizing the incredible technology we have for copying and redistributing data.
I mean, we’ve kinda already found a way, and it’s ads. Now it’s obvious that the ad market as a whole is horrible (it’s manipulative, it has turned into spying, it does not work really well, it’s been controlled by just a handful of companies etc), but at least it’s democratic in that it allows broader access to culture to everyone while still paying the creators.
Personally, I would not be against ads, if they were not tracking me. As of now, though, the situation seems fucked up and a new model is probably necessary. It’s just that, until now, every other solution is worse for creators.
I don’t see anything wrong with paying for software or music or digital media. I don’t think that not doing so is theft - like I also don’t think that getting into a concert without paying is theft. By the way a concert is also not digital data, at least an irl one.
Why do you hate libraries?
A library card is your ticket there and libraries are paid via taxes, which is why they’re free at point of use.
Attending a free concert is not stealing. Breaking into the Eras tour is.
The library buys once and allows multiple people to read/watch each item without each person needing to individually purchase. Just like one person buying something and sharing it with others.
The main point is that digitization distribution is not a concert
Digital distribution is a service. You can steal a service.
If you fuck a prostitute and then don’t pay them, you are stealing from them.
If the prostitute uses a technique, and then you use the same technique without paying hem for reuse, is that stealing or does their direct involvement matter?
Prostitutes don’t become prostitutes because they know secret techniques.
The metaphor is describing the service provided, and that not paying for said service is indeed stealing.
Trying to make it a different metaphor requires a new framework from you, because you copying their actual service would be you pimping them, under this metaphor.
Someone sharing content on a peer to peer distribution network is not using the digital distribution service of whoever sold the content. They are not 'stealing' HBOs bandwidth to share Game of Thrones.
They are sharing a thing that they initially paid for from HBO at no cost to others, similar to letting your friends watch it with you on your TV at the same time. The only difference is scale.
HBOs service is “provide access to GoT”
If you provide access to GoT, by acquiring their content and then redistributing it, you are stealing the same way you pimping your prostitute is stealing.
Idk why people here love stealing but hate admitting it. It’s fuckin weird. Like the literal word used is “piracy” for shits sake lol
Piracy is used to equate copyright infringement with theft.
Is drawing your own Mickey Mouse and selling it theft? You did all the work and took nothing from Disney.
If you make a copy of Mickey Mouse at no cost to Disney and sell it, is that theft? You took nothing from Disney.
If you have a really good hamburger at McDonald's, make your own copy and sell it at your stores is it theft? No, and that is where the Big Mac came from, a copy of someone else's work.
Copyright infringement is not theft. Not all copies of something are copyright infringement. Pimping someone is human trafficking, not theft.
If you’re going to retype the code of a program from scratch, then your analogy is valid. If instead you are taking the production created through someone else’s labor without compensating them, then you are stealing from them.
Stop reading my comments if you aren't going to pay me.
It’s okay I won’t use their digital distribution system to pirate their stuff.
It’s just like falling to pay a prostitute you never fucked
You’re not using their distribution service when you pirate something. That’s the whole point.
Libraries get money via tax. What people here are arguing for is that others should work for them or free. Because game studios, for example, are overwhelmingly not paid via tax money. They are depending on people buying their software. And many software has ongoing costs.
I have never had a problem with people taking a tape recorder to a concert, even if it’s against terms of service
But you do understand that if nobody would buy a ticket, there wouldn’t be concerts?
Do you think I should be forced to pay for a ticket if I’m standing next to the concert venue on the sidewalk but can still hear the performance?
Literally no one thinks that. But you know that already, don’t you?
It’s theft of intellectual property…
Than why are there “marketing” campaigns that use that slogan to denounce piracy?
Honestly that’s only because people are intimidated by big words.
Don’t know, never heard of it.
youtu.be/HmZm8vNHBSU?si=wlEnYZKREf8L_E-o
It’s not even that old of a campaign lmfao.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/HmZm8vNHBSU?si=wlEnYZKREf8L_E-o
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
My guy I think maybe you don’t realize how old you are because that campaign is 25+ years old 🤣
That is just typical corporate disinformation and not reflective of modern opinions held by real people.
So… you have heard of it… lmfao.
Yes, which is the point that was being made that you missed… real people also believe this, maybe talk to more people…?
Yeah but not in a LOOOONG time 🤣
Real people don’t believe this. It’s just corporate propaganda.
There is no such thing as intellectual property - you can not own a thought.
Once again with the strawman.
Intellectual property is not a thought that you own. It’s an idea or digital creation. Something that actually takes time to make, often a whole lot of time. Something you never would have dedicated as much time to if you couldn’t be compensated for it.
I love how you guys play these mental gymnastics to justify this shit to yourselves.
You seem to not understand what the word own means and the difference between material and not material goods.
You seem to not understand what “theft” means.
I have a thing and than someone takes it away, so I can’t use it anymore. If somebody copies that thing - it’s not really theft.
My point is more - concepts from physical world don’t nessessary apply to digital world.
Yes, it absolutely is, by any standard. Ask the dictionary, ask the law, ask literally any authority on literacy and they all come up with the same verdict.
You’re just lying to yourself to justify doing whatever you want.
If you want to argue when piracy is and is not ethical, that is a different discussion we can have, and we’d likely largely agree. But saying that anything that is digital doesn’t belong to anyone is pure nonsense.
Sure buddy what ever makes you happy.
None of this makes me happy
Sorry to hear.
That’s strange, ignorance is supposed to be bliss.
You say “ask the dictionary” — multiple dictionary definitions as well as Wikipedia say that theft requires the intent to deprive the original owner of the property in question, which obviously doesn’t apply to copyright infringement of digital works.
You say “ask the law” — copyright infringement is not stealing, they are literally two completely different statutes, at least in the US.
So, what the hell are you talking about? Copyright infringement is not theft.
Like many words, “theft” has several different definitions, that being one of them.
Congratulations, that’s the 4th strawman in this thread. No one is talking about copyrights.
So what the hell are you talking about?
My brother/sister in Christ, everyone in this discussion is talking about copyright infringement. That is the actual legal name for what we colloquially refer to as “piracy,” according to, you know, the law, which you previously referenced as something we should look to.
It just seems that what you are saying is that people shouldn’t be paid if their work doesn’t create something physical.
Nope, that’s not what I’m saying. I just make a difference between copying, stealing, physical goods, digital goods and immaterial things. They are not the same.
Easy examples: original and copy does not really apply to digital works or two people on opposite sides of world can have the same thought but not have the same physical object at the same time, etc.
Please name for me something someone could create on a computer, that you would agree they should be paid for; even if they show a demonstration copy to someone.
What ever they can find someone to pay for. I my self pay or use legally free software for my work. I just do t think that if someone pirates a copy of adobe cs it’s equivalent to theft of a physical good. Completely ok in my book for private use a bit shady for commercial use - but adobe subscription model is shady in my book anyway.
So…say you like to use Sublime Text. And you pay for a premium license. How do you know the person you paid is the person who wrote Sublime Text?
In fact, let’s suppose one day you go online and it seems there are hundreds of excellent open source IDEs, all of which look a lot like Sublime Text, with different names. Who deserves the credit? It could be theorized that each of the authors you’re looking at DID pay for their initial copy; and since software is free to use in any way you like, it’s free to sell its use, right?
The above is not a problem in our world where the code of the application in question is the intellectual property of its original author - that even when he makes it open source, he retains the rights to put a donation/premium button in the help menu.
I’d still like a direct answer; what goods can most normal people produce on a computer that, absent intellectual property laws, they could still commonly sell? I’d also question what would be the path for highly niche specializations where, currently their work sells for high prices due to the constrain on supply. If everyone worked off of a FOSS donation model, they likely would not have so many four-digit donators.
Dude are you really that dense? I say that digital goods are not the same as physical goods and the concept of ownership or theft which applies to physical goods does not apply in the same way to non physical goods. Humans created different frameworks to be able to make money and integrate non material goods into economy. But that does not change the nature of things: unlimited number of people can have the same thought at the same time in different physical locations - that is not possible with physical objects; if someone copies an digital objects it’s still there for others to use, not so much if someone steals an objects.
If we are talking about copyright infringement, sure - but don’t equate copyright infringement to theft. And we can talk about use of immaterial goods, but no-one really owns them. Again - you can not own an idea, even if you create a legal framework that pretends that it’s possible - at any given time at any given place someone can come up with the same idea even as complex as say - periodic system of elements.
That’s a lot of words. So, what’s the answer to the question?
If copying is an action open to everyone, what can a person create on a computer, that they could expect other people to pay them for? What could they make that doesn’t have equal value simply to copy, than to buy from its creator?
If you not interested in my opinion feel free to leave at any point.
Quite simple because you value the works of others? If you want for example a specific art piece from a specific artist you commission it from that artist. We also don’t need to have a theoretical debate about it - since steam exist. You can have most games pirated or get them even cheaper (than on stem) from grey key market - but if one makes a convenient affordable (localized cost for example )distribution options, people will pay for things they use - because most people actually think that it’s the right thing to do (as long as they can afford it). No everyone is an asshole, most people are actually not.
I love how you bootlickers always deny that anyone could possibly have a principled objection to modern intellectual property laws. I don’t need to “justify” at all. I rarely even pirate anything, but I don’t believe I’m doing anything wrong when I do.
Wow look that’s 3 strawman in a row, you guys are exceptional at fabricating fictional arguments to tear down.
If you’re going to use that word you should at least know what it means so you don’t sound stupid.
Ah, it’s an idea, not a thought. Gotcha. Glad you cleared that up.
Who the fuck cares? Dinner also takes a great deal of time to make.
That’s not true. People have been telling stories and creating art since humanity climbed down from the trees. Compensation might encourage more people to do it, but there was never a time that people weren’t creating, regardless of compensation. In addition, copyright, patents and trademarks are only one way of trying to get compensation. The Sistine chapel ceiling was painted not by an artist who was protected by copyright, but by an artist who had rich patrons who paid him to work.
Maybe “Meg 2: The Trench” wouldn’t have been made unless Warner Brothers knew it would be protected by copyright until 2143. But… maybe it’s not actually necessary to give that level of protection to the expression of ideas for people to be motivated to make them. In addition, maybe the harms of copyright aren’t balanced by the fact that people in 2143 will finally be able to have “Meg 2: The Trench” in the public domain.
Why should an artist not be paid but a gardener or someone who build your house is supposed to be paid?
After all, humans build stuff and make stuff with plants without compensation all the time.
You just sound like a Boomer who thinks work is only work when the product isn’t entertaining or art.
Why are you making up a story about an artist not getting paid?
People who are not human fucking garbage care. If your position is that you simply don’t care about stealing from someone else what they spent years of time and money to create, you’re just a trash person and this conversation is moot.
.
It’s abundantly clear at this point that you don’t think people are entitled to compensation for work performed or the products they create so it makes perfect sense that you feel that way.
Nobody said that, just that copyright infringement isn’t stealing.
“Something you never would have dedicated as much time to if you couldn’t be compensated for it.”
Just telling on yourself 😂
What is that supposed to mean?
If no one thinks that, why are you saying it right now?
Actual theft of intellectual property would involve somehow tricking the world into thinking you hold the copyright to something that someone else owns.
…huh?
…no? What are you talking about? All it involves is illegally copying someone else’s work.
Isn’t ‘theft of intellectual property’ taking someone else’s work and try to pass it off as your own?
No.
Nah, if I stole their IP, they wouldn’t have it anymore
Nah, that’s not how that works.
Intellectual property is a scam, the term was invented to convince dumb people that a government-granted monopoly on the expression of an idea is the same thing as “property”.
You can’t “steal” intellectual property, you can only infringe on someone’s monopoly rights.
That is absolutely 100% a completely insane position. The fact that you feel entitled to literally everything someone else creates it’s fucking horrific and you are a sad person.
For someone who bitches all over this thread about people strawmanning their position, this is a pretty fucking great reply.
Hint: one can be pissed about people throwing around the not-based-in-legal-reality term “intellectual property.” One can be pissed about people using it as part of a strategy to purposely confuse the public into thinking that copyright infringement is the same as theft, a strategy which has apparently worked mightily well on you. One can be all of those things, and yet still feel that copyright infringement is wrong and no one should be entitled to “literally everything someone else creates.”
What you posted was a textbook definition of a straw man.
No, you have it wrong, one is part of a strategy to confuse the public into thinking it’s not, because it justifies doing whatever they want.
But they don’t feel that copyright infringement is wrong. How closely did you read the previous statements?
They literally said “Intellectual property is a scam”. I don’t know how else you could possibly interpret that
I don’t know how the original poster meant it, but one possible way to interpret it (which is coincidentally my opinion) is that the concept of intellectual property is a scam, but the underlying actual legal concepts are not. Meaning, the law defines protections for copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets, and each of those has their uses and are generally not “scams,” but mixing them all together and packaging them up into this thing called intellectual property (which has no actual legal basis for its existence) is the scam. Does that make sense?
Exactly, “intellectual property” doesn’t exist. It’s a term that was created to try to lump together various unrelated government-granted rights: trademark, copyright, patents, etc. They’re all different, and the only thing they have in common is that they’re all rights granted by the government. None of them is property though. That was just a clever term made up by a clever lobbyist to convince people to think of them as property, rather than government-granted rights related to the copying of ideas. Property is well-understood, limited government-granted rights to control the copying of ideas is less well understood. If the lobbyists can get people to think of “intellectual property” they’ve won the framing of the issue.
So it’s just a classic case of someone saying something entirely unrepresentative of what they actually mean, then arguing it to death…?
Could we stop having this meta-debate about what a person who is not either of us meant, and instead could you comment on the substance of my post?
Intellectual property is not a scam.
Ok, thanks for the engaging discussion. Goodbye.
If you think it’s okay to copy what someone else has created without their permission, for a product you have not paid for, we have nothing to discuss. It’s as simple as that.
This feels like an easy statement to make when it applies to Disney putting out new Avatar movies. Then, suddenly, you realize how extensively it causes problems when you’re a photographer trying to get magazines to pay for copies of the once-in-a-lifetime photo you took, instead of re-printing it without your permission.
“InfORMaTioN wANts tO Be FrEe, yO.”
That’s a pretty specific example. Probably because in many cases photographers are paid in advance. A wedding photographer doesn’t show up at the wedding, take a lot of pictures, then try to work out a deal with the couple getting married. They negotiate a fee before the wedding, and when the wedding is over they turn over the pictures in exchange for the money. Other photographers work on a salary.
Besides, even with your convoluted, overly-specific example, even without a copyright, a magazine would probably pay for the photo. Even if they didn’t get to control the copying of the photo, they could still get the scoop and have the picture out before other people. In your world, how would they “reprint” it without your permission? Would they break into your house and sneakily download it from your phone or camera?
This is the kind of situation I’m citing:
arstechnica.com/…/one-mans-endless-hopeless-strug…
A lot of photography is not based on planning ahead before being paid (a person requests Photo X, and then pays on delivery). Nature photographers, and in fact many other forms of artists, produce a work before people know/feel they want it, and then sell it based on demonstration - a media outlet notices their work in a gallery or on their website, and then requests use of that work themselves.
The struggles of the above insect photographer are even with the existing IP laws - they only ask for fair compensation from what they’ve put so much effort into, and VERY MANY media outlets don’t bother; to say nothing of giving a charitable donation.
So, they choose to rely on copyright, when they could do work for hire instead.
No, they ask for unfair compensation based on copyrights.
No - they CAN’T do work for hire. Are you listening?
“Hi. I do really cool photos. Please hire me to take one, and after you’ve paid me, you can see it.”
According to you, that’s a comprehensive resume and advertisement for a photographer, absent of a single graphic. According to you, a client could come to a consult about buying a photo, sneak their phone camera up to the print, and say “Never mind about payment! I just copied it. You can keep the print! So long, loser.”
You’re not even trying to imagine the impossible hurdles such a craft would have trying to earn enough to eat food every day, much less have a roof over their head. If you have nothing substantive to add, everyone on this site should be done with you.
Your inability to imagine anything other than the status quo is really depressing.
Imagine if startrek was written with IP in mind. Instead of all these wunderkinds being all gung ho about implementing their warp field improvements on your reactor you’d get some ferengi shilling the latest and greatest “marketable” blech engine improvements.
Fiction is much better without reality leeching in.
Star Trek was set in a future utopia. One of the key things about the show is that it’s a post-scarcity world where even physical objects can be replicated.
They definitely wrote the series with IP in mind… in that their view of a future utopia was one where not only did copyright etc. not exist, but nobody cared much about the ownership of physical objects either.
Jesus didn’t ask for permission to copy bread and fish. It’s a clear moral precedent that if you can copy you should.
What would the Jesus do?
Checkmate Atheists!
Jesus was the first pirate.
Nah, that would be Prometheus.
Wasn’t the idea and origin story of Jesus stolen from previous texts and religions lol
They forked Judaism
Pretty sure it was Marvel or something.
Athiests don’t have a problem with Middle-Eastern Socialist Jews, the ‘Christians’ sure do.
It’s not a scam. It is equivalent to it in some ways and not in others. In a capitalist and globalist society (like the one we’re in), goods have a price and a value. Copying data can be done without a price but it can’t be done without value. If someone created something of value and our society rewards that value with money and people need that money to survive, pay their bills, and support their families, then it’s not possible to copy that data without depriving the creator of its value.
Still not theft.
It is theft. It’s theft of value and income rather than theft of a good, though. If you can’t admit that then you’re not here to have a good faith discussion of the topic. You’re just here to bloviate and validate your own opinion.
So it’s theft if a lend/give a book to someone since they didnt pay for it…?
You’re just being dishonest now. I’ve answered this several times. If you’re lending or giving someone a book, you’re limited by the very physical nature of the fact that it’s an actual book. That’s not the same as pirating digital content or copying a book (which requires physical resources and costs). Your disingenuous attitude might work on children but it’s unwelcome in this discussion.
You haven’t answered it, you keep implying the person is doing it for profit or the people would be buying the books from the artist.
If they had no intention of buying it, how’s the artist losing out…? The access of digital or physical is moot, I’m asking why it’s different if it’s just sharing.
It’s not theft for these reasons, sorry.
.
.
Not a lawyer, but most of what you said is true, except:
We’re talking about the theoretical value the creator might get if you decide to pay for something. If you never had any intention of paying to access something if you couldn’t find a pirated copy, no value has been lost by the creator due to copying the data and therefore no harm has been done. The requirement for criminal liability should be that a harm has been inflicted by you beyond any reasonable doubt. Piracy as a deprivation of monetary value can not ever meet this requirement. Of course, the actual requirement is that you have committed a crime beyond reasonable doubt, so if corrupt legislators make piracy a crime, the justice system can obviously charge you with it despite it being victimless, hence the scam.
What you just highlighted is still true, even if you disagree with it. The social contract of goods and services that underpins our entire economic system globally is that, in order to ingest a good (in this case, media), you’re agreeing to pay someone for the time that it took them to create that good in exchange for the value and enjoyment you get in ingesting it. If you never had an intention of paying and wouldn’t access it if you couldn’t find a pirated copy, then you’d move on and ingest something else, if that social contract was being upheld. The point being that, if you didn’t pay for it, you wouldn’t get to read/watch/listen to it. You can’t definitively say that no harm has been done because you can’t definitively say that you wouldn’t pay for it if that was an option. If piracy wasn’t an option but all your friends bought whatever and were constantly talking about it, you’d likely end up paying for it to be able to partake in those discussions. Game of Thrones, for example, was both the most-watched show on HBO and the most pirated show. If it wasn’t available to pirate, it’s dishonest to say that none of the people that did pirate it wouldn’t have paid for it and wouldn’t have watched it.
Heads up! Plex media server with the Plex clients on all your devices is such a smooth experience. Highly recommended. And their “Watch together” feature is so nice for people that prefer to stay in bed and spend the winter binge watching next to a warm body.
Use Jellyfin. Stop relying on corps’ services.
Or Kodi
There’s a Jellyfin plug-in for Kodi and it’s pretty awesome
.
I would if it had most of the features that Plex does.
It does.
It doesn’t work on Samsung TVs, I tried
You’re inputs broken? Who the fuck cares about TV OS support?
Me with my limited budget
I spent 30 dollars on an orange pi zero 2 and installed android TV on it.
Can you afford 30 dollars? The privacy alone is worth the cost. Those samsung TVs are spyware central.
Sorry I can’t justify that cost
I dont believe you.
Can you browse web on your tv? That would work.
I was curious and tried that on my Samsung TV from 2016, it loads a grey background and does nothing
Maybe, I put it into dev mode to install the app, but it seems that it’s not functional in the current version
Oh, I meant browse to the webpage like you would on a computer. Is there not a browser available? I’ve only got dumb tvs, so sorry I can’t be of more help.
Ok.
So it has a dedicated music app?
It has music filtering?
Good 4k/x265 performance?
Has a third party (or built in) utility that shows me streaming usage?
Allows me to limit remote users to streaming from a single IP address at a time?
Let’s me watch something together with another remote user?
Has an app for most any device (like Plex or Emby) that does NOT require sideloading?
Has built in native DVR steaming/recording support?
Low effort response:
Dunno Dunno I think so Some data, yes Yes Yes but it’s jank Yes I believe so
So it doesn’t.
So you lied.
Just started my switch last weekend! Jellyfin is amazing so far. Just need to figure out how to export all the Plex metadata and posters to .nfo files.
There are surely tools to help, that has to be a common problem
I’ve been searching all over and haven’t found anything yet. The only answer seems to be to directly open up the Plex database in sqllite and navigate the schema myself and figure out how to export the specific tables and fields I want in some usable format. Once I have that, there are tools to generate .nfo files. 
Jellyfin is majorly based. I use it with Syncthing for all my media except games
And they recently added a feature where they tell your friends on the platform what kind of porn you’ve been watching ✌🏾 I think I’ll stick to Jellyfin.
Heads up! Plex is garbage and enshitefying their own services to make more money.
It is working well for my purposes, but I suppose I may have recommended something without knowing this part of the story.
Don’t feel bad. Plex is working wonders for me. Yea, there are things that annoy me about it, like the volume issues. But all in all, it passes the “wife test”.
99.9% of the people here who trip over themselves to shit on Plex and recommend any other service that requires IT knowledge to consistently and easily give access to family members, don’t have to deal with the “wife test”. Substitute “wife” with husband or mom, or grandma.
Heads up! Jellyfin is a great alternative!
I thought this community was for tech related news, not tech related OpEds.
Normally people pay to see the circus, but you could just sneak in though. It’s not exactly stalling, so what do you call that? The circus is still there, but you didn’t pay for it.
If lots of people start doing that, the circus probably won’t have enough money to keep on performing. Maybe they’ll get rid of the more expensive bits and just keep the cheaper ones in the future.
I’m legit unsure whether your argument is purposely bad or you just don’t know that it is.
Why is the argument bad? Please elaborate.
Not enough workers exploitation.
Because the issue at hand is more like if you bought tickets to the circus, but when you went to go see it you were told the circus isn’t there anymore and you don’t get a refund.
That I would definately call stealing, and if I wanted to see the circus the next time it was in town I would absolutely sneak in.
A more honest analogy for the situation was that there are very few incidents of circuses doing that and now people demand it’s morally justified to get free entrance to every circus, concert, fair, museum, …
“Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” though, right?
It’s not just a few circusses. Every major circus company seems to consistently pull this trick.
But people aren’t just sharing media that is affected. They pirate everything, even when there are ways to buy and own it.
“Some people speed on roads, so all roads are bad.”
This conversation is about media you can’t buy and own.
It’s like you bought a circus membership to watch the circus at a particular venue as many times as you want. You watched the circus a few dozen times, then one day the circus announces they won’t be going to that venue anymore and you can’t watch it anymore.
This is where the analogy breaks down, because the circus requires people and an area to operate in. Digital movies and TV shows should just require my device to watch it on.
To strain the metaphor further: The Circus leaving the venue isn’t leaving town, they’re just moving across the street. But your tickets are only valid for the old venue. Do you expect people to purchase new tickets or just sneak in?
There’s also the people who purchased a lifetime membership to the circus and then were told the next day “The circus will no longer be going to that venue anymore after the end of the month.”
The expectation is that I purchased this media and can watch it as much as I want, whenever I want, for the rest of my life. When companies say “Lol, no. Fine print” reasonable people aren’t going to shrug their shoulders and say “You got me, I guess I’ll purchase more things.” They’ll say “screw that, I can get it for free and keep it forever, what service are you providing that’s better?”
It’s a thousand times better than this empty garbage. How does this have any upvotes?
If you pay for the circus and they take away the circus so you can’t see it, and then replace it for Circus2, did you own a ticket for the circus?
That would depend on the terms of sale.
Unlikely as what you’re implying sounds like a get-out clause in favor of the trader which is not valid.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treatment/unfair-contract-terms/indexamp_en.htm
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Without details of the hypothetical scenario made here, we cannot know if that’s the case. If the ticket purchaser was unable to see the circus because their flight home was delayed, the circus has no obligation to refund them. If attendance of “Circus 2” is offered to the purchaser due to the cancellation of “Circus 1” under the conditions of the original ticket purchase, then it’s unlikely to be an unfair contact.
There are all kinds of details missing here that we can freely speculate about.
What would you call it if you buy a piece of art and hang it on your wall, then a couple months later the company that sold you the art comes into your home, takes the art away, and says you don’t own it anymore?
If enough companies do that people are going to stop paying for art.
People are pirating products that can be purchased and owned.
People are also “buying” products that are being taken away from them by the license holders of the purchased work. The article explains this with several examples in different markets.
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Of course they do, there will always be people who pirate. Most people dont mind paying for stuff and services if it respects them.
There is Baldurs Gate 3 for example, you can buy it on GOG without DRM, and I highly doubt it made a dent in their sales.
Because the majority of people do not pirate because they truly believe they are doing something morally good. That’s laughable.
If it really was about going against the licensing schemes these people would all buy on GoG. Instead they rather pirate the games and use Steam for the rest.
The majority of people pirates stuff because they feel entitled to it and are greedy and because it works and is easy to do. They do not respect those who put the work into the music or the movies or the games.
What makes me so angry about it is the hypocrisy. Since these are often the same people who are virtue signalling about how capitalism is bad since employers are too greedy to pay good wages.
The irony is quite strong in this.
Yeah i agree, that most people do not pirate because of morality, but because pirating is more convenient meanwhile being way cheaper, you said it yourself. I do not watch a whole lot of movies or shows, but for example if i could buy Arcane, I would, but instead I can only watch it if I buy a Netflix subscription. I dont like this arbitrary limitation to be honest, you could buy movies back in the day.
For games, it is the case, because steam is actually a good service. People got what they wanted from Baldurs Gate 3 plus it is on a service which gives you tons of features. For example netflix on the other hand just limits how you consume content instead of enabling you other features.
One more thing, when Netflix was the only streaming service, people actually paid for it. Now that it is worse, pricier and there are more competing streaming services, it is way more convenient to pirate.
People are also shoplifting from stores. That’s irrelevant to what is being discussed here
Then the example about the painting is also irrelevant.
The example about the painting was analogous to what the link article is talking about.
If that was a normal purchase, then that’s clearly theft.
If it was art leasing, there’s probably a long contract with details about a situation like this. No matter what the contract says, the local law might still disagree with that, so it can get complicated. The art company might be violating their own contract, although it is unlikely. The company might be within the rights outlined in the contract, but they might still be breaking the law. You need a lawyer to figure it out.
Well it was sure we fuck presented as a normal purchase. Adding legal text to where you sign the cheque saying “you may come to my house and take this away at any time” doesn’t make it less bullshit.
The world is full of bad contracts. It’s truly sad that we decided to accept them without making numerous alterations here and there.
It’s not possible to make changes to a digital contract. The only option is to not make the “purchase” and acquire it elsewhere.
More people should let the service provider know that their contract sucks and that they refuse to pay for the service under the proposed conditions. Most people don’t even read the contract, so I don’t think the situation is going to improve any time soon.
That company is also going to show you the agreement you signed that says they can do that, which is the current situation with digital goods. People are still buying them.
Nobody said otherwise. The argument isn’t “this is illegal”, it’s “this is bullshit.”
And the argument being put forward is that people shouldn’t be.
That’s a bad analogy because there’s finite space for people to watch the circus, meaning that seating for the show they conforms to fire codes, etc. is finite.
It’s also a bad analogy because someone who sneaks into a circus trespassing, not stealing.
I agree that the analogy isn’t perfect. As you pointed out, people sneaking in are taking space from people who would be willing pay for the service.
If you could somehow sneak into Netflix and take some of their bandwidth or their ability to provide the service to paying customers, then the analogy would work. In reality though, people pirate Netflix shows and movies by torrenting, and that has no impact on Netflix’s bandwidth.
The way I see it, circus and digital videos are a service. You are supposed to pay for both, but you can easily see both of them for free. Comparing these two with stealing just doesn’t work IMO.
You could also compare it with watching a football match from the other side of the fence. Although, in reality, you wouldn’t get a very good view of the game, whereas torrenting movies gives you a great view. Interestingly, the football example doesn’t involve trespassing, but you still get to enjoy a part of the service. All analogies break at some point.
That’s not a fair example, because 5 Euros has an intrinsic value. The theft here is of intellectual property. Here’s an analogy:
The action is still harmless. Information should be free.
www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html
How is creating a popular a novel any different than creating a popular object? Hundreds of hours of labor go into both and the creators are entitled to the full value of said labor.
Say you have an amazing story about the vacation you took last year, and told all your friends about it. You would justifiably be pissed if you later found out one of your friends was telling that story as if they had done it. It’s the same for someone who writes a book or any other form of media.
But they aren’t claiming they made it though.
I bought a book, I lent it to my friend to read. That shouldn’t be different than copying it so we could both read it at the same time and talk about it.
No one is claiming we done it.
It is completely different. You can’t loan one book to 300,000 friends. By doing that, you’re stealing income from the author who wrote the book. If you, instead, recommended the book to your friend and then they bought it, you both get to read it and the author still gets to make a living.
So if I share that book with 50 friends over the course of the year that’s not taking income, but if it copy it 50 times and share it in a day it is? I could also sell it to my friends or even rent it out to them, that’s all money in My pocket and legal, until I copy it instead.
No, it still is. You’re just physically limited to one person until they finish reading which limits the damage. You can’t physically share it to them in one day. Either way, the author isn’t getting paid for their work.
If you actually like the book, you should encourage people to pay for it so that the author can make more of what you like. The way you’re doing it, the author will have to get another job and won’t be able to write because they can’t pay their bills.
Edit (since OP edited): The point still stands. You can’t sell one book to multiple people and “renting” it is still taking money from the author even if the damage is physically limited to one item.
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I do see where you’re coming from, but not necessarily. If my friend has zero interest in ever buying said book (or can’t afford to) and would never become a paying customer, there is no downside to sharing a copy. In fact, if they like the book enough, they may even become incentivized to buy themselves a copy or look into the author’s other work legitimately when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
This is how/why I pirate most games. I don’t have the type of pocket money to spend on games I don’t know I’ll love, so I pirate them first. If they’re good enough, I’ll buy the actual game on steam later. Spider-Man, Baldur’s Gate 3, Cassette Beasts, etc. are all games I plan to buy when I can afford to. And I can promise I never would have bought Slime Rancher 2 if I hadn’t pirated the first one at some point and enjoyed it.
I’m exactly the same way. The point is that you’re paying for the things you want to see more of. That’s where my prior comments about value matter in this context. If your friend wasn’t interested in purchasing and you share a copy, then there’s no difference on the value side other than, without your purchase, they wouldn’t be able to ingest that content. The risk of the opposite, though, is far greater when there are no physical limitations. Even in the library scenario someone mentioned earlier, the libraries are still paying for the initial purchase and the number of rentals inform their future purchases so the author still retains some value from that and their livelihood is still supported.
Mind you, I’m not against piracy. What I’m against is people pirating and then pretending that it’s not stealing. You may not be stealing a physical item but you’re still stealing value and income from the creator. What you’re doing at least returns value and income to creators whose work you enjoy. I feel like people here ignore that because they’re not personally affected by it.
I own a production company. We make everything from graphics, video, audio, 3D models, to custom per-project hardware builds. A few years ago, a small subset of my team decided we wanted to make a video game for iOS/Android. We released it at 99 cents. On Android, it was available for pirating on day 1 and we had planned for that inevitability so our player stats included a tag in our reporting that recognized that. We only got about 300,000 downloads worldwide on Android and, of those, about half were pirated plays. If 100,000 of those people had paid the 99 cents, that would have been life changing for us, at the time. We could have paid off the house we were using as an office at the time. We blew it off initially as “eh, they probably wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” or “they probably pirated it just because they could and tried it once and stopped playing” but, much to our surprise, the player population that played it the most (over 70,000 that played for at least 10 minutes every day) were the pirates. We even added cosmetic transactions after the fact to try and recoup some of those users and made packs for 99 cents. They kept playing but pirated the packs and used them for free. The game studio side of things died and we shut it down afterwards. If even half of the half of people who pirated and played the game daily had paid any one of the 99 cent costs, we could have funded more content or more games. I find it hard to believe that that many people hated our game but still played daily and didn’t even like it enough to pay slightly more than the cost of a stamp for our team’s work.
You know who pays for our work every time? Movie studios, production companies, video game developers. People shouldn’t be surprised when they’re feeding the very monster they’re complaining about and killing the alternatives and, worse yet, attempting to justify their theft as being moral. Just admit you’re stealing and let’s be adults and figure out a way to not have to keep the existing, shitty system afloat.
Either way the person is losing out, so the end result is the same so it shouldn’t matter in the end. I’m sorry you missed this point. If I can lend someone a book, there is no reason why the situation should be different if it’s digital or a copy. The artist isn’t missing out since they never had the intention of buying in the first place.
But hey, throw insults, that’ll get people on your side.
The end result is not the same. You can’t physically reproduce and share a book fast enough, for free to create the same dent that you can by digitally reproducing something ad infinitum. I didn’t miss the point. Again, you missed the point of the thread that you responded to. You didn’t respond to the main thread on this post, you responded to a comment that the authors of this content deserve the income and value of the media you’re ingesting.
You’re just a dishonest person. I don’t want you on my side. You don’t see the harm you’re causing and then attempt to justify it because you’re a bad person who doesn’t care if you’re hurting people and stealing their livelihood just so you can have something like an entitled child. On top of that, you keep pretending like I missed the point when you keep ignoring the point you responded to. Just go away.
Why are you assuming it’s being done for profit? I already said it was to share with my friends. You can’t take money from an artist if they never had the intention of buying in the first place.
If lending a book isn’t theft, sharing a digital copy isn’t either. Obviously making a business and profiting from it is entirely different, but that shouldn’t have to be specified.
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There is a difference here between lending or resale of a physical product. Can you sell a second hand book? Typically, yes. Can you do mental gymnastics to draw a parallel to reselling a digital version? Evidently, also yes.
Why would reselling a physical copy be different than a digital…?
Thank you for saying this. I get downvoted here all the time for reminding people here that the creators of these works need the income from this to survive, pay their bills, and take care of their families. You may not be stealing the movie/book/music or whatever but you are stealing income from the creators. People here don’t like hearing that because it throws a wrench in their mental gymnastics they use to justify piracy.
The only justified piracy is the kind that results from media that is no longer legally available for purchase. In cases like this Sony situation, as this article points out, not only do customers know about this in advance but the industry has been vocally and incessantly warning people about this. Consumers who still have Sony and Adobe money for this stuff are just as much to blame for this. They weren’t willing to not have something on principle so they bought it anyway and these companies took that as a sign that this behavior is ok.
Next time, vote with your wallet and don’t buy their shit in the first place. Find ways to buy things that don’t use this shit and have some self-control and don’t buy the things that do. This whole Veruca Salt “but I want it, daddy” bullshit has put us in this situation and the situation where everything now is a subscription and everyone is harvesting our data. Keep giving them money and they’ll keep giving you more of this horseshit.
Piracy can only be considered to be depriving someone of some good if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the pirate would have paid for access to the content had they not had a pirated copy available. Not only is this not true in the majority of cases, it’s also completely impossible to prove in 99.9% of the cases where it is true.
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We aren’t talking about plagiarism, the friend would be telling the story about you still.
Spoken word narratives are such an integral part of culture, imagine if your grandpa told you to never repeat any of the stories of his childhood because “he owns the copywrite”. Insane. That’s what you are suggesting.
Ideas are not objects. Having good ideas shared incurs no loss to anybody, except imagined “lost potential value”.
I’m saying that those who create are entitled to the value of what they create. If a company asks to look iver some of your work before hiring you, says that they aren’t interested, and then you see them using that work afterwards i doubt you would be saying “well, information should be free”.
If you want to write stories, draw pictures, make movies or webshows and distribute then for free ti everyone, then that’s a noble initiative, but creatives depend on what they create for their livelyhood.
Here I was thinking we all deserved a giant meteor.
The publisher example is one of a difference in power and you’re saying that IP is there to protect the author. Except this whole video is about how that doesn’t happen anymore. The law is written and litigated by those with power.
That happens already.
If the situation is reversed, the hammer comes down on the independent artist.
We need stronger worker and consumer protections. Copywrite is a shit solution.
FTFY.
Including your personal information?
Strawman. Is intellectual property the same as personally identifiable information? Can you doxx a director using their movie?
Comment I replied to said information.
No reasonable person who says “information should be free” is also lumping in PII with that. It’s clear from the context in this thread that they are referring to media and knowledge (seeing how the post itself was about media and everyone has been discussing the justifiability of things like piracy amid the erosion of digital ownership), not about posting where people live and shit, so you bringing up personal information is at best a misunderstanding of what the saying “information should be free” actually means or at worst a logical fallacy and deliberate attempt to derail the conversation.
Also, just saying, personal information is currently free regardless of whether or not it should be or whether it’s legal or ethical. There are thousands of websites indexable by search engines that list people’s information for anyone to take, mostly from data breaches or otherwise scraped from the internet. It’s one of the main ways scammers get your contact info. There are even websites specifically dedicated to archiving doxxes, hosted in jurisdictions with no privacy laws so the victim can never get it removed. Search your own phone number or email, I bet you’ll find it listed somewhere possibly with a ton of your other information. Unlicensed movies are immediately struck off the internet as soon as they’re discovered though, funny how the law takes pirating movies more seriously than the posting of private information that can literally ruin people’s lives and make them a target of assault, stalking, vandalism, etc.
What is exactly “information” in this statement? Is a feature length movie “information” that needs to be shared freely? At 4K freely or will HD suffice for the meaning? Or is it just a plot summary? I’m in the camp that will argue just the latter.
Stealing involves depriving the original owner of access or possession of the item. Duplication is not stealing because the item being duplicated is not taken away.
Even if you consider it stealing, then what defense do you have for the people who paid the price that would supposedly allow them to have it permanently and suddenly it still gets taken away? That’s not stealing? Even if we accepted that piracy by people who didn’t pay is theft, why should people who already paid for the media not be able to access it from somewhere else if their original access is denied?
There is more nuance to it than that. The copyright holder still owns whichever copies are made, whether or not they are made with their permission. One could argue that by making a duplicate, you have taken possession of a copy without consent from its owner.
As for your other example about a copyright owner revoking access; this is completely subject to the terms of sale of that item. Without details of the license agreement it’s impossible to say if the terms were breached.
That is an extremely recent construct largely promoted by the big media companies themselves. For the vast majority of human history, intellectual property was not a thing and works could be freely copied, modified, redistributed, etc and it was considered normal. When copyright first came into effect, it was for a fixed period that was relatively short, after which anyone could use the work however they wanted. That was the original intent of copyright, which was only to give artists an exclusive period to profit from their work without competition, not exclusive rights for all eternity. Disney was the one that lobbied for copyright terms to be extended, then extended again, then again, and critically, extended to include the life of the “person” that created it, but since corporations are also “persons” under the law and just so happen to not have bodies that can die, effectively corporate media is copyrighted forever.
Also, those media companies claim to be such big proponents of intellectual property protection, they would never, ever do the exact same goddamn thing to independent artists, with the only difference being that they actually profit from it when the vast majority of “piracy” is for personal use, and that they know for a fact that independent artists rarely have the resources or time to actually do anything about it, right? Riiiiiiight?
mashable.com/article/disney-art-stolen-tiki
insidethemagic.net/…/disney-under-fire-for-allege…
insidethemagic.net/…/super-nintendo-world-stolen-…
techcrunch.com/…/dbrand-is-suing-casetify-over-st…
nintendolife.com/…/looks_like_nintendo_accidental…
thegamer.com/microsoft-joins-sony-in-stealing-art…
gamerant.com/sony-stolen-art-playstation-network/
ganker.com/sega-stole-from-an-artist-608965/
If anything, shouldn’t small independent artists get more protection under the law if copyright was really meant to benefit artists and safeguard the creative process like it claims it does? The FBI can arrest and jail you for pirating a movie, but when a corporation commits the same crime there isn’t even a whiff of consequences. At this point we really ought to ask what the real purpose of copyright is after all the changes made to it and who it’s actually meant to protect.
Gee, it almost sounds like the laws regarding what they can and can’t put in those terms of sale are nowhere close to fair and were specifically written by the giant media holding companies to exclusively benefit them and screw over the consumer! Laws and regulations can’t possibly be immoral and corrupt right?
Dude, thank you for reminding me I’m not fucking insane.
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Especially telling when it’s the corporation that owns the copyright, and not the actual artists and other workers that actually created it.
Accidentally deleted my comment. Spelling…
To separate the worker from owning the means of production?
I mean, at the low level, sure. “Bart Simpson”, the concept, was created by a person. Bart Simpson, the character, was developed and built as a collaborative effort of several people spanning the course of decades, and continues to be developed by teams of people.
The copyright shouldn’t belong to an individual. The rights to the intellectual property need to be protected, but so too do the rights of everyone who contributed to building it.
Unfortunately, corporations are really the closest proxy we really have.
Thats what’s really exciting about new media, and small time collaborators, and niche content. HomeStar Runner doesn’t belong to Disney, or Fox, or Viacom. He belongs to the small group of people who created him and his friends. The same could be said for Kurzgesagt, or The Lockpicking Lawyer, or both the Nostalgia and Angry Video Game nerds.
[citation needed]
The closest thing we have to “representation proxy to a community of people who helped author a thing” is an author’s guild, for example. And things like the Writers’ Guild already exist, I’m sure there’s a Drawers’ Guild too. Not as close, but more solidly defined, would be a union, oh guess what? We have those, too.
In comparison, a “corporation” has a whole lotta fat.
Corporations don’t need you to shill for them.
I think my point is getting lost in the one pro-corporate part of it…the corporation is responsible for nearly all of the risk, and that investment is what ultimately creates the content. They absolutely do deserve some stake in its IP, just not necessarily nearly as much as they currently have.
This is why I love new media. Low enough startup costs that small individuals and small groups could easily creat and own their own content and IP. It’s really the big investments that complicate everything.
It used to be necessary to sell your soul to the establishment to get your content in front of a large audience, but it’s not anymore.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s only in this specific context and conversation that I would call Google the good guys, or at least the lesser of two evils. Obviously context matters.
No and no.
The creators take more of a risk by going with a corporation. Corporations have hella money, they can afford to spend some on [checks notes] living wages.
Once again no. The creators do.
I’m not saying the creators don’t. You’re saying the people who bankroll it don’t. I say that’s a bit unfair.
Yeah, the creatives don’t get reimbursed nearly as much as the (top) talent, and them not as much as the owner class. That’s a tale as old as time. I don’t think that copyright is really the demon you’re making out to be here though. It’s also worth noting that only the top talent really gets the good money. Most of the cast is also pretty unequally paid. That goes to the creative side as well…for every Spielberg or Tarentino or Vince Gilligan there are tens of hundreds of very skilled writers not getting their fair shake.
And I think we’re mostly in agreement, I just think that whoever bankrolls should get a fair share of the profits. I think that’s a fair take. The problem isn’t the copyrights, it’s that the bankrollers are getting way more than a fair share.
And again this is the problem new media solves. You don’t need to bend to the studios to get your content in front of a big audience…and even better, you can get your content in front of a niche audience, too, which is something the studios couldn’t really do very well. They used to be the roadblock and you had to play by their rules, and that’s no longer the case.
The corporations exist to extract as much ownership as possible from the creative class, it is not a proxy ownership by those doing the collaborative work. See the recent WGA strike as an example. Unions and co-ops are the proxies, not corporations.
I absolutely agree with you that the arguments you put forward is the way it should be. However, currently, as we see here in the case of Sony, there is a perceived unfairness in what consumers expect from a license agreement and what is in fact in them.
Time will tell if our judicial system acknowledges that it’s reasonable to assume that if you are offered a digital good “to buy” that it will remain available ad infinitum and hence Sony held to be liable.
In a strict legal sense I think you are right. There is some good rationale for copyright, going all the way back to the 1700s, I think. Most artists pretty much need copyright in order to survive. Also, yes, companies should have the ability to freely negotiate contracts, and to have legal protection against someone breaking those contracts. And, yes, these slogans about piracy not being stealing are legally unsophisticated and facile. That said, you can probably sense the “however” coming…
HOWEVER, the context is important. All law is based on an implied social context. When companies engage in practices that poison the market, they break the implied social contract underlying the laws that protect them. The result is retaliatory behavior by consumers. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about media and games or food prices. People will steal when they feel the law, as applied in a particular social context, is no longer fair. It isn’t morally right, but it isn’t exactly wrong either. It’s more of an inherent market mechanism to curtail shitty corporate behaviour, and that’s why governments tend not to interfere too much with individual downloading.
When there is no easy way for consumers to fight back, that’s when governments need to get involved. Ridiculously high drug prices being a good example.
I believe we are arguing the same side of the argument.
By duplicating, you’re depriving the company to the exclusive right to copy that thing. But I don’t think stealing some nebulous concept of a monopoly like that is wrong.
The keywords: company and monopoly.
Only if you subsequently distribute it does that “theft” break the law.
Also money doesn’t actually have intrinsic value. It’s just fancy paper. Things like food and shelter and clothing, and the tools and materials with which to make them, that’s what intrinsic value is.
Making a copy without the copyright is against the law, no matter which way you slice it. Egregious large-scale infringement is usually prosecuted, whereas it’s otherwise settled civilly. Nevertheless, both constitute copyright infringement.
Indeed I had the terms confused: it’s incorrect to say fiat currency has intrinsic value; it has instrumental value.
Nani?
If what you care about is the abstract idea that the idea of something can be owned, whether the book is in the library or in my pocket doesn’t change the fact that the idea of the book is by the author. I can move the book wherever - across even national borders if I want to - and that “intrinsic value” doesn’t change.
That second dot should be when you make an identical copy of the book without taking it from the shelf. When I get an unlicensed copy of a book, the original is never out of place, not for a moment
Piracy was huge in Australia back when films were released at staggered times across the world. If it was a winter release in America, it would release six months later in the Australian winter. Try avoiding spoilers online for six months.
Piracy is less now because things are released everywhere at once and we aren’t harmed by a late release
Now when companies pull shit like deleting content you think you bought, they encourage people to go around them. Play Station can’t be trusted? Well there are piracy channels that cost only a VPN subscription (and only while you’re collecting media, not after, while watching and storing it) and people will be pushed to those
Taking a product from the shop without paying and returning the item later is still stealing.
There was a story on Reddit where man stole a few grands of $ in products over a few years at his local grocery shop, and one day when he wanted to return what he stole he was arrested on site.
The issue here is that there is a period of time where the shop does not have the item.
If you are trying to make an analogy to digital copies, this still doesn’t hold water. The copyright holder does not have ownership of your copy.
The copyright holder should never have ownership of my copy. If I purchase it it should be mine to use. The shop should not be allowed to come to my house and take it away.
The key difference here is that you only own the copy when the copyright holder sells it to you. I don’t know if you’re being obtuse, but this shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp. If it helps in understanding, try replacing “copy” with “product” and “copyright holder” with “store.”
Right, I should own my copy. I have purchased this copy and it’s mine now. It’s bullshit for a store to say “now that we no longer sell the thing your purchased previously you’re not allowed to own it anymore.”
Ownership is one condition that a copyright holder might offer, but that’s not guaranteed. Video rental shops would allow unlimited consumption for a limited time period, for example. We can argue all day about the differences and what consumers want versus the conditions under which content producers currently operate. I am personally also extremely frustrated by that, and I vote with my wallet: I do not subscribe to services that I find too restrictive or too expensive.
Where I am in the minority, however, is my position that copyright infringement is illegal, unethical and can in any way be legitimized.
Some people would call it counterfeiting but we won’t do that , right ?
Depends on the intention. Most “illegal” copies are distributed for free so that’s not counterfeiting (there’s no intention to deceive or defraud)
That’s probably going into semantics and what the law says, it’s different for every country.
What’s happening with games and softwares are cracks and repacking, it’s manipulating few parts of the original product to provide partial or sometimes full functionality. This is an infringement of intellectual property and not a counterfeit.
For podcasts, music and movies it’s usually a rip, out of vinyls, lossless or a high definition source. These are copies, not manipulated in any way.
Maybe camrips are truly a counterfeit.
Not unless it’s distributed.
Copying copyrighted works is not a crime. Distributing those copies is a crime.
Yea there might be an intent to make profit or resell in there
Copyright doesn’t explicitly say anything about distribution. Distribution is usually used to determine the scale of the crime and calculating incurred damages.
I have yet to see country that doesn’t mind copying their currency unofficially but I’m open to suggestions 🫡
Correct, that would be counterfeiting if you would copy money with the intention to deceive or defraud others. That doesn’t contradict what I said.
IMHO it does contradict what you say. Intention doesn’t matter. If you copy currency , you either have to make apparent its fake currency or you are might get in trouble with law. Intention, aka motive is hard to prove and if proven doesn’t make it legal to copy official currency.
Further to that, paying for a product then the seller taking that product away from you without refunding your payment is stealing.
Don’t forget adjusting for inflation and real money being given back not some shitty gift card
YES! This IS stealing!
Man does “Google Nest” come to mind. Buys company. Pushes it all over the place. “Eh, I think we’re done. Whole ecosystem useless now.”
Which is par for the course with Google and not at all a surprise, but sheesh.
If you have sex with, but don’t pay a prostitute, are you stealing?
Did they consent to the free sex?
No because the entire metaphor is built on the concept of prostitution
Prostitutes can’t have a romantic life unless they’re paid to do so? This is such a bizarre metaphor, let’s see where it leads 🍿
Also: if there’s no consent it’s not steeling, it is rape. It’s really strange to think how because of someone’s profession we recontextualize the act as steeling and not rape. Ie it’s like saying one is steeling from prostitutes while not addressing the fucking rape. This is your brain on Milton Friedman economics - where your body is capital and it has a price.
Hey dude it’s called a metaphor. Sex is a fleeting service.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.
You buy it and have it for a short period of time.
Yes, that’s the definition of a service. Just not sure what your point is about talking about prostitutes as if one was steeling a service when they get raped. Steeling from creatives is rape or something?
The metaphor is both limited and clear and any failure to understand is so absurd as to seem intentional.
Wait, instead of metaphor you meant a literal example? Absurd indeed to compare rape to downloading something illegally.
Hey dude put your effort elsewhere
Working on it
Thank you for fighting the good fight. This dude is unhinged
Piracy is also not at all like stealing services, just as it is unlike theft of real items.
Not paying a prostitute because you have a sexual partner at home who meets your needs is closer, but also not the same
Except your literally performing the same service, which I paid by everyone but you. Game of Thrones is expensive. Subs pay for it.
Fuck man I’m pro-piracy because I do it to, but it is absolutely stealing. Make peace with it.
Stealing is the wrong word for it though as software piracy does not deprive the owner of the thing copied.
There are arguments that it is nett good even as it gets people into an author, singer, game company, while they cannot afford it and they may become a good customer for that author, singer, game company later in life
This new problem where companies revoke your licence to content is the industry shooting itself in the foot so I don’t care about the ethics of it, if they don’t sell me a product for me to own like I own a paper book, I’ll take a copy without licence
How is the owner not deprived of your copy? Have you given it back to them? It’s an odd thing to mince over words like “theft” and “stealing.” If it’s the words that bother you, perhaps consider this: should it be permissible to consume a digital good without consent of the copyright holder?
If the copyright holder wants more exposure, that is up to them to decide. It’s absolutely unreasonable to do so on their behalf and claim it’s somehow doing them a favor. With that logic, any form of theft can be legitimized.
Put 5 eur in my pocket and i have to dance
The “taking a physical object” analogy doesn’t even give us anything useful.
Most stores of perishable goods don’t want to hold onto their stock; they want to give it away, ideally in a way that makes them money. In many countries, they will even give away the last excess to homeless people that would not reasonably be able to afford it.
If there’s one orange seller in a town that’s put effort into a supply train to bring oranges there, but someone has shared a magic spell that lets them xerox oranges off the shelf, then that orange seller never gets paid, and has no livelihood; it doesn’t help him that he still has all of the oranges he brought to market, he’s not going to eat them all himself.
I expect the morally deprived will answer “Not my problem.” Yet, it’s going to be an issue for them when they try to run their own business.
The irony of hiding a pro-piracy post behind this 🤦 <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9813f044-3884-435e-bfce-e6668d27f785.jpeg">
web.archive.org/web/…/playstationed/
Thanks, but I was actually referring to the Tyler James Hill post Cory links at the end…
You’re completely right, bluesky is trash
I don’t exactly recall when or where I heard/read this quote, but man it is dope
I remember this from the hip hop scene. You know you’ve fallen off when nobody is sharing/pirating your album
I am the guy! I made the quote! Feels goddamn awesome to see it everywhere now!
Not the one you said, but OP quote.
Pirated valheim, played 20 hours, bought the game.
Pirated baldurs gate 3 on early access, bought the game with only act 1, that’s how good it is.
Pirated Valhalla, played 5 hours, uninstalled that trash forever.
Started pirating streaming services when they told me that I can’t watch shit anymore because streaming service b and c took the shows, and now I have to pay two different streaming services if I want to keep watching.
We pay for three video streaming services plus Spotify plus Kobo’s monthly plan for audiobooks plus a monthly Microsoft tax for apps and cloud storage plus regular Steam purchases.
Anyway, I just got back into piracy after a 15-year hiatus due to the enshittification of video streaming. It reminds me of how cable TV got ridiculous back in the 90s and so people figured out how to hack the satellite feeds and make pirated VHS tapes to pass around. As Gaben has said, piracy is always a service problem.
I’m still happy with Spotify and Steam. I’m mostly okay with audiobooks, too. However, Amazon is fucking with that service too by making some books Audible-only. For example, you can get Books 2 and 3 of Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time books on various platforms, but not Book 1 because Book 1 is Audible-only! Am I going to reward Audible for that kind of malicious licensing? Haha, no, of course not.
Just for curiosity, how do you find Kobos selection compared to Libby/Overdrive (or similar), if that’s an option in your area?
I really can’t be happier with either, for audiobooks or ebooks, considering their price (free, through your public library). Drawback being that selections are limited depending on your library (but you can be linked to several, and you may be eligible for several…here in Massachusetts, anybody in the state is eligible for BPL plus the regional networks and colleges (I.e. COFAN). And there are libraries in other states that accept patrons from anywhere. And you can be on multiple waitlists
But, the limiting selection or not being able to get instant access when you want to scratch that itch. I bought my wife and I kindles on Prime day. Those each came with free Kindle Unlimited months. And then there’s Prime Reading as a benefit of being a prime member.
But, while I like ebooks, my wife greatly prefers audiobooks (she’s at 140-something for the year, and rarely uses her kindle because the phone is way more convenient for audiobooks. That’s entirely through Libby, but she’s also counting the Harry Potter books on her friends Audible account that we’ve been listening to with the kids). And the audiobook selection on kindle unlimited is terrible and clunky…they really want to push you to Audible. Though I do really like being able to toggle between reading and book in the same app. But while I do enjoy the occasional sales (been on waitlist for months for “To sleep in a sea of stars”, and then found it on prime sale for 99¢ or something), I can’t justify a “subscription” to “own” an ebook.
Would love a service that had a good selection of ebooks and audiobooks, and compatible with kindle and IOS
I have never tried Libby or Overdrive, though one or both are an option in my area, I believe. I have this vague feeling of unease associated with only having a certain amount of time to listen to the book.
I chose Kobo because they are a smaller company competing with Amazon. They have a subscription where you pay about $15 per month to get 1 credit per month. Since most audiobooks are about $35, it’s pretty economical and I feel like I’m supporting the artists, too. Plus, seeing the new credit every month keeps me reading/listening to literature rather than just doomscrolling.
Kobo’s selection is very good. The very few times I haven’t been able to find a book on Kobo, it is because of some shitty Audible exclusivity problem. I mean, a person is almost compelled to pirate the book in that case, just to punish, in some miniscule way, Audible’s anti-consumer, anti-competetive practices.
Fuck them, they want our money and our data, while giving shit services.
imagine buying audiobooks in the age of Perfect Text to Speech
david johnes is my personal narrator now
Oh man, you have to listen to Andy Serkis read LOTR. Or the full cast version of World War Z. These are full audio performances. At the moment at least, some narrators are much better than automatic text to speech.
There are other book sellers besides amazon
Yes, I know. I said in my comment that I am on Kobo’s monthly audiobook plan. My comment about Amazon is that they are fucking with the market by not allowing other companies like Kobo to sell certain audiobooks.
It’s probably worth pirating games just to test play them before buying the good ones for online play
It’s also great to check if my aging pc is even capable of running it somewhat smoothly.
You can just return steam games within 2 hrs tho
Not all games are on Steam
True, which again brings us back to “piracy is a service problem” which imho it totally is. I never pirate steam games.
I haven’t pirated games in like 18 years
I’ve never paid for movies, showes, or music lawl. I’ll donate or buy merch if I love a musical artist tho
I find the reaction to this and hbomberguy’s plagiarism video interesting. Both pirating and plagiarism are forms of infringement of intellectual property rights but one is considered ok and even just while the same voices condemn the other.
What makes ok against a faceless corporation but not ok against an independent creator? Should be wrong in both cases.
Edit: I want to acknowledge that plagiarizing a work and then selling it causes more harm than the simple act of one person pirating a piece a media
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While both are infringement on intellectual property, the cardinal difference is that plagiarism is stealing someone else intellectual work and passing it off as your own product. With piracy the pirate doesn't claim they themselves made the game, nor do they resell the game for profit.
Plagiarism involves an extra act of deceit. You’re passing off someone else’s work as your own. It appears most people find this immoral.
Also, copyright is a monopoly on the publication of the work - piracy as it’s commonly used wouldn’t even be considered infringement.
Plagiarism is fraud. In many cases the original creator doesn’t expect anything financial, just acknowledgement.
People are always on here arguing about whether pirating is stealing or not. I do think it’s stealing I just can’t bring myself to give a fuck about these large corporations. They have been stealing from the people for years.
Yeah I really don’t care if I’m stealing in this context, I care if I’m stealing from independent content creators. Another thing is I know I can’t afford all the music I listen to, but I can afford to go to shows of my favorite artists. Piracy is often completely transparent of any content distribution strategies so I find it a great way to explore music.
I’d probably argue digital piracy isn’t theft. It’s quality control.
you cant steal something that isnt fucking physically real
am i stealing smells and sounds from my neighbors
no democrat city judge would side with a corpo over a random joe with a bangin lawyer
What would you call it if you make a contract with a gardener, they make your entire garden and then you don’t pay them. Since it’s not stealing, where is the harm, right?
Er… first off, you signed a contract. Second, you’d be stealing their labor. Their physical labor.
You’re stealing their time. That’s not really comparable since the people who made the tv show or movie you’re pirating have already been paid.
Do you believe actors etc. would still keep getting paid if everyone would just pirate everything?
Do you believe there will ever be a time where everyone pirates everything?
Since the idea seems to be that pirating digital goods is a moral imperative, the question what are the consequences if everyone would do it is valid.
Your last sentence sounds unhinged but I agree wtiu the rest
I look forward to this gem being repeated along with “enshittification” by the dunning krugers at large
What does that even mean?
Ownership is compromised a bundle of rights. If it’s your bundle, you can split them up however you want, sell whatever kind of limited or unlimited licenses that can come up with, and this applies to real, personal, and intellectual property.
If it’s not theft, why does the greed and unfair practices of the industry matter? Why does there need to be any justification or excuse?
Should definitely have a right to repai; with any other property right you generally have a duty to maintain the access to your interest. I recently unlocked a bunch of premium features in my car. HD radio, comfort window roll down (rolls down 2" with a tap") auto tailgate close (had auto open, but not close, had to hit a button on the lid to close), auto side mirror tilt down in reverse, roll down windows from keyless entry, close tailgate from keyless entry.
If I understand the interface at all, it’s pretty openly accessible (if you have the right OBDii port adapter and software, which ironically you need to buy a license for). Code looked fairly straightforward, and by that I mean it looked like other computer code I’ve seen. Wonder what the original price was for those extras were from the dealership, probably over 10k.
Those “features” are all so pointless they’re bordering on absurd.
Thanks for reaffirming my bias that new cars suck.
I am really concerned the next car I need to buy, which is probably 20 years off, is going to be this trend cranked to 11. With software and hardware I can find alternatives and hack my way around the “you paid for it, but we own it and can do whatever we want to it” mentality that tech companies push, but cars seem like a whole different world when it comes to the “you paid for it, but we own it” mentality.
Yes, like everyone today, they don’t want to get your money once. They want reoccurring revenue and to farm and sell all of your data.
It’s shite like that is the reason why I’m planning on staying in the south, so I can just daily my 56 bel air. All it really needs is a AC and I can always just take the heater out and take a normal ac unit apart and put it in. At this rate I’m wondering if that car is going to be more practical than modern cars purely because you don’t have to pay to open the window. Sure it may not have the speed as modern car but like even in my z3 I rarely ever go faster than 60mph.
I probably pay less for fuel and subscribed features in my electric car than you do for fuel in your '56 bel air. I definitely pay less for maintenance
Window opening, seat heating, auto tilting wing mirrors are all standard. My subscription covers games, streaming video, always connected internet, self driving features - so I get all the features of yours and more for the base price and just luxuries on subscription
Not all new cars are bad
Car subscription features 😭😭😭 are people really genuinely ok with this?
The ones I want, yes for me, no for others. That’s one of the things I like about the company I bought from, the base model is fine, extras are available that are a genuine ongoing cost (like streaming audio and games) so a subscription is reasonable
Why in the name of fuck do you need games in your car? Jfc
Charging on road trips. It takes half an hour and often it’s best to stay with the car
Don’t you have a phone to play games on?
Yep, but big screen is good
Because it tears at the fabric of Humanity. It’s a ‘death by a thousand cuts’.
Humanity constantly needing to be on guard and pushing back against being taken advantage of by people who want to charge them multiple times for the same thing in different ways, especially the ones that used to be free, over and over again.
Fighting that is pushing back against unfairness, which is one of the root beliefs of Humanity.
I think piracy is copyright infringement. But like who cares if some big corpos get infringed upon by some dudes.
What about non-corpos and small companies that make the stuff being pirated? Is that still a “who cares” situation?
You means the ones that endorse piracy because it helps sales instead cannibalize them? The people that abuse the system are outnumbered by the ones that treat it as a trial period.
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You would be in the minority, piracy can increase sales because a lot of people see the value after the trial period and pay for it.
Linky for source of one company.
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Why are you sensationalizing the quote?
Actual text below
“With only 10 reviews on Steam, saying a 400% sales increase is an eye-catcher for sure but not necessarily as huge a financial payoff in context as that percent shouts at us,” he explained. “Others can correct me if I’m wrong, but Steam reviews usually hover around roughly 2% to 5% of copies sold, so if we go off of 5% and it has 10 reviews, that’s around 200 copies sold. If a 400% increase occurred, then they’ve now sold close to 1,000 copies. That’s really awesome for an indie dev; a few thousand bucks is nothing to shy away from and can get them going on their next project. I do believe it gave them a boost, but this is very much a PR headline rather than an exponential overnight success.”
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So where did the one sale to four come from?
Another Linky
How many do you want that corroborate that it increases sales and not cannibalize them?
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There was no need for a demonstration, the article went into detail explaining their numbers. There was no need to sensationalize the information. Thats bordering on fallacious arguments, well not bordering, it IS.
It’s based off of somewhat available statistics, some games release sales data and you can extrapolate and get a decent sample size. So not a wild guess in the slightest. Steam also has all that information internally, you can go verify the claim yourself if you want. But there’s no need since plenty of people have done it multiple times and found the averages based off tiers of sales.
And it’s moot, I can provide dozen more similar claims, there’s even been studies done.
Did you even read your own article?
It did not increase sales. They couldn’t even attribute it to sales.
I did
In fact, encouraging piracy has been practiced for many years now, with a handful of devs embracing it as a valuable marketing tool. For Laborde, though, this is no longer a viable strategy.
There’s hyperlinks in the article in that section with other sources. I can’t hold your hand here, the piece is also a little op-ed too, of course the writer is going to have a bias. Especially when they imply they’ve used it or know its benefits previously.
The creater of Minecraft endorses piracy even, it’s in the one of the hyperlinks, only handholding I’ll give you here.
That’s not true. I am one of these people. It did not help sales.
There is a third party that cares: those of us who pay subscriptions that finance the content that pirates steal. Due in part to rising rates of piracy, our subscription fees go up and/or production budgets go down. In turn, pirates should care, too, because then there’s less in quantity and quality to steal.
At least for piracy of streaming content, I believe what should become apparent to everyone is that convenience drove down piracy and greatly increased gains for everyone, and once corporations got greedy and started rolling out new platforms and fragmenting content between them, everything started going down the drain. Even without accounting for piracy, convenience was lost, multiple platforms mean more fees to get the same content that was originally in one platform, so less people willing to pay. Less income per platform drives down investment in content and drives up cancelations of ongoing projects. Less income than was originally observed when a single platform had condensed content means there’s greater incentive to drive ads and increases prices on all platforms, thus also potentially driving down users subscribing to said platforms.
None of that factors in piracy. If we do factor in piracy, it’s a fact that before fragmentation, subscription rates were high, and after fragmentation, there’s a lot more incentive to pirate content. In some instances, platforms shoot themselves in the foot even further by further charging rental fees or purchases of individual content, as well as region blocks and ads.
Piracy surely is a problem all throughout the history of streaming services (something that could still be argued as not actually something to worry about because those pirates were never going to be customers in the first place, and Netflix was still booming enough to incentivize other companies to roll out their own platforms), but it becomes a symptom of another problem later down the line due to lack of convenience. Even so, the current state of streaming platforms wouldn’t be much different if piracy wasn’t happening. People would simply consume less content due to budget constraints or due to being annoyed at lack of conveniences.
I personally hate depending on a platform that on a whim may decide to remove content I watch. There’s specific songs that have disappeared from my Spotify playlists for no good reason (a lot for geoblocking reasons), there’s shows that just get removed from Netflix, there’s all of game of thrones on prime which I couldn’t watch due to geoblocking and ended up having to pirate it even though I was paying for a platform which had the show. It’s a lot easier, a lot more convenient, to pirate. The content is yours, instantly, until you decide to delete it from your computer. I didn’t mind paying for Netflix for years, and since they incentivized account sharing, I shared the account with 2 other friends and we split the cost. It was super convenient. Now, I have a plex library nearing the 50tb mark with about 40 people watching content on it, everything automated and everyone can request whatever they want, and I simply ask for donations to buy more drives. It’s still more expensive than subscription services due to energy costs, donations not being enough for the equipment needed to store content and run services, and costs of internet, static ips, and domain names, but I’m not planning to stop as it’s overall more convenient, not just for me, but for 40 other people.
Do you give those 40 people back their donation money if you ever close your service? Since in the end, they never got any of the hardware or media they watched over your Plex for their money.
They’re called donations for a reason, it’s a contribution to keep the service growing (not going since I’m personally invested in keeping it going for as long as possible) and nobody is forced to give a dime if they don’t want to.
Have you considered giving Netflix a monthly donation for all the great content they continue to create for your collection?
I’d have to give Amazon, HBO, Hulu, Disney, crunchyroll, etc. Donations as well since they’re contributing just as much, if not more than, Netflix to my collection now👀
Your frustrations with streaming services are very relatable and I completely agree that the space has become increasingly fragmented. I, too, have cut down on some subscriptions where I feel that I don’t get my money’s worth.
I believe your case is a perfect example of intellectual property theft: your 40 customers are paying you instead of paying the copyright holders. If you hadn’t offered them with this solution, it’s not unreasonable to think that they would be more willing to spend that money on purchasing it directly from the legitimate owner. Consequently, it can be argued that your shared library is incurring damages through missed revenue. By extension, even by an iota of a percentage, the service provider or the production studio will need to recoup that in the ways I’ve mentioned.
So while I completely understand your rationale for pirating, surely we can agree that in cases like these, there is some—no matter how little—degree of legitimacy to the assertion that piracy is detrimental to those of us who pay for our subscriptions.
We can agree about piracy being detrimental for sure! We just disagree on how detrimental it is vs corpo’s own actions.
Regarding the donations, it’s “give whatever you want, even 0, and inly when I say we need new gear”, so I wouldn’t say it’s lost revenue since barely anyone donates and it all goes directly to covering part of the cost of new hard drives. I’ve asked for donations twice so far, and none of the times have seen enough donations to cover for 100% of equipment expenses. Just thought I’d clarify on the “donations” thing :)
Piracy isn’t costing these companies any money if people never intended on giving them money in the first place. This argument almost implies that these companies have an inherent right to our money whether we want to spend it with them or not.
There will be a portion of pirates that never intended to spend money, but surely there will also be at least some pirates who deliberately stopped paying a subscription in favor of consuming content for free.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that corporations have some unalienable right to take our money; what I’m saying is that with the recent increase in digital piracy, it’s not unthinkable that it has had some, however small, financial impact on their bottom line.
I feel this is a very nuanced take and genuinely don’t understand how this community has taken offense to it.
I think a compromise on copyright could be a good middle ground in future. In the same way that I’m happy to wait for a game to go on sale before I buy and play it, I’d be happy to wait until a movie or series enters the public domain so I can consume it without paying. Obviously not for hundreds of years, or 56 years. But if Netflix/HBO etc shows and movies became free to watch after 6-7 years, most piracy traffic could be easily captured by legal platforms that are more convenient and accessible to more viewers. I struggle to see how it would not further relegate piracy to a niche activity done by very few, or be bad for the content producers in any significant way
the way i see it, on big budget productions anyone who is relying on their paycheck to survive already got paid for their work, and the ones collecting royalties or sales percentages are rich enough that i couldnt care less. smaller independent studios or individual creators are the ones that i will always support, and in cases like itch.io games that are pwyw i will take the free download and figure out how much i will pay based on how much i like the game.
Don’t you see the problem in your reasoning? When everyone would just pirate, nobody would be able to get paid. The money that pays the wages for the workers isn’t willed into existence, it ultimately comes from the consumer. Bigger studios pay their workers before the project is finished. That money comes from ongoing sales they produced before.
If I’m pirating, it means I either can’t afford the item, it’s too hard to get, or the ways to get it have been made overly complex and frustrating. This means literally no money was ever going in anyone’s pockets to begin with.
How am I preventing a sale that was never going to take place to begin with?
i would see your point if my reasoning were extended beyond where my boundaries are set. my position is based on a lot of factors and isnt a blanket statement that piracy is never immoral or that everyone should pirate all the time regardless of circumstances. if everyone were to pirate, it would certainly change my perspective on it as a broad practice, though not absolutely.
my argument, at least from the perspective of my original comment, was more of a reflection of my feelings that the least deserving are making the most profit off of any given large studio property, and i advocated piracy as a reaction to that given current studio structuring and the state of the entertainment market. and i understand that the profit of previous properties are directly responsible for the amount invested in subsequent works, but there is a certain degree of profitability which makes me feel like any argument about how piracy is hurting business is petty complaining over what is comparitively loose change for those that continue to be paid. i dont quite get a pang of empathy for a few thousand or even tens of thousands of instances of piracy for a property with profits in the hundres of millions considering how many instances were from people priced out anyway.
That’s Like saying I don’t pay rent to the landlord, the house has already been built.
If a society agrees on this being right, no more houses will be built. And no movies will be made.
If society agrees on something like that then houses will still get built as obviously we’ve entered the socialist utopia were all waiting for
Capitalist brains stuck on “buh peeps need money or not do nothin”
well, when reduced to those terms they so seem to be similar concepts but needs and luxuries are not exactly equivalent, not to mention the difference between a tangible possession vs an intangible “experience” which have wildly different relationships, transaction types, and even grey area over what is considered piracy.
also, claiming society has agreed on these exchanges being “right” isnt exactly accurate. society certainly tolerates these exchanges, but to what degree has changed significantly in recent years. theres a good debate over intellectual property ownership, and whether the original idea is more valuable than the creation of the work itself. certain aspects of filmmaking, for instance, are recognized as being more significant to the finished work than some other roles (directors, cinematographers, etc) but the fair compensation of other roles which make no less significant contributions to the relevance of any work is a subject on which society cannot make a fair judgment without knowing the details of every relationship.
in the end, i believe piracy is and should be viewed as an organic market force which should prompt corrections in order to minimize, but due to the nature of the transaction it will never go away.
It’s just a common tactic to draw attention to the weakness of the company and damage to the company’s interests, and it’s not because people can’t speak out at all. Although it is a bit biased to say this, my disgust towards these big companies will not change.
Piracy was never stealing, it was only copyright infringement.
Stealing is a crime that goes back to the 10 commandments, it’s old. When you steal something you take it from someone else, depriving them of it.
Copyright infringement is a newish crime where the government has granted a megacorporation a 120 year monopoly on the expression of an idea. If you infringe that copyright, they still have the original, and can keep selling copies of that original to everyone else, but they might miss out on the opportunity to make a sale to you. Obviously, that’s very different from stealing something.
The irony is, you pirating today has been shown to influence you buying it later on in a sale. And there’s a good argument to be made about your word of mouth praise helping their sales.
Yup. I’m about to suggest about half a dozen people to watch a movie on Netflix I pirated last night. Leave the World Behind. I highly reccomend you see this to understand my last statement here. I have “suggested” to a few dozen people to watch Hulu for Firefly.
They don’t get my money because I don’t give a flying fuck to support the extortion of the people this tyrrany that’s been running since Crowley and even longer. Looks free but there was never an end to slavery. It just stopped giving a shit about your color. To counter, goes over everyone’s head one way or another. Doesn’t matter. All life will die on this planet in less than a decade.
Holy moly that comment took a turn.
Yeah, but did you get it at the “counter?”
No, I don’t get it.
The counter is that the slavery of everyone doesn’t mean they’re “not racist” by applying slavery “to white people too.” They’ve been enslaving white people since way before we came to the US. I am, by family, English & Irish. So just because I’m blond, blue and white don’t mean I’m not ready to WAR against slavery by the corporations or any bullshit hedgemony. Democratic party is as guilty as the republicans and their claim to fight is just sucker lies. They don’t fight shit for real and Biden is just Trumps most active cock sucking bitch.
I don’t mean this in any disrespectful way at all, but I’m completely missing the context of what you’re trying to tell me and genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about.
u and me both, poopkins
Lol, thought that was just a pet name for a second there, poopkins
Then ask questions. I have no problem helping to understand but if you’re just wavng wide wand agians the whole shebang then say goodbye with your ignorance.
Hey buddy, I have a question. What are you talking about?
Corporate slavery.
Jesse, WTF are you talking about?
Sucks being uneducated, especially when folks don’t care to help because you’re a condescending dick about it. Not to mention religiously expletive.
RIP
Ditto.
As every musician knows, exposure is always better than payment! This is why you shouldn’t offer payment to musicians at your wedding, since they’re getting great exposure already. /s
That’s two very different cases. Using exposure to extort services out people is different than copying something to see if you’d enjoy it.
It’s really not that different. The main difference is the audience size. For an independent musician selling merchandise, it would be equally insulting to them to tell them that they will be repaid in exposure if they give you one for free.
Making a copy of something “to see if you’d enjoy it” or because it’s somehow great for their exposure is mental gymnastics to justify piracy. Let’s just call it intellectual property theft and stop beating around the bush.
Copying isn’t theft. You’re about 40 years late to this conversation and you’re starting from the taste of boots? You’re equating an instantly reproducible, finished product with a service; your analogy sucks.
The entire goal of my comment was to avoid mincing words. As somebody who has first hand experienced copyleft violation, it sure doesn’t feel different on the receiving end. I feel this very personal experience is equivocal to copyright infringement. I’m not licking any boots—thanks for that accusation.
It’s easy to excuse illicit behavior from your armchair by gaslighting with the choice of words, because after all, violating copyright is just sticking it to the man, right? In truth, I feel that my software was stolen for profit and just for me as the little man, there’s no other word that comes to my mind than “theft.”
You should write an open letter to hobbyists. It worked for Gates. If your software was “stolen for profit” and that didn’t result in more people trying it and buying, I have bad news: it didn’t seem like it was worth the money to the people who tried it. JRC does many studies on piracy and the data shows that total sales are not displaced by piracy volume, again and again. You can make the argument that this is only true for games and music (typically the subject of these studies) but this hardline attitude of it being the same as stealing sucks.
Lovely, so your rebuttal is that not only is my emotion wrong but my software sucks, too. I would suggest putting yourself in my shoes and envisioning what a shitty thing that is to say.
To offer a bit of background: the clone my game published itself on Google Play with ads removed. Aside from simply the confusion of a game with verbatim the same name, this further entices users to install it, because Google Play displays a label when an app contains ads.
What is the worth to a user? This is a terrific question, and I have spent years narrowing down the right valuation of ad content and in-app purchase pricing to remove ads. The game currently has 15M historical installs with fairly industry standard retention rates, so it can’t be completely off. But the thing is, that valuation will always be higher than 0.
So where does the steal come from? The cloned app only offered the ad-free experience long enough to gather enough installs, to then revert the change with a swapped out AdMob account number.
I think most of this has been offset by that change now as I’ve seen a similar growth return to my app. But those losses in the interim period are gone forever. Somebody took my code base, republished it in blatant violation of GPL, causing me to lose revenue. I feel robbed and your apathy genuinely perplexes me.
Biggest personal examples are Minecraft and FL Studio. I asked my parents to buy Minecraft for me after a week of pirating it, and I bought an FL Studio license when I could afford to, nearly a decade after I first used it. I don’t use it much, but it felt right.
yup, pirated jedi: fallen order. liked the game very much, but jedi: survivor wasn’t cracked yet. so i bought a key for 30€.
the problem is: it runs like shit, because it’s a bad PS5 port and denuvo probably also has an effect on that.
i will never buy from EA again.
It likely was the fault of denuvo, which ironically piracy would strip improving the experience.
An associate of mine defines stealing as, “taking (either by cloning or removing) something (either digital or physical) of which is not of your original possession”
If anyone has a rebuttal, please help.
Edit: What’s with the downvotes? I’m on your side.
It’s not so much a rebuttal, but ask if they think stealing has any relation to depriving another person of something. Imo, they have a correct, though extremely narrow, definition of stealing that doesn’t leave any nuance for comparing different kinds of stealing. Piracy, or as they would say ‘stealing digital media’ is not a kind of stealing that deprives another person of that thing, so clearly it’s somewhat different than stealing money or physical property.
If they aren’t willing to entertain that there are different kinds of stealing then they’re ignorant of reality and it might not be worth your time to try to change their mind.
It’s not really a rebuttal, but by that assessment, a person may not view a webpage, as the browser copies files from a distant server for viewing.
Hi, welcome to the Technology community here on Lemmy! Discourse is not tolerated here, so please just tack on your endorsement of piracy and leave your civility at the door.
I never endorsed it. Sure, it may be justified, but that doesn’t make it legal.
Whoa whoa, we don’t take kindly to people telling us that. Only a boot-licking, brain-dead, corporate shill wouldn’t outright endorse piracy. Take your nuance somewhere else, pal!
It’s because that’s not a common definition and it’s not even a good one. No normal person would call cloning stealing. Also, this completely misses lending, gifting, downloading a webpage or even renting. All of those would be stealing under this definition.
Who cares what your associate uses as a definition, stealing / theft has long established definitions. You can just point and laugh and say that your associate doesn’t actually understand the words he/she is using.
You could say that you define agreeing as “thinking someone is completely wrong”, and that you agree with your associate.
The war of semantics is about as intelligent as the tweet that went viral where someone criticized trains requiring tickets. “Why are you charging me to get on? You’re going that way anyway.”
youtu.be/Qi5GXwY7W_0?t=165
Not exactly. The original translation from Hebrew was closer to “thou shall not kidnap,” arresting control of a person’s personal boundaries and will, not a violation of personal property, which didn’t really exist as a concept at the time.
Good topic, good point, terrible writing. I couldn’t finish the article with the author’s ego and personal bias butting into his great story.
I honestly don’t see the same conceit you do, and I expected it before reading. I just read the author as a jaded evangelist.
I don’t see an article. And don’t you dare contradict me. You’ll be missing the point entirely.
I usually just assume that Im probably gonna agree with the thing so dont see the need to put more time into it. If it was something that I felt different about then maybe i might have, but as that is probably not the case there’s no need dragging it out for no reason.
Plus, they seem to be on top of the thing, so im gonna make sure to stay out of their way and leave them alone and let them do their jobs.
There’s little left to do at this point, and its not really my place to tell them how to do their jobs. Thatd be presumptious, as I might just as well know next to nothing about it compared to them. Why making it even more complicated than it already is? Its their job after all, not ours, and we have to respect that. Lol what would even the job be, that is not exactly information i would carry around so. Besides, i already have one other job anyway, so…
In the end, the important thing is that they are on top of it, and i bet i would feel more or less the same way even if the whole thing was another thing altogether, as long as i feel the same way as they do about it, and that theyre doing something about it instead of giving it time to grow, maybe into something even worse!
But regardless- something is being done, right now, by someone, right there. you dont see that sort of thing around much these days. Also doesn’t hurt that they could possibly have more insight into the details of the case than maybe anyone else.
I dont know how you guys feel about it, sometimes I’m not 100% sure myself, but i cant imagine i am going to feel any regret having maybe the best guys possible feeling more or less dead on the same way i do about it. Its practically guaranteed, think about it- if it werent for them, I could have never heard anything about it in the first place…
And as if that wasn’t all, here comes the icing on the cake- the same guys who first blew the lid off the whole thing to begin with can likely identify the deeper issues as well, and therefore should know how to change it for the better instead of some shmuck making it worse out lack of insight and proper research… Winnn!
At this point for all we know, literally any alternative could be a better option. In the end, regardless of every little detail of everything about this, they seem to be here to really do something- anything about it, and I think we might consider ourselves lucky that something is being done here at all.
You say an unholy bunch of nothing at all.
Oh! Doctor Korkorow? Yeah I feel ya, I couldn’t ever really get through his writing either, but I know of him, about him, his opinions, values, dedicated work et c, I have nothing but respect and gratitude for for the dude.
Cory fights for the User!
If this rhetoric was used in a conservative opinion piece instead of a pro piracy opinion piece, I’m pretty sure it would be banned for calling for violence towards specific individuals.
Guillotine preview image and quotes like:
What a trash article and site. How is this permitted.
I mean, the analogy doesn’t even work.
Just because I can only rent a car and not buy it, doesn’t mean it would be fine to smash the window and steal it instead.
What if the company wasn’t trying to get you to rent the car? What if they tried REALLY hard to get you to think you were buying the car, but once you “bought” it, they start crippling things and telling you you can’t fix it yourself but instead need to pay exorbitant prices for them to “upgrade” it, since, now that you’ve “bought” it, you don’t technically “own” it
But, is the piracy only justifiable if and only if the item you bought was unilaterally taken away from you? This seems to be arguing that: SOMETIMES purchased digital goods are stolen from a consumer, therefore it is ALWAYS justifiable for a consumer to pirate. I think we need a more nuanced take on piracy.
And now that SAG AFTRA concessions were made to give to more payout to actors and other creative folks based on streaming metrics, I think that means consumers should attempt to stream if available to help ensure the creators hit their metrics for payout.
My criteria for what makes something worth purchasing versus pirating is pretty simple: can I purchase a file in a format that I want to be able to use on all my devices without DRM for a fair price. If that’s the case then I’ll buy it. I buy stuff off GOG and Humble Bundle all the time.
As for streaming. If the service is good and has enough content on it to keep me invested then I’ll pay for the sub. For several years Netflix was good enough that I almost completely stopped pirating movies and shows. There was just always something on there to watch. When it got to the point that I had to look for shit that I hadn’t seen before and wanted to watch I cancelled it, and I haven’t picked up any other services since then other than what came with my internet. I’m not going to juggle 14 steaming services and try to keep track of what is available on which one when I can just pay for a VPN and download everything from one source. Especially considering some of the more niche stuff I want to watch isn’t available on any of them a lot of the time.
The bottom line is make not pirating more convenient and cheaper than pirating and I’ll stop doing it.
How do you make it cheaper than pirating?
I have to pay for and setup hardware to store and distribute media I pirate which costs money and time but I guess I didn’t really mean it had to be more convenient AND cheaper just that if there was a service that beat piracy on those two points combined I would use it. Spotify for instance has pretty much all the music I would want so I haven’t downloaded any for a few years.
The analogy is that you buy a car (because if it breaks, the car and your entertainment stuff, you will buy a new one to replace it, you will also carry all maintenance) but suddenly you can’t drive backwards anymore because the manufacturer decided retroactively that you should pay extra for that (possibly in a subscription).
I would say it is your good right then to make your car drive backwards regardless of what it may take.
Clutch those pearls a little tighter.
Is it too much to ask for civil, level headed, and nuanced discussion or posts?
People with no attachment to reality might overreact like that, but the rest of us have reading comprehension on our side.
“deserves to be”: this is a phrase commonly used when people are basically venting, but it almost never suggests that someone should actually do the action. Just search for the phrase “deserves to be string up” and you’ll see just how common it is.
As for “over an anthill”, when someone describes an outrageous situation, that’s yet another clue that they’re venting, not proposing an actual action.
Honest people who read the news and opinion pieces should know this, so either you’re new to reading, or you’re dishonest.
Again, first day reading? Or just dishonest?
No, I’ve just been living in American for the past 30 years or so and have an understanding of what inflammatory and dehumanizing attacks on individuals and groups does to society. And even if it’s permissible based on the rules of this community, it’s still garbage journalism.
Living in American? What does that even mean?