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You seem to be under the impression that people and corporations get equal treatment under the law.
You seem to be under the impression that they should. At what point does one person’s right to get richer override other people’s right to have a decent life?
Since that abomination called “Citizens United” was imposed on us decent living people (in the US)
Well, they do. It’s when humans and lawyers get Involved that things become unjust and unbalanced. The law itself is quite clear, otherwise.
I think that’s their point, that they don’t get equal treatment under the law.
If a lawyer can twist it around, then we never really had the same protections.
Frankly this catch phrase never made any sense to me, from a logical point of view.
It assumes that:
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If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
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And if buying =/= owning then pirating =/= stealing, because you can’t own it otherwise.
But the justification in the second statement is completely irrelevant to the first statement. You still own it without buying. It’s still stealing.
UNLESS - we examine what “stealing” is. This is where the arguments about being in a digital space vs. a physical space comes in. Where the question is raised: Is making an exact copy really “stealing”? Or, consider what is being “stolen”? The original item? The idea? We need to think about this more.
But it’s here the argument should be made and here the debate should be. That’s where “pirates” have a chance of winning. Let’s get rid of this flawed, easily repeatable, but fundamentally incorrect catch phrase and come up with a better one already. One that makes sense.
*(Nevermind that most of you technically aren’t even pirating, you’re just downloading the fruits of someone else that pirated.)
I was locked out of my EA account for half a week due to a bug on their end. I downloaded a game I own(lease?) so I could play over the weekend.
Is this pirating?I think you would technically be since what you agreed to by accepting the EULA is that you would have the game on your EA account and would rely on their services to play it, you don’t legally have the right to play the game if it’s fine into your possession another way.
And they fit sure have provisions about downtime and access issues in the EULA.
The digital area is something I haven’t looked much into so I can’t really comment on that but I know regarding physical media the relevant US laws only really make exceptions for things you’ve done yourself. Just because you own a physical copy of Pokemon Yellow doesn’t mean you’re allowed to download a copy of it from off the Internet. You’re allowed to make and use a backup from a physical cart you own. This is why emulators can’t (legally) include ROMs, ISOs, BIOS files, encryption keys, etc. as those are the copyrighted materials that you’ll need to make a copy of yourself to legally use emulators.
To my knowledge (not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) what you did is indeed piracy because you downloaded it. If you had cracked it yourself you probably would have broken some licenses and whatnot that you had agreed to with EA, but I don’t believe that would have been piracy.
Either way EA is very much unlikely to do much anything about it as for the most part the industry only cares about the sources of pirated materials. They generally only ever go after people distributing pirated materials so they’ll (legally) attack torrent sites, ROM sites, and other such distributers. The most you’re likely to ever get personally is a strongly worded letter (possibly a C&D) to your ISP from some AAA video game company if they notice you seeding a torrent for their game as then you’re being a distributer of pirated materials.
Outside of that I’ve never heard of them coming after anyone for having the entire collection of GBA titles on their thumb drive or emulating Halo having never owned an Xbox or playing the latest Sim City without always online functionality. I’m not saying it can’t or won’t happen, but you’d make headlines if it did.
Yeah. I’m sure it’s not entirely legal. I don’t think anyone would want to bring a lawsuit because it could set a precedent.
deleted by creator
I think the problem is that theft is the wrong crime to compare to. Piracy is more akin to toll skipping.
I don’t think the phrase supposed to be a logically consistent justification, but rather a way to voice their discontent with/encourage opposition to the increasing degree of control that corporations exert over products you supposedly “bought” from them.
It hasn’t been possible to take full ownership over purchased media since the dawn of copyright law—buying a book doesn’t mean you can run it through a photocopier and sell it at the nearest flea market, after all. Even so, it wasn’t until the advent of software licenses that this rhetoric became popular, as you literally cannot “own” a piece of media that is only available through licensing. Licenses are also largely unregulated: while you were always bound by relevant laws, you are now also bound by the terms of the license, in which the licensor often reserves the right which often reserves the right to change the terms or terminate the license as they see fit. As if relentless regulatory capture was not enough, corporations have engineered a world in which you are effectively at their mercy, and a lot of people are understandably upset by this. So, if these people are deprived of any legal means of owning the media they wish to own, they resort to piracy. Of course this isn’t “justified” in the traditional sense, as stealing something that isn’t for sale is still stealing, and authors/publishers/etc. are not obligated to sell their works, but to them it doesn’t matter, as the underlying social contract of media creation and distribution has been violated.
What field uses
=/=to mean!=?!= isn’t universal, i’ve mostly seen it used in programming.
Otherwise ≠ is the symbol we use in maths and generally the more common one.
=/= is just the worst rendition of ≠ for people that don’t know how to write it or are too lazy to go find it.
Yeah =/= is honestly a little confusing. I know
!=isn’t universal though, gotta start making sure to use≠insteadYou’re definite not wrong, I actually went to use “!=” first. But then thought if someone wasn’t familiar with programming they might not get it, so I went with the “=/=” hoping it would make sense to more people. Forgot that we’re on lemmy and the audience here would generally understand lol. Didn’t know ≠ existed though, will probably use that from now on. Nice!
Have you heard of our Lord and Saviour, APL?
It’s a shorthand way of writing ≠ digitally without needing to know the alt code or where it is in your mobile devices keyboard
Yeah in programming we just use
!=:!: NOT=: EQUALIt is not a composite expression but a single expression made up from 2 letters. And this is not a widespread notation.
If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
This isn’t the point being made, and I think why you think it’s illogical
Theft requires you deprive someone of an item, not that you get something without buying it. If your definition of theft were accurate then getting a free game would be piracy, which is silly
UNLESS - we examine what “stealing” is
Theft of a persons property without intent to return. Legally piracy and theft are different, not just semantically. There’s no discussion to be had about what stealing is as it’s not what’s happening
I like this! Would I be able to bother you to post this to https://lemmy.ca/c/actual_discussion
I feel it would be a really worthwhile topic to dig into and you’ve articulated it well!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
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Piracy technically isn’t stealing, it’s intellectual property reproduction license violation. Clever bastards those lawyers. You basically don’t purchase the music, you purchase the right to reproduce it for non-commercial purposes.
Exactly. If I stole an item that belongs to you, I’m denying you the possession of that item, and you’ll either have to acquire another one, steal it back, or just not have it at all. When someone commits an act of digital piracy, they aren’t denying anyone the possession of it, therefore it isn’t the same as stealing.
Calling it theft is, in my opinion, emotionally manipulative and prevents any serious discussion on the ethics of piracy.
Even the word piracy is a bit suspicious to me; original pirates robbed ships in international waters and were considered enemies of mankind, so calling a much lesser act piracy sounds very manipulative… I wonder where the word piracy was first used to describe copyright violations, can’t seem to find anything about it.
Piracy was used as far back as the 1700s to refer to illegal copies of books or unauthorized publishing outside of publishing monopolies. In general, I get the feel of breaking monopolies, turning to less savory methods to get what is owed, and liberating goods from the hands of wealthy hoarders.
For a while, the U.S. publishing industry was based on pirating British books, many of which were previously pirated from France. The only significant difference between the usages is the freeing of information vs keeping goods for oneself.
That’s interesting and informative, thank you.
The theft is monetary and the creator and distributor of what’s being pirated are the victims, it’s not theft in the sense that you’re taking something from someone and they don’t have access to it anymore, they can still sell copies, by not paying for it what you’re stealing is the money that should have been transferred to them.
What I’m saying is that this isn’t theft, I’m not saying there is no harm in piracy, but there is a clear difference. When you steal something from a store, they would need to acquire the merchandise again to restock, as well as being denied the money that item would have otherwise be sold for.
I’m not saying piracy is victimless, or that it is ethical, but it’s clearly a different level of crime, so it should not be called theft.
By this logic wage theft isn’t theft since the employee never had the money in their possession.
Let’s exaggerate things. An indie dev sells a game for 5$ and when all things are split up they have 2$ going to them. They sell one copy but with the tracker they put into the game, they can tell that there’s a million person that have played it. Their income for the work they put in is 2$, a million -1 people got to enjoy what they created through piracy. So you’re telling me, no one has stolen anything from that creator?
Wage theft is different from piracy. When you work for an employer, you are giving them hours of labour in exchange for the compensation, I have a limited amount of labour hours to use in my lifetime, whereas copying a work can be done an infinite amount of times without requiring an additional labour time to recreate it.
I’m not saying that piracy is ethical, there are many cases where it is unethical, but it is not theft.
Right, because content appears out of thin air.
I’m not saying that piracy is ethical, but it isn’t theft.
in wage theft, there is an agreement about getting paid, and the employer fraudulently does not pay that. I have no such agreement with ubisoft or blizzard.
Ok, but you acquiring content through piracy also is fraud and also makes you acquire something someone worked for without compensating them when the agreement they had with society in general was that they would make their creation available in exchange for money.
But hey, social contract, who needs that? 🤷
>acquiring content through piracy also is fraud
letting someone share a song with you is not fraud
Theft is not monetary because you didn’t take money away from the creator, hence there’s no “theft” in strict meaning of the word. It’s like saying you stole money from the store because you didn’t pay for the apple. You stole the apple, but not the money. Except in digital world, store would be able to duplicate the apple infinite amount of times, so intellectual property is not missing on the author’s part, you just violated the law because you used it without compensation.
I understand the angle you are coming from, you are seeing it as potential income you have now prevented the creator from earning and phrasing it as theft.
Also, arguing about all of this is pointless, especially online. That’s why lawyer is a life calling and not something anyone can just do as a hobby. Written law is always different from interpreted law and lawyers will try to twist and wiggle around meanings of words as much as possible, which is also the reason why agreements and contracts are written in such a way.
Then as I mentioned again and again, wage theft isn’t theft because you never had the money for it to be stolen from you.
And am not sure lawyers classify it as such either.
It’s important never to forget who sets the terms of commerce, wages, and employment.
All the peasants can do is game the terms they set. And the owner class that sets those rigged terms, and their doting class traitor sycophants, rage against even that.
“you you you… You’re just supposed to eat cat food in the dark crying if you can’t afford to enjoy life, while we laugh about your subsistence at the country club! No fair!”
Now… Wait.
Is the argument here that something must be owned to be stolen? I don’t think ownership is contested, just who is the owner. Or is the argument that pirating also isn’t owning… Or… What? Just tit for tat and it looks like the thoughts should be related somehow? I’m all for sailing the high seas and for right to repair / software ownership, but the two concepts are independent as far as I can see.
Idk, if I’m going to try to reproduce this mental gymnastics I should really stretch first: I don’t want to pull something and end up a sovcit.
This saying / idea sprang out of folks losing content they “bought” via online platforms.
Basically the letter from Sony(?) Said that due to licensing rights content was going to be removed from their servers… and that the items you bought were no longer available.
So… essentially nothing on a digital platform is ever purchased . It’s just leased until the platform owners decide to alter the deal. And such, if you can’t actually buy it… Are you actually pirating it?
Licensed, specifically a unilaterally revocable and non transferable licence to view personally. Leasing implies recurring payments, and some areas allow lease assignments and other consumer protections that aren’t afforded to licensing.
Renting implies reoccurring payment, leasing just means “agreement to use X under Y conditions”. Example A: A device leases an IP address from a router. Example B: You rent a movie from blockbuster.
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of the difference
Yes, you are actually pirating it lol.
Removal/revocation without violation of terms of service is bogus, but you enjoy a product without contributing a share of the cost to develop or keep developing. Getting gouged is absolutely aggravating and consumers are being taken advantage of, but we all have the option of not buying.
I can also see reasonable situations for removing content, but not “just because” and certainly not indefinitely for everyone.
Idk man… I feel like if I pay ~$40 for a digital item… I should have the same rights with it as the physical copy.
If a digital market place sells me the item… I should be able to return to that market place and redownload it. Basically once they sell it… they are obligated to host the files.Or as an alternative … I get 1 download of a drm free product. And everything after that is rebuy.
This sell it for $40 and then it’s gone off your game system or out of your account I think is shit business practice.
Streaming services can do what they want with their content… because you’re paying x money a month to access it… that’s the assumed behavior. Digital products advertised as “buy it on digital” should behave as items purchased and owned by the end user.
Maybe that’s just me being pro consumer…
I feel like if I pay ~$40 for a digital item… I should have the same rights with it as the physical copy.
That’s the whole problem - you don’t. Your feelings are irrelevant. If you want that, you need to demand it, and refuse to do business with those who will not provide it. Of course they won’t, so just stop buying digital copies, keep physical media alive.
so just stop buying digital copies, keep physical media alive.
That’s the only way forward honestly.
We have to return to physical media. Tho I fear it’s too late.
If you want the same rights then buy a DRM free version.
Good luck finding one
If you can’t find one then skip the game or accept the fact that you might lose access to it. That’s the way the creator decided their game would be distributed, if you disagree you’re treating them as slaves by getting the fruit of their labour without compensating them and without their agreement.
That’s the way the creator decided their game would be distributed
They just don’t want to consider that it’s possible to steal from the people who made the game even if paying for it doesn’t guarantee you’ll own it forever.
The copyright troll known as “publisher” just will pocket all money you think you paid to people who made the game.
Option one: pay for game, some money goes to publisher, some goes to creators
Option two: pirate game, no money goes to anyone
Which one helps the creators?
Option three: Donate to creator or buy something directly from them to help offset the cost of pirating.
Pirates: Nah I’m good fam. I just want free shit because I’m too poor and don’t get paid enough.
A donation or purchasing something else doesn’t legally or morally entitle you to owning an unrelated product made by the creator though…
I disagree. Consumer gets game, creator gets paid. Seems pretty cut and dried to me.
Unless the creator gives you their approval, it’s a donation that you can’t assume gives you the right to their product.
It’s funny the mental gymnastic you guys will do to justify your choices and make you feel like you’re morally right.
By the way, I don’t believe for one second that you’ve sent donations to all the creators of which you’ve pirated content.
it’s immoral to prevent people from sharing tools or stories or songs or skills. i’m entitled to enjoy whatever someone wants to share with me.
No you’re not if it’s infringing on someone’s copyright and you would agree with me if you ever created something you were trying to sell to make a living.
some goes to creators
You wish. https://dashfight.com/news/modus-games-lays-off-mane-6-developers-4490
Which one helps the creators?
Let’s ask them
…
You realise that the screenshot you shared tells you to buy from real platforms first and foremost?
You realize that the developers all got paid before the game was even released, right? They were getting paychecks the whole time.
Game wasn’t complete.
For downvoters here: they still did not deliver everything that was promised during crowdfunding campaign. And with scale of layoffs I’m not sure they can.
So I hope you check beforehand if that’s actually the case for the specific product you pirate. What I am seeing is that people just pirate everything because they do not respect the creators. From digital art, to indie works in movies, games and music. People pirate because they have the deeply capitalist mindset that if you can pay less (or nothing) for something you should. Even if that means the person that put in the labour and skills has less because of your behaviour.
The idea is that people buy a cd but record companies and some trolls want to make you believe you dont own whatever is on it just a license which is mental gymnastics. You are right.
Are you saying buying a song and buying the rights to a song are the same? That would be a pretty smooth brain statement.
If you are saying that your personal and non-commercial use is just a license in that it is in any way revokable after purchase, then yes I agree with you.
You can keep your derogatory language to yourself.
I‘m saying if you buy a song, movie, art piece It is yours to do with as you please, forever.
Thats what buying means.
You have to buy it (the rights for music or movie) to do as you please in an unlimited fashion, not buy a COPY of it. Otherwise it’s personal use only.
Sorry if that’s too subtle to grasp.
You’re making an irrelevant distinction here. If you buy a CD with a song on it, do you buy the rights to the song? Or a copy?
A copy, right? You own a copy. The music corporation isn’t going to show up one day and repo your CD because of X, Y, Z reason. You have unlimited personal use of the copy. Not the rights to the whole song, but just the copy. You can play it in your car. You can play it in your walkman. You can loan it to a friend.
But when you buy a digital copy, your ownership rights are dependent on them. It’s more like a lease with terms subject to change whenever the lessor wants, like because they got bought out or they lost the distribution rights or most commonly through pure incompetent inability to maintain the systems that they require you to use in order for you to use your copy.
It’s almost impossible to just buy a .wav of a song anymore. Now when you “buy” a song it has a ton of restrictions on it, any one of which could prevent you from playing it. You can’t loan it to a friend. You can’t play it on a different device unless you log in to their systems. Sometimes you just lose access to it forever with no recourse.
That’s what this post is about. Ownership of the copy, not the rights to the original. Literally no one is talking about the rights to the original. You just brought it up out of nowhere.
No youre bringing stuff up, read back. OP said a cd, not a digital copy. And when you buy a cd, you own a copy not rights. You can’t play the CD as part of your election campaign, or make it your eHitler Minecraft theme and publish it on YouTube. There are terms of use by which you must abide. OP said you buy it you own it and you do whatever you want and that is patently false for a CD which is their example not mine.
If you want to talk about digital copies that is different in some ways you describe, but I. No world do you buy a copy of a song and have unlimited permission to do whatever you want
I specifically said “personal use”. Anything within personal use is fair game when you buy a CD. So no election campaigns, no selling it yourself. Personal use. That’s EXTREMELY different from a digital item that can poof at any time.
And again, stop bringing up rights. No one is talking about rights to media. Totally different thing.
As I said, thats the legal definition. Slavery used to be legal, abortion is illegal in many places.
I dont care about your definition of right and wrong. If I buy something, it is mine.
Blocked for repeated derogatory language.
Without a legal system and legal definitions, your claim of ownership doesn’t mean anything, rendering your entire argument pointless.
Now we‘re dogpiling. Nice.
Nobody said we dont need a legal system. I say legal does not define what is „right“.
Bye dummy!
Nah bro, piracy because we don’t wanna pay.
We don’t mind paying. If it is actually owning and convenient.
A lot of games for example you can buy on GoG, and archive the installation file. That is probably the closest you can come when it’s about owning closed source software. Pirating games that are buyable on GoG is simply stealing money from the creators for no other reason than being greedy and cheap.
Well, GoG does have a lot of games but only few of the latest games that we want to try out. Or could i buy, say, Diablo 4 on GoG? Dave the Diver? Enshrouded? Sons of the Forest? Borderlands? Not even Sims?
If you can’t buy it DRM free and don’t want to buy it with DRM then you’re not entitled to being able to play it.
Given how DRM has tanked the performance of many games or has rendered them unplayable at some point after release and in some notable cases even after release for a while… I was never entitled to being able to play a game with DRM anyway.
Yes, not even the games i bought. The Need for Speed copy i got which uses SafeDisc which has been unsupported since Vista? Nope! The copy of Colin McRae Rally 2005 which uses StarForce DRM which can mess with my drive as a whole? Nope! SimCity 2013 which i didn’t buy but read the news that the EA servers couldn’t handle the influx of gamers? Nope! Gran Turismo 7 which i also didn’t buy but read the news of where Sony couldn’t handle the influx of gamers almost as if they didn’t learn a single goddamn thing from SimCity 2013? Nooooooooooope!
DRMs would be less contentious if they didn’t somehow mess with the experience of the honest paying users. The worst thing that could happen back in the 80’s and 90’s was perhaps LensLok which didn’t work too well with some CRT screens but also was rarely used. In other cases you had to have the game manual or the funny looking Dial-A-Pirate disc from Monkey Island which could be at worst mildly annoying.
However in the pursuit of profit companies started to really fuck shit up for paying users. Back in early 2000’s it was StarForce “just” making your drive not work anymore or, say, your SPORE key “just” not installing anymore after the third install. But nowadays you need a spare NASA computer for a game that without Denuvo could be working fine on a regular old gaming pc. And there’s not even a guarantee that you can keep ANYTHING in perpetuity that you bought digitally, which is what OP initially complained about. If users don’t get custom servers up quickly, all users can do with their copy of The Crew is to screenshot the Steam page, print it and wipe their ass with it. Same with all those Warner shows on Playstation Video and some shows and ebooks from Amazon IIRC. And remember how i mentioned that SafeDisc stopped working? Without No-CD cracks i couldn’t even play those games even though i have bought them. We don’t have that problem nowadays thanks to discs not necessarily having any game files anymore. Just an installer for the digital storefront and the code, that’s it. Except Garfield - Lasagna Kart for the Nintendo Switch… IT DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING CARTRIDGE AT ALL! JUST AN EMPTY GAME COVER! AND NOT EVEN AN ESHOP-CODE! YOU HAVE TO REDEEM A CODE ON MICROIDS.NET TO GET AN ESHOP-CODE! IF OR RATHER WHEN THAT SITE GOES DOWN AND YOU WANT TO BUY A COPY IN A STORE, PERHAPS WITH A GARFIELD CASE FOR THE SWITCH LIKE I DID, YOU’LL HAVE ONLY A CASE FOR A SWITCH AND ENOUGH SLOTS TO NOT PUT IN THE GAME YOU SPENT MONEY FOR!
If i buy a game legally and in turn am not entitled to keep a physical copy, create a digital backup copy or even to having that copy work (not necessarily working fine, compatibility issues are bound to happen)… I don’t feel like game companies are entitled to my money. Piracy is less convenient than buying a game but the value proposition of actually keeping a game… i have a hard time to truly denounce it. Especially when i think about switching to Linux and know that many digital storefronts make trouble on Linux in one way or another.
I have been thinking about a possible solution a few years ago: Selling full game copies via NFTs. A token that contains all the game files. The token would be created on demand when a user wants to buy the game. The DRM would only have to check whether the token was present in the wallet and that’s Too bad that NFTs are computationally quite expensive and whatever blockchain i would store the copy on, they want their miners to be paid. That’s by the way the reason NFTs only hold links to whatever you buy. Also if digital store owners actually wanted to allow users to resell games, sites such as G2A wouldn’t probably be seen as dubious. Finally my solution wouldn’t stop the arms race between crack groups and game companies. It would lessen the incentive a bit, but at an insanely high ecological and monetary price point.
When there’s incentive to view the transaction as “inconvenient”, I think a lot of people see it so.
I can’t really imagine the piracy crowd are the ones to accept $70 pricing, either - or ever say the phrase “Dang. You drive a hard bargain.”
Then read the EULA and don’t purchase if it mentions the platform can revoke the access to your account.
Bad news! You’re stuck playing console games that have physical copies!
One of the many aspects of the problem is that this is an infringement on consumer rights. Not currently illegal, but only because the consumer protection aspects of the US have been ground down to nearly nothing.
I think the gist of this meme is that restrictive DRM and piracy are both in a similar ballpark of morally wrong, but only one is illegal because the rich own the courts.
Is it an infringement on your rights when you go to a theater and they charge you to see a movie which you won’t own after it’s finished?
No, because you’re not purchasing a copy of the movie. You’re purchasing a one time viewing. And that’s a very clearly laid out term of the sale.
So just like it’s clearly laid out in the EULA for the service you’re using to pay for games that what you’re buying is a limited license?
Alright, glad we agree
Good news! Play Xonotic!
Agreed if you have enough financial stability to do so.
Digital Piracy is always right when you are poor when a sale to acces a copy isn’t possible no one loses anything from acquiring it for free and if anyone deserves free game and movie entertainment to distract them from perpetual hardship its the poor.
That doesn’t make any sense. Ok yes let’s help disadvantaged people of course, but still.
Someone has to make the content and someone has to pay for it: devs gotta eat and the fair cost may be less than game retail, but it’s always greater than zero. If the cost isn’t fair, dont buy, or at least dont pretend you’re entitled to it. If the original costs X, and there are Y “free copies” of it, everyone owes X / (Y + 1), or some angel investor owes the whole total for all of us.
How about museums and parks? Any new person walking through doesn’t incur any (or minimal cost) to experience, and hell, some museums are free or have voluntary donations! That model is possible because of taxes and donations/fundraising/auctions to provide a public service. If Gabe Newell is going to finance a game, sure, you and any impoverished friend can have a free copy. For the game ecosystem now, you and every friend getting a free copy means 1 of 2 things:
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To get the next game, all of us paying for it get to be charged a larger share of fair price than if you also paid (even if things are totally fairly priced), OR
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We don’t get a next game because revenue was too low.
As an individual it totally doesn’t matter, but if everybody came to this way of thinking then nobody is gonna pay but basically everyone will still want the content.
For the record i do pay creators that make the stuff i enjoy because i am not impoverished and i recognize that within this economy i am the group that should support their livelihoods.
The way i see it when it comes to the poor only 2 options exist.
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poor person cant afford to purchase the game so valve gets 0 dollars and the poor feel worse because they see everyone enjoying this thing they are financially excluded from
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the poor person obtains a free copy, valve gets the same 0 dollars but now the poor person can be included within the games community, potentially aiding its popularity. Absolutely nothing is lost.
Currently everyone who want to pirate can do so, and yet creators still exists, evidently enough people are paying to maintain it.
I understand your argument in context of a functional fair economy but i am an anti-capitalist
I know you may disagree with this and i respect the focus in wanting to make the current system work but ultimately my ideal is that the means to live should be separate from our productivity. If food, healthcare, housing, family and entertainment are all guaranteed. Then a creator does not need money to share their work. They can create because they want to create because they enjoy to create. And the face that people would copy and enjoy their work is the highest form of flattery as it means people really like what you do/make. The enjoyment of those people becomes the creators contributing to society.
You may think that people wouldn’t do some work anymore but that is where i would wholeheartedly disagree. Many people would do volunteer work if they didn’t need a job, i would still do the very same thing for free that i am getting paid for now but arguably id be even more motivated because id feel like i am helping the community rather then having it be a business transaction for personal gain.
I respect that perspective, and hey some games even say “yeah pirate it and share it with your friends who might buy”. The place I still would have issue is that the society you’re discussing does t exist NOW in the US so it’s a little unfair to live by how things would be if the world were perfect.
I am not sure what you mean. I am not vouching for people that buy games now to stop and become pirates. I also sincerely hope no one has forgone a daily hot meal or sold a kidney just to obtain a game which can be pirated.
Piracy does exists right now in the us and many people do so; i have yet to see it being the main factor of a studio going bankrupt.
Its an indication that most people are willing to do the right thing which is a different thing depending on their socio-economic circles.
Big tangent here, but
They can create because they want to create because they enjoy to create.
Okay so now everyone is a creator, who manages them? Who deals with distribution, with bugfixes, with all the tiny minutiae in Yung modern world?
My job is that I maintain the electrical power that goes to the servers that host the software that people use to create. No one has a “passion” for power and cooling system maintenance, but it’s an absolute necessity even in a fully automated world. Someone has to make sure the robots are working. Who has a passion for creating a controls monitoring system that is 2% faster and 8% more efficient than the previous iteration? Who will decide to create, in their spare time, one tenth of one percent of one percent of one project that eventually becomes the next iphone? Who will volunteers their time to make sure tickets are routed properly between these departments? Who lies awake at night wishing they were independently wealthy so they could have the time and energy to tell people that their poor performance is hurting a project and the project doesn’t want them anymore?
You envision a world where there are billions of artists and no one who knows how to replace the insulation in your attic, or would do it if they could.
I don’t think everyone has a passion for art either.
Honestly your picked the wrong person to lay out this particular example :), no offence.
I have a very big passion for creating small % efficiency every iteration. In fact i refuse to do any task any other way. If i am not improving the flow of a task every time i do it then my talents are being wasted. As long as i can do such improvements even the most repetitive menial tasks are fun. Ive nevee had a task go stale besides when a bosses specifically barred me from looking for potential improvements.
Ive spend much free time to specifically tweak the airflow and temps of my desktop. I absolutely wouldn’t mind to use those skills elsewhere.
Some people get annoyed knowing something is broken/not perfect and get a kick out of solving that no matter what its about.
Some of the stuff you mentioned like routing tickets and much of the work i do know can soon be automated by ai and robots.
I very much agree robots need human oversight/caretakers but it again confused me that there be no people willing to this. Most fellow nerds love robots, some already build and improve them as a hobby, seems only natural that the opportunity to use that skill for a greater good can be even more rewarding.
I am sorry to hear you dont seem to feel this kind of excitement with your job now. I am not sure how you became burned out or where nudged in a career path doesn’t interest you.
I am not assuming your actual personal ability to do a great job but i admit that the fact many people aren’t excited about their job is something that worries me towards work quality. If i wasn’t I would not trust myself to get optimal results.
My hope is that once your livelihood is guaranteed without work income you no longer feel pressure to do what you don’t love so you can go out, discover what you do love and find there is almost certainly something you can do that you are passioned about that can be used helping society rather then just yourself.
I know a few fellow jobless autists with untapped potential as they were failed by the school system that would love a chance to work in your industry.
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There is enough open source and free and dirt cheap content available already that you can’t play in a lifetime. While I agree that stuff that’s too expensive for the majority of people shouldn’t even exist, I don’t see why creative content should be free for the taking in a society that doesn’t support that way of life yet. Unless you also agree that people should be allowed to take everything else for free as well.
To quote the meme “if you see people steal food, diapers or medicine, no you did not”
I wouldn’t call it free for the taking because i still believe that under the current system all people with the means to pay, should pay. And thats also what i mostly observe in real life.
I am also against people taking and legally buying more then what they/relatives really need. There is way to much wasted around us, even properties.
Because you can only afford tofu doesn’t make it ok to steal a steak.
If we could produce infinite free steaks, then yes, it is ok.
So in that scenario we can produce infinite steaks, right?
Now, people start stealing those steaks because we can produce an infinite amount of them, infinite supply = cost should be zero.
Now, tell me… What’s the incentive for the steak producer to continue producing those steaks if people aren’t paying for them?
See where I’m going with that?
In the end of doesn’t matter if an infinite quantity can be produced “for free”, there’s people behind the product that pay the price and no matter how you want to justify it, if you don’t respect the way the creator wants to give access to their product to people, you have no moral ground to stand on.
I’m not saying people don’t do it, I’m saying that trying to justify it to make you feel better about it is pure hypocrisy and just wrong.
That’s objectively untrue due to the case study of what’s actually happening in real life though. You CAN steal as many steaks as you want, and people ARE paying, at least for the good ones. Enough to fund giant companies that produce more steaks.
if you don’t respect the way the creator wants to give access to their product to people, you have no moral ground to stand on.
Sometimes the creator is wrong. Monopolies are wrong. Slave labor is wrong. Massive environmental externalities are wrong. In many cases, these things are not illegal, but they should be. Same goes for restrictions on purchases of digital media. It’s wrong, and we shouldn’t respect it. That’s the moral high ground.
I am good friends with someone who works with detained criminals and thats not how most thievery happens. Besides alcohol (but addiction is a different story) baby food is the item most often stolen. Packages of sliced cheese are also common.
The criminal poor don’t go to the store to steal specific items they go to buy food like normal and with every item they are counting if they will have enough on their account. When they get to their budget limit they try to swap some stuff to make It work. If that really doesn’t work they sometimes decide to take a more expansive items from their cart and smuggle it out without paying.
Of course this wont be the exact scenario for all store-theft but its what i hear is most common at least where i live.
What I’m saying is that there’s plenty of cheap games you can play, even tons of free ones (one a week on epic) if you don’t have enough money. It doesn’t make it morally right to pirate games.
I know people do it, I do it too, trying to pass it as being somehow morally right is what I can’t accept. I’m at fault, I accept it and don’t try to make myself believe that it’s ok, it’s not.
I see where you are coming from.
Doing something wrong and realizing it is wrong is a really important skill to have as its part of the guilt mechanisms which is important in a healthy society.
I am going to settle on i agree on what you say here specifically but i disagree that there isn’t more to discuss within the same topic about what is and isn’t morally right. Which admittedly is something that would requires a much bigger body of people to weigh in on.
Wishing you well!
I primarily use it to see if things are actually worth me paying for them, I’ve lost count of the games I’ve tried out, found they were great and bought outright. Watching things is more of a service issue though, I’ll pay a subscription for something if it’s actually decent, Netflix went and screwed that up for me. If I could actually trust any of the streaming services to not do something stupid again then maybe I would.
Digital products don’t cost anything to produce many copies of for sale. That’s why they can have many deep discounts through the year.
“Piracy” word is unfitting actually but it’s overused by distributors. “Ownership” is unfitting too, but it comes to mind by default when we talk about paying. You either receive a product that you can use indefinitely or a service that you can use indefinitely. That’s about it.
Problem though, is that products almost consistently aren’t delivering on quality expectations as of lately. Or they contain some artificial restrictions/defects that impact the product value in end users’ eyes. Or they can randomly stop working at all. The list can go on.
In the end, it’s not that pirates don’t want to pay for stuff. It’s that they are not allowed to pay as little as they deem adequate for the quality of the product they get.
The ultimate reason behind everything is people’s wish to be able to use stuff they paid for. Indefinitely where possible. And because the product is good enough most of the times.
Piracy was never stealing, because potential purchase can’t be stolen since it’s not happened yet, and any pirate using a product without paying for it can be equal to that potential purchase. The new catchphrase is just a convenient way to remind distributors that they need to provide on value and quality and stop blaming someone for their failure to meet their financial goals.
Some of what you say is true but I still don’t think there’s any A implies B. Quality does seem to be down, prices and DLC are up, and some older content just isn’t available for purchase at all.
Some of this is bogus though. It doesn’t cost any money to make a digital copy, but it costs a LOT of money to make the original. This is like R&D/T&E cost for any manufactured product, so to call it “free” is a little disingenuous. I also agree I agree I don’t want to pay full price, but the “potential purchase” is horseshit. If you walk into a department store and pick up a shirt (even if stock is infinite) because you want it but don’t think it’s cheap enough, that’s theft. Sure you can come back when it’s on sale and buy it, but a purchase/payment is transactional: if you don’t uphold your end, that’s not a transaction. Last, while some of us DO just want a way to pay and own in a legit way, you can look at replies to the last comment and find a 1 in 5 example of “I’m never paying, I want it for free” which jacks the prices for the rest of us even if we are just paying a fair share of up front cost.
Your mistake is trying to explain everything with physical analogies. It straight up won’t work properly.
but it costs a LOT of money to make the original.
Yes and so what? Should there be a link between those costs and the amount of copies sold? I see regional prices increased by as much as 500% sometimes. For titles that have been around for many years too.
It’s just simple to assume that those initial costs will be recouped eventually, so long as the product is good enough. Regardless of piracy. I think it’s also adequate to assume that people must be okay with paying the asking price for what they get, and that it will not make the business less successful, if the product is good enough. If it’s not good enough then it shouldn’t sell much in the first place, and it may be impossible to recoup costs.
This is like R&D/T&E cost for any manufactured product, so to call it “free” is a little disingenuous.
Fine, so let that small (albeit not free) cost of copying one digital copy slip from the pocket of the company. This is where pirates get it. They then create their own supply chain with their own R&D/T&E/whatever costs that are completely disconnected from the company and therefore shouldn’t be a concern.
the “potential purchase” is horseshit
When pirates who weren’t going to purchase a game try it for free and decide they actually want to support the developer or recommend it to a friend, this is a sale that wouldn’t be possible without piracy. Not exactly horseshit.
If you walk into a department store and pick up a shirt (even if stock is infinite) because you want it but don’t think it’s cheap enough, that’s theft.
Exactly because the stock is infinite no one would ask you to be responsible for what you’ve done. That t-shirt is probably cool and more people would want it when they see it on you. But really it just can’t have infinite stock and a price at the same time.
if you don’t uphold your end, that’s not a transaction.
Why even care what transaction is? In the end, some potential sales convert into real sales and that’s all that matters. Digital products can have demos and trials - there is no need for the nature of distribution to be “transactional”.
“I’m never paying, I want it for free” which jacks the prices for the rest of us
Missing the logical link here. But anyway, those people should be outside of the target audience. Yet still there are ways how they can help generate potential sales. By wearing a t-shirt they got for free from some illegal store, you know.
I see no reason why the cost shouldn’t be a function of copies sold, or rather that the maximum of cost and possible revenue shouldn’t be a function of copies sold. The point of selling is to make money, and profitable games beget sequels / remakes / expansions. Of course this isn’t a guarantee that companies are always good actors but we can’t control that.
I have no idea what the intersection is between devs and companies like EA or steam or whoever to be able to say that when you pirate you hurt the distributor not the developer. The cost of piracy may impact either one or both, but the original post is “company bad so piracy OK” so it’s not really a small scale / one-off discussion.
There are some pirates who will pay for a copy when all is said and done, but I would bet a large sum that these people are vastly in the minority. There’s not a good deed potential purchase at the end of probably even 1 in 5 downloads of anything.
To really boil it down, companies are predatory, but it doesn’t justify unbridled piracy. In the same way companies are predatory gougers, people are generally shitty, entitled leechers. Something something two wrongs something something else.
I see no reason why the cost shouldn’t be a function of copies sold, or rather that the maximum of cost and possible revenue shouldn’t be a function of copies sold.
Not sure if you’re thinking of proposing some new system for the industry to go with, that would not be a subject of the same piracy related catchphrases.
Of course this isn’t a guarantee that companies are always good actors but we can’t control that.
We can, in fact, control that with our wallets. To some degree, yes. But it would sound more stupid if someone says “we can’t control companies” and something like “piracy should stop” together.
The cost of piracy may impact either one or both, but the original post is “company bad so piracy OK” so it’s not really a small scale / one-off discussion.
This is what we can’t control though - the revenue split between devs and publishers. As for the “company bad so piracy ok” I don’t think there is anything to discuss. It’s viable and I could use that myself (though I might not even have enough time to care about pirating stuff, I just don’t buy products related to specific parties).
There are some pirates who will pay for a copy when all is said and done, but I would bet a large sum that these people are vastly in the minority. There’s not a good deed potential purchase at the end of probably even 1 in 5 downloads of anything.
And I would say there is even less deed potential in trying to convince pirates into buying stuff instead of downloading it for free. The point is, information spread helps sales of good products (so you want more paid/free end users, not less). Another point is, most pirates will always be pirates (so it’s useless to blame people who wasn’t even going to purchase your product by default). Third point is, digital products are luxury so it’s not a loss of people when they don’t buy your product (they will be just fine without it) - it’s your loss when people are not convinced to give you the money (the amount you ask for) for your product.
companies are predatory, but it doesn’t justify unbridled piracy
So what you’re saying is “yes some companies are providing bad products but it doesn’t mean people are entitled enough to not pay for such products”? Then what would you say as a day 1 purchaser to people who paid 75% less than you to receive the same product? Where is the point when you go from “that’s ok since it was an official discount” to “that’s not okay because they didn’t pay for it (
as much as someone else paid)”?No matter how bad something is or how little someone else paid for it, neither you nor anyone else is entitled to any product free of charge. Period. Whether you indirectly help sales or you don’t, it’s a shit perspective to take.
Yes I sail the seas every now and again and yes companies are shitty, but there’s no inherent high ground to be found in taking something without paying for it.
Well sorry, if I know the company will treat me and my PC as shit for buying their product, I’d rather consider using other party’s services a way to go.
I directly helped with bug reports (that were indeed used to fix stuff) on several products I didn’t own. You can also teach Minecraft’s creator how indirect help of pirates is a shit perspective I guess.
Also no. Bytes can’t be taken, only copied. As I said, physical world rules don’t really work here. You can copy as much as you want without doing any harm, and someone might even thank you later for preserving some work of art that was mistreated or abandoned by its original distributors.
“I’m never paying, I want it for free” which jacks the prices for the rest of us
It doesn’t. Those people are not a loss- they would not have bought even if piracy was impossible/unavailable, they would just do without. Companies claiming they have to raise prices to compensate for people who won’t buy their crap is a lie, and you are a fool to believe it.
“they would not have bought even if piracy was impossible”
Yeah, they would forgo their hobby and look at the wall all day instead!
Or, you know, find something else…
That they couldn’t pirate
No, dip ass.
If you’re middle class or upper middle class and not a teenager, you spend money on the things you want. If you can get them for free, most people do that instead.
The last time you went to a museum and it was donation requested instead of admission required, did you put any money in? My money is on no.
It’s because people do not want to pay creatives because you can’t physically touch stuff creatives produce.
Are they being paid now? There are about 9 Walmart workers for every professional writer in the US.
I take a rock from the moon, nobody owns the rock nor the moon. I don’t think I’m stealing it then. I’m just taking it.
So yes, something needs to be owned in order to be able to actually steal it.
The difference being that you not buying the moon rock doesn’t affect a person that worked to produce that rock (because there isn’t one) whereas pirating a copy of a game because you decide you don’t want to pay money for it because you fear you might not be able to play it permanently, that’s work theft, you’re profiting off the work of a person/team by enjoying the product they made to sell without compensating them.
I’m sure you wouldn’t appreciate it if your boss came up with a similar way to justify not paying you for the work you do and he told you “Oh no, I’m not stealing anything!”
That’s where I’m at. Whether or not a product is digital or freely reproducible is irrelevant, because rights to distribute ultimately belong to whoever wrote it. Their terms. Violating those terms to obtain a copy, again whether legitimately following those terms would give you full access to a copy or a license to use, is still theft. It’s easier to justify theft when the impact on the victim is so small, but even if it was zero, that doesn’t make it not theft. I’ll say it again, those are justifications, not disqualifiers.
Not that I’m some bootlicker either, I’ve got a jellyfin setup and you can guess where I got those movies. The difference is I’m not gaslighting myself into thinking that there’s anything legitimate about it. I fucking stole them dude (edit, and I don’t have a shred of guilt either). It’s just a stupid catchphrase, with logic comparable to “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”
to whoever wrote it. Their terms.
I see. So if I make a Mickey Mouse cartoon I own that?
If it’s steamboat yeah. Otherwise you just can’t distribute it. Obtaining copyright is it’s own can of worms, and I’m not the guy to ask about it
I think you know it wasn’t steamboat that I was referring to.
So let me ask you: if a company can own an idea how come they get to own ideas off those ideas? Do farms get own the energy I get from food? Why are derived works also held by the company forever?
I wasn’t sure if you meant steamboat, but that’s the cool thing about the word “otherwise”, I can give you conditional answers. English is neat that way.
Anyway, like I said already copyright law isn’t in my wheelhouse. Actually, I’m confused, what are you arguing exactly? That pirated copies are derived works? I don’t understand what this has to do with piracy.
False analogy. When I am being paid to design something it is to bring something into the world that does not exist. If my employer could find it in the world they wouldn’t pay me.
The solution is to purchase a game, but then also pirate a drm free version of it.
Although an ideal solution would be to prevent companies from imposing those restrictions in the first place.
They already have. Wage theft is by far the largest form of theft in the US, and they certainly try to claim that it is legal.
So it makes it ok to do it too?
They’re clearly working on the principal of “might makes right” considering that every single digital media company has had instances of “selling” customers media, and then deciding to make it impossible for the customer to use said media, and they never give refunds.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Since they are legally people, and they have all the power, then clearly it’s ok for the rest of us to be thieves, just like them
How about the creators?
It’s funny because so far all the pro pirating arguments ignore the creators, the work they do and the fact that they have to make a living too.
If you’re referring to any of the major media companies the creators already got paid. Hollywood and the software industry both use Hollywood accounting so there’s never any profits to be shared in residuals.
Again if they want to be predatory thieves in their business models, it’s totally fine for us to steal right back.
Don’t worry, you are on the path. If you are asking these questions you are miles, or kilometers, ahead.
You can pare this down significantly. Piracy isn’t theft. They are different things.
Imagine if we could hook up Bittorrent and Bitcoin somehow, and made it so you could create a torrent of your work and get some money when people download.
And then people who seed it could maybe get a little cut for helping to host things. And you’d buy tokens and you’d know that almost 100% of the money goes to the artist, and the artist has control over the entire process.
That would be neat, but I’m sure someone here will explain why this is unworkable and stupid. Which is why I posted it.
Imagine YouTube reposts stealing merger ad revenue but it’s your main revenue instead.
That’s definitely a hard problem we’d have to solve.
“What we need are stronger copyright laws.”
- Disney lawyers, probably
Eight hours later, and no one disagreed.
I think you might be on to something
Drugs.
99% of revenue would go to the first copycats that can feasibly pretend the works are theirs, and dominate the space with their own seeder bots.
Democracy is nice, but…it needs a bit of regulation and enforcement. You’d end up slowly building up a lot of the rules that currently dictate digital purchases, sans corruption.
🤔
Good luck doing that with current laws and what happens if the artist doesn’t want to share their work anymore?
What’s funny is that in theory NFTs could have been used for something like that (proof of ownership of a digital good that can be resold), the problem being that you will rely on a third party platforms to authenticate and download the things you own as it can’t realistically be stored on the blockchain…
You don’t need special digital scam money to do this. You can just go buy the thing directly from the creator/the creator’s agent. If the creator wanted to go through the trouble of self-publishing, they’d have just done that.
Most of the back and forth is predicated on the idea that the digital world works the same as the digital one. It does not!
In the physical world you cannot produce and exact copy of something for zero dollars.
In the digital world you can make many copies at effectively zero cost.
Stealing, theft, is predicated on taking something from someone so they no longer have it.
Making a digital copy does not steal or remove access.
The whole argument, which I would posit is deeply flawed, is that pirating removes imaginary potential profits for reselling the thing copied (not stolen). If that’s so then prove it. Prove that at some point in the future I, or any other given person, would have bought that digital thing. Unless you’ve invented time travel you just can’t.
Copying digital content isn’t theft and pirating isn’t the right thing to call it.
We have to figure out how to better frame or address the digital world that just fundamentally doesn’t operate the same as the physical one.
So just like you can’t prove that none of the pirates would have bought it if pirating didn’t exist? But which is more likely, that sales would stay the same or that more people would buy the products if piracy didn’t exist?
You’re not entitled to the fruit of someone’s labor without compensation or their consent, even if you pinky swear that you’ll compensate them at a future date.
At face level you would expect that, but a lot of the people I know that pirate do it to that way they can see how the game or movie is and then if they like it they buy it afterward. Game Demos are rarely a thing nowadays and otherwise they just wouldn’t have bought it in the first place. Under this scenario they are actually gaining more profit than if they were to heavily combat, but corporations/non-indie studios are shortsighted and would rather chase a fictional lawsuit case then actually make a profit.
I bought one $60+ game that I absolutely hated after 20 minutes. I don’t plan on making that mistake again, just anecdotally supporting this theory.
As soon as you release something to the world, you have given up some control over the thing- otherwise, people would have to come to you to see/hear your art, which would limit the profits considerably.
In this case the product is released and people are given access to it under certain conditions agreed to by the creator. We’re not talking about fan fiction and the death of the author, stop mixing up debates.
I suppose we should just start throwing people “likely” to do crimes in prison preemptively!? That’s not how anything else works. Why would it work like that here?
Likely?
The second you illegally download copyrighted content you’re committing a crime. The fact that you intend to potentially buy it at a later date doesn’t matter, just like you can’t leave a store with a TV and tell them “Don’t worry, I promise I’ll be back in two years to pay for it!”
“Stealing, theft, is predicated on taking something from someone so they no longer have it.”
So if I purchase a product and then its taken away due to service closure or ‘updated’ to be so different as to no longer be recognisable that would be theft surely.
Yes.
What you pay for through platforms is a limited usage license. Get a physical copy or just buy DRM free games if you want to own them
Physical copies are still just purchasing a limited usage license purchase.
Technically, even purchasing DRM free games are again just a limited usage license.
Sure, but at least a physical copy you can resell and no one can keep you from playing and same for that last part with the DRM free version and it seems to be the issue people are having right now and that led to this discussion.
The concept you bring up applied before the digital world took off as well.
For those of us who were around when the whole “YoU WoULdN’t StEaL a CaR!” argument against piracy was being made, it was a false equivalency when it came to ownership back then too.
Copying a song off the radio onto a tape cassette was not the same as breaking into a car, hot-wiring it, and driving off in it. Someone copying a song from the radio onto a cassette was not preventing others from listening to it.
Yes. This is not about theft. It’s about intellectual property rights and royalties via cloning a non-physical creation. They just masquerade it as theft because it helps their argument. It’s disingenuous of them.
Then wage theft isn’t theft because you never were in possession of the money so it wasn’t stolen from you.
If buying isn’t owning,
Then it’s time to get communism
This must be why blockbuster failed, people just grabbed whatever and left saying it’s not stealing because blockbuster lets them rent it
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I think you missed the point
People would call the above stealing even if you could only rent from them
Stealing a rental car is still car theft.
Bad comparison.
It’s more like buying a car, driving it for two years, then the manufacturer decides they no longer want to support the car so it auto drives off in the middle of the night
No you can’t have a refund
Don’t even need the auto drive off aspect.
A better comparison is where the car will no longer start no matter what you do to it. But you own the body/frame.
But like if someone stole it in those two years it would still be theft.
It’s a perfect comparison, it’s just not proving what you think it’s trying to prove. It’s proving that the If/Then statement is wrong and makes no sense if you think about it. It’s not proving that piracy is theft.
Piracy isn’t theft, but this isn’t why.
If the rental car was advertised as a car you can own, you paid the price for owning the car and they get you on the fine print. No sir, then its not theft.
Making exact copy of rental car is not.
Fuck yeah I would download a car
In the same way that taking a photo at a museum is theft
I mean yeah, but digital copies of something are definitely different then a literal car.
Yeah, if they could print effectively infinite copies of the car at almost zero cost then it would be comparable
They sure are!
No one expects to be the owner of a rented car. That why people ask “are you the home owner or a renter?”
Do you go to a car store and pay full price to have the car in your car library indefinitely before having the dealer come say “sike, we’re taking that back”?
Buying something is owning. That has never changed.
You don’t purchase digital goods. You buy a license to use them, under the conditions you agreed to. Piracy explicitly breaks those conditions 99.9% of the time.
So no, it isn’t stealing. It’s just plainly illegal. And it hurts everyone from the original artist to the multi-billion dollar company that distributes it. Whether you think that is immoral or not is up to you.
Yes, that is the small text they use to justify it, but that’s not how they advertise it. When Amazon Prime wants me to pay for a movie it doesn’t say “License it now!” It says “Buy it now!”
If you go digging into the EULA you’ll see it being called a license, but no effort is made to actually make that clear to the customer.
Furthermore, being technically legal doesn’t make it acceptable. If someone opened a bookstore, and put some treatment on all their books that caused them to suddenly disintegrate after a year, it doesn’t matter if they have on all their receipts that “books are not guaranteed to last longer than a year” or that they “aren’t doing anything illegal”. It’s still a bullshit business practice that shouldn’t be tolerated.
When it says “buy it” you asuume the it refers to the content - they’d probably argue it refers to the license.
It’s worth stating this has basically always been true for books. You can buy paper. Buying bound paper with words on it is not quite the same. You can’t produce a movie from that idea, and state “I invented this idea from a bundle of bound pages I bought, that already had some words on them.”
You never owned the original reproduction rights to the book’s content. That never mattered much until copying and pasting became so easy.
Huh. Never quite looked at it that way, but you are right. I can see how physical book is a form of a license to read a literary work. It is however naturally impossible to revoke. It would be the same if digital content had no DRM - which is generally not the case.
So I guess DRM and you not being able to download and use content outside the company’s ecosystem is the real issue here.
You can buy those movies on physical medium though.
Yes, scams exist. I never claimed that things like your hypothetical situation would be moral, or should be tolerated.
Yet you think the shit corpos are doing isnt just scamming you out of your money?
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Were you under the impression that Amazon was going to assign you the copyright to the song or movie that you purchased? No? Then you understood that you were buying a license and you’re just playing pretend about the confusion.
It’s got nothing to do with copyright. It’s about ownership of a copy. You buy a CD, you own it. You “buy” digital media, it can get taken away from you. That should not be permissable. Yes, I know it’s legal, but it shouldn’t be, and in a just society, it wouldn’t be.
Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahaha.
Bro is just incredible how there is people defending this multibillions dollars companies. The studios don’t care about the author or the creator. They don’t care about the actresses or the singers. They don’t care about you as the consumer of this media. They only care about PROFIT.
Sources :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hollywood_labor_disputes
https://apnews.com/article/actors-strike-ends-hollywood-5769ab584bca99fe708c67d00d2ec241
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/17/business/hollywood-actors-sag-aftra-strike-by-the-numbers/index.html
As you can see these executives are not compensating the actors , the writers. The actual creators of these movies and series you said " wE sHoUldN’t pIrAtE" are not even getting their good deal and let’s not talk about the music industry which is the same or worst situation for the creators.
I don’t see how piracy hurts anyone.
Some pirates just want a free demo before they buy it, others pirate stuff they already bought for convenience reasons, or decide to pay for a license if they like it and want to support the creators, and the third type of pirate never would’ve bought anything to begin with, so no lost sales in any conceivable way.
So it doesn’t hurt the content creator because a minority of pirates actually compensate them for their work?
If piracy didn’t exist at all the “never would’ve bought it” people wouldn’t have a choice but to compensate the content creators in order to enjoy their work. They probably wouldn’t buy all the content that they consume at the moment and would instead be playing less games or watching less movies, but they would still be doing something with their free time and money and it would profit others (and potentially themselves).
Those are valid points, I agree.
I think we have to get to the bottom of why people pirate things. Some just don’t give a fuck and want everything for free, even though they could afford it. Being pissed at those people as a content creator is perfectly understandable, everyone should be fairly compensated for their work.
It’s just that when companies do their best to make being a legitimate buyer an objectively bad experience, that’s a point where I’m not opposed to piracy at all. Adobe comes to mind. Fuck those guys, they just ruin everything.
But if we look at video games, Steam has become so nice over the years that many people rather buy there than to pirate, which says a lot.
What’s funny about that is that people don’t own anything they buy on Steam either. Valve can turn around and ban your account for no reason and you’ll have no recourse against them. They have complete control over the distribution of content through their platform, not the users. They (and probably the publishers as well) can decide to remove a game from their servers completely and it will be just too bad for you if you purchased it.
Yeah, you don’t own anything you buy there.
(Well, some games on Steam are in fact completely DRM-free, but that’s another story)The main difference is that Steam is overall so much more customer friendly than say Ubisoft or EA, to the point these other stores realized they can’t miss out on the sales they get by distributing their games there.
Steam offers a lot more features and ways to deal with your games. For example, once you’re logged in, you can still access your games even when offline, which other launchers don’t allow you to do. Infuriating when the internet is down and you thought you could still play one of your singleplayer titles.
And they even go so far as to still provide games that were taken down to those who bought them before, which I don’t think any other platform does.
But in the context of the current conversation, Steam is no better than any other option that isn’t DRM free (there are DRM free games on Steam but you can’t download the installer itself, you download the game through Steam and then can copy the install folder elsewhere as backup).
Yeah, I was just trying to say that maybe piracy would be less of a problem if customers were actually respected
Do you know any platform that only offers digital stuff that’s not buyable in a “good” way? Because I don’t. That pirates pretend to ride some moral high horse is a cope that’s incredibly disrespectful towards creators.
I feel in online communities like the Fediverse there is an active community of people who do not respect work of people who aren’t working in tech or science. Or maybe it’s predominantly a disrespect for creatives? I see this in discussions about AI image generators as well. And it’s basically the same set of arguments that try to suggest artist should work for free.
They just have to add “get a real job and do your hobbies in your free time” and we have full circled back into the boomer mindset.
I’m gonna draw a hard line though, one between individual creators who do honest and fair work, and big corporations that exploit anyone who wants or needs to aquire their products legitimately.
Because legal or not, what some companies are doing is just completely fucked. Again, Adobe.
Yes, there’s a million reasons to rationalize piracy to yourself.
I think it’s fair to say that, at least occasionally, one of those reasons isn’t true and it hurts the creator.
It’s just my impression of things based on what I’ve seen, but if that’s objectively wrong, I want to learn why
And on the general topic of rationalizing piracy:
Don’t get me wrong here, it is within the sellers rights to impose rules and restrictions about how the product is to be used. That’s not a bad thing per se.But some of these restrictions are just stupid, and only hurt legitimate customers.
Sure, take me for example: I’ve pirated movies which I very well could have paid for, but just didn’t want to.
Yes, I agree that sellers can impose those restrictions. Yes, I agree that those restrictions can hurt legitimate customers.
We have another one.
Slavery used to be legal. So it was okay?
Right now „selling“ stuff and saying its just a license you fool is legal so it is okay?
That is a false equivalence, and I think you know that.
Feel free to point out where because thats exactly what people mean by the phrase in the post.
Comparing slavery to purchasing digital media might be a good place to start.
Its unimportant which example you use.
The underlying principle is legal ≠ correct. Just because something is legal, its not necessarily morally or otherwise correct.
Selling a movie to someone and calling it a license is highly manipulative and I think you know that.
Yes, I said from the start that it might not be moral.
But that’s exactly the point: companies sell movies to theaters, and then those theaters sell tickets to each viewer. That’s the license they each agreed to. A theater buying a movie off Amazon and then selling tickets to everyone who watched it would probably make some people upset, and would very clearly be illegal.
Talk about mental gymnastics.
You cant sell a limited time license. That is rent, plain and simple. If you pay 3 years rent at once or monthly, its still rent.
If you pay for something and have to give it back, you dont actually become the „owner“.
And thats why people say if buying isnt owning, piracy isnt theft, plain and simple.
What’s funny about your bad equivalency is that pirating is treating the people who created the content as slaves since you’re enjoying the fruit of their labour without compensating them.
This user you interacted with here, went on to describe this conversation as you “abusing” and “manipulating” them. They claimed that you were a troll, and started a huge thread in the Fediverse community about expanding ban powers and purging the world of people they disagree with.
My god it’s a discussion thread on the internet, with two people disagreeing. This is what they consider trolling and abuse now.
Look at how they responded to you disagreeing with them: https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/204629
Wow…
And another one. There are a lot more and better ways to compensate an artist than giving money to record companies.
Besides that, I‘m not saying dont buy artistic work, I‘m saying please pirate products of companies that try to bullshit their customers.
Ok, realistically, how many pirates turn around and send money to the creators, making sure that all the people involved in the creation of the content are compensated for their work?
You don’t want to admit it but in the end you’re still taking money from the creators and if everyone was doing that then no one would create content.
I hope pirates are happy that some people keep paying for shit.
You‘re not answering my comment but repeating a set of beliefs. If you want to discuss stuff, feel free to. Otherwise kindly move along.
You’re saying there are better ways to compensate the creators, I’m saying no pirates do it, especially not in a way that would make them legally allowed to have a copy of the creators’ work.
If you don’t want to buy a CD because you don’t want the record label to profit from your purchase and you instead buy a t-shirt and go see a show, it doesn’t give you the right to have a digital copy of the artist’s songs. What you bought is the right to see a show and to own a t-shirt and downloading a copy of their album is still taking money from the artists and all the people that worked on it.
Referencing one point of my many arguments is not a discussion.
„Selling“ limited licences should be illegal but isnt. Legal does (evidently) not mean morally or otherwise okay. Supporting artists does not mean buying bad products, you cant prove that no pirates buy merch or use alternative methods to support creators, therefore I‘ll just ignore your statement.
You were the one trying to derail the topic to a cd or movie, which is not what I said.
https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/204629
Wow, you’re a big baby aren’t you?
Let me solve that for you by blocking you 😘
Yeah, feel free to. Always happy for one abusive person less in my lemmy experience. Reported, blocked.
they supposedly bloced me, too.
some people cant stand the cognitive dissonance that comes with learning they were wrong.
Considering that this account has never before interacted with me and immediately went there, they either used an alt or have severe issues with impulse control and abusive behavior.
no, it’s not
What do you call it if you work to create something for someone and that person decides that what you created is theirs for free and you don’t have a say in the matter?
Because that’s exactly what slavery is and that’s exactly what pirates do.
If you disagree you should mention it to your boss because I’m sure they would be very happy to know that!
deleted by creator
An unfunny meme - ah - the OP is German. Nevermind. Do carry on.
It’s not like memes have to be funny.
In this case it would help if it at least was right.
Ignoring all options to actually buy something to pirate something because you also find offers were you can rent it is just a capitalist mindset. Denying workers money because you want stuff as cheap as possible.
I’m sorry, but did I lay off a thousand people despite record profits?
