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I will accept my downvotes in advance because what I'm about to say is probably against the mindset of most of the people that come here but:
Piracy is wrong.
I say that as someone that pirates. I'm not sure why people have to justify their actions. I know what I'm doing is wrong, I know I'm taking money away from these businesses that run streaming sites, that make movies, write books(this is the one I feel worst about because this is likely taking money directly from creators). But I do it anyway because I'm cheap, I can't afford it, its easier to pirate stuff, plenty of reasons. But none of them make it morally right, and none of them make it ethically right.
When we pirate things, we're pirating entertainment. Entertainment isn't a right. You don't need this stuff to survive. Plenty of entertainment is provided for free at libraries, online with free movies and books. Hell, you can go outside, grab a stick and a rock and boom! Free entertainment. Sure, there are people that pirate things like Photoshop to get ahead in their careers or to jumpstart them, I'm not talking to those people. Adobe has done research and they know those people buy their products when they become professionals. I'm talking to the people downloading a movie and somehow morally justifying it. But when it comes down to it, you are taking something that someone paid money to make in an effort to make money off of it. In my mind, there's no justification for that. Again, I don't care that you do it, I do it too. But no one is gonna get any points in my mind for stating that somehow what you are doing is right, or that it isn't stealing because you're downloading a copy of something. How silly an argument that is. If you take something that someone else expects money for and it isn't vital to your survival, that is wrong.
I'll get off my soapbox now. I love all of you, have a great day :).
Thank you for mentioning Libraries! As a librarian, I'm always getting shocked faces when I tell patrons what is accessible with their library card
I used to pirate a lot of stuff, when I couldn't afford it. Now I only pirate things that I a) already paid for (and want a more convenient way of using it or to ensure it can't be taken away) b) can't obtain any other way, or c) don't know if I will like it, so I use the pirated version as a demo of sorts
Well I'd argue that two things can be wrong at the same time and I see OPs image mostly as a humorous jibe at the dubious practices that have risen with digital content. When you buy a Disc you can resell it, and the company can't knock on your door and say "Excuse me, we'd like the disc back but we'll keep your money". With a digital movie you just obtain a license to view it that you can't resell and can be taken away from you at any time (the cases I know of are admittedly rare till now and caused at least some public unhappiness and in some cases even law suites IIRC). All at the same or even higher price than before.
Then there is the fact that I'm all for using the correct terminology. When you steal something that something is lost to its previous owner. Piracy isn't stealing it's copyright infringement. Companies just prefer to call it stealing because it sounds more evil. Same with the billions of losses through piracy that they complain about. They are based on the wrong premise that every copy is a lost sale, which just isn't true. Take you for example: you can't afford it, so you personally don't loose them anything. And maybe you even buy some stuff you wouldn't have if you hadn't pirated it, or something else from that company before that you really liked. Then I remember people from my school days who had all the movies, all the games, anything. But when you asked "How is it?" they mostly answered "Oh, I haven't played it". I doubt this kind of "collector" would do the same if it actually cost them money, even if they had the means. In short those number are inflated to make the problem appear bigger than it really is.
Is it still a problem/ morally wrong? Probably, but it does put things in a different perspective for me.
And no, I don't need to justify anything to myself. My limiting resource is time, not money, so I buy my fish in the supermarket instead of trying to catch it on the high seas ;) Doesn't stop me from grumbling about them, obviously
I wonder if we're wrong to group entertainment and physical goods into the same category though. They're wildly different things.
If I make you a pair of shoes, I need to charge you money to account for my time, my effort, and the materials it took to make them. If I make a thousand shoes, it doesn't scale; the price per shoe has to stay the same.
If I write an ebook, I would charge for the time and effort it took to write it, but there's no material charge. It scales entirely differently because I can make a billion ebooks for the same cost as one.
Considering that, the old way of thinking that I should be able to resell an ebook like some shoes I bought doesn't seem to apply logically. We're buying entertainment, not physical goods. I don't bitch that I can't resell the experience of going to a concert, so why do I bitch (and I do) that I can't resell digital media?
I just wish the publishers would price media accordingly. If they all worked out a deal with stremio to get ten cents whenever I streamed a movie, I wouldn't think twice. But instead I need to sign up with multiple services and pay $20 to stream one, and I just realized I'm bitching to the choir so I'll end there.
Yea, thats essentially the problem. Companies getting greedy and trying to squeeze out more money by all means they can get away with. If they priced things fairly (and split the profits fairly with the content creators) a lot less people would have an incentive to look to the high seas. And just maybe (pipe dream, I know) worked out deals with each other so people wouldn't need a freakin website just to find out where the hell they have to subscribe to watch something...
And sure, customers trying to avoid paying for anything is also a problem, but I feel the "cure" a) isn't one and b) hurts the people who pay much more than those who pirate.
Essentially the grass isn't green on either side of the fence and that's why we can't have nice things 🤷
Copyright is not a natural law - there is nothing natural about for example not telling a joke to somebody else without first tracking down the person who invented it and agreeing on payment for being allowed to tell it.
And, no, I'm not exagerating: as soon as it is created that joke legally has a copyright, owned by its creator, and sharing it (and that includes "public performances" such as telling it to your friends) requires the authorization of the owner of that copyright in that joke.
The only reason you don't see people fined for telling jokes is because it's not enforced because it's not worth the trouble (plus it would quickly turn people against Copyright).
So, now that we've shown that Copyright does in fact go against the natural human tendency to share - literally it's anti-natura - then that means it's an artificial construct created by man, so a law, written by lawmakers, with all the problems that rules made by politicians have.
Now, if you look at the justification for creating such an artificial restriction on the naturaly human tendency of sharing what you heard, it's to "incentivise creation", which "benefits all because the copyrighted work will go into the Public Domain at the end of the copyright period".
This makes sense, and it might even have been true in the beginning but it's not anymore:
- You see, when this Law was first made the copyright period started as 25 years, which meant that copyrighted works did indeed go into the Public Domain to be freely enjoyed by all, but over the years that period has extended (go look at the various time when that period was extended and you will find the "strange" "coincidence" of it happenning when the first Mickey Mouse movie was about to go out of Copyright in the US) and is now around lifetime of the creator plus 50 years (more in certain countries, such as the US), which means that almost none of the creative works we grew up with (in our childhood) will never go into the Public Domain before we're dead and burried.
Think about it: under the current Copyright Legislation, for every single one of us and for all effects and purposes the "contract" between Society and cultural creators were Society enforces an artifical limitation to the natural human act of sharing and in return cultural creators make works which although at first requiring payment to enjoy, will one day be free to enjoy has been broken - we will never freely enjoy those works we've known since our childhood, the payment that Society (in other words: all of us) was supposed to get for that artificial limitation to sharing.
If a contract has been broken the injured side (that would be Society) doesn't have an obligation to abide by it.
Copyright is not a natural law, but neither is the trading of money for some bread.
I think IP is a (partially mistaken) attempt to enforce the same rule (that works really, really well) that we put on the trade of physical goods, on the trade of cognitive work.
It's tough because with the wheat it's conceptually simple. Yes, you're indirectly paying for their "work" in making the bread, but you don't have to think about work because the bread itself contains the value.
But information is copyable, and that's fundamentally different than bread.
Feels like something should be different, but I don't think the idea of ownership should be rejected merely because it's not natural. Ownership of goods is more natural, but still just an aspect of culture.
Exchanging stuff is absolutelly natural (you see little children doing it) and extending barter trading to "trading for tokens which can be exchanged with different people for other things" is really just introducing a new type of item being exchanged.
Going from sharing of ideas to not-sharing, on the other hand, is going for doing something naturally to the very opposite of that (hence my use of "anti-natura").
I don't think "exchanging stuff but now with tokens" is at all comparable with "stop doing what you would otherwise naturally do without even thinking about it and bring into this exchange an unrelated 3rd party".
I feel like you're trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole there: Copyright Legislation is not about the natural give and take in a exchange or trade (in this case of information) but rather it involves a 3rd party, which is not even present, which is the owner of the copyright of said information (used to be the creator, nowadays it can be anybody or a company) who is artificially inserted in what would otherwise be a normal exchange between 2 persons as an additional externaly party that also requires something.
I suspect the recurrent confusion of so many between copyright violation and theft is exactly because copyright is entirely unnatural, so people fall back to the closest instinctive human behaviour to try and understand it, ending up with the completelly way out there incorrect idea that copyright violation is like one side in an exchange taking stuff from the other and running away before giving their stuff to the other, when in reality you have to sides doing an absolutelly normal exchange (or even a gifting) and there is a 3rd party, not physicially present and never met, seen or otherwise involved with either which the powers of the land say is supposed to authorize that exchange and get a cut if it so wishes, and which both parties of that exchange choose to ignore.
It's not theft because both parties on the exchange are conducting a normal exchange just like they do with all other classes of thin and both are abidding by it. The closest "normal" illegality to copyroght violation is tax evasion and not tax in a democratic nation (were the money goes into the common pot to help everybody) but rather tax in an absolute monarchy or dictatorship were whomever was supposed to get that cut from that transaction is going to keep the money and even then the analogy fails because your're also supposed to give that 3rd party money even when GIFTING something.
You're not familiar with Hollywood accounting, are you?
More harm is caused by propping up the media industry with draconian IP laws than by any amount of piracy, and actual content creators are overworked and underpaid not because of pirates but the mad pursuit of exponential short term profit growth.
If you care about developers, don't consume the media.
If you must consume the media, pirate.
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@stappern @Talignoram6571 It's a difficult question. I'm a game developer. We estimate that about 25% of all active copies are pirated.
If all pirated copies would just disappear, would those people go buy the game? I don't think so. They would just stop playing. They don't care about the game enough to spend money, or they really just cannot afford it.
But you could argue that more people are playing the game, and they might buy a sequel in the future.
So, do we loose money? Yes, a little.
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Amen brother. I also eat meat and I know it's wrong. I ain't gonna justify that shit I'm gonna pull a Cypher and blissfully chew that juicy steak.
Sometimes we do shit that's wrong. Oh well.