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AITAH for pirating games before buying them?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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No. Intellectual property is not real, so nothing is being stolen by you.
If it's a small developer, and you like the game, make sure to support them if you can. If it's a mega studio, don't feel bad about not paying anything.
That's my personal policy at least.
Intellectual property is not real?
So unless I make something physical I am not making anything real? So all my work up to the point of a plant being actually built is not real?
Doing anything on a PC or smartphone is not real.
Inventing a train of thought that cures every known desease and mental illness is simply not real - because you can't touch it. This is the equivalent of dark ages church logic.
You are being intentionally obtuse. It's not that the thing itself literally does not exist at all, it's that the ownership of ideas is not real. When you steal a physical item the original owner is deprived of that item. When you copy an idea the original "owner" still has access to it.
I find it funny you're calling him intentionally obtuse right after you seem to just simplify theivery at whether something physical is stolen. If you're basing it off of something being stolen or not, IP is used to protect the realized gains off of an idea. Yeah you aren't stealing a physical something, but you are robbing the creator of what the item is valued at. It is exactly the issue that you can't own an idea that IP is usually heavily protected. Ironically, the intention is to help new ideas(and their profiting worth) from being stolen by someone (or something ie Coporations) with better means to distribute and profit off of the idea. Otherwise, why wouldn't I just get a copy of a game, underpriced it, and sell it as cheap as I wanted? I've put no thought or labor into actualized the idea, so I have no reason to price it beyond my initial investment. It why when someone (or something) sells full rights to their IP, it can be worth millions. They don't care about the idea. They care about what the idea can provide in the future.
To draw a parallel, saying IP isn't real is like saying currency has no worth. On the surface, duh of course currency isn't actually worth anything. It's not like people can (practically) eat a dollar or make shoes out of a dollar, but we've (generally) collectively decided it's worth something. It instils confidence that when I walk into a store, my currency has a conversion rate of so many dollars per good. If thousands of people added millions of dollars into their bank accounts by just "copying" the electronic money, no one has lost money, but the value of the currency is deflated by those actions because there's nothing stopping everyone from from just adding millions to their accounts. The confidence that people will be harshly dealt with for deflating the currency like that is one of the innate things that gives currencies (and IP's) their value. Handwaving it away by saying it isn't actually real is also just being obtuse.
If I value the item at $0 then I have robbed them of $0.
We already do that. It is called piracy. We take it and sell it for as cheap as we want ($0).
I don't care if the value of IP is deflated. I already believe it to be zero so that doesn't change anything. Ideas should be free to be shared.
And before you say something like, "then nothing new will ever get made" just remember you are on Lemmy. The developers make it because they want to, not because of the money. People can still make things without profit incentive. In fact I think the world would be a much better place if we had less creations focused on making money and were left with only creators who are driven by passion rather than profit.
You can also steal physical items and claim their value is 0. What does this have to do with IP specifically?
Luckily we live in reality, where thieves don't get to arbitrarily determine the values of their plunder.
Pirates absolutely can and do arbitrarily determine the value of their plunder. As evidenced by this post.
You can disagree with it, but piracy will always be a part of reality.
FOSS is made because people want it to be made and made available. People who make games and art vary between it purely wanting to be made and wanting to make a profit off of that. If you're dense enough to think saying you value something at $0 and then still enjoying it like the other people willing to support the IP, then you're an asshole.
There is a balance between what the creator is allowed to value their idea and what people are willing to pay for that idea. If they can't find a middle ground, then the transaction shouldn't occur. If you force that transaction by stealing their idea and efforts, you're being a thief. What you use to justify your actions is up to you, but you're a thief nonetheless.
This isn't even a coherent sentence. But I'm assuming you mean I'm an asshole for enjoying something without paying when other people do pay? Except if I enjoy something I do pay for it. Just because I don't think people should own ideas doesn't mean I don't support creators when I enjoy something.
And no, by law I am not a thief. A thief is someone who commits theft, and theft is "the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it." Copyright infringement does not deprive the owner of it, it is simply a copy. At least in the United States where I live copyrighted works are not considered stolen property. You can call me an asshole if you want but by definition I am no thief.
He says it is not real, so it can not be stolen. That is a pretty simple message. What am I getting wrong? He says nothing about ownership. It just does not exist. So don't tell me I am obtuse when the maximum is that the person was ambiguous.
That would be a ~~ecumenical~~ philosophical matter.
The results of your ideas are real, the outcomes and impacts are real. The mental labor you do is valuable, but none of it is "property."
If your thoughts and ideas and concepts are property that can be stolen, then please explain how you can be deprived of them.
Thinking hard about something is labor, but it's not property, it can't possibly be property, because it lacks all of the aspects typically required to define property.
IP laws are not the only way to ensure a creator is compensated for their work. Money isn't the only possible compensation, and modern IP law doesn't protect most small time creators. It protects mega-corps and their monopolies on content/products/services.
It stifles competition and progress, not enhances it.
I used to think this way, then I realized physical property is not real either. Both are defined by the state, recorded on paper somewhere, and protected by force.
Just because you can actually physically go to my property does not change the fact that it is only my property because I have a deed.
I'm still not sure how to feel about IP but I'm less dismissive of it for now.
Let's word it differently then. Physical property is literally real, like, you can go to it. IPs are not a resource. The game devs do not run out of copies of a game because OP pirated them. They remain at an infinite supply. If someone breaks into your house and makes off with your microwave, you are now short a microwave; If you pirate software, the developer is not short in any stock of software
Possession of property isn't the same as property itself. Although I agree with you that I am sceptical of property in general, at least physical property makes some sense when defined. Intellectual property just makes absolutely no sense.
With intellectual property there is at least (by default) a direct link between the work necessary to create an item and its ownership. With physical items the initial ownership is necessarily predicated on having controlled a means of production.
I can create an IP and I do not need to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to do so. But I cannot create a substantial physical item without paying the people who own the materials and the factories for the privilege of doing so. Why is previous ownership such a critical factor in ownership of new items, separate from the work to create them?
Intellectual property laws have their own issues but at least with regard to them conceptually, intellectual property is more “pure” than physical property.
Your ethics are on point.
People should be rewarded for their mental labor, but that's not the same as saying they have created intellectual property.
A thought or concept is not an object that can be stolen. An idea cannot be a scarce resource that is used up.
If concepts or ideas can be "stolen" then that means somebody is being deprived of them. But unless you somehow erased the idea from all parts of that person's brain and transfered it into yours, nobody has been deprived of anything, and thus nothing has been stolen.
You cannot be "deprived of profit." That makes no sense. Nobody is owed any profit for simply trying to sell something.
If I create art to sell, and nobody buys it, I haven't been robbed of anything at all. And that fact doesn't change if somebody walks past my art booth, looks at my painting, admires it, and then walks away. They didn't "steal" anything from me. I haven't been deprived of anything. Unless you want to make the claim that they are a thief now that they enjoyed my painting without paying my anything for it.
If that's true, then everybody who walks through an art fair or gallery but doesn't buy any art is a robber and should be arrested and charged.
The idea that IP protects the little folks who are struggling artists is a capitalist myth perpetuated primarily by corporate advocates that are the actual beneficiaries of IP laws. It's used by mega-corps to lock down massive amounts of content, make billions off of it, exploit actual artists to perpetuate their monopoly on creative expressions of characters.
It's also used by pharma corps to artifically restrict supply of critical drugs to the population in order to make billions in profits and enrich their shareholders.
And the whole, "nobody would create anything if copyright/patents didn't exist" is yet another capitalist myth, disproved by countless examples. As if the entire internet doesn't run on the back of Linux, a free and open source project spanning literal decades, Wikipedia, the largest single encyclopedia of human knowledge in dozens of languages, all the millions of pages of fan fiction and hobbiest artists that have created passion projects with no expectation of making money. Etc etc.
Don't buy into the propaganda.
If intellectual property is not real, then why do you support the idea of paying small developers instead of large developers? Their intellectual property is just as fake as large studios, right?
I really wish pirates were more honest with themselves. Just admit that you're taking something that doesn't belong to you and own it. I pirate content all the time, but I don't do the mental gymnastics to justify it. Just admit that you stole something and that you don't care, it's not that hard. I have an old PC in my closet that has about 200 movies and a bunch of cracked games on it that I've pirated over the years, and I don't care that I stole them. The Robin Hood complex some pirates have is just weird, imo. You're not sticking it to The Man; The Man is still bankrolling more per week than the team who made the content you stole is making in a year, regardless of your seed ratio.
By the way, large studios also have developers who rely on their jobs to put food on the table, just like the small studios. If you think anybody at EA aside from the C-Suite execs are significantly richer than the average indie dev, you'd be mistaken. Next time you're playing a pirated AAA game, look at your character; the guy who spent several weeks of his life sculpting and rigging that model is probably just as concerned about paying his rent on time as you are.
By the way, this isn't entirely directed at you, specifically. Just my thoughts on the general attitude I see in a lot of piracy communities lately.
You are not wrong, but maybe just a bit of perspective:
In my city, you can go to the public library, borrow a DVD, take it home, watch it. 100% legal. 100% free. No library membership fees. And they have multiple copies of most DVDs, so it's not like it's some lottery to use the service.
It feels a lot like downloading a movie without paying anyone to watch it. The only difference is you gotta go outside. Oh, and no guilt tripping.
Anyway, what's my point? Well piracy is only illegal because some people (not everyone) decided that everyone is going to pay an equal, but not necessarily an equitable, share to fund the development of said IP (unless you have a library in your area to counter this, partially). Worse, that everyone will keep paying a very small group of people money we'll after the development of said IP has been paid off. Even worse, that small group of people will use their profits to corrupt the legal system to ensure that that protectionism continues to serve their benefit, not others... Point being, you can pirate, and care... care a lot.
Victims are created when piracy affects small production houses struggling to make ends meet. Victims are created of everyone else when the law is abused beyond it's original purpose to squeeze consumers.
So you too should be honest and not call it theft. Piracy is piracy, good or bad. To compare it to the crime of theft is to perpetuate the marketing of those to stand from a black and white view on the matter.
It is theft, but the argument is better framed as to whether or not it's moral theft. Most people who pirate feel comfortable pirating from larger corporations over small time creators/groups, with the usual justifications you've provided above. Personally, I've justified it at times because I couldn't afford to purchase the thing, which leads to another argument of "if I wasn't going to buy it in the first place, is it actually effecting them".
There is no argument to be made, however, where it isn't true that if you were to have purchased it, the owner of the idea will make more off of it. Whether you care or not about that owner getting more is a different argument, but you are robbing them of value for the idea, however little that value might have been.
I'm not arguing for or against pirating, but people in the comments saying it isn't theivery really seem to be arguing whether stealing is wrong or not. Call it what it is and go back to the argument people have been having for thousands of years.
Which, I realize I didn't address libraries. Taxes pay for libraries to operate, and then the library pays to have copies of the works. If no one wants to read my book, libraries aren't going to just go out and buy thousands of copies. And trying to tackle libraries would also start to erode arguments for reselling something. And to bring it back to the OP, I've read books in a library before that I enjoyed enough to purchase a copy of my own. I've also read books I haven't. But someone purchased that book for me to rent, and in a small part, I've paid for that book myself by paying taxes.
No, the difference is that you're expected to return it. You're not supposed to keep it forever. That's why there's a "due by" date on checked-out materials.
Absolutely wild how stuff like this is downvoted here. People are disconnected from reality as if the world is a little hippy community. reminds me of this, have fun reading.
That link is chillingly hilarious.
Makes me think of a simple job like garbage man; they drive up the pay to encourage people into it. So what’s the incentive without capital?
In theory, you see the job needs to be done, you do it for the good of the community.
No worries, I am sure the local diaper boy will handle that.
Jesus Christ.
I think... I think I understand conservatives a little now.
I do not understand them - the same way I can not understand those delusional socialism nutjobs.
It's not mental gymnastics. Why is it so hard to believe that people genuinely don't believe in intellectual property? It has nothing to do with "sticking it to the man." I just do not believe in IP, full stop.
And piracy is not stealing, it is making a copy. When you steal a physical item the original owner is deprived of that item. When you copy something the original "owner" still has access to it.
Not everyone thinks the same way you do. In fact you sound like a terrible person if you genuinely believe that what you're doing is wrong but you're doing it anyway.
You can also believe in Santa, how does it matter, to the whole society, what you believe?
It's the same with FOSS. IP is just as fake as physical private property, but that doesn't mean we can't pay people for their labour.
If I find a really useful open-source licensed app developed by one or two people as a hobby, and they have a donation link in their repo, I might send them something.
If it's a really useful open-source licensed app developed by some corporation, there's no way I'm giving them money. The company has invested in developing the app as open source; they chose to (or were forced to by virtue of open source dependencies) make it public. The devs were already paid by the company. Whether the company takes in enough revenue by other means to pay for this open source project isn't my problem.