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Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
(pluralistic.net)
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Technology
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Amoral at worst. Public transportation shouldn't have a fee at use. Tax the rich, invest in transport
Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?
A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being "removed" in that situation either.
Ah, in that case, no that is also not stealing.
What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.
Who is losing resources when you hop a turnstile?
The transportation authority who maintains the trains and stations.
Only if the rides are a scarce resource. Which they aren't. Nothing that some customer could have bought is removed by jumping a turnstyle.
Nothing? Not even the fuel required to transport the extra weight of somebody who hasn't paid? Not even the wages for the employees who conduct and maintain the trains?
You can argue that the amounts are miniscule, sure. But "miniscule" does not equal "zero".
When you're paying, you're not buying the fuel nor are the salaries directly affected by one person is paying for riding a train.
What you're describing is called "marginal cost" and reducing this is the reason why the economics of any large scale business is actually working. You could argue with these marginal costs, but you'd be entering a completely different model/domain of economics. And no one uses this model which is abstract/non-abstract in any aspect that happens to make your point valid.
I think I figured out the disconnect here. Yes, hopping a turnstile is against the law. It is still not considered theft. It is called fare evasion, and it is more akin to a traffic violation. The reason I was confused, and why I assumed you meant morality, is that nobody is saying piracy isn't against the law. The article never said that either.
Jumping a turnstile and taking a physical, actually scarce resource is not comparable to duplicating a digital, artificially scarce resource.
The train requires ongoing maintenance and can only hold a finite amount of people. Taking the train seat for free takes away something from another person. Downloading media does not use any ongoing resources, and does not take anything away from another consumer.
Comparing the morality of physical goods to digital goods are not really a good comparison specifically because of the artificial scarcity brought on by making something digital to try to make it more expensive doesn't map to the real scarcity of physical goods.
Again, I have to ask: How do you think those digital goods are made in the first place? Somebody labored to create it. They deserve to be paid for it.
Not sure why this is such a hot take.
How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
However much they're asking. They put a price tag on it for exactly this question.
Not really. Civil disobedience is about refusing to follow a law, not choosing to break a law. There's a difference between the two concepts; one involves going about your day as normal and ignoring laws, and the other is going out of your way to break a law. Piracy is no more a form of civil disobedience than looting a grocery store is.
Ah, that's not my understanding of civil disobedience. I prefer this definition: "civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/)
I suppose the piracy aspect might not be public enough to count as civil disobedience though, unless you count as public the noticeable cumulative effects of all piracy.
Right, but in this instance you're not damaging the government through these actions. You're damaging private entities. Civil vs criminal.
EDIT: Although, piracy often crosses both civil and criminal statutes in many cases, because copyright law is weird like that.
Agreed, and to me the solution is not "let's hope the companies play nice", but rather to bring in anti-monopoly regulations, like Canada's Bill C-56.
We need to force companies to add interoperability, transparency and fairness imho. Like the ongoing fight to force Apple to allow competing browsers in iOS. Or alternate app stores for Android and iOS.
That is a false equivalency.
The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven't paid for.
Pirating takes away a possible purchase. You haven't actually used any of their resources or cost them anything.
If I wasn't going to buy it anyway they haven't lost anything.
If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you've actually cost them resources.
I don’t get this logic at all. Piracy doesn’t take away a possible purchase. There is an assumption that the media downloaded was ever going to be paid for. In 100% of the cases where I downloaded pirated content, I was never going to pay for the product, even if it was available to me by other means. Further I cannot remove a sale from someone when I never possessed the money to pay for it anyway.
I believe most people that pirate cannot afford to buy digital releases or pay for streaming services etc… (not all cases of course). In these situations nobody loses. The media companies didn’t lose anything because I was never going to buy it, and it wasn’t stolen because they still possess the media.
Edit - I agree with you Lmaydev I replied to the wrong comment.
And media costs money to make.
If you weren't going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That's the thing, if you're interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
But not to copy, which is what you are asserting is being "stolen". No one is claiming that turnstile jumpers are taking away money from train manufacturers. You're having to mix analogies, because copying something isn't theft.
I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. The point is that in both examples, somebody is exploiting somebody else's labor without paying.
There is no labor in making digital copies.
You are trying to blur the line between the media/art/music/film, etc, and the reproductions of it.
Artists do deserve to be paid for their work, but artists do not deserve to maintain ownership over the already-sold assets, nor whatever happens to those assets afterwards (like copies made). If you want to say they should retain commercial rights for reproduction of it, sure, but resell of the originally-sold work (e.g. the mp3 file), and non-commercial reproductions from that sold work? Nah.
They didn't put in labor towards that. To say they did expands "labor" far beyond any reasonable definition.
You're trying to blur the line between what is and what should be. We don't live in an ideal world.
Yup, many people (like you) consider copyright morally okay, and many people (like me) consider copyright infringement morally okay.
Not an ideal world for either of us, I guess.
But by this definition then, it should be ok for only one person to buy the item and then just copy and give it to everyone else, and the original author receives payment from a single item?
If it comes from their copy, sure. But streaming proved that people won't do that if they have a less onerous way to do it, whether it be Spotify or Netflix.
People only started reverting to piracy when services started cannibalizing access to content and demanding more money than the access was worth.
Most video games don't contain DRM, and can be found as torrents online, and yet video game sales are through the roof.
You're literally just rehashing all the tired MPAA/RIAA talking points claiming that piracy would kill music and movies, that never panned out despite piracy always still existing.
This is true to an extent, but if you would have a legal streaming platform that is free with all the same content then everyone would use that, no? The only reason someone would want to pay for Netflix is to donate to Netflix because they like it. But we all know how small of a percentage that would be. Reason why people use streaming services is that they're simple and legal, and they are willing to pay for it.
True. Though literally no clue about how much DRM there is. However, if piracy is fully legal then there would be no reason to purchase the games (assuming they're as convenient). People are prepared to pay for things that are legal.
Not really. I am arguing against piracy being legal. I am not arguing that piracy in its current form is killing anything.
As in this argument.
Yes, that was my point.
Are you suggesting a case in which it's funded by some billionaire who does not need to charge money in order to cover the cost of hosting? Because if not, we're back in the "commercial use" territory that I already covered.
If it's purely hypothetical in order to ask if people prefer free things, then sure, of course people prefer free. But people prefer convenient even more, as streaming shows.
Half the reason piracy took off in the days of Limewire and Napster is because the RIAA actually made agreements with the big music publishers not to sell their music on digital services, in order to prop up CD sales. When iTunes came along, it instantly ate up the vast majority of Limewire/Frostwire/IRC traffic for music.
This is a fair point. I doubt anybody would do this, or the monetization would be done through ads which might fall into the commercial aspect? Don't actually know, but this is already a thing and not something I was really thinking about. Relating to this actually, it would be interesting to know how much licencing fees are in comparison to server costs for the current streaming services.
I was thinking something more like a program that just pulls data from torrents directly, so no need for a central server. Yes, probably not feasible using the current system as everyone would just leech, but maybe one would have to also share things you watch or something. Yes, again, this would complicate things but I don't think that is necessarily has to. I feel like there has been a service like this (popcorn time or something), I think I used something like this aaaaages ago.
Definitely there would be technical challenges for something like this but to me it does not sound impossible. I just feel like that if something like this system would exist (if piracy were legal), it would completely nuke the cash flow for tons of companies. It would not remove all of it, some people would donate just like they do for open source projects.
At least for me personally, I am willing to pay for stuff in order for it to be legal. Should the need to pay be removed, while keeping things legal, I'd have no incentive to pay. The only incentive would be convenience, but I don't think there would be any reason for piracy to be less convenient than non-piracy; it's already more convenient for tons of use cases I'm sure.
Definitely true, just as happened with movies etc when Netflix and the like popped up. However, one can also argue that this was not due to convenience, but due to now there being a legal way of doing things. In reality I'm sure that everyone weighs legality and convenience (and the cost of the service) differently and makes their own decision.
Currently the convenience factor is going down due to enshittification (among other things), while price is going up. I feel like piracy is up but it's not like I can get a non-biased view from Lemmy (or reddit) and I have not actually looked into it.
It'll be interesting to see the direction in a few years.
Just fyi what you're describing is already baked into most modern torrent clients, letting you "stream" the video or music files, rather than downloading.
I don't agree with this at all. There are tons of things someone might want to use or have but not enough that they'd be willing to pay for it. Or over a certain amount of money.
The fact is that the person in question is still taking something without paying for it. A sense of entitlement (I want it badly enough that I should have it for free) doesn't change anything in this equation.
Sure, they are procuring something worth money without paying for it. But this is a very different argument than you would not pirate something if you would not also be prepared to pay it.
Rips do exist, ya know?
And physical media's never stolen, right?
The data to validate this is scarce, but I'd wager that most rips come from stolen physical media. I don't think there's too many people out there going "I just paid $20 of my hard-earned money for this Blu-ray, so now I'm going to give it away to strangers for free". The whole "paying for something" thing is kinda antithetical to piracy in the first place. But again, there's no real way to quantify this.
So you just dmit that you assume everything is stolen. That's motivated reasoning, buddy.
We're literally talking about piracy, so yes lmao
So, according to you, piracy is stealing, because it has to be stolen at some point. And the reason that it must be stolen is because it is connected to piracy.
Don't act surprised if you're downvoted, if you present your circular logic this plainly.
No, I never said anything of the sort. Piracy is stealing because you are taking something without paying the cost for it.
I don't care about downvotes from pirates with a Robin Hood complex. I'm on Kbin and most of them don't sync to my instance, anyway.
When I steal a shoe, the shoe can't besold anymore, because I have it. If I pirate a game, is there one less copy that steam can sell?
Piracy is categorically something else than stealing. Have you even read the original post?
Edit: If you really follow your logic strand, you would have to reach the conclusion that Sony stole content from their users.
Edit2:
This u?
These are not the same statement. You're getting the before and after mixed up, likely on purpose.
The origins of most of all western countries' wealth comes from theft, full stop.
That's only the case for pre-Bluray release content. Most of it was just captured from rips, Amazon Prime or Netflix.