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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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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.
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.
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.