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Piracy was NEVER stealing
(fedia.io)
It doesn't matter if it's a CD, a Film, or manual with the instructions to build a spaceship. If you copy it, the original owner doesn't lose anything. If you don't copy it, the only one missing something (the experience) is YOU.
Enjoy!
Of course, if you happen to have some extra money for donations to creators, please do so. If you don't have that, try contributing with a review somewhere or recommending the content, spread the word. Piracy was shown to drive businesses in several occasions by independent and biased corps (trying to show the opposite).
Lol, love hearing this moronic argument. If you had the magical ability to point at an object and clone it out of thin air, that also wouldn't be stealing.
If I pointed at a Rolex on a person's wrist and magically an identical copy of that watch appeared on my wrist, nothing was stolen, because nobody was deprived of anything. The net amount of that thing in the world only increased, and nobody was dispossessed of their property.
I hope you've never walked past a concert venue and heard some of the music being performed without being in the venue, otherwise by your logic, you are literally a thief who robbed that artist of their intellectual property and should be arrested and imprisoned. At the very least, made to pay restitution to the artist and record company for the cost of the music you "stole" from them.
Miss me with that bullshit.
I'm not OP, but i think you're being intentionally simple-minded here...
So following your argument further, if we all did this no one would produce anything because they'd never get paid.
Then what?
The point is, there's hundreds of hours of work in most things. What you're saying makes sense if we're taking about a shitty NFT that was 'someone drawing their cat in MS Paint', but an album or movie that involved many people and lots of labour is different because they deserve to be compensated for their work.
Back to your example, no one measurers songs heard in the seconds they were experienced and seeing the performance is probably the key part if we were breaking it down... Waking past a venue isn't taking in the show (sneaking in and getting the full experience would be. Admittedly, of it's an outdoor venue the example gets muddier!)
So, what I'm arguing, is that what's morally wrong about piracy is not fairly compensating the workers that produced it. They deserve their time and expertise to be traded for (sorry, in not finding the words I'm wanting...) and that's where the theft lies
The idea that everything must have a profit motive behind it or nobody would do it is a Capitalist myth.
In most cases of large scale production, the vast majority of people involved are already compensated for their labor. Ironically, often it is the artist/group themselves that don't receive compensation directly for their work, but as a conditional percentage based on overall profitability of the parent label corporation, (who are near universally nasty, scummy, and exploitative.)
Doing labor is not a sufficient condition for compensation. If it were, I could go through parking lots, washing people's cars while they are inside, and then present them a bill for my labor. Then, if they refused to pay, I could take them to court for "stealing" my labor from me by enjoying a freshly washed car and not paying the bill.
I could create artwork and demand people buy it from me to compensate me for all the labor I put into making it. Both examples are obviously ridiculous, because while labor very well may be a necessary condition for compensation, it isn't a sufficient condition.
You admit that my concert example, at least in certain circumstances works. Which means that it proves my argument. If consuming content without compensation is actually stealing, then people walking past and listening to some of the music in a concert are literally thieves and should be arrested and forced to pay restitution. A ridiculous conclusion to the vast majority of people, even, I would wager, to many anti-piracy folks.
I advocate compensating artists for their work if you can and if the artist is independent. I think its morally wrong to support the current exploitative entertainment structure by willingly paying for services and products that are designed to abuse the consumer and in many cases, the very artists that are under their banner.
You also never addressed my Rolex example, which is basically a perfect analogy to how digital media is replicated IRL.
You also ignore the idea that an action can become morally right in and of itself depending of the motive. Piracy itself can be an act of protest to support proper orientation of the markets and social norms around the creation and distribution of art.
History is filled with activists engaging in what was illegal and considered immoral at the time, but we look back on their actions now as good and upright. Just because many pirates are nerds that post dank memes doesn't delegitimize their actions.
Labor rights activists a century ago read Socialist theory and distributed cartoons and media mocking rich tycoons and abusive bosses. In other words, they were also nerds that posted dank memes.
I'd love to be able to actually discuss this, because a wall of text isn't at conducive to healthy discussion.
Your concert example is frankly ridiculous. A better one is people sneaking in without paying. Overhearing a few minutes of muffled bars of music does not compare with going to the show - what nonsense! That you claim it proves your point, well... You're dreaming.
Not a wall of text, I spent quite a bit of time carefully breaking down all of my points by numbered section.
If it's too much work for you to go through my post and address each point like I have been doing for yours, then I don't think we have much else to discuss.
One last question: Is it wrong for you to go to a bookstore, read a book, and put it back on the shelf without buying it? What about reading just 75% of it? 50%? How about just the first chapter to see if you like it? Or do you think it would be wrong to even skim the first page without buying it?
I don't have the energy to dissect your 20 part manifesto, sorry.I appreciate the effort, but got lost in the bullet points (the un-bulleted things felt like responses to the bullet and I wondered who you were replying to). It all felt like the crazed conspiracy theorist meme, sorry. I'm on a phone and it's such a shitty interface to wade through complex argument
As for books - No way, it's not wrong at all, and I regularly pirate music before I buy it, for example. We're not that different, I'm probably just accepting more 'guilt' for what I pirate.
Do you agree that physical goods are a whole different set of circumstances to abstract things? (As in, how the rolex is fundamentally different to the concert experience)
To each their own I guess.
So if you think the book example is fine even reading the whole thing and never paying for it, how is that any different from any other piracy examples? You consumed media that the artist created in its entirety without giving them any compensation.
I agree that physical goods are totally different, but in my magical wizard example, I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
A real life example is if I take a digital scan of a 3D figurine, turn it into a 3D model, and let other people on the web download it and 3D print it.
Did I "steal" anything? Of course not. Nobody is being deprived of anything at all.
See with books, that's where out gets complicated. I don't agree that reading part of the book is a problem, but the whole book does count as piracy to me. I do admit I don't know where the line is crossed. It's great the way libraries skirt around this problem and I don't really know how that fits in the broader scheme.
Perhaps another great idea is a magazine where there's really only one or two articles of interest - in my mind, have at it and consume what's of interest without shelling out for the whole thing (this is a lot like time-shifting, where recording content played on the air at a certain but inconvenient time is absolutely fair use).
Format shifting via a 3d scanner is fine but uploading to for others is where it's problematic - personal use has always abominated various liberties, I felt.
Great thought experiments, cheers
You are literally saying this on Lemmy. A piece of software that is developed for free using other software/tools that are free, and run on servers that are hosted by others for free. Most open source projects work this way. People are fully capable of doing things because they want to. Not everything needs to be profit-driven.
If we all did this, what would happen is there would be way less slop and lazy cash-grabs. Because the only people left making things would be the ones who are actually passionate and believe in what they do.
...and crucially, don't NEED to be paid for their work.
Yes, FOSS is 'a thing', but it doesn't require complicated and expensive things like sets, locations and recording studios - because code is entirely abstract, it doesn't have these constraints.
Yes, there will still be the occasional thing from a passionate story-teller, but without the budget to ensure the appearances are as intended we'll be far more limited in what stories we can tell (however, I'd gladly live in a universe without the constant marvel drivel!). We'd still be excited about 70s era star trek-type stuff, not the recent Dune movies...
While there's certainly shitty cash grabs going on, there's still passionate story tellers and the reason everything these days is shitty cash grabs is because we're all pirating everything the studios won't take a risk on a genuine story
You're initial closing statement criticizes people for "...hiding behind word definitions..." when the OP's post is arguing that copying is not Stealing.
It's very telling that your criticisms aren't ever leveled at the system itself, but instead, the people who object to how it is structured.
You frame yourself as a pragmatist who just operates honestly, never raising issue with the exploitative and often abusive practices of these corpos, record labels, executives. I never said piracy doesn't hurt anyone, I said it isn't theft.
Piracy hurts exploitative corpos the most, which is a good thing. It's good to cause harm to evil structures and subvert their authority and power. That's literally the point of social activism.
The fact that some well-meaning and innocent folks are going to get caught in the crossfire is sad, but such is the cost of subverting abusive power structures. Remember, pirates never created those structures, the corpos, billionaires, and corrupt politicians did.
I respect some pirates, I despise others. I tip or buy merch from small time artists whenever I can, often far more than they would have gotten from me buying their art, and far far more than if I streamed their song a few times of Spotify, YT Music, or dutifully watched an ad that played on their channel.
Piracy can be done in an ethical way, or an unethical way, but it's certainly not, "at best, morally grey."
You better go out and buy fast food at every drive-thru you can find, you not buying food from them might contribute to lower sales for that chain, which could lose those workers their jobs. Obviously that's ridiculous, but that argument uses the same reasoning you just used. If your argument is true, then you're a morally grey person at best if you aren't spending as much money as possible on fast food every month, or any other good/service in existence for that matter.
Nice thoughtful response to my comment, really compelling points!
Oh wait, you couldn't think of any refutations to my arguments, so you just resorted to an ad hominem.
Weak and disappointing. Go somberly stare at your torrenting client, thinking of all the people you're putting out on the streets by "stealing" from them, your darkened and evil soul too corrupted by piracy to ever be redeemed. Lol get over yourself.
Yeahhh, obvious you don't have anything left to say.
You disputed the OP's post where they stated that piracy wasn't stealing by claiming that people like them "needed to hide behind word definitions"
Corpos are bad, Capitalism is bad...yes, I stand by those statements because they are true.
Yes, it would be better for society at large if everybody pirated from the corpos and stopped funding their monopolistic, anti-consumer, anti-repair, privacy-violating practices. Again, yes this is true, I stand by that, that's the definition of "greater good."
Never hand waved the moral implications away of innocent people getting hurt by piracy. What I actually did was contrast the moral bad of that harm, against the moral good of harming the corpos that abuse society at large. I determined that the overall moral good of harming the corpos outweighed the moral bad of harming innocents. I also pointed out the fact that the real harm has been perpetrated by the Capitalists, billionaires, and big media conglomerates, not the pirates.
You obviously lack the ability or at least the willingness to address my counterexample about what your philosophy entails. The fact that you thought that was an analogy instead of what it actually was, (a reductio ad absurdum) demonstrates that.
I don't need to try, you clearly haven't thought very hard or deep about your position, it's shallow and filled with knee-jerk argumentation.
I suspect strongly that you feel very guilty about your actions, and instead of addressing those feelings, you project them onto others.
I think you do this because you cannot stand the idea that other people pirate things guilt-free, you are jealous of them, so you project your own feelings of shame onto those other people and claim (without any compelling reasons), that those people aren't actually guilt-free, they are just lying to themselves to deal with the shame.
You rage and seethe at those with a clear sense of purpose and vision because you lack those things in your own endeavors, and it galls you.
Go confess to a priest for being a naughty little pirate lol.
Folks when people start making these types of bad faith replies that's when you know that they are a troll and the best thing you can do is report them and start ignoring them.