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You seem to be under the impression that people and corporations get equal treatment under the law.
You seem to be under the impression that they should. At what point does one person’s right to get richer override other people’s right to have a decent life?
Since that abomination called “Citizens United” was imposed on us decent living people (in the US)
It’s important never to forget who sets the terms of commerce, wages, and employment.
All the peasants can do is game the terms they set. And the owner class that sets those rigged terms, and their doting class traitor sycophants, rage against even that.
“you you you… You’re just supposed to eat cat food in the dark crying if you can’t afford to enjoy life, while we laugh about your subsistence at the country club! No fair!”
Imagine if we could hook up Bittorrent and Bitcoin somehow, and made it so you could create a torrent of your work and get some money when people download.
And then people who seed it could maybe get a little cut for helping to host things. And you’d buy tokens and you’d know that almost 100% of the money goes to the artist, and the artist has control over the entire process.
That would be neat, but I’m sure someone here will explain why this is unworkable and stupid. Which is why I posted it.
Imagine YouTube reposts stealing merger ad revenue but it’s your main revenue instead.
That’s definitely a hard problem we’d have to solve.
“What we need are stronger copyright laws.”
- Disney lawyers, probably
🤔
Eight hours later, and no one disagreed.
I think you might be on to something
Drugs.
Good luck doing that with current laws and what happens if the artist doesn’t want to share their work anymore?
What’s funny is that in theory NFTs could have been used for something like that (proof of ownership of a digital good that can be resold), the problem being that you will rely on a third party platforms to authenticate and download the things you own as it can’t realistically be stored on the blockchain…
Now… Wait.
Is the argument here that something must be owned to be stolen? I don’t think ownership is contested, just who is the owner. Or is the argument that pirating also isn’t owning… Or… What? Just tit for tat and it looks like the thoughts should be related somehow? I’m all for sailing the high seas and for right to repair / software ownership, but the two concepts are independent as far as I can see.
Idk, if I’m going to try to reproduce this mental gymnastics I should really stretch first: I don’t want to pull something and end up a sovcit.
They just don’t want to consider that it’s possible to steal from the people who made the game even if paying for it doesn’t guarantee you’ll own it forever.
The copyright troll known as “publisher” just will pocket all money you think you paid to people who made the game.
Option one: pay for game, some money goes to publisher, some goes to creators
Option two: pirate game, no money goes to anyone
Which one helps the creators?
Option three: Donate to creator or buy something directly from them to help offset the cost of pirating.
Pirates: Nah I’m good fam. I just want free shit because I’m too poor and don’t get paid enough.
A donation or purchasing something else doesn’t legally or morally entitle you to owning an unrelated product made by the creator though…
it’s immoral to prevent people from sharing tools or stories or songs or skills. i’m entitled to enjoy whatever someone wants to share with me.
No you’re not if it’s infringing on someone’s copyright and you would agree with me if you ever created something you were trying to sell to make a living.
The idea is that people buy a cd but record companies and some trolls want to make you believe you dont own whatever is on it just a license which is mental gymnastics. You are right.
Are you saying buying a song and buying the rights to a song are the same? That would be a pretty smooth brain statement.
If you are saying that your personal and non-commercial use just a license in that it is in any way revokable after purchase, then yes I agree with you.
You can keep your derogatory language to yourself.
I‘m saying if you buy a song, movie, art piece It is yours to do with as you please, forever.
Thats what buying means.
You have to buy it (the rights for music or movie) to do as you please in an unlimited fashion, not buy a COPY of it. Otherwise it’s personal use only.
Sorry if that’s too subtle to grasp.
As I said, thats the legal definition. Slavery used to be legal, abortion is illegal in many places.
I dont care about your definition of right and wrong. If I buy something, it is mine.
Blocked for repeated derogatory language.
It’s because people do not want to pay creatives because you can’t physically touch stuff creatives produce.
I take a rock from the moon, nobody owns the rock nor the moon. I don’t think I’m stealing it then. I’m just taking it.
So yes, something needs to be owned in order to be able to actually steal it.
The difference being that you not buying the moon rock doesn’t affect a person that worked to produce that rock whereas pirating a copy of a game because you decide you don’t want to pay money for it because you fear you might not be able to play it permanently, that’s work theft, you’re profiting off the work of a person/team by enjoying the product they made to sell without compensating them.
I’m sure you wouldn’t appreciate it if your boss came up with a similar way to justify not paying you for the work you do and he told you “Oh no, in not stealing anything!”
They already have. Wage theft is by far the largest form of theft in the US, and they certainly try to claim that it is legal.
So it makes it ok to do it too?
They’re clearly working on the principal of “might makes right” considering that every single digital media company has had instances of “selling” customers media, and then deciding to make it impossible for the customer to use said media, and they never give refunds.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Since they are legally people, and they have all the power, then clearly it’s ok for the rest of us to be thieves, just like them
How about the creators?
It’s funny because so far all the pro pirating arguments ignore the creators, the work they do and the fact that they have to make a living too.
Nah bro, piracy because we don’t wanna pay.
We don’t mind paying. If it is actually owning and convenient.
A lot of games for example you can buy on GoG, and archive the installation file. That is probably the closest you can come when it’s about owning closed source software. Pirating games that are buyable on GoG is simply stealing money from the creators for no other reason than being greedy and cheap.
Well, GoG does have a lot of games but only few of the latest games that we want to try out. Or could i buy, say, Diablo 4 on GoG? Dave the Diver? Enshrouded? Sons of the Forest? Borderlands? Not even Sims?
If you can’t buy it DRM free and don’t want to buy it with DRM then you’re not entitled to being able to play it.
Given how DRM has tanked the performance of many games or has rendered them unplayable at some point after release and in some notable cases even after release for a while… I was never entitled to being able to play a game with DRM anyway.
Yes, not even the games i bought. The Need for Speed copy i got which uses SafeDisc which has been unsupported since Vista? Nope! The copy of Colin McRae Rally 2005 which uses StarForce DRM which can mess with my drive as a whole? Nope! SimCity 2013 which i didn’t buy but read the news that the EA servers couldn’t handle the influx of gamers? Nope! Gran Turismo 7 which i also didn’t buy but read the news of where Sony couldn’t handle the influx of gamers almost as if they didn’t learn a single goddamn thing from SimCity 2013? Nooooooooooope!
DRMs would be less contentious if they didn’t somehow mess with the experience of the honest paying users. The worst thing that could happen back in the 80’s and 90’s was perhaps LensLok which didn’t work too well with some CRT screens but also was rarely used. In other cases you had to have the game manual or the funny looking Dial-A-Pirate disc from Monkey Island which could be at worst mildly annoying.
However in the pursuit of profit companies started to really fuck shit up for paying users. Back in early 2000’s it was StarForce “just” making your drive not work anymore or, say, your SPORE key “just” not installing anymore after the third install. But nowadays you need a spare NASA computer for a game that without Denuvo could be working fine on a regular old gaming pc. And there’s not even a guarantee that you can keep ANYTHING in perpetuity that you bought digitally, which is what OP initially complained about. If users don’t get custom servers up quickly, all users can do with their copy of The Crew is to screenshot the Steam page, print it and wipe their ass with it. Same with all those Warner shows on Playstation Video and some shows and ebooks from Amazon IIRC. And remember how i mentioned that SafeDisc stopped working? Without No-CD cracks i couldn’t even play those games even though i have bought them. We don’t have that problem nowadays thanks to discs not necessarily having any game files anymore. Just an installer for the digital storefront and the code, that’s it. Except Garfield - Lasagna Kart for the Nintendo Switch… IT DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING CARTRIDGE AT ALL! JUST AN EMPTY GAME COVER! AND NOT EVEN AN ESHOP-CODE! YOU HAVE TO REDEEM A CODE ON MICROIDS.NET TO GET AN ESHOP-CODE! IF OR RATHER WHEN THAT SITE GOES DOWN AND YOU WANT TO BUY A COPY IN A STORE, PERHAPS WITH A GARFIELD CASE FOR THE SWITCH LIKE I DID, YOU’LL HAVE ONLY A CASE FOR A SWITCH AND ENOUGH SLOTS TO NOT PUT IN THE GAME YOU SPENT MONEY FOR!
If i buy a game legally and in turn am not entitled to keep a physical copy, create a digital backup copy or even to having that copy work (not necessarily working fine, compatibility issues are bound to happen)… I don’t feel like game companies are entitled to my money. Piracy is less convenient than buying a game but the value proposition of actually keeping a game… i have a hard time to truly denounce it. Especially when i think about switching to Linux and know that many digital storefronts make trouble on Linux in one way or another.
I have been thinking about a possible solution a few years ago: Selling full game copies via NFTs. A token that contains all the game files. The token would be created on demand when a user wants to buy the game. The DRM would only have to check whether the token was present in the wallet and that’s Too bad that NFTs are computationally quite expensive and whatever blockchain i would store the copy on, they want their miners to be paid. That’s by the way the reason NFTs only hold links to whatever you buy. Also if digital store owners actually wanted to allow users to resell games, sites such as G2A wouldn’t probably be seen as dubious. Finally my solution wouldn’t stop the arms race between crack groups and game companies. It would lessen the incentive a bit, but at an insanely high ecological and monetary price point.
Stealing a rental car is still car theft.
If the rental car was advertised as a car you can own, you paid the price for owning the car and they get you on the fine print. No sir, then its not theft.
Bad comparison.
It’s more like buying a car, driving it for two years, then the manufacturer decides they no longer want to support the car so it auto drives off in the middle of the night
No you can’t have a refund
But like if someone stole it in those two years it would still be theft.
It’s a perfect comparison, it’s just not proving what you think it’s trying to prove. It’s proving that the If/Then statement is wrong and makes no sense if you think about it. It’s not proving that piracy is theft.
Piracy isn’t theft, but this isn’t why.
I mean yeah, but digital copies of something are definitely different then a literal car.
They sure are!
Yeah, if they could print effectively infinite copies of the car at almost zero cost then it would be comparable
In the same way that taking a photo at a museum is theft
Piracy technically isn’t stealing, it’s intellectual property reproduction license violation. Clever bastards those lawyers. You basically don’t purchase the music, you purchase the right to reproduce it for non-commercial purposes.
Exactly. If I stole an item that belongs to you, I’m denying you the possession of that item, and you’ll either have to acquire another one, steal it back, or just not have it at all. When someone commits an act of digital piracy, they aren’t denying anyone the possession of it, therefore it isn’t the same as stealing.
Calling it theft is, in my opinion, emotionally manipulative and prevents any serious discussion on the ethics of piracy.
Even the word piracy is a bit suspicious to me; original pirates robbed ships in international waters and were considered enemies of mankind, so calling a much lesser act piracy sounds very manipulative… I wonder where the word piracy was first used to describe copyright violations, can’t seem to find anything about it.
Piracy was used as far back as the 1700s to refer to illegal copies of books or unauthorized publishing outside of publishing monopolies. In general, I get the feel of breaking monopolies, turning to less savory methods to get what is owed, and liberating goods from the hands of wealthy hoarders.
For a while, the U.S. publishing industry was based on pirating British books, many of which were previously pirated from France. The only significant difference between the usages is the freeing of information vs keeping goods for oneself.
Frankly this catch phrase never made any sense to me, from a logical point of view.
It assumes that:
-
If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
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And if buying =/= owning then pirating =/= stealing, because you can’t own it otherwise.
But the justification in the second statement is completely irrelevant to the first statement. You still own it without buying. It’s still stealing.
UNLESS - we examine what “stealing” is. This is where the arguments about being in a digital space vs. a physical space comes in. Where the question is raised: Is making an exact copy really “stealing”? Or, consider what is being “stolen”? The original item? The idea? We need to think about this more.
But it’s here the argument should be made and here the debate should be. That’s where “pirates” have a chance of winning. Let’s get rid of this flawed, easily repeatable, but fundamentally incorrect catch phrase and come up with a better one already. One that makes sense.
*(Nevermind that most of you technically aren’t even pirating, you’re just downloading the fruits of someone else that pirated.)
I was locked out of my EA account for half a week due to a bug on their end. I downloaded a game I own(lease?) so I could play over the weekend.
Is this pirating?deleted by creator
What field uses
=/=to mean!=?!= isn’t universal, i’ve mostly seen it used in programming.
Otherwise ≠ is the symbol we use in maths and generally the more common one.
=/= is just the worst rendition of ≠ for people that don’t know how to write it or are too lazy to go find it.
Yeah =/= is honestly a little confusing. I know
!=isn’t universal though, gotta start making sure to use≠instead
It’s a shorthand way of writing ≠ digitally without needing to know the alt code or where it is in your mobile devices keyboard
Yeah in programming we just use
!=:!: NOT=: EQUALIt is not a composite expression but a single expression made up from 2 letters. And this is not a widespread notation.
-
Ignoring all options to actually buy something to pirate something because you also find offers were you can rent it is just a capitalist mindset. Denying workers money because you want stuff as cheap as possible.
Buying something is owning. That has never changed.
You don’t purchase digital goods. You buy a license to use them, under the conditions you agreed to. Piracy explicitly breaks those conditions 99.9% of the time.
So no, it isn’t stealing. It’s just plainly illegal. And it hurts everyone from the original artist to the multi-billion dollar company that distributes it. Whether you think that is immoral or not is up to you.
We have another one.
Slavery used to be legal. So it was okay?
Right now „selling“ stuff and saying its just a license you fool is legal so it is okay?
That is a false equivalence, and I think you know that.
Feel free to point out where because thats exactly what people mean by the phrase in the post.
Comparing slavery to purchasing digital media might be a good place to start.
Its unimportant which example you use.
The underlying principle is legal ≠ correct. Just because something is legal, its not necessarily morally or otherwise correct.
Selling a movie to someone and calling it a license is highly manipulative and I think you know that.
Yes, I said from the start that it might not be moral.
But that’s exactly the point: companies sell movies to theaters, and then those theaters sell tickets to each viewer. That’s the license they each agreed to. A theater buying a movie off Amazon and then selling tickets to everyone who watched it would probably make some people upset, and would very clearly be illegal.
Talk about mental gymnastics.
You cant sell a limited time license. That is rent, plain and simple. If you pay 3 years rent at once or monthly, its still rent.
If you pay for something and have to give it back, you dont actually become the „owner“.
And thats why people say if buying isnt owning, piracy isnt theft, plain and simple.
What’s funny about your bad equivalency is that pirating is treating the people who created the content as slaves since you’re enjoying the fruit of their labour without compensating them.
And another one. There are a lot more and better ways to compensate an artist than giving money to record companies.
Besides that, I‘m not saying dont buy artistic work, I‘m saying please pirate products of companies that try to bullshit their customers.
https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/204629
Wow, you’re a big baby aren’t you?
Let me solve that for you by blocking you 😘
Yeah, feel free to. Always happy for one abusive person less in my lemmy experience. Reported, blocked.
they supposedly bloced me, too.
some people cant stand the cognitive dissonance that comes with learning they were wrong.
Yes, that is the small text they use to justify it, but that’s not how they advertise it. When Amazon Prime wants me to pay for a movie it doesn’t say “License it now!” It says “Buy it now!”
If you go digging into the EULA you’ll see it being called a license, but no effort is made to actually make that clear to the customer.
Furthermore, being technically legal doesn’t make it acceptable. If someone opened a bookstore, and put some treatment on all their books that caused them to suddenly disintegrate after a year, it doesn’t matter if they have on all their receipts that “books are not guaranteed to last longer than a year” or that they “aren’t doing anything illegal”. It’s still a bullshit business practice that shouldn’t be tolerated.
When it says “buy it” you asuume the it refers to the content - they’d probably argue it refers to the license.
It’s worth stating this has basically always been true for books. You can buy paper. Buying bound paper with words on it is not quite the same. You can’t produce a movie from that idea, and state “I invented this idea from a bundle of bound pages I bought, that already had some words on them.”
You never owned the original reproduction rights to the book’s content. That never mattered much until copying and pasting became so easy.
Huh. Never quite looked at it that way, but you are right. I can see how physical book is a form of a license to read a literary work. It is however naturally impossible to revoke. It would be the same if digital content had no DRM - which is generally not the case.
So I guess DRM and you not being able to download and use content outside the company’s ecosystem is the real issue here.
Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahaha.
Bro is just incredible how there is people defending this multibillions dollars companies. The studios don’t care about the author or the creator. They don’t care about the actresses or the singers. They don’t care about you as the consumer of this media. They only care about PROFIT.
Sources :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hollywood_labor_disputes
https://apnews.com/article/actors-strike-ends-hollywood-5769ab584bca99fe708c67d00d2ec241
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/17/business/hollywood-actors-sag-aftra-strike-by-the-numbers/index.html
As you can see these executives are not compensating the actors , the writers. The actual creators of these movies and series you said " wE sHoUldN’t pIrAtE" are not even getting their good deal and let’s not talk about the music industry which is the same or worst situation for the creators.
If house owning isn’t housing, shoplifting isn’t shopping
No no. Pirates live on boats. And piracy isn’t ownership of a house. Which is where lots of people do lifting…
Just, ah, sigh, don’t make me tap the sign again.
