I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
Isnt the free market supposed to self-regulate?
If companies can exploit it, why shouldnt we?
No, free market isn’t “supposed” to self regulate. That’s silliness. The only people who say that have no understanding of the concepts.
Regulation is required. Unfortunately with regulatory capture it’s not happening.
Yep. The self regulating market is either utopian vision by blind idealists or double speak for maximizing profits and fucking over anybody and anything while doing it.
“Piracy” has never been stealing except for the boats and parrots kind.
It’s not stealing if it’s been stolen before! Arrr
I’m the guy who coined this phrase on a Louis Rossmann video and I’m so proud!
I was there
I had no idea it would turn out to be such a big deal until my friend linked me a Lemmy post with my YouTube name in the picture. 🤣 Then I realized I had an absurd number of YouTube notifications! Interestingly enough, YouTube has some kind of interesting way to taper the notifications off so they aren’t overwhelming.
I suppress all YouTube notifications. I only shitpost in comments anyway because that’s what they are there for.
Got a link?
Yes. https://lemmy.world/post/1098344
I’m the guy in the pic.
Digital piracy is not theft, by definition. Theft requires taking something with the intent to deprive the owner, copying things does not deprive the owner.
Digital piracy is copyright infringement, which (in the vast majority of cases) is not even a crime. It is a civil offense.
Counterpoint:
I wrote a book. Sold maybe 10 copies. If someone “pirated” my book, they are depriving me of the $2 or whatever Kindle Direct pays.
Admittedly not a significant amount, but it does fulfill the definition, imho.
It explicitly doesn’t.
If you have a hard copy book and someone steals it, you’re not only losing out on the potential sale price of the book, but the tangible value you have already paid to produce that copy.
Say the book is $12, you get $2, the publisher gets $5 - the book store buys it for $7, and sells for $12 making $5 profit. If you steal from the book store, they’ve lost a potential profit of $5, but more importantly they’ve actually lost the $7 they already paid for it. This is what theft is about, the value of a possession taken away, not the potential value.
With a digital book, each individual copy costs nothing. It costs something to make the original, but making a copy is free. Thus the only thing you’ve lost is the potential profit, which arguably you wouldn’t get anyway as the person didn’t want to buy from you to begin with - just because they downloaded it for free does not mean they would have paid full price if a free download wasn’t an option.
With theft, you have a tangible loss. With digital piracy, the only loss is opportunity to profit.
I’m all for piracy but I still try to spend money where it morally makes sense to me.
I’ll buy, rent or subscribe to content from actual creators or artists or developers if I know I am supporting their livelihoods or careers.
I’ll pirate content if I decide for myself that the content has already paid for the livelihoods of the creators or workers who produced the material and now it’s only the title holders and corporate interests that are profiting from the ownership and entitlement of controlling the content for commercial reasons only. For me this is mostly just big budget movies, old films and commercially produced music.
To me, anything that’s already paid to help the original artist or creators should be made public. Locking it away and making people pay for the privilege of the content just to make more profit for someone else is piracy itself. This is especially true for films and music that are so old that the original artists and creators and owners are multi millionaires or just no longer exist.
I may be wrong but that is my own personal view of collecting digital content.
The long and short of the argument is “fuck the people who farm everyone else’s efforts for millions. They don’t own ideas or information.”
Someone ripped off your YouTube video you worked hard on? I’m mad. Motherfucker cropped out your watermark and everything!
Someone copy your big budget movie? I don’t give a fuck. You’re Fox who makes it their business to lie to everyone and buy up control.
Nowadays you can almost reach every creator out there, and we use thousands of content and tools.
How would a financially average person can afford to pay these creators in such a scale?
A dollar at a time … I’m willing to give or donate a dollar, two dollars or even five at a time … if we all did that with a popular creator, they’d easily be able to reach a lot of money in a short time.
I donate to wikipedia, Open Source Software projects I use, firefox, thunderbird, ubuntu (although I am getting skeptical about this one) and other linux projects … on top of that I send funds to creators, app developers and lemmy instances and other fediverse projects and those people who maintain the software, servers and communities in the fediverse
In all, I probably spend about three or four hundred dollars a year or more to these projects … but I know that for the majority of them, the money is going to people that need it … not to people who just want to add to their wealth after never contributing anything of value other than their ownership of someone else’s work.
And if we all did this as users across the board … these small content creators would have more than enough to sustain themselves and continue creating and maintaining these projects
Thank you for this insightful and humble reply, 1 dollar at the time 🙏
I assume when the purchase happened there was an agreement that said something like this might happen. If not, then people can sue Sony for the stealing. If so, then trying to argue that this means piracy isn’t stealing is sophomoric at best.
I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.
Embrace the reality instead of using twisted logic to try and convince yourself that it’s something else.
I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.
Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.
We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.
- I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).
I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.
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Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.
If that’s the goal, the better approach would be to not consume the media at all, and being vocal as to why you are doing this. Pirating it just shows them that the demand will still be there, despite how bad they supposedly are as a company, so that they just need to learn how to bone you too. It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.
it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions.
Clever? Maybe. Sophomoric? Absolutely. By misrepresenting why they are losing access to this media, they are effectively admitting that piracy is actually stealing. As I’ve said elsewhere, piracy is not the action of a neutral/chaotic good character, as many among piracy circles like to pretend, but the actions of a chaotic neutral character.
But make no mistake about my position. People losing access to stuff they purchased (and probably thought was now theirs) is just another in a long list of reasons I say “fuck those bitches” and have really no moral qualm with pirating content.
Why does “sophomoric” being used as negative in your argument? you imply we are arguing an unsophisticated logic built on foundational information accessible to everyone, not requiring much depth to grasp. Pedestrian justifications should probably be sophomoric lest the justification be inaccessible and easily confused.
My opportunity to truly own media i purchase has been stolen from me, i was requested or offered no consent on the issue from the large companies claiming that not purchasing a revocable license is theft; i previously found thing accessibly priced so i swallowed my tongue, now media companies are again price gouging so we find ourselves in this situation once more.
Pedestrian justifications should probably be sophomoric lest the justification be inaccessible and easily confused.
Simple arguments that people can understand and sophomoric arguments where people act and argue like children are not one in the same.
i was requested or offered no consent on the issue from the large companies claiming that not purchasing a revocable license is theft
Then sue them because you would have a strong case.
Or pirate like I do, but don’t pretend that it’s something that it isn’t.
It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.
Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped – just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd… Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?
I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.
You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.
Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?
If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.
Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work
Pedanticism that totally avoids the point. Whether they provide the product or create it, the logic still obviously applies.
You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that.
This also defeats the point that it is some duty to pirate it, because if they have no idea the scope then how many people doing it is not going to affect their decisions there either
Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony?
If we’re being pedantic, I never said it helps them. I said it let’s them know there is demand there and that not consuming it would be better for the goal.
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I have several games on Steam that I’ve “played” for less than an hour but have most of the achievements for because I’ve purchased it after finishing a pirated copy.
In agreement with you! I don’t get why the need to justify. First of all life isn’t about fairness, and people and corporations both need money to survive. Individuals and corporations make all the effort to get more for less.
If there was a need to justify it should be as simple as corporations take things for free all the time, be it tax brakes, labor, IP, whatever and try to get by with it without it being “stealing” it. Artists take ideas, copy, repurpose all the time and get by without “stealing” when they can.
In the seas one should be reasonable and take what they “need” (actually a want) “for less”, without violence, instilling physical harm, and they are good to go. Life isn’t fair.
Above all, like you said, people in general want things for less with the least friction. For some people the seas are dangerous and present too much friction to get in and out unscathed, these people will pay to get something. Sailors do not want to pay and accept some of the risks, and for those sailors that know how to do it well the risks and frictions are small.
There is no need to justify to the ego whether it is stealing or anything else. It is just taking and sharing. And doesn’t the saying goes that “sharing is caring”? ;-)
Thank you. I swear some people must be exhausted with all the mental gymnastics they do for self justification.
The ways they try to justify ad blockers as their god given right is equally frustrating. It’s okay to use an ad blocker (and you should!). Please stop acting personally insulted when sites then attempt to make your ad blocker useless, it’s just how things go.
Advertising is horrible
Yeah I’m a huge pirate but I also have subscriptions to publications, buy a bunch of games, buy music and even have almost every release from a few labels, go to concerts as much as I can. It’s not about the money for me at all
We should call it archiving instead of piracy to be honest.
Great idea! It’s up to us to preserve culture, we can’t leave it to those only motivated by profit otherwise cultural history will be lost when it becomes unprofitable.
And since we’re not coordinating, I’d better make sure I preserve the bits of culture important to me.
Better yet, let’s call it “arrchiving”!
I used to have Netflix, HBO Max, Youtube Premium, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime and “Videoland”. But since I used Linux, I could not stream with a higher bitrate. I could not download for offline playback, I had to jump through hoops to get things to play every now and then.
They also did not always have everything I wanted to see, or I had to pay extra for “premium early access” (Disney).
So I was fed up, learned about using multiple usenet backbones, how to send sabnzbd through VPN’s, Radarr, Sonarr and Overseerr. Now I only have Netflix and Youtube Premium for my wife. And Plex for myself. And access to much more content.
And I do not consider it stealing, i consider it to be the natural result of them trying to gouge me while still not providing me.
They say we’ve got it all wrong, it’s not the items we’re stealing. It’s he money they think they should’ve gotten from that item.
In five years, they’ll be telling us it’s stealing not to go see the latest marvel movie.
Please drink a verification can.
Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.
The water is certainly muddy with digital media, but this is just another oversimplified argument.
If you need to do mental gymnastics to feel OK about pirating then…idk find something better than this.
See comments below for more mental gymnastics
People who assert property rights (including limited monopoly rights on intellectual property) are doing mental gymnastics too. We’re just used to them, thanks to a century of propaganda after the great depression.
The current state of wealth distribution a century later doesn’t seem to carry the promise that capitalism can be fair.
In fact, IP maximalism (Thanks, Walt!) has denied the public a robust public domain, and our courts struggle to do the mental gymnastics to understand why we have a public domain in the first place.
That is to say, the US and EU have totally lost the plot.
Property rights aren’t even fair. Big guys assert them, and little guys have them taken away. A good comment: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/5648831
If I were to steal cable, I would be using the cable company’s resources to deliver content to my house without paying for it. If I were to set up an inductor under a power line to steal power, I would be depriving the power company of power they could have sold to somebody else without giving them anything in return.
When I torrent something, I don’t even put any additional load on Netflix’s servers. With their current monetization scheme I don’t even make the show’s producers any less money.
And when you subscribe to 1 or 2 rotating streaming services and only torrent for personal archiving purposes, you aren’t even depriving the streaming services of any revenue.
When you steal cable, you don’t deprive the cable company of anything.
When I torrent something
wrong.
I torrrented a gratis OS called Arch the other day. Please understand torrenting doesn’t equate to copyright infringement.
It was clear from context what was meant, i.e. torrenting copyrighted content. Let’s not be disingenuous about this.
It’s not gymnastics. It’s a pretty easy step. Corporations fuck you over. You fucked them over. No mental gymnast skills required for that
Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.
You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that. You can access services without authorization, but you’re not stealing anything. You can access services you don’t have authorization to access and then disrupt people who are authorized to use those services. But, again, not stealing. Just disruption.
Stealing deprives a person of something, copyright infringement and unauthorized access to services don’t.
You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that.
If you hire me to paint your portrait and then don’t pay me you have stolen my labour. I have given my time and effort and have not been reimbursed for it.
If you paid me and then gave your neighbour a copy of your portrait then you have not stolen my labour.
you have stolen my labour
No, that’s not theft. That’s fraud.
I don’t know if any freelancer who has not been paid for their work will agree with you
Freelancers may be upset if they’re mistreated, but that doesn’t mean they get to declare they were murdered, or that they were raped, or any other crime that didn’t occur. Theft has a specific definition, and fraud is not the same thing as theft.
You’re being pedantic in the cases you want while complaining to others when they are differently pedantic. I’m not stooping to pretending to misunderstand due to pedantry.
If you are using the term theft colloquially, which most of us are as this is not a court, legal journal, economic journal, etc. Given that colloquial means the way people generally speak, as we are now, theft has a meaning: taking something that’s not yours through force or trickery. That would mean fraud is a type of theft in this case and not a different thing altogether.
So be a pedant I guess but it’s boring and lazy-brained.
I’m all in favour of people being pedantic, especially in the case of laws.
If you are using the term theft colloquially
I’m not, “theft” is misused all the time. It’s something that the copyright cartels encourage because they get to pretend that copyright infringement is theft. It’s not. We should push back and say theft has to meet certain conditions, and copyright infringement isn’t theft. Nor is “wage theft”, which is a form of fraud.
By buying into the colloquial definition of “theft” and expanding the scope to be any time someone is inconvenienced, you give the copyright cartels power to make people think copyright infringement is as bad as actual real theft, when it’s clearly not.
If you’re not going to use the term in a colloquial context while you are in a colloquial setting, then you need to cite what source you are referencing for your definition. Given that you are talking about laws, then you need to recognize that every place defines things differently according to the law. So which law, where?
Being unnecessarily argumentative and snobby while at the same time not meeting your own standards is ridiculous.
Nah, no need to go to laws, just use a dictionary.
So salary theft by employers is not really theft. Got it.
If it’s theft, it’s theft. If it’s fraud, it’s fraud. It could be either. But “wage theft” is not copyright infringement, which is not theft.
Here’s what California’s Department of Industrial Relations says:
Wage theft is a form of fraud
Stealing services doesn’t necessarily have to do with copyright infringement.
My point is that OP over simplification of theft is not even worth considering, from a legal or personal point of view.
Not really, theft is theft. Fraud is fraud. Just because something feels like theft doesn’t make it theft.
You were the one who quoted that wage theft is a form or fraud, so I’m not sure what’s your point. Yes, some theft can be fraud… but still theft.
Wage theft isn’t theft, it’s fraud.
So if someone creates a piece of art and I take a photo of it and sell the photo, or create prints of it, or even just give it give that photo to lots of people, what is that?
Distribution.
Who cares? The point is, it’s not theft. The person who had the art still has the art, so it’s not theft.
That is an assumption made that the artist still has the original thing that was not paid for. I understand what you’re being pedantic about. I just don’t think you’re right.
What part of that statement suggests that the artist no longer has the original art? As stated, no theft occurred.
I guess you can’t steal anything when you just decide to limit the definition of the word.
But if we’re in reality and using the way words are actually defined then yes you can steal something intangible, and no it does not require someone to be deprived of something.
I’m not going to look up every state, but the Penal Code in some states explicitly define theft as:
A person commits an offense if he unlawfully appropriates property with intent to deprive the owner of property.
So, I think it is reasonable to include intent to deprive as part of the definition.
You do understand the difference between penal code and the definition of a word, no? Surely the reason why the two are not at all even slightly interchangeable is plainly clear to anyone of reasonable intelligence.
In the state where I live, the penal code includes the legal definitions of words such as “theft”.
The legal system here does not use a Webster’s dictionary to define words. We use the penal code, code of criminal procedure, traffic code and other legal guidance codes to define the meanings of words used in the law and in official government communications.
These are the definitions that would be used by complainants in cases brought against pirates, if such a case were to be brought. For that reason, I believe these definitions are relevant here.
The penal code necessarily uses incredibly narrow definitions with very specific verbiage.
Using the word steal in OPs title is common use of the word, which aligns with the dictionary definition, they certainly are not quoting a legal definition
Get outta here with this dumb shit.
So much ‘verbal’ diarrahhea to try to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing.
I pirate shit, that is a form a theft. Cope with it or stop doing it.
I was genuinely following your debate points until you got to:
Get outta here with this dumb shit.
I have been kind and polite our entire interaction. I didn’t even initially downvote you. In fact, I initially upvoted you. If I’ve worded something in a manner that implied I was attacking you, my apologies.
I’ve simply offered a reason one might include a specific phrase in their definition. There is no reason to be this angry or insulting in such an innocuous and ultimately meaningless debate.
You made some good points. I feel I made some good points. That should be the end of it, whether we agree or not. There’s no need to bring emotion into our interaction other than support for each other’s valid points.
I don’t think you understand how laws work. Many times, they are required to define terms in order to enforce the law.
Keep reading.
decide to limit the definition of the word.
To what it actually means? Sure.
To selectively focus on one small sliver of the definition of the word, ignoring the full meaning of the word and the context to push your agenda? Smells like propaganda.
The entire definition matters. There’s already a term for “copyright infringement” it’s “copyright infringement”. Pretending it’s theft is just a trick the copyright cartels are using to try to make it seem like a serious crime that has existed for millennia instead of a relatively new rule imposed in the last few centuries by the government, then made ridiculous by the entertainment cartel.
I guess you can’t steal anything when you just decide to limit the definition of the word.
I guess you can steal anything when you expand the definition of the word to anything you want.
You live on the internet, it would take you 5 seconds to link to the “actual definition” you are using if the word was actually used that way.
I buy water, I own it. It just passes Thur my body or shower and pipes. That’s like saying you don’t own your tires as they wear away. You can own consumables. I get your underlying point about theft is more then taking away something. You could be depriving someone of money they would have made. Same with copyright theft. Someone buys your product and copies it then sells it. They didn’t steal from you directly but still caused harm. Piracy is a service issue, if things you buy on that service don’t work people will stop using that service. I’m not going to download 12 game launchers to play the games I want, I’ll stick with steam. Same way with tv/movies.
“muddy waters” is a saying, I don’t think you should take OP literally. The Rest you’ve written seems to agree with their sentiment btw.
Ahhh, thanks I misunderstood. I do agree but also I have a Plex server. I started it when I worked at blockbuster. Technically even ripping your Blu-rays can be illegal so, you have to find your one morals and not rely on laws.
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Copyright infringement causes less harm than the copyright itself. Piracy causes less harm than the cruelty and greed in production and distribution of mainstream media. Less harm is caused by theft than by a system that willfully starves the public and vaults away excess to drive demand and market price.
No artists should go hungry but then no non-artist should either. And yet in our system artists are enslaved and had their work taken from them so that enterprisers can live in luxury while the rest of us toil, undernourished.
How much media production does piracy fund?
You’re asking a loaded question.
You could be asking can we get quality content without the artifice of intellectual property to which the answer is yes, and has been demonstrated time and again.
You could ask how many artists get wealthy from producing copyrighted content to which the answer is very few In fact most creators who are good enough to get published by record labels or publishing houses see so little of that money they can’t turn it into a full time career, largely do to Hollywood Accounting but the labels and publishing houses get a lot of money from having controlling ownership of that content.
You could ask what harm is caused by intellectual property laws to which I can reply their expansion from a monopoly limited to a decade or so extended to life + nearly a century has denied the public a robust public domain which was the whole point of copyright inserted into the Constitution of the United States in the first place. It’s made worse because we don’t know what all is copyrighted or patented, judges don’t know what can be copyrighted, and what is considered fair use, or how art even works. (e.g. Not every blockist painting owes money to Pablo Picasso’s estate). It’s a tangled mess with a ton of precedent that favors richer legal war-chests, and has caused a pronounced reduction both of the quantity of content getting made and the quality of that content.
So maybe you should ask better questions.
Same with copyright theft
Is this when you steal someone’s copyright and collect licensing fees posing as the legitimate copyright holder?
They didn’t steal from you directly
Or indirectly.
still caused harm.
Maybe, maybe not. But no theft occurred.
I meant infringe on the copyright. I don’t think what Disney and some others are doing is right with extending it but I do think the person that created the things should have some legal protection from it being copied for a bit.
Copyright infringement isn’t theft, that’s the main point. It’s breaking a rule that the government created giving people a temporary (now extremely long term, but temporary) right to control the spread of ideas. Whether or not you approve of that law is beside the point. The point being, theft is as old as the ten commandments, if not older. Copyright is a new thing that’s only a few centuries old.
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Damn, just say stealing. Thought we were pirates. Not cowards
It’s not theft though. When you steal something you deprive someone else of it.
It’s just copyright infringement. Since copyright is an artificial temporary monopoly granted by the government, it’s pretty different from “theft”.
Are you not depriving someone else of their legal right to control the distribution of copies of their work?
Yes, which is not theft. It’s not murder either. Nor is it blasphemy. It’s just copyright infringement.
When you steal something you deprive someone else of it.
Ok, I was just going off what you said previously.
That’s just one element of theft.
If you don’t drink a verification can, are you depriving Mountain Dew of their legal right to make you drink verification cans? If you don’t enroll in the IOF, are you depriving Israel of its legal right to murder thousands of darker skinned people? Maybe some legal rights are so stupid they shouldn’t exist?
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How did your mind even come up with such bad analogies? Amazing.
So you are too stupid to answer the question? Blocked.
We’re sharing.
Like Robin Hood, but in a pirate ship.
I call my Plex server Whydah Gally.
Yarr we be murdering the media, just call it murder me matey.
The media corporations in their greed and cruelty have long earned violent reprisal and deserve to be sacked.
Pirating their content is comparatively petty.
But better still is to not pirate their content and let it remain unseen and forgotten.
The reward for creators and artists is to become a part of culture. The promise of riches is a false, capitalist dream.
Aye aye
Look at the shit sony is apparently intending to do. Total bullshit.
Property is theft. Possession is alright.
You shouldn’t be denied the stuff you actually use. But people definetly should not be allowed to hoard all the water in the world for themselves.
ASK YOURSELF how did they come to be in possesion of the land of the world?
at some point the entire planet was the commons. With WHAT right did they carve it up and claim it is theres for all eternety?
Just because you weren’t born at the right time you should be denied the use of the world as everybody else? first come first serve basis? how when it isnt yours to decide over.
the people who carved up the world and put their flags in it, and then put fences around anything so that we may never use it and are condemned to sit idly by have robbed all of us of our fair share.
the world is still belonging to the commons.
Nobody owns the air or the moon but only because the moon is out of reach and the air can’t be fenced off otherwise you would have to pay for tides and every breath you take. think about that.
Rethorical question: why didn’t property rights matter when the spanish went to south and middle america? why didn’t they matter when north america was lifted off of the original owners? but now if you take some guys land in the same exact area suddenly property rights matter?
so basically you can go around stealing off of everybody in the world but if somebody steals a lighter or pen off of you they go to jail? make it make sense…
Would you rather everyone can just walk into your house and take whatever they want? I for one am quite happy with the rules and morals we keep.
Those flags put up are often there to keep different cultures with different rules apart. It’s not as easy as erasing borders to have a free world. People are too selfish for that.
Sure, governments still steal all the time. Things are definitely not perfect, but that’s not related to someone stealing your lighter.
Possession is what you literally currently use, I am talking about property things that you do not currently use but still decide over. So the house you live in is in your possession (and also your property) but the 100 others you own are in your property not in your possession.
So nobody should ever be able to take the car you use even if yours is better than mine, or even if i dont have one. But nobody should be able to keep people from using anything they dont use themselves.
does that make sense?
regading selfishness - well currently they are, you are right, I would agree with you there
However just like a tiger in a small cage in a zoo does show unusual behaviour that deviates from its healthy behaviour in the wild. So do we humans under the conditions of lack of freedom show behaviour that is dysfunctional that would not be displayed would we live under freedom. Selfishness at least in that sense is a consequnce of our current conditions. However I do not believe human beings have to be angles before we can stop fencing of most of the world to most of the people.
Selfishness is part of the human condition. Tribes needed to fight over resources and mark their territory in order to keep the tribe alive. It’s in your instinct.
There have always been borders and territories, and there have always been fights and wars over it.
I don’t really see how your “if you don’t use it” policy applies here, and I also think the problem of this topic is easier than that.
Tell me about it. Some dudes wife “I’m taking extremism to the max because my period tells me to”
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Well played!
