I used to have a moral objection to piracy, I thought that if a piece of media is good enough that I enjoy it then the people that made it deserve to be paid for their work.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that even if I do pay for something there is no guarantee that the people that worked on it will get their fair share and paying for media is increasingly a worse user experience than piracy.
I feel similarly but one of those choices is guaranteed not to help the people you’d like to see helped
I’m not so sure that’s true. What if normalizing and removing friction from piracy gets to the point where the streaming services have to react by providing better services and better payouts?
That’s easy to say, but what can they actually do that provides a better service than piracy at this point? They can’t compete on price, number of shows, or quality of shows with piracy by a long shot. They can potentially provide a better ease of experience with quick downloads and casting, but they already have that and I don’t know that it can get any better.
As a general rule, I’d assume more piracy means less money into an industry, and less money in means fewer and less risky products that appeal to the lowest common denominator.
There’s lots they can do…
- cheaper prices (by lowering the % of rent-seeking),
- better pay distribution for creators (Especially so that I pay to support the shows I watch rather than a global pool),
- interoperability (to allow new businesses which provide frontends to multiple streaming services),
- social (clipping and sharing, group watching, etc)
- more equal promotion of shows/movies (instead of based on royalty rates)
I already said, they can’t compete on price. Cheaper prices will always be more than free. Same with interoperability, if you have the actual file you can run on anything. Group watching already exists.
More equal promotion of shows/movies and pay distribution don’t actually help make the experience better for the consumer, that’s more relying on the consumer behaving ethically and that they believe piracy is wrong. It only helps for the people who think it was only sometimes wrong, which I don’t think is a huge group (although they are certainly the most vocal supporters of piracy)
Nor are you likely to get what you paid for
Or to keep it
On that note, the only relatively convenient exception I know of is Bandcamp Fridays. They’re specific days where Bandcamp doesn’t take any share of purchases.
I wish this were a more common practice, and I wish I could allocate my Netflix/HBO/prime/etc. subscription dollars to support specific titles. Instead, shows get cancelled because people didn’t stream it enough on day 1. I want a s2 of Tales From the Loop, but it’s still in limbo with no way for fans to show support.
I felt like I was the only one that liked Tales From The Loop.
It absolutely depends. I’m an indie game developer. I’ve worked at various studios as an employee, contractor, and as an owner. Depending on the setup if you pay for a game I worked on I could potentially get a bonus, I could see that money directly as profits, or I could see nothing at all. Sometimes just continued survival of the studio in working at is reason enough for me to encourage people to buy the game but sometimes I’ve not liked where I’ve worked and encouraged people to pirate from a studio that rips off its employees.
So really, the best bet is to ask. The best way to support a game developer is to ask how to send the money directly and buy the game on itch.io if available.
In fairness, games are still something I’m willing to pay for and books. I think probably because Kindle and Steam are better user experiences than pirating those.
Yeah those 2 are exactly the ones I pay for too. Games in particular (I buy most books but not all).
But video content, nope :P
Piracy isn’t stealing anyway. You’re not removing the data from the original owner.
But the original creation cost time and money, which you’re not reimbursing the creator for. The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn’t cost anything.
It’s like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure it’s not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldn’t even happen if everyone acted like this, or the organizers would have to pay for it all by themselves.
If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you “bought”. Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.
Would you call it Piracy if I lend a bluray from a friend? I didn’t pay for it and yet I’ve watched it.
No, because it’s so widespread and natural that it should be expected and already accounted for in the price. But there is no hard line imo, and simplified examples often fail to capture all the aspects that go into the decision. E.g. I’d say paying for one person at a concert and sneaking in another would basically be piracy, even though the two situations are very similar on a surface level.
I think it’s about reasonable expectations both parties of the agreement can have, based on established social norms. If you buy a movie for personal consumption you should be able to expect that you can watch it whenever you want, and also share that experience with friends and family. And at the same time the seller should be able to expect that you limit it to a reasonable number of personal contacts, and don’t start to sell it to strangers or run a movie theater, because that expectation was used to set the price.
So if piracy was “widespread and natural” it’d be bueno?
If that would be possible then yes, or course.
That’s bascially the Start Trek future, where everybody’s needs are met and people can just do whatever they want. It doesn’t “cost” anything to create stuff, so it’s fine to copy everything for free. But that’s not the reality we are living in. In our’s somebody has to pay for things, and if everyone pirated everything then things couldn’t be made anymore.
An example where it kinda works is open source software. People don’t charge for copies, because they expect to get help with their work and also be allowed to use other OS software without paying for it. As long as that balance holds it works out fine, but there are a lot of projects that required too much investment from the creator’s and didn’t provide enough back for them to keep going. And even there, companies profiting from OS projects are expected or even required to pay it back, by contributing code and paying for engineers and sponsorships.
To further the thought experiment. I digitize my Blu-ray and put it on a private tracker to share with ONLY my friends. Is that piracy?
Copywrite laws are antiquated at best and need to be destroyed at worst.
If you need more proof look at bullshit like how Paramount+ until recently couldn’t show flagship shows like Picard in Canada because the rights were given to Crave.
So as a consumer I want to go to the owner of the property and I can’t watch it because the owner told me they gave a copy of it to someone else.
Trust me, they’re working on ways to prevent that too as we speak.
The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn’t cost anything.
under what ethical system?
Mine, obviously. But feel free to correct me if you disagree with something.
there’s no reason to believe what you claimed. a claim made without justification can be dismissed without justification.
What unjustified claim did I make that you disagree with? Seems all rather uncontroversial to me.
The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn’t cost anything.
i don’t need to disagree to disbelieve. i do disagree, but without establishing your justification for this claim, it’s kind of hard to argue against it.
The justification was that creating things has a cost, even if a copy doesn’t, and that we should distribute that cost as fairly as possible among the people benefiting from the creation.
They made a justification. They showed you how people couldn’t make these things without people paying for them.
They showed you how people couldn’t make these things without people paying for them.
but that’s not true. people make things all the time without being paid.
people make things all the time without being paid.
Less people make things without being paid than those who make things to get paid. That is a common fact we can both agree on. If you need the number of open source games compared to the number of paid games then I recommend you grab those numbers yourself.
It’s like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure it’s not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldn’t even happen if everyone acted like this
That’s a systemic problem, something I wouldn’t personally care about. The “system” is just so horribly screwed up and skewed against us that I just no longer care if it works or not.
If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you “bought”. Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.
This rubs me the wrong way too, yes. Though I’m really beyond moral justifications, I just stopped caring.
Same here. The world is unjust so act accordingly.
Which doesn’t mean be an asshole to everybody and steal everything you can but be an asshole to assholes and steal from franchises.
This post seems to be largely about the value of product ownership and the harm that DRM brings to the end user, and does a great job at making that point. However, the title seems to have caused a different discussion to spawn in the comments about whether piracy of digital content is justified. This is just a casual reminder to read the article before replying in the comments.
This is just a casual reminder to read the article before replying in the comments.
This should anyway be a sticky to every post about third party content.
If you can own nothing, then nothing is theft.
YOU can’t own anything, Big Corp however do own a lot 😉
You can own it though.
Physical media still exists.
which also has DRM on it
True but you can easily rip it.
Which they claim is illegal and a violation of the DMCA
IP in general is a very difficult idea to support. In theory, it’s supposed to reward innovation, but in practice it results in stagnation and price gouging.
This shit again? have people never heard of lending? the thing you get to use for a short duration at a fraction of the cost to buy it outright or create it yourself? The thing you don’t actually own and have to give it back? renting?
is this some kind of alternate universe where people think they own every movie or game simply by paying $$. is this kindergarten mathematics? and this is coming from people who can’t code for shit and don’t realize the scale of things bts.
Get a physical copy that doesn’t require internet activation then, assholes.
but but but… that requires actual physical movement and getting out of my basement. 😭
Get a physical copy that doesn’t require internet activation then, assholes.
Just a little bit closer, you’re almost getting the point!
Hi @satan@r.nf, please remember Beehaw’s primary founding principal when commenting here: Be(e) Nice.
It is possible to disagree with someone without using abusive language. If you think they are wrong, attack their arguments (civilly), not the person.
Or I can pay nothing and get a plain video file that I can do anything I want with, and play on any device without needing a player. And as long as I keep that file backed up somewhere, I’ll always have a copy of it.
The TV business is struggling to learn the lesson the music industry learned a long time ago.
And you provide what return, besides snark
Get a physical copy that doesn’t require internet activation then
I cannot speak about movies. But physical games now are also just “usage licenses”, they are encrypted and if the console is connected to the internet at any momento, your rights to play the game may be revoked (just like digital games or, in this case, digital TV series)
Granted, I only skimmed through the article, and overall I agree with, but that headline is a nonsensical statement. This coming from someone who pirates every movie and show that isn’t on Disney+. Whether you own, rent, or lend, you still had to pay for access to it. Piracy circumvents that. I don’t own the rental car. If I drove off with it, is that not stealing?
There are plenty of ways to justify piracy. There’s a few good reasons listed in the article. I do it because switching between a dozen streaming services is too inconvenient. But even putting morality aside, that headline is just plain dumb, it’s illogical.
Edited in case this came on too harsh
Driving off with the rental car is a fine analogy if we were comparing this to not returning a DVD you rented.
But this is not that. And that is kind of the point.
Piracy is a breach of contract for sure. The point the author is trying to make is that our current licensing contracts around media are out of touch with the social contract (you pay for something, you get it).
Hence the moral hazard. So companies will flaunt the social contract (like in the case of Sony) with impunity but will get rightous as soon as people flaunt the legal contract. It’s a double standard, where all the power is in the hands of those with the biggest legal department.
You can’t define “theft” untill you first define justice. And if consumers and media holders can’t even agree to a just system, then why bother categorizing anything as theft at all?
Oh I agree with the article as I already stated in my previous comment, and I hope people read it, because my only argument really is that it has a poor headline. The headline says that taking media that you wouldn’t have owned isn’t piracy (which is nonsense), the article says that piracy is justified when ownership is as nebulous as it often is with a lot of digital media these days (which I agree with).
No no, that is not what the headline says.
The headline says “you’re told that what you’re doing is buying by the people selling you the media, but that’s not what you’re actually doing. So, if they’re lying to you about what you’re buying, then pirating a different thing isn’t stealing the thing they are trying to sell you.”
It’s definitely tongue in cheek and has some hyperbole in it, but that is the gist of the statement.
then pirating a different thing isn’t stealing the thing they are trying to sell you.
Maybe not that version of the thing specifically, but it’s still stealing if they ultimately created it and you obtained it ignoring their conditions for sale.
Don’t get me wrong, you have a really good point. A lot of times the bootleg version of a good is better than the legal version because of the legal version’s tos and spyware enforcing them. I just don’t see how obtaining the bootleg isn’t piracy/stealing. There’s good justification for stealing it imo (as a pirate myself), but that’s all it is, justification. It’s still stealing.
So I guess I’m just being pedantic when I say I disagree with you, but realize I see where you’re coming from, and that we basically agree in spirit
I get ya. I think there’s also a petulant sentiment of “you don’t want to play fair? Then fuck you, I won’t either”
The car goes away when you drive it off. Replacing the car would take power to run multiple assembly and formation machines, and resources for each part.
When you download a movie, it doesn’t go anywhere, you simply use a miniscule amount of power to make a copy.
No one has lost anything and the product is still available where it was. Copying is not theft. When you steal, you leave one less left.
How many lemmy commenters can make the same false equivalence analogy in one week?
I know, I know, I figured someone was going to bring this up, and personally that’s part of the reason I justify my own piracy (cause I’m broke and movie studios aren’t), but two things:
-
The cost of creating, copying, and distributing a good isn’t strictly relevant to the transaction of said good. If the original owner doesn’t want me to have access to a good without paying for it, and I take it anyway, that’s stealing. The labor and capital required to create, copy, and distribute that good isn’t relevant to that transaction, only my moral justification for stealing it anyway. Which is fine, imo, just be honest with yourself. You’re stealing, and it’s justified. Stick it to the man
-
Assuming that it is relevant, making digital media isn’t free. I can get away with piracy only because there’s enough people paying for the media to make it worth it for the studio. At least one other commenter pointed this out, but if everyone pirated, who would be making movies and video games? So to keep the system going, imo, only pirate if you weren’t going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.
At least one other commenter pointed this out, but if everyone pirated, who would be making movies and video games? So to keep the system going, imo, only pirate if you weren’t going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.
You’re missing another option… And one that most people seem to continue to purposefully forget. When Netflix first started… It was a good product at a worthwhile price. Lots of people gave up pirating. Music was the same thing with Spotify and such services. Piracy is only getting worse again because the companies that “produce” the content can’t keep their heads out of their asses and the services that cut back on piracy are now worse than what we left originally. As someone who had purchased these services for YEARS… There’s nothing but greed on their end… They can’t be mad when people respond with their own form of greed, they made the first move here. They could have continued making money from people who otherwise wouldn’t have paid. They chose this path to some extent.
I think my last sentence includes your “missing option”, actually. Take streaming for example, I’m not paying for 6 different streaming services. I can’t, I won’t, and I’m not going to juggle them every couple months either. So I pirate. Even if for some reason I couldn’t pirate their stuff, I just wouldn’t watch it. Either way, they don’t get my money.
-
If everyone who would buy a digital product pirates it instead, then it’s clear that they have been harmed by the piracy. This whole “own” vs “rent” vs etc argument is completely tangental as is the definition of “steal”, unless pedantry is the purpose of this post. It’s clear that piracy can be harmful.
“But they lost nothing physical” is an extremely shallow argument that ignores that not everything with value is physical. If I copy your idea as-is and make a product out of it before you, you can always come up with new ideas, right? It’s not like you lost something physical. Clearly you haven’t been harmed, right?
If someone who wouldn’t purchase a digital product pirates it, then it’s less obvious whether the creator got harmed by it. Also, to be clear, the discussion over digital ownership is still important.
It’s got nothing to do with whether it’s physical. Cars are different from movies because the movie can be reproduced infinitely without resource cost (or, very minimal). If you steal a rental car, they have to buy a new one. If you pirate a movie, they haven’t lost anything.
If you pirate a movie, they haven’t lost anything.
Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value? Otherwise if everyone pirates the movie, then they lose nothing and have no incentive to enforce that people purchase it before watching it.
There are a lot of ways to justify pirating digital content. Pretending as though digital content has no value is not one of them, unless you really and truly believe that creators of digital content deserve no compensation.
First off, I was specifically addressing your concern about the car & it’s physicality. Value of physical objects is directly related to the scarcity of the resources; digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.
Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value
Secondly (and thirdly in a sec), this is the fundamental misapprehension that surrounds piracy. Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale. In terms of music (I read a study about music piracy a few years ago), this is rarely the case, and in fact, it was the opposite: the study found that the albums that were pirated more resulted in more sales, since the album’s reach was extended.
Thirdly, one of the core issues with the entertainment industry at the moment is that the streaming services have no way to gauge the draw of a specific show, movie, or song, since subscribers just don’t approach their subscription that way - you don’t subscribe to Spotify because your want to hear Virtual Cold by Polvo; you subscribe because you want to have access to their entire collection, as well as all the other awesome 90s noise/math rock - even though, let’s be honest, you really just listen to Virtual Cold over and over.
As a result of this clusterfuck, streaming services can’t correctly apportion payment to their content - they do an elaborate split of the profits. So - the best way for the “content providers” (ie copyright holders) to increase profits is to reduce the amount of content on the streaming service - so the profits are spread over fewer titles.
This is massively hurting the production companies - please note none of these fuckers are getting any sympathy from me, this is just an explanation - they’re having a hard time finding a balance between how much they can spend given that half of their productions’ profits are pennies. (Oops, forgot one element: because of streaming tech, no one buys films in tape or DVD or whatever - which was half of a film’s profit.) Do they make a bunch of huge budget action movie sequels that fill the theater seats? Or do they make smaller-budget films with smaller profit margins?
It’s a shitty situation, and I don’t know what the answer is - but I know that the answer isn’t whatever the fuck this is. And, until they figure their shit out, I’m just going to step outside the market for a bit.
I’m not living in some dream world where piracy doesn’t reduce profits. I know that the underground bands that I like are usually supportive of piracy because it helps them more than it hurts - and when it comes to film and TV, when those companies complain about piracy , it’s just like those bullshit shoplifting claims - attempts to turn their “line not go up” on poor people. Piracy is a grain of sand in the Sahara - they have way bigger problems than that - though I do think increased piracy metrics might help encourage them in the right direction.
Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.
To be clear, I’m not against piracy as a whole, but at its core if a potential buyer pirates something, then that is an opportunistic loss, and thus there exists a value to what was pirated (or rather the sale of it).
digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.
There are a number of ways to price digital content. You could price it based on cost of production split among an estimated number of sales plus a premium, or based on what others in the industry price it at. Regardless, to the creator of that digital content, each sale of that content has value, and while the copy itself might not, the transaction does.
Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale.
I “demoed” Minecraft before buying it, and you can bet I recommended it to others as well. There are plenty of instances where piracy can be a good thing, however I was never trying to state otherwise. In my original response, I had called out that piracy by people who would not otherwise purchase a product was less clear. There are also people who “pirate” content they’ve already purchased, and those who pirate like I did to demo a product before buying it later. In your case, you also have a justification for it when it comes to music. However, the point was that piracy can be harmful (as is shown by my extreme example of everyone pirating something), and therefore the sale of the content being pirated has value. They aren’t charging just because they feel like it, they’re charging because they’re selling a product, and the product had a cost to produce, even if it was mostly just an initial cost.
The debate around digital product ownership is an important one, and if you’re voting with your wallet by pirating the content, then by all means I won’t stop you. However, the idea that you aren’t “stealing” because you pirated digital content rather than purchasing a license to it is a distraction from the real problems of digital ownership that the article covers extremely well, most of which stem from lack of control over your copy of the product. Using piracy to try to effect change makes sense, but only because that piracy can harm the creators/distributors. If it didn’t harm them, then they wouldn’t care about the piracy and wouldn’t be interested in changing.
Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.
So by that logic, if I were to hack your computer, copy the data, and put sell it to some group for them to use, would that be theft. You still have your data, you haven’t lost anything directly, and while the group I sold it to may use a saved credit card or password to harm you I didn’t, so would what I did be considered theft?
Similarly, if I just sold the information gained by it to advertisers, marketers, your friendly neighborhood stalker, etc… Would that have been theft? You weren’t harmed, the demonstrably valuable information was just taken without your consent and given to a third party that wanted it.
I just wrote like a 10 page response to another comment on that same post I made so I don’t think I have the energy to go too deep on this - so, to keep it short:
-
I was just rebutting that person’s claim that a car and a digital object have the same relationship to value, and they don’t; physicality requires resources that “digitality” doesn’t.
-
I feel like you might’ve agreed with me in the second part? Or, if not, I think you managed to destabilize the entire data economy in like 2 sentences, so, fuck yeah.
-
If it’s not theft then it’s fraud I guess
Some are more equal than others
