I get that the economy we’re in means a bunch of people, like yourself, feel justified in entertaining themselves using whatever means they can afford. I’d be lying if I said I never pirated music when I was a broke highschooler.
But the reality is, if the funding isn’t there, it doesn’t happen. I don’t think DRM is the ethical way to squeeze money out of your audience, nor do I think not compensating people who worked hard to create something you enjoy is the ethical way to consume media.
If you liked it, and you can afford it, pay them a fair price for your experience. Artists are already starving without society having a “copying isn’t stealing” mentality. It doesn’t matter if it’s Netflix, or a busker; you’re not paying them for a physical thing that they hand you, you’re paying them for the effort they went to craft an experience for you.
the money I’d pay to Netflix or Spotify won’t actually go to the artists who worked on the stuff
Not enough of the money goes to the artist, but money does go to the artists. If you’re not sure, ask literally any artist who has their content featured on netflix, or any of the other platforms.
Money also goes to the marketing team, and software developers, and internationalization teams, and all the other people in the chain who actually do have a purpose and make that artist’s content more available to the world than it otherwise would be.
But they’re always going to take more than they should, that’s just called inefficiency, and is where competition can happen. But if it’s not generating enough income, the content simply won’t happen.
Which is honestly fine with me, lord knows we have too much garbage on these platforms.
Most imortantly: I don’t want to shame anyone for pay/not paying, as I usually don’t know their financial situtation.
Totally agree. I felt I was very clear that I myself pirated when I couldn’t afford to pay, which is consistent with the belief that you should pay what you can afford.
Artists are already starving without society having a “copying isn’t stealing” mentality.
If labels didn’t take huge chunks of their income… with very little return on their part. Guess what…
This actually isn’t a problem with the consumers, it’s a problem with the “production” side of this equation.
or a busker
A busker doesn’t hold my files I create via video recording on my phone of the “event” hostage… under threat of lawsuit/men with guns beating down my door and taking all my electronics.
you’re not paying them for a physical thing that they hand you, you’re paying them for the effort they went to craft an experience for you.
No I’m not. I’m paying to own the disc/content. I couldn’t give a damn what “experience” they think they’re creating. But it’s in their best interest that the “experience” is worthwhile so I purchase the next one.
If labels didn’t take huge chunks of their income… with very little return on their part.
That is my point, yes.
This actually isn’t a problem with the consumers, it’s a problem with the “production” side of this equation.
It is both. Contrary to the simpliatic worldview of Lemmy/reddit circle jerks, more than one problem can exist.
A busker doesn’t hold my files I create via video recording on my phone of the “event” hostage… under threat of lawsuit/men with guns beating down my door and taking all my electronics.
Again, I don’t think DRM is ethical. I also don’t think being able to afford to compensate someone, and not compensating them is ethical.
I’m paying to own the disc/content. I couldn’t give a damn what “experience” they think they’re creating
You can go buy blank disks for a fraction of the price of ones with content on them.
You will never own their content, they own the copyright, you do not. Even when you purchase a physical blu-ray disk, you would not be allowed to open a theater and start showing it to people. That is because: You. Do. Not. Own. Their. Content. Ever. You’re only paying for the experience of witnessing it. Just like going to see a play 200+ years ago, just like going to a movie theater today. You’re allowed to be confused about that, but it doesn’t change reality.
it’s in their best interest that the “experience” is worthwhile so I purchase the next one.
So you literally do “give a damn” about the experience. Which is it?
You make a decent point, but the disconnect between people paying for content and the money going to the people who contributed effort to it is getting wider and wider.
Popular shows that people subscribed for get axed after 1 season or moved to another service. All the work people did for Warner Brothers’ Batgirlgets thrown in the trash so that WB can get a tax write-off, before any movie watcher can even give a cent to them in support.
The point is big studios make so much year after year that pirating their stuff doesn’t make a dent in whether the people they hire get paid accordingly.
Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?
A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being “removed” in that situation either.
What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.
Nothing that some customer could have bought is removed by jumping a turnstyle.
Nothing? Not even the fuel required to transport the extra weight of somebody who hasn’t paid? Not even the wages for the employees who conduct and maintain the trains?
You can argue that the amounts are miniscule, sure. But “miniscule” does not equal “zero”.
I think I figured out the disconnect here. Yes, hopping a turnstile is against the law. It is still not considered theft. It is called fare evasion, and it is more akin to a traffic violation. The reason I was confused, and why I assumed you meant morality, is that nobody is saying piracy isn’t against the law. The article never said that either.
Jumping a turnstile and taking a physical, actually scarce resource is not comparable to duplicating a digital, artificially scarce resource.
The train requires ongoing maintenance and can only hold a finite amount of people. Taking the train seat for free takes away something from another person. Downloading media does not use any ongoing resources, and does not take anything away from another consumer.
Comparing the morality of physical goods to digital goods are not really a good comparison specifically because of the artificial scarcity brought on by making something digital to try to make it more expensive doesn’t map to the real scarcity of physical goods.
How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
However much they’re asking. They put a price tag on it for exactly this question.
In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
Not really. Civil disobedience is about refusing to follow a law, not choosing to break a law. There’s a difference between the two concepts; one involves going about your day as normal and ignoring laws, and the other is going out of your way to break a law. Piracy is no more a form of civil disobedience than looting a grocery store is.
Ah, that’s not my understanding of civil disobedience. I prefer this definition: “civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/)
I suppose the piracy aspect might not be public enough to count as civil disobedience though, unless you count as public the noticeable cumulative effects of all piracy.
I don’t like this analogy, because there’s a real, albeit small, cost to the subway of that free ride, in terms of fuel and increased maintenance. Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”
It should be a free service anyway. Without free public transport, democracy does not exists. Same reason healthcare and education should be. So sure, you are “stealing” a ride - something that should be yours anyway because people are not born with the ability to travel kilometers of cityscapes, something that is now mandatory to survive and thrive.
You’re also potentially blocking a seat that could be used by a paying passenger, and the operator will statistically run more/longer trains at higher cost to cope with increased demand.
Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”
You know that the pirated files were stolen in the first place, right? Movies and video games aren’t just sitting out in the open free for somebody to snatch up like apples on a tree. They end up in the hands of scene groups by somebody in the studio taking an unauthorized copy of the product and distributing it.
Lost sales are damages, as demonstrated by the courts hundreds and hundreds of times over now.
Ever heard of “ripping” a disk, a stream, or a download? Movies, series, and video games get paid for by someone who then proceeds to make unauthorized copies, they very rarely come from anyone at the studio.
Lost sales are “legal” damages, which doesn’t mean they’re actual loss of anything, since people who were not going to pay, are worth exactly $0.
It’s different when bootleg copies get sold, since then there is an actual payment that isn’t going to the right person.
Does you license plate say “PRIVATE”? Because this is some real sovereign citizen logic, using definitions of terms that the rest of the world doesn’t agree with.
Ever read the message at the beginning of a rip? You know, the one with the FBI logo on it. Remind me what it says?
“people who were not going to pay” is not one singular group, but you use this as if everybody who isn’t going to pay is part of the same demographic. Some people won’t pay because they don’t want it in the first place. Some people won’t pay because while they want it, they can’t afford it. And some won’t pay but will take it anyway because they feel entitled to it.
Painting all these groups with the same brush is disingenuous at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst.
Many scene groups actually purchased the games and cracked them, I’ve read NFOs that say “buy the game, we did too”.
People recording in movie theatres have to either sneak into the theatre or buy a ticket themselves.
Someone scanning a book to post online had to have bought it or borrowed it.
Yes some games are cracks of illegitimate obtained leaked copies or other unscrupulous methods.
I have played pirated games in the past but my Steam library has thousands of dollars worth of games I bought, many
of which I wouldn’t have if I weren’t interested in these type of games to begin had pirating games not been possible.
Sure, the opportunity cost from piracy’s “lost sales” to the publisher/licensor is non-zero. But how many sales that would have happened varies greatly on the perceived value vs. price of the product, and how available it is. If it’s not in stores anymore and can only be bought from scalpers on eBay, the publisher cough Nintendo cough doesn’t see that money anyway vs. pirating it.
I have hundreds of CDs, which are bought and paid for. Tell me, again, how making copies and (hypothically, of course) giving them to friend[1] incurs a direct cost to the CD producer?
Nearly all pirated content was most likely originally purchased once, and ripped. There’s no evidence that much of it is from shoplifted DVDs.
The employees don’t get paid less if some jumps the turnstile, the fuel cost to carry a single person is completely trivial, and I didn’t say nobody should care about turnstile jumpers. I said its not stealing. If you damage the tracks and cause the train to derail you’re a monster, and there are financial costs, but you still didn’t steal the train. Your argument doesn’t make any sense.
So are you arguing that turnstile jumpers are harming the company, but they are not stealing the service / train / ride? Like the literal word “steal”.
Yes. That is in fact what I am arguing. I would also argue that the harm is tiny and can sometimes be justifiable, depending on the circumstances, but yes. It absolutely does do some non-zero harm, and yes there is no thing being stolen. That is the argument I am making.
I dunno, I mean are the train company allowed to take my money and then go “sorry we fell out with the fuel company so we’re just gonna keep your money and not take you to your destination. Soz babe x”
Operating a train is not creating a train. And media does not require resources to operate, so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.
Bruh, no one in here is arguing about legality, we’re arguing about morality, and no one but corporate shills buy into “potential sales” having value.
You’re trying to argue against what people just fundamentally, intuitively understand; copyright is a legal construct (not a moral one) that is 99% bullshit.
How do you feel about jumping the turnstile at a train station?
Counter question: Do you think that running libraries is theft?
Public Lending Right programs exist in 35 countries to compensate authors whose works are in libraries.
Great! Let’s do that for any type of media!
They do already.
Some countries have a blank media fee on writable casettes, discs and hard drives that are paid to music and movie studios for this purpose.
And yet: Netflix prevents me from recording any of their shows and sharing the recording with my friends and family.
I get that the economy we’re in means a bunch of people, like yourself, feel justified in entertaining themselves using whatever means they can afford. I’d be lying if I said I never pirated music when I was a broke highschooler.
But the reality is, if the funding isn’t there, it doesn’t happen. I don’t think DRM is the ethical way to squeeze money out of your audience, nor do I think not compensating people who worked hard to create something you enjoy is the ethical way to consume media.
If you liked it, and you can afford it, pay them a fair price for your experience. Artists are already starving without society having a “copying isn’t stealing” mentality. It doesn’t matter if it’s Netflix, or a busker; you’re not paying them for a physical thing that they hand you, you’re paying them for the effort they went to craft an experience for you.
Don’t get me wrong: I pay for my indie games and don’t have the time for the so-called “triple-AAA” crap.
But the money I’d pay to Netflix or Spotify won’t actually go to the artists who worked on the stuff. That’s just not how this works.
Most imortantly: I don’t want to shame anyone for pay/not paying, as I usually don’t know their financial situtation.
Not enough of the money goes to the artist, but money does go to the artists. If you’re not sure, ask literally any artist who has their content featured on netflix, or any of the other platforms.
Money also goes to the marketing team, and software developers, and internationalization teams, and all the other people in the chain who actually do have a purpose and make that artist’s content more available to the world than it otherwise would be.
But they’re always going to take more than they should, that’s just called inefficiency, and is where competition can happen. But if it’s not generating enough income, the content simply won’t happen.
Which is honestly fine with me, lord knows we have too much garbage on these platforms.
Totally agree. I felt I was very clear that I myself pirated when I couldn’t afford to pay, which is consistent with the belief that you should pay what you can afford.
If labels didn’t take huge chunks of their income… with very little return on their part. Guess what…
This actually isn’t a problem with the consumers, it’s a problem with the “production” side of this equation.
A busker doesn’t hold my files I create via video recording on my phone of the “event” hostage… under threat of lawsuit/men with guns beating down my door and taking all my electronics.
No I’m not. I’m paying to own the disc/content. I couldn’t give a damn what “experience” they think they’re creating. But it’s in their best interest that the “experience” is worthwhile so I purchase the next one.
That is my point, yes.
It is both. Contrary to the simpliatic worldview of Lemmy/reddit circle jerks, more than one problem can exist.
Again, I don’t think DRM is ethical. I also don’t think being able to afford to compensate someone, and not compensating them is ethical.
You can go buy blank disks for a fraction of the price of ones with content on them.
You will never own their content, they own the copyright, you do not. Even when you purchase a physical blu-ray disk, you would not be allowed to open a theater and start showing it to people. That is because: You. Do. Not. Own. Their. Content. Ever. You’re only paying for the experience of witnessing it. Just like going to see a play 200+ years ago, just like going to a movie theater today. You’re allowed to be confused about that, but it doesn’t change reality.
So you literally do “give a damn” about the experience. Which is it?
You make a decent point, but the disconnect between people paying for content and the money going to the people who contributed effort to it is getting wider and wider.
Popular shows that people subscribed for get axed after 1 season or moved to another service. All the work people did for Warner Brothers’ Batgirl gets thrown in the trash so that WB can get a tax write-off, before any movie watcher can even give a cent to them in support.
The point is big studios make so much year after year that pirating their stuff doesn’t make a dent in whether the people they hire get paid accordingly.
Amoral at worst. Public transportation shouldn’t have a fee at use. Tax the rich, invest in transport
Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?
A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being “removed” in that situation either.
Ah, in that case, no that is also not stealing.
What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.
Who is losing resources when you hop a turnstile?
The transportation authority who maintains the trains and stations.
Only if the rides are a scarce resource. Which they aren’t. Nothing that some customer could have bought is removed by jumping a turnstyle.
Nothing? Not even the fuel required to transport the extra weight of somebody who hasn’t paid? Not even the wages for the employees who conduct and maintain the trains?
You can argue that the amounts are miniscule, sure. But “miniscule” does not equal “zero”.
I think I figured out the disconnect here. Yes, hopping a turnstile is against the law. It is still not considered theft. It is called fare evasion, and it is more akin to a traffic violation. The reason I was confused, and why I assumed you meant morality, is that nobody is saying piracy isn’t against the law. The article never said that either.
Jumping a turnstile and taking a physical, actually scarce resource is not comparable to duplicating a digital, artificially scarce resource.
The train requires ongoing maintenance and can only hold a finite amount of people. Taking the train seat for free takes away something from another person. Downloading media does not use any ongoing resources, and does not take anything away from another consumer.
Comparing the morality of physical goods to digital goods are not really a good comparison specifically because of the artificial scarcity brought on by making something digital to try to make it more expensive doesn’t map to the real scarcity of physical goods.
Again, I have to ask: How do you think those digital goods are made in the first place? Somebody labored to create it. They deserve to be paid for it.
Not sure why this is such a hot take.
How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
However much they’re asking. They put a price tag on it for exactly this question.
Not really. Civil disobedience is about refusing to follow a law, not choosing to break a law. There’s a difference between the two concepts; one involves going about your day as normal and ignoring laws, and the other is going out of your way to break a law. Piracy is no more a form of civil disobedience than looting a grocery store is.
Ah, that’s not my understanding of civil disobedience. I prefer this definition: “civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/)
I suppose the piracy aspect might not be public enough to count as civil disobedience though, unless you count as public the noticeable cumulative effects of all piracy.
Right, but in this instance you’re not damaging the government through these actions. You’re damaging private entities. Civil vs criminal.
EDIT: Although, piracy often crosses both civil and criminal statutes in many cases, because copyright law is weird like that.
Depends on the circumstances I guess, but no matter how I feel about it people jumping the turnstile aren’t stealing the train.
Are they stealing a ride?
I don’t like this analogy, because there’s a real, albeit small, cost to the subway of that free ride, in terms of fuel and increased maintenance. Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”
It should be a free service anyway. Without free public transport, democracy does not exists. Same reason healthcare and education should be. So sure, you are “stealing” a ride - something that should be yours anyway because people are not born with the ability to travel kilometers of cityscapes, something that is now mandatory to survive and thrive.
You’re also potentially blocking a seat that could be used by a paying passenger, and the operator will statistically run more/longer trains at higher cost to cope with increased demand.
You know that the pirated files were stolen in the first place, right? Movies and video games aren’t just sitting out in the open free for somebody to snatch up like apples on a tree. They end up in the hands of scene groups by somebody in the studio taking an unauthorized copy of the product and distributing it.
Lost sales are damages, as demonstrated by the courts hundreds and hundreds of times over now.
Ever heard of “ripping” a disk, a stream, or a download? Movies, series, and video games get paid for by someone who then proceeds to make unauthorized copies, they very rarely come from anyone at the studio.
Lost sales are “legal” damages, which doesn’t mean they’re actual loss of anything, since people who were not going to pay, are worth exactly $0.
It’s different when bootleg copies get sold, since then there is an actual payment that isn’t going to the right person.
Does you license plate say “PRIVATE”? Because this is some real sovereign citizen logic, using definitions of terms that the rest of the world doesn’t agree with.
Ever read the message at the beginning of a rip? You know, the one with the FBI logo on it. Remind me what it says?
Like which one exactly?
There is none. Some rips used to come with a “Ripped by [some nick]” and a scene group logo, but they’ve grown out of fashion.
Just kidding, I know you meant this one: https://youtu.be/CXca40Z01Ss
“people who were not going to pay” is not one singular group, but you use this as if everybody who isn’t going to pay is part of the same demographic. Some people won’t pay because they don’t want it in the first place. Some people won’t pay because while they want it, they can’t afford it. And some won’t pay but will take it anyway because they feel entitled to it.
Painting all these groups with the same brush is disingenuous at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst.
Many scene groups actually purchased the games and cracked them, I’ve read NFOs that say “buy the game, we did too”.
People recording in movie theatres have to either sneak into the theatre or buy a ticket themselves.
Someone scanning a book to post online had to have bought it or borrowed it.
Yes some games are cracks of illegitimate obtained leaked copies or other unscrupulous methods.
I have played pirated games in the past but my Steam library has thousands of dollars worth of games I bought, many of which I wouldn’t have if I weren’t interested in these type of games to begin had pirating games not been possible.
Sure, the opportunity cost from piracy’s “lost sales” to the publisher/licensor is non-zero. But how many sales that would have happened varies greatly on the perceived value vs. price of the product, and how available it is. If it’s not in stores anymore and can only be bought from scalpers on eBay, the publisher cough Nintendo cough doesn’t see that money anyway vs. pirating it.
I have hundreds of CDs, which are bought and paid for. Tell me, again, how making copies and (hypothically, of course) giving them to friend[1] incurs a direct cost to the CD producer?
Nearly all pirated content was most likely originally purchased once, and ripped. There’s no evidence that much of it is from shoplifted DVDs.
There’s no evidence that “much” of it is from purchased DVDs, either.
100% of the dozens of DVDs in this household were purchased. You have a few in your house that were shoplifted as a counter data point, maybe?
No, they’re just stealing the fuel and wages the employees should be getting for maintaining the train.
The employees don’t get paid less if some jumps the turnstile, the fuel cost to carry a single person is completely trivial, and I didn’t say nobody should care about turnstile jumpers. I said its not stealing. If you damage the tracks and cause the train to derail you’re a monster, and there are financial costs, but you still didn’t steal the train. Your argument doesn’t make any sense.
So are you arguing that turnstile jumpers are harming the company, but they are not stealing the service / train / ride? Like the literal word “steal”.
Yes. That is in fact what I am arguing. I would also argue that the harm is tiny and can sometimes be justifiable, depending on the circumstances, but yes. It absolutely does do some non-zero harm, and yes there is no thing being stolen. That is the argument I am making.
Yeah alright makes sense. Sometimes it hard to know what people are exactly arguing about.
“Trivial” is not “zero”.
Maybe, but it’s also closer to the price saved on less wear and tear on the turnstile than it is the price of the ticket.
Ok, then make the trains a public service, collect taxes for it and make puplic transport free.
Analogous to the whole “piracy” discourse: Manage more media like libraries.
That would be a great idea, and could even help combat climate change.
I dunno, I mean are the train company allowed to take my money and then go “sorry we fell out with the fuel company so we’re just gonna keep your money and not take you to your destination. Soz babe x”
You wouldn’t download a train?
You wouldn’t 3D print it?
I don’t see how that compares. Trains need human labour and lots of resources to function.
How do you think movies, music, games, books, or any form of media is produced?
Operating a train is not creating a train. And media does not require resources to operate, so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.
Using, no. Acquiring, yes.
No, nothing was lost when the copy was acquired, because copying does not remove the original. Literally, nothing is lost.
Lost sales are considered damages, so yes something is lost.
EDIT: This is worse than arguing with SovCits.
Bruh, no one in here is arguing about legality, we’re arguing about morality, and no one but corporate shills buy into “potential sales” having value.
You’re trying to argue against what people just fundamentally, intuitively understand; copyright is a legal construct (not a moral one) that is 99% bullshit.
What are you talking about? That’s literally the entire point of the article and this comment section.
What if you were never going to buy it?