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.
Now you’re the one being obtuse, unless you’re claiming that you’re actually arguing that you can be charged with theft, which you can’t be, because legally, copyright infringement isn’t theft.
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.
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” (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.
Agreed, and to me the solution is not “let’s hope the companies play nice”, but rather to bring in anti-monopoly regulations, like Canada’s Bill C-56.
We need to force companies to add interoperability, transparency and fairness imho. Like the ongoing fight to force Apple to allow competing browsers in iOS. Or alternate app stores for Android and iOS.
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".
When you’re paying, you’re not buying the fuel nor are the salaries directly affected by one person is paying for riding a train.
What you’re describing is called “marginal cost” and reducing this is the reason why the economics of any large scale business is actually working. You could argue with these marginal costs, but you’d be entering a completely different model/domain of economics. And no one uses this model which is abstract/non-abstract in any aspect that happens to make your point valid.
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.
I don’t get this logic at all. Piracy doesn’t take away a possible purchase. There is an assumption that the media downloaded was ever going to be paid for. In 100% of the cases where I downloaded pirated content, I was never going to pay for the product, even if it was available to me by other means. Further I cannot remove a sale from someone when I never possessed the money to pay for it anyway.
I believe most people that pirate cannot afford to buy digital releases or pay for streaming services etc… (not all cases of course). In these situations nobody loses. The media companies didn’t lose anything because I was never going to buy it, and it wasn’t stolen because they still possess the media.
Edit - I agree with you Lmaydev I replied to the wrong comment.
The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven’t paid for.
And media costs money to make.
If I wasn’t going to buy it anyway they haven’t lost anything.
If you weren't going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That's the thing, if you're interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you’ve actually cost them resources.
How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
The data to validate this is scarce, but I'd wager that most rips come from stolen physical media. I don't think there's too many people out there going "I just paid $20 of my hard-earned money for this Blu-ray, so now I'm going to give it away to strangers for free". The whole "paying for something" thing is kinda antithetical to piracy in the first place. But again, there's no real way to quantify this.
So, according to you, piracy is stealing, because it has to be stolen at some point. And the reason that it must be stolen is because it is connected to piracy.
Don’t act surprised if you’re downvoted, if you present your circular logic this plainly.
But not to copy, which is what you are asserting is being “stolen”. No one is claiming that turnstile jumpers are taking away money from train manufacturers. You’re having to mix analogies, because copying something isn’t theft.
You are trying to blur the line between the media/art/music/film, etc, and the reproductions of it.
Artists do deserve to be paid for their work, but artists do not deserve to maintain ownership over the already-sold assets, nor whatever happens to those assets afterwards (like copies made). If you want to say they should retain commercial rights for reproduction of it, sure, but resell of the originally-sold work (e.g. the mp3 file), and non-commercial reproductions from that sold work? Nah.
They didn’t put in labor towards that. To say they did expands “labor” far beyond any reasonable definition.
and non-commercial reproductions from that sold work?
But by this definition then, it should be ok for only one person to buy the item and then just copy and give it to everyone else, and the original author receives payment from a single item?
If it comes from their copy, sure. But streaming proved that people won’t do that if they have a less onerous way to do it, whether it be Spotify or Netflix.
People only started reverting to piracy when services started cannibalizing access to content and demanding more money than the access was worth.
Most video games don’t contain DRM, and can be found as torrents online, and yet video game sales are through the roof.
You’re literally just rehashing all the tired MPAA/RIAA talking points claiming that piracy would kill music and movies, that never panned out despite piracy always still existing.
But streaming proved that people won’t do that if they have a less onerous way to do it, whether it be Spotify or Netflix.
This is true to an extent, but if you would have a legal streaming platform that is free with all the same content then everyone would use that, no? The only reason someone would want to pay for Netflix is to donate to Netflix because they like it. But we all know how small of a percentage that would be. Reason why people use streaming services is that they’re simple and legal, and they are willing to pay for it.
Most video games don’t contain DRM, and can be found as torrents online, and yet video game sales are through the roof.
True. Though literally no clue about how much DRM there is. However, if piracy is fully legal then there would be no reason to purchase the games (assuming they’re as convenient). People are prepared to pay for things that are legal.
You’re literally just rehashing all the tired MPAA/RIAA talking points claiming that piracy would kill music and movies, that never panned out despite piracy always still existing.
Not really. I am arguing against piracy being legal. I am not arguing that piracy in its current form is killing anything.
if you would have a legal streaming platform that is free with all the same content then everyone would use that, no?
Are you suggesting a case in which it’s funded by some billionaire who does not need to charge money in order to cover the cost of hosting? Because if not, we’re back in the “commercial use” territory that I already covered.
If it’s purely hypothetical in order to ask if people prefer free things, then sure, of course people prefer free. But people prefer convenient even more, as streaming shows.
Half the reason piracy took off in the days of Limewire and Napster is because the RIAA actually made agreements with the big music publishers not to sell their music on digital services, in order to prop up CD sales. When iTunes came along, it instantly ate up the vast majority of Limewire/Frostwire/IRC traffic for music.
Are you suggesting a case in which it’s funded by some billionaire who does not need to charge money in order to cover the cost of hosting?
This is a fair point. I doubt anybody would do this, or the monetization would be done through ads which might fall into the commercial aspect? Don’t actually know, but this is already a thing and not something I was really thinking about. Relating to this actually, it would be interesting to know how much licencing fees are in comparison to server costs for the current streaming services.
I was thinking something more like a program that just pulls data from torrents directly, so no need for a central server. Yes, probably not feasible using the current system as everyone would just leech, but maybe one would have to also share things you watch or something. Yes, again, this would complicate things but I don’t think that is necessarily has to. I feel like there has been a service like this (popcorn time or something), I think I used something like this aaaaages ago.
Definitely there would be technical challenges for something like this but to me it does not sound impossible. I just feel like that if something like this system would exist (if piracy were legal), it would completely nuke the cash flow for tons of companies. It would not remove all of it, some people would donate just like they do for open source projects.
At least for me personally, I am willing to pay for stuff in order for it to be legal. Should the need to pay be removed, while keeping things legal, I’d have no incentive to pay. The only incentive would be convenience, but I don’t think there would be any reason for piracy to be less convenient than non-piracy; it’s already more convenient for tons of use cases I’m sure.
When iTunes came along, it instantly ate up the vast majority of Limewire/Frostwire/IRC traffic for music.
Definitely true, just as happened with movies etc when Netflix and the like popped up. However, one can also argue that this was not due to convenience, but due to now there being a legal way of doing things. In reality I’m sure that everyone weighs legality and convenience (and the cost of the service) differently and makes their own decision.
Currently the convenience factor is going down due to enshittification (among other things), while price is going up. I feel like piracy is up but it’s not like I can get a non-biased view from Lemmy (or reddit) and I have not actually looked into it.
It’ll be interesting to see the direction in a few years.
Just fyi what you’re describing is already baked into most modern torrent clients, letting you “stream” the video or music files, rather than downloading.
Exactly. And if they can’t afford to keep making music or whatever on that then we just have less of those things. Sure seems like we have more than ever, though.
Yes, we have more than ever. Because people are willing to pay for legal content. If you are suggesting that an artist should be content with selling a single album, then I doubt we would have professional artists for long.
If you weren’t going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That’s the thing, if you’re interested enough in a product to want it then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
I don’t agree with this at all. There are tons of things someone might want to use or have but not enough that they’d be willing to pay for it. Or over a certain amount of money.
The fact is that the person in question is still taking something without paying for it. A sense of entitlement (I want it badly enough that I should have it for free) doesn't change anything in this equation.
Sure, they are procuring something worth money without paying for it. But this is a very different argument than you would not pirate something if you would not also be prepared to pay it.
The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
The origins of most of all western countries’ wealth comes from theft, full stop.
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do.
That’s only the case for pre-Bluray release content. Most of it was just captured from rips, Amazon Prime or Netflix.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And neither can you, or publisher lawyers, which is why it’s called piracy and not stealing in the first place.
The publishers lost the fight to call it theft or stealing, as to use those terms is slander and libel due to how inaccurate they are.
So even legally, you’re wrong to say it’s stealing or theft, especially when your only evidence is your own vague assumption that the creator lost money (they didn’t) using your own presumed and deluded “quantified” cost of the piracy (not theft, or lawyers would call it that)
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.
And poverty, car crash deaths, lung cancer from pollution, etc.
Honestly a similar solution can work for media, we can use government to fund many small creatives and studios, breaking up publisher monopolies and possibly even doing some social good by allocating specific funds to black/white/native/hispanic/whatever creators to not only encourage creative endeavors for all communities but also build lasting cultural heritages.
That would require the government to work for the people, instead of against them, though, so I doubt we’ll see it anytime soon.
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.
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.
Really depends on the industry. E.g for games: The devs were already payed their salary and usually don’t get residuals. Here the money goes to the publisher/studio. As I already said: I pay for the indie games I play singe I want these studios to be able to exist/pay their devs. But the money I’d spend on Call of Duty will mostly go to Bobby Kotick and his shareholders.
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.
Those people don’t get residuals, but wages. Yes, the money has to come from somewhere. But the animators of a Netflix show I’m watching where already payed. Yes, the people currently working on stuff that will come out in the future still need wages, but let’s not forget that most of the money I’d pay will go to shareholders.
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.
I don’t really care for this liberal narrative.
Which is honestly fine with me, lord knows we have too much garbage on these platforms.
So, people who make that “garbage” don’t deserve to pay their rent? Either be defending the poor workers or be a market extremist. Pick a lane, my dog.
that you should pay what you can afford.
I don’t think people should be ripped off though. Which is what I think is happening with the big platforms.
But the money I’d spend on Call of Duty will mostly go to Bobby Kotick and his shareholders…Yes, the people currently working on stuff that will come out in the future still need wages, but let’s not forget that most of the money I’d pay will go to shareholders.
Yes, more than should, sure, we’re saying the same thing.
And then I said:
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.
To which you responded:
So, people who make that “garbage” don’t deserve to pay their rent? Either be defending the poor workers or be a market extremist. Pick a lane, my dog.
Which is a textbook straw man. And then there’s this gem:
Why are you mad that I call your stuff about “competition” and “inefficiencies” a “liberal narrative”? That’s what the liberal market economids are supposed to be. How did you interpret it exactly?
You ever find yourself in a discussion where it is abundantly evident that the other person is too ill-equipped to contribute meaningfully to the discussion, but also openly obstinate and reductive in the face of anything they don’t understand?
It’s impossible to not be condescending in that situation, I’ve already done it enough, and I’d rather not continue. Cheers.
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.
In that case you’re actually using a limited resource: space on a train. And by occupying it you’re preventing someone else from using it (assuming a full train). Copying media doesn’t cost any resources (ignoring the tiny amounts of electricity) or interfere with anyone else’s ability to use that resource.
You’re technicall still using the company’s resources (it costs some energy to run the empty train), so I still don’t think it really compares to piracy.
But since they are miniscule compared to what they are wasting by running largley empty trains I think it’s morally ok in that case.
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.
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.
I pay taxes, those were used to pay the people who build the bridge. And yes, taxes should be fair. If it’s a private bridge then the owners have every right to demand a fee for crossing it.
Yes, of course. They created the design, it cost them time and money, you want to use it, so you should pay part of those costs. Or to put it differently: You both use the design, why should they be the ones to pay for its creation, and not you?
Who says you can only owe something if you take something away first?
Think about how rent works. The building or appartement will still be there, loose value over time and need repairs whether you live there or not, yet you still owe the owner rent if you do.
your might owe under almost any circumstance, but almost all of them have to drop with a mutually agreed contract or transfer of property. what circumstance do you think created the debt here? and what if someone walks across my front yard bridge? do they owe the engineers too? it’s just silly.
This is going into feasability and away from morality, but ok.
The law is the “mutually agreed contract”, and the usage created the dept. You can be expected to know that the design of a bridge might be copyrighted, you can’t be expected to know that a bridge is private property and crossing it requires a fee. Ergo it’s on you to contact the owner of the design, and it’s on you to collect a fee from people using your bridge if that is what you want to do.
No it’s not. Why should someone let you stay in a building they payed and/or worked for, without you paying for a share of the upkeep, repairs, insurance etc., and the fact that the building exists in the first place?!
if you feel like rent as it currently exists even vaguely approximates the kind of model you claim you haven’t been paying attention. rent is, at its core, having other people pay for something because you own it. landlords are infamous for not paying for upkeep and repairs. the incentives behind owning property that other people live in lead to bad outcomes for people who can’t afford to own.
I’m talking about rent in principle, not how it is often perverted today. You can make just about anything immoral if you add price gauging and not-fulfilling-contractual-obligations to it. There are a lot of rents with fair prices, e.g. almost everything that’s not housing, but also apartments from social housing or housing associations.
rent doesn’t exist in principle, it exists in practice. and in practice, the history of rent is a history of wealth extraction. if its “perverted” today, it definitely was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. if you aren’t aware, this is a pretty basic leftist thing. if property can be held privately, those who own the property can use that ownership to extract wealth from people who need water, food, and shelter, but do not themselves own property. they can use that extracted wealth to buy more property, depriving ever more people of places in which to live their lives without paying somebody else for the privilege. and so on. thus “private property is theft”.
in any case, rent isn’t an uncontroversial example of how to fairly pay people who do things. rent is deeply political, and has been for most of modern history. it isn’t just common sense that we ought to allow people who own things to make money off that ownership, that’s a political statement, and one that should require some justification, considering its material impact on poverty, homelessness, and the accumulation of wealth.
rent doesn’t exist in principle, it exists in practice. and in practice, the history of rent is a history of wealth extraction
This is a completely useless stance when you want to figure out if rent itself is morally good or bad.
There are a lot of instances of rent today that are completely fine. For example, my parents rent 2 rooms of their appartement to university students, and they just ask for a share of the costs they have, proportional to the size of the rooms. That is rent, but free of other influences like profit maximization, and all parties seem to be very happy with the arrangement. Or if you rent a tool or car from a local company, you’ll pay mostly for a share of the acquisition and repair costs, and a bit on top so the owners and employees of the company can keep the lights on. There is absolutely nothing wrong about this form of rent.
If you’re saying that rent + limited supply + capitalistic profit maximation + corruption is a problem, then I absolutely agree with you, but it would be false to blame that on the rent part of that equation. And I would definitely not go as far as saying that private property in general is bad, expecially not very limited private ownership like a person owning the house they live in or part of the company they work for. Too much concentration of ownership is a problem, not the concept of ownership itself.
This is a completely useless stance when you want to figure out if rent itself is morally good or bad.
hard disagree. we have to examine things as they exist in the real world, not as we would like them to be. if we are only figuring out whether it would be good in principle, we’re failing to recognize whether that principle is actually founded on actual observable fact. and the observable facts say that rent has always been a potent tool for capitalists to extract wealth from people.
There is absolutely nothing wrong about this form of rent.
also disagree. why are these university students renting? schools could be providing housing to students if we invested public funds into that kind of project. what does the necessity of rent for students do in practice? well, the extra costs involved in having to rent space on the market in order to go to school structurally disadvantages marginalized students. students whose parents can cover the rent are able to maximize their time learning, take advantage of more extracurriculars, or save the money they make from a job for themselves, while students who can’t have to live in their cars, take jobs to cover costs, or just not get the education they want. the scale of the problem is smaller, but the nature of the problem is the same. those who have not must give their money to those who have in order to have a place to live.
lets just go through this. the supply of available property will always be limited. capitalism is defined by the private ownership of the means of production. corruption implies a system not working as intended. capitalism is intended to maximize profit, capitalism requires private ownership, resources are always limited, and rent requires private ownership. you might as well just say “private property + the limitations of a finite universe + private property + the incentives of private property is a problem”. i’m kinda joking, but not really.
And I would definitely not go as far as saying that private property in general is bad, expecially not very limited private ownership like a person owning the house they live in or part of the company they work for. Too much concentration of ownership is a problem, not the concept of ownership itself.
this is a problem of terminology. generally when socialists or other lefties are talking about private property, they’re talking about land and the economic abstractions of land ownership. socialist politics makes explicit distinctions between personal property and private property. i hear this argument alot, honestly, and if you find yourself making it as an argument against criticisms of private property more than once, i’d just recommend learning a bit more about what socialists believe, because its kind of just talking past what we think the problem is, and how we propose to solve it (democratically, instead of at the whims of rich folks).
you’ve talked about corporations a couple times, so i do wanna just say that those aren’t necessarily reasonable structures in and of themselves. it isn’t a given that the owners of a corporation should earn a profit, or that owning shares in a company is something beyond critique. there are more democratic organizational structures that don’t concentrate power towards those who have the most stuff.
hard disagree. we have to examine things as they exist in the real world, not as we would like them to be.
I don’t get why you keep trying to spin this as some sort of fairytail. Separating different things to figure out their role in an overall system is a completely normal and useful thing to do. If your car is broken you don’t just throw it on the scrap yard, or even declare cars in general non-functional. You look inside and figure out which part is the problem. And you can attribute the failure of the car to one part and declare the others functional, even if you’d never see those parts driving alone on the highway (although I gave you examples of that for rent). This is not a matter of facts vs fiction, this is about keeping separate things separate and not mixing things up, correlation vs causation and stuff.
also disagree. why are these university students renting? schools could be providing housing to students if we invested public funds into that kind of project […]
That’s not an argument against rent, that’s an argument against students having different means and having to pay for things in general. Why do students have to pay for food themselves? Why do they have to do their own house work when others can afford to hire someone? Those are all good questions, but they only concern rent in so far as it’s also a thing people pay money for.
lets just go through this […]
There is so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to begin.
Resources are not always limited, not in an economic sense. If there are more houses than people wanting to live in them then houses are essentially “unlimited”, in the sense that you’d probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. Owning a house also has costs attached to it, and you’d probably have a hard time covering those costs with earnings from rent in this case. People owning property in places no one wants to live in can attest to that.
Rent doesn’t require private ownership. Property can be owned and rented out by public entities, and that’s actually pretty common.
The rest is a gross oversimplyfication of the matter, as well as a logical error. You argue that X is in the equation, X requires private property, ergo private property is the problem. That’s just wrong, or at least not compelling. As an example, burglars require air to live, but the problem of burglaries cannot simply be reduced to the existence of air.
And uhm … the universe is infinite as far as we know, but that’s another discussion entirely.
this is a problem of terminology
Ok, could be that we mean the same thing. I personally think that a certain level of private ownership is necessary in order to establish responsibilities and solve disputes. E.g. if I own my house then I get to decide what to do with it, but I also have to be the one to take care of it. That might be what you’re calling personal ownership, while I’d just say that’s private ownership within healthy limits.
Separating different things to figure out their role in an overall system is a completely normal and useful thing to do. […]
that isn’t my point. my point is that rent has always existed within unjust systems, and is itself a tool for those systems to accumulate wealth. if we’re taking gears out of a meatgrinder and trying to identify just how much that gear contributes to the problem of grinding people into meat, we’re missing the point. in practice, the system in which rent operates is built to deprive people of resources. but even then your framing is not agreeable to me. we aren’t talking about a machine, we’re talking about a complex socio-cultural phenomenon that developed organically over generational time spans. the idea that we could even rip the word “rent” out of the context it exists in and get anything worthwhile out of analyzing it like that is not reasonable to me. like, cultures and economies don’t have parts like an engine do, they have trends and policies and outcomes, and those things can’t reasonably be reduced to cogs in a machine.
That’s not an argument against rent, that’s an argument against students having different means and having to pay for things in general. Why do students have to pay for food themselves? Why do they have to do their own house work when others can afford to hire someone? Those are all good questions, but they only concern rent in so far as it’s also a thing people pay money for.
you’re doing the thing again. separating rent out from the system its built into and analyzing it only as the act of exchanging currency for housing itself. i’m trying to engage in a systemic critique, not a stubbornly isolated look at a single piece of a larger whole. the problem of students “having different means” is not the point. you have to look at the larger picture. on a population scale, how does the requirement to pay your resources into the pockets of wealthier people for basic housing affect a society?
rent is, in the case of the university student, a material obstacle towards getting an education. those who do not have money or home ownership are more likely to be denied an education as a result, and will have less access to money making opportunities in the future. the money they could have been saving for themselves goes into the pockets of richer (whiter) people, so they are less likely to be able to pass on money they make during their lifetime onto their kids. non-white people are much more likely to be renting than white people, and that is historically because non-white people were restricted from home ownership in the past, and were not able to build the kind of generational wealth that comes from home ownership. rental arrangements reinforce existing social stratifications by providing the means by which the wealthy (and white) can continue to extract resources from the poor (and brown), as they have done for generations past.
like… sharecropping was rent, and its sole purpose was to explicitly ensure that freed slaves continued to provide wealth to their former masters. the actual observable impacts of rent are to transfer wealth from people who have no resources to those with resources to spare.
[…] If there are more houses than people wanting to live in them then houses are essentially “unlimited”, in the sense that you’d probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. […]
i was being facetious. my point was more that these factors you seem to think are separable are interlinked. just as a wake up call, there are currently more houses than people wanting to live in them. there are many multiples of houses left unoccupied for each homeless person in the United States, and the price of housing hasn’t done the thing you’re saying it would. instead, homelessness is increasing as landlords continue to raise rent, and the prospect of owning a home is becoming more and more out of reach for more and more people.
Rent doesn’t require private ownership. Property can be owned and rented out by public entities, and that’s actually pretty common.
there is a rabbit hole i could go down about this, but i don’t really wanna. my position is relatively simple. housing is a human right. putting literally any barriers up that prevent people from getting a place to stay are wrong. imposing extra financial burdens onto the people who have the least money is wrong. rent is such a burden, even for public housing. nobody outside the people who live on the land should have ownership over the land, not wealthy folks, not the state. housing co-ops, self-governance, that is what we should strive for.
As an example, burglars require air to live, but the problem of burglaries cannot simply be reduced to the existence of air.
i don’t really know how to respond to this. air isn’t a socioeconomic phenomenon with a proven history of driving wealth inequality? it doesn’t interact with race and class in ways that structurally disadvantage people who are poor and brown?
And uhm … the universe is infinite as far as we know, but that’s another discussion entirely.
lol. disagree, but fine, ill be less hyperbolic. “the parts of the universe we can build houses on currently are finite.” is that better?
That might be what you’re calling personal ownership, while I’d just say that’s private ownership within healthy limits.
i’m just gonna end with this: i’m not prepared to expand upon the exact shape of why i think you’re wrong, and why i think your rebuttals fail to provide a compelling challenge to the ideas i’m trying to convey. (that is not to say there aren’t compelling challenges to socialist ideas, there certainly are.) i used to hold a very similar position. the idea of doing away with private property once seemed ludicrous to me. then i actually engaged with socialist and anarchist arguments for why they believe the things they believe, and i found them compelling. i’m not saying you will too, but i am saying that the reasons i believe these things are knowable and there’s plenty of media out there that explains it better than i ever could.
Ok so, if you’re not willing or able to separate different ideas and concepts, then this discussion makes little sense imo. Drowning a very specific question in your ideology is not the way to actually get a good and truthful answer.
Thanks anyway for your time and effort, have a good one!
Eh, can’t win em all. I will say, just as a parting thought, the things you’ve been saying are also ideological. Believing clean separations between ideas and concepts are possible, appealing to existing systems as a way of validating the moral rightness of other systems, even believing that there is an objective “good and truthful answer” is an ideological position. I’d say one of the more pernicious ideological positions a person can take is to believe they do not have an ideology. It makes it very difficult to think about or discuss why you believe the things you believe.
It depends on the system. In taxes, yes. Use isn’t tied to paying. In consumer goods and services, they are not paid by taxes. So they do have a direct use/buy causation.
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.
You are equating someone’s terrible hobby project to paid games like it’s 1 to 1. You are simply arguing in bad faith. Have a good day though, hopefully, one day we can converse properly.
Yes, because there is a basic assumption. Those projects aren’t consumer-facing games. Those are hobbies. You know it and you are simply arguing in bad faith. I know actual game developers who released their games for free or under a pay-what-you-want model. They refuse to do so again because they can’t support themselves by doing it. I am a game developer and I won’t release my games for free because I need to support myself. There is all the data you need. Find me other data saying otherwise.
I know actual game developers who released their games for free or under a pay-what-you-want model. They refuse to do so again because they can’t support themselves by doing it. I am a game developer and I won’t release my games for free because I need to support myself. There is all the data you need.
Oh no! 😱that was a lost sale! To pirate jail with you!
(To those who think I’m full of shit, I direct you to Google the Microsoft patent for disabling streaming content if more that 4 people were in the room with a pop up to demand more money or kick someone out before resuming)
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.
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.
So in the near future where we can digitize and transmit memories, then can we consider sharing experiences “widespread and natural”? Or are we going to have to deal with malware injected directly into our brains to keep protecting and propping up monopolistic rights holders like Disney?
You think I’m kidding, but corps would cream at the prospect of being able to tell if someone has seen content and paid for it by scanning their brain (or device) and punishing “unlicensed views”
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.
Copywrite needs to die. Yes I understand there’s a lot of nuance in that statement but I stand by it. Copywrite does nothing but further enable assholes to be assholes.
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.
Sure would be nice if our Representatives would pass a comprehensive right-to-repair law. I can’t see it happening with our oligarchy running things, and consumers still making shitty buying choices.
Cory Doctorow is a smart guy, and has some great takes. But he also pays for Xitter Blue (or whatever they call it) so do with that info what you will.
The way I read it on his blog, it seemed he was paying for it. It’s entirely possible I misunderstood. I didn’t know what his Xitter handle is, I haven’t use that site in years.
What are you talking about, I don't see any tick. Are you talking about the big text that says "NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK"?
Maybe I am missing something but it kinda looks like Lemmy is engaging once again in a favorite activity, finding reasons why someone is "problematic" whether true or not, because that's more fun than just engaging in reasonable posting and commenting and letting people be worth listening to sometimes
Like why did 5 people upvote just pure combative nonsense. What did they see in it that led them to say "yeah this resonates with me, fuck this guy for objectively false reasons! I support this message!"
I think it’s because people are taking their frustrations out on whatever seems to make people think something might be on the upswing. Even better, because you can’t necessarily see who upvoted nobody can call them on it.
It’s like the folks who go to see a movie and gush about how awesome it was when you’re sitting around shooting the shit, but the moment they get on the Net they trash it in as many ways as possible.
More or less agreed. Side note though, votes on Lemmy aren't private. Admins or self-hosters can always see them if they care, and other platforms (notably Friendica and kbin/mbin depending on version and config) display the identities of people voting to everyone. It seems wrong to me that most Lemmy-style platforms don't make this clear.
I’d say that Apple is way worse than Google in a lot of cases. But this doesn’t mean Google are saints either. Both companies collect huge swaths of data on their users and easily share it with LEA. at least Google doesn’t hide behind a fake “Privacy” curtain like apple does.
Even though Google kept Android opens source for their own personal gains but this still helped get us Graphene OS, and other privacy and security focused Custom Roms. And they could’ve or still can kill entire custom ROM market if they want to (I hope they don’t read this and get any idea). And currently only Google pixel devices allow you to relock the bootloader with custom keys no other phone manufacturer does that. And apple doesn’t even allow you to sideload apps for “security reasons”. When it could be argued that Graphene OS is much more secure than both stock apple and android.
Why would a company hoard up such an enormous pool of money? That couldn’t have been more prudently spent on R+D or whatever Apple does nowadays?
The only reason to horde wealth like that is to threaten nation(s). Apple can decide to sell off its trillion dollars and tank the entire global economy, great depression style.
They’re commiting economic terrorism and I won’t shed any tears if Tim Cook, the rest of the CSuite or any board members just end up disappearing. In my eyes thatd just make trhe world a better place.
+1, either cull them from the union or cull them from the free trade deals.
What makes no sense is to let them decide to not enforce the EU rules while at the same time treating them as if they are a valid compliant member when it comes to trading with other countries in the union.
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’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.
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)
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.
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.
When it comes to Google, I find it completely absurd how people are OK with a giant ad / spy company saving and profiting from their private searches. Their entire lives, every sensitive query, stored in their databases. Why is this accepted? Completely shocking actually.
They are basing their entire profit model on spying on users privacy and selling it to advertisers. Doesn’t that make you sick to your stomach?
If you want best effort, use DDG as your main search. If the first query doesn’t bring back what you want add g! to it and it will redirect to Google. yt! goes to YouTube, b! goes to bing, w! Wikipedia, etc.
Big fan of kagi.com. rock-solid privacy policy (seriously, I am one of those guys who read them all, this is probably the best I have seen), excellent search results and very nice features (lensed to search in specific contexts only - say, programming, up/down ranking of sites as you prefer, automatic rewriting of urls, custom bangs). The cons, is that it’s a paid service. I am personally a customer since November 2022, never looked back.
I never fully understood this Reuters range investigation. I have had a Tesla Model 3 for many years now, and it tells me I can go, say, 290 miles on a full charge. When I plan a long road trip, it figures out I need to stop at a charger after about 275 miles so I have a few percent left. So I drive the 275 miles, get to the charger with roughly that amount of % charge left, charge my car and keep on going. If I really only had 150 miles of range, there’s no way I would’ve ever reached that charger. I’ve done trips like this many times now. In my experience the advertised range is more or less realistic, and this is easily provable with any car.
Is it a quality control issue? Are people being confused by the massive effect temperatures have on EV range? It doesn’t seem like the major conspiracy it’s made out to be. Mishandled though, probably.
That sounds way off. For a LR that would be 388 Wh/km, which is incredibly bad. Normal values should be 150-200 Wh/km unless you’re pulling a trailer or going 200+ km/h.
This appears to be an escalating fraud, affecting newer models more than old. So I’d guess that’s ^^ the answer.
It’s not just a Reuters investigation, they’ve been fined by a few jurisdictions and they absolutely do have the ability to pay lawyers to defend those charges if they’re false.
According to the article they had to derate their ranges by 3-5% or so. Cory is talking about the range being less than half of the estimated one. I think we would’ve seen thousands of stranded Teslas around here if that were really the case. So I remain doubtful.
FWIW I suspect most of these “omg why is my range suddenly gone!” complaints with Tesla to be exactly the same as with all other EVs: Very low temperatures, or towing. You’ll find plenty of people complaining about every model and make of EV because consumers expected to have the advertised range even though they’re towing a trailer or are driving through a freezing mountain pass. Unfortunately EVs just don’t handle this very well.
It’s amazing how bad it is now with SEO-optimisation. Most people (myself included) put “reddit” into the search query to clean things up in the hopes that we’ll get something other than an ad-serve/affiliate-sales-linked website, but this really opens you up to being exposed to astro-turfing.
Edit: Really interested to hear if other people have better ideas than this.
Hadn’t thought of that. Unfortunately generally I’m looking at current products/news more often than not. Makes me worried about the whole dead internet theory if I’m being honest.
If you’re actually interested in results from Reddit, you should put in site:reddit.com. Otherwise, you’re just encouraging/rewarding sites that use that term for their SEO spam.
Google juices reddit posts now so no need to throw that shit in anymore. There were recent news articles about it coming from the antitrust case against the company. Now many folks use “-reddit” for how bad reddit is these days clogging up search.
Been using Duckduckgo for a few years now and found it very good, although it’s also on the downward SEO ruined path. Have tried Google occasionally and wow is it juat completely full of crap.
Every fucking engineer and inspector that got burned by this dangerous criminal 90 day whistleblower process had better be writing a will and talking to a lawyer right now. If it can’t be fixed now I don’t know how it will ever. It had always struck me as funny that the FAA has Boeing inspect and okay their own planes, that is the first thing that needs to change.
It’s the first and primary duty of being an aviation engineer, the duty to the public (or in simple terms, to not have planes fall out of the sky). The systemic, criminal, and wilful negligence in management that has let things get this bad has to be rectified, before more people get hurt. Management needs major reprisals for firing and punishing engineers who did their job correctly.
I agree that it’s a strong likelihood for John, but I thought Joshua died from an upper respiratory infection. Is there any evidence that it was caused by an outside party that I’ve missed?
My conspiracy theory about MRSA is that an innocent person could just visit two patients, one with it and one without it and MRSA would infect the second patient. Thus it could very easily be weaponized against people who end up in the hospital. So I would love to see those records publicly to check everyone who visited. Did any of them visit another patient who happened to be infected and when.
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