You shouldn’t be denied the stuff you actually use. But people definetly should not be allowed to hoard all the water in the world for themselves.
ASK YOURSELF how did they come to be in possesion of the land of the world?
at some point the entire planet was the commons. With WHAT right did they carve it up and claim it is theres for all eternety?
Just because you weren’t born at the right time you should be denied the use of the world as everybody else? first come first serve basis? how when it isnt yours to decide over.
the people who carved up the world and put their flags in it, and then put fences around anything so that we may never use it and are condemned to sit idly by have robbed all of us of our fair share.
the world is still belonging to the commons.
Nobody owns the air or the moon but only because the moon is out of reach and the air can’t be fenced off otherwise you would have to pay for tides and every breath you take. think about that.
Rethorical question: why didn’t property rights matter when the spanish went to south and middle america? why didn’t they matter when north america was lifted off of the original owners? but now if you take some guys land in the same exact area suddenly property rights matter?
so basically you can go around stealing off of everybody in the world but if somebody steals a lighter or pen off of you they go to jail? make it make sense…
Would you rather everyone can just walk into your house and take whatever they want? I for one am quite happy with the rules and morals we keep.
Those flags put up are often there to keep different cultures with different rules apart. It’s not as easy as erasing borders to have a free world. People are too selfish for that.
Sure, governments still steal all the time. Things are definitely not perfect, but that’s not related to someone stealing your lighter.
Possession is what you literally currently use, I am talking about property things that you do not currently use but still decide over. So the house you live in is in your possession (and also your property) but the 100 others you own are in your property not in your possession.
So nobody should ever be able to take the car you use even if yours is better than mine, or even if i dont have one. But nobody should be able to keep people from using anything they dont use themselves.
does that make sense?
regading selfishness - well currently they are, you are right, I would agree with you there
However just like a tiger in a small cage in a zoo does show unusual behaviour that deviates from its healthy behaviour in the wild. So do we humans under the conditions of lack of freedom show behaviour that is dysfunctional that would not be displayed would we live under freedom. Selfishness at least in that sense is a consequnce of our current conditions. However I do not believe human beings have to be angles before we can stop fencing of most of the world to most of the people.
Selfishness is part of the human condition. Tribes needed to fight over resources and mark their territory in order to keep the tribe alive. It’s in your instinct.
There have always been borders and territories, and there have always been fights and wars over it.
I don’t really see how your “if you don’t use it” policy applies here, and I also think the problem of this topic is easier than that.
Digital piracy is not theft, by definition. Theft requires taking something with the intent to deprive the owner, copying things does not deprive the owner.
Digital piracy is copyright infringement, which (in the vast majority of cases) is not even a crime. It is a civil offense.
If you have a hard copy book and someone steals it, you’re not only losing out on the potential sale price of the book, but the tangible value you have already paid to produce that copy.
Say the book is $12, you get $2, the publisher gets $5 - the book store buys it for $7, and sells for $12 making $5 profit. If you steal from the book store, they’ve lost a potential profit of $5, but more importantly they’ve actually lost the $7 they already paid for it. This is what theft is about, the value of a possession taken away, not the potential value.
With a digital book, each individual copy costs nothing. It costs something to make the original, but making a copy is free. Thus the only thing you’ve lost is the potential profit, which arguably you wouldn’t get anyway as the person didn’t want to buy from you to begin with - just because they downloaded it for free does not mean they would have paid full price if a free download wasn’t an option.
With theft, you have a tangible loss. With digital piracy, the only loss is opportunity to profit.
Yeah I’m a huge pirate but I also have subscriptions to publications, buy a bunch of games, buy music and even have almost every release from a few labels, go to concerts as much as I can. It’s not about the money for me at all
Great idea! It’s up to us to preserve culture, we can’t leave it to those only motivated by profit otherwise cultural history will be lost when it becomes unprofitable.
And since we’re not coordinating, I’d better make sure I preserve the bits of culture important to me.
Yep. The self regulating market is either utopian vision by blind idealists or double speak for maximizing profits and fucking over anybody and anything while doing it.
If you don’t drink a verification can, are you depriving Mountain Dew of their legal right to make you drink verification cans? If you don’t enroll in the IOF, are you depriving Israel of its legal right to murder thousands of darker skinned people? Maybe some legal rights are so stupid they shouldn’t exist?
I buy water, I own it. It just passes Thur my body or shower and pipes. That’s like saying you don’t own your tires as they wear away. You can own consumables. I get your underlying point about theft is more then taking away something. You could be depriving someone of money they would have made. Same with copyright theft. Someone buys your product and copies it then sells it. They didn’t steal from you directly but still caused harm. Piracy is a service issue, if things you buy on that service don’t work people will stop using that service. I’m not going to download 12 game launchers to play the games I want, I’ll stick with steam. Same way with tv/movies.
Ahhh, thanks I misunderstood. I do agree but also I have a Plex server. I started it when I worked at blockbuster. Technically even ripping your Blu-rays can be illegal so, you have to find your one morals and not rely on laws.
I meant infringe on the copyright. I don’t think what Disney and some others are doing is right with extending it but I do think the person that created the things should have some legal protection from it being copied for a bit.
Copyright infringement isn’t theft, that’s the main point. It’s breaking a rule that the government created giving people a temporary (now extremely long term, but temporary) right to control the spread of ideas. Whether or not you approve of that law is beside the point. The point being, theft is as old as the ten commandments, if not older. Copyright is a new thing that’s only a few centuries old.
Copyright infringement causes less harm than the copyright itself. Piracy causes less harm than the cruelty and greed in production and distribution of mainstream media. Less harm is caused by theft than by a system that willfully starves the public and vaults away excess to drive demand and market price.
No artists should go hungry but then no non-artist should either. And yet in our system artists are enslaved and had their work taken from them so that enterprisers can live in luxury while the rest of us toil, undernourished.
You could be asking can we get quality content without the artifice of intellectual property to which the answer is yes, and has been demonstrated time and again.
You could ask how many artists get wealthy from producing copyrighted content to which the answer is very few In fact most creators who are good enough to get published by record labels or publishing houses see so little of that money they can’t turn it into a full time career, largely do to Hollywood Accounting but the labels and publishing houses get a lot of money from having controlling ownership of that content.
You could ask what harm is caused by intellectual property laws to which I can reply their expansion from a monopoly limited to a decade or so extended to life + nearly a century has denied the public a robust public domain which was the whole point of copyright inserted into the Constitution of the United States in the first place. It’s made worse because we don’t know what all is copyrighted or patented, judges don’t know what can be copyrighted, and what is considered fair use, or how art even works. (e.g. Not every blockist painting owes money to Pablo Picasso’s estate). It’s a tangled mess with a ton of precedent that favors richer legal war-chests, and has caused a pronounced reduction both of the quantity of content getting made and the quality of that content.
If I were to steal cable, I would be using the cable company’s resources to deliver content to my house without paying for it. If I were to set up an inductor under a power line to steal power, I would be depriving the power company of power they could have sold to somebody else without giving them anything in return.
When I torrent something, I don’t even put any additional load on Netflix’s servers. With their current monetization scheme I don’t even make the show’s producers any less money.
And when you subscribe to 1 or 2 rotating streaming services and only torrent for personal archiving purposes, you aren’t even depriving the streaming services of any revenue.
People who assert property rights (including limited monopoly rights on intellectual property) are doing mental gymnastics too. We’re just used to them, thanks to a century of propaganda after the great depression.
The current state of wealth distribution a century later doesn’t seem to carry the promise that capitalism can be fair.
In fact, IP maximalism (Thanks, Walt!) has denied the public a robust public domain, and our courts struggle to do the mental gymnastics to understand why we have a public domain in the first place.
That is to say, the US and EU have totally lost the plot.
Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.
You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that. You can access services without authorization, but you’re not stealing anything. You can access services you don’t have authorization to access and then disrupt people who are authorized to use those services. But, again, not stealing. Just disruption.
Stealing deprives a person of something, copyright infringement and unauthorized access to services don’t.
So if someone creates a piece of art and I take a photo of it and sell the photo, or create prints of it, or even just give it give that photo to lots of people, what is that?
That is an assumption made that the artist still has the original thing that was not paid for. I understand what you’re being pedantic about. I just don’t think you’re right.
You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that.
If you hire me to paint your portrait and then don’t pay me you have stolen my labour. I have given my time and effort and have not been reimbursed for it.
If you paid me and then gave your neighbour a copy of your portrait then you have not stolen my labour.
Freelancers may be upset if they’re mistreated, but that doesn’t mean they get to declare they were murdered, or that they were raped, or any other crime that didn’t occur. Theft has a specific definition, and fraud is not the same thing as theft.
You’re being pedantic in the cases you want while complaining to others when they are differently pedantic. I’m not stooping to pretending to misunderstand due to pedantry.
If you are using the term theft colloquially, which most of us are as this is not a court, legal journal, economic journal, etc. Given that colloquial means the way people generally speak, as we are now, theft has a meaning: taking something that’s not yours through force or trickery. That would mean fraud is a type of theft in this case and not a different thing altogether.
So be a pedant I guess but it’s boring and lazy-brained.
I’m all in favour of people being pedantic, especially in the case of laws.
If you are using the term theft colloquially
I’m not, “theft” is misused all the time. It’s something that the copyright cartels encourage because they get to pretend that copyright infringement is theft. It’s not. We should push back and say theft has to meet certain conditions, and copyright infringement isn’t theft. Nor is “wage theft”, which is a form of fraud.
By buying into the colloquial definition of “theft” and expanding the scope to be any time someone is inconvenienced, you give the copyright cartels power to make people think copyright infringement is as bad as actual real theft, when it’s clearly not.
If you’re not going to use the term in a colloquial context while you are in a colloquial setting, then you need to cite what source you are referencing for your definition. Given that you are talking about laws, then you need to recognize that every place defines things differently according to the law. So which law, where?
Being unnecessarily argumentative and snobby while at the same time not meeting your own standards is ridiculous.
I had no idea it would turn out to be such a big deal until my friend linked me a Lemmy post with my YouTube name in the picture. 🤣 Then I realized I had an absurd number of YouTube notifications! Interestingly enough, YouTube has some kind of interesting way to taper the notifications off so they aren’t overwhelming.
I assume when the purchase happened there was an agreement that said something like this might happen. If not, then people can sue Sony for the stealing. If so, then trying to argue that this means piracy isn’t stealing is sophomoric at best.
I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.
Embrace the reality instead of using twisted logic to try and convince yourself that it’s something else.
I have several games on Steam that I’ve “played” for less than an hour but have most of the achievements for because I’ve purchased it after finishing a pirated copy.
The ways they try to justify ad blockers as their god given right is equally frustrating. It’s okay to use an ad blocker (and you should!). Please stop acting personally insulted when sites then attempt to make your ad blocker useless, it’s just how things go.
I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.
Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.
We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.
I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).
I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.
Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.
If that’s the goal, the better approach would be to not consume the media at all, and being vocal as to why you are doing this. Pirating it just shows them that the demand will still be there, despite how bad they supposedly are as a company, so that they just need to learn how to bone you too. It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.
it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions.
Clever? Maybe. Sophomoric? Absolutely. By misrepresenting why they are losing access to this media, they are effectively admitting that piracy is actually stealing. As I’ve said elsewhere, piracy is not the action of a neutral/chaotic good character, as many among piracy circles like to pretend, but the actions of a chaotic neutral character.
But make no mistake about my position. People losing access to stuff they purchased (and probably thought was now theirs) is just another in a long list of reasons I say “fuck those bitches” and have really no moral qualm with pirating content.
Why does “sophomoric” being used as negative in your argument? you imply we are arguing an unsophisticated logic built on foundational information accessible to everyone, not requiring much depth to grasp. Pedestrian justifications should probably be sophomoric lest the justification be inaccessible and easily confused.
My opportunity to truly own media i purchase has been stolen from me, i was requested or offered no consent on the issue from the large companies claiming that not purchasing a revocable license is theft; i previously found thing accessibly priced so i swallowed my tongue, now media companies are again price gouging so we find ourselves in this situation once more.
It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.
Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped -- just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd.. Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?
I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.
You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.
Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?
If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.
Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work
Pedanticism that totally avoids the point. Whether they provide the product or create it, the logic still obviously applies.
You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that.
This also defeats the point that it is some duty to pirate it, because if they have no idea the scope then how many people doing it is not going to affect their decisions there either
Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony?
If we’re being pedantic, I never said it helps them. I said it let’s them know there is demand there and that not consuming it would be better for the goal.
In agreement with you! I don’t get why the need to justify. First of all life isn’t about fairness, and people and corporations both need money to survive. Individuals and corporations make all the effort to get more for less.
If there was a need to justify it should be as simple as corporations take things for free all the time, be it tax brakes, labor, IP, whatever and try to get by with it without it being “stealing” it. Artists take ideas, copy, repurpose all the time and get by without “stealing” when they can.
In the seas one should be reasonable and take what they “need” (actually a want) “for less”, without violence, instilling physical harm, and they are good to go. Life isn’t fair.
Above all, like you said, people in general want things for less with the least friction. For some people the seas are dangerous and present too much friction to get in and out unscathed, these people will pay to get something. Sailors do not want to pay and accept some of the risks, and for those sailors that know how to do it well the risks and frictions are small.
There is no need to justify to the ego whether it is stealing or anything else. It is just taking and sharing. And doesn’t the saying goes that “sharing is caring”? ;-)
I used to have Netflix, HBO Max, Youtube Premium, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime and “Videoland”. But since I used Linux, I could not stream with a higher bitrate. I could not download for offline playback, I had to jump through hoops to get things to play every now and then.
They also did not always have everything I wanted to see, or I had to pay extra for “premium early access” (Disney).
So I was fed up, learned about using multiple usenet backbones, how to send sabnzbd through VPN’s, Radarr, Sonarr and Overseerr. Now I only have Netflix and Youtube Premium for my wife. And Plex for myself. And access to much more content.
And I do not consider it stealing, i consider it to be the natural result of them trying to gouge me while still not providing me.
Recording from free to air is legal because of the “time shifting” argument. The show is being broadcast regardless, just because it’s at an inconvenient time for you doesn’t mean you should have to miss it. It’s also worth noting that media producers fought tooth and nail against this.
That might actually be an element of a workable argument in Court. I think it’s a very clever reframing of the precedent that allows recordings of broadcast media.
I’ve got a better argument but it won’t hold up in court. If a company is making a profit then all costs of production, operation, and provision have been covered, every single shareholder from the individual worker to the CEO to the suppliers have all been paid adequately and fairly for their contribution, the consumers with the means and ability to contribute have, and I thank them for enabling the ability to socialise access to the product for the rest of the society that propped up the corporation so that it could produce.
If you want to argue that suppliers, producers, and workers haven’t been adequately and fairly compensated for their contribution then why is there a profit margin?
In fact, it’s morally acceptable to socialise the benefits and production of any corporation making a profit, though the law has this pesky tendency to call it theft.
Companies pay big bucks for timed exclusivity though. If reverse timeshifting was legal, movie theaters would go bankrupt. I feel like this wouldn’t hold up.
I like the way you think, but that’s kind of not true these days. We have streaming services and rights holders just straight deleting shit or producing shitty sequels and reboots just to keep the IP out of public domain. IDK about your location but here FTA is basically dead. It’s all shitty reality shows being hosted by third rate celebs from other reality shows because they either can’t or won’t produce or pay for actual content.
The difference is that grabbing it pre-FTA is also grabbing a perfect copy. The quality may not matter to many of us, but to some it does. And because it matters to some, major copyright holders have started to treat unlicensed exchanges as “competition” from a business PoV (which is a concession from strictly seeing it as crime). So their business strategy is to compete with the unlicensed channels by offering perfect quality media at a price (they hope) people are willing to pay (also in part to avoid the inconvenience and dodgyness of the black market).
FWiW, that’s their take and it’s why they get extra aggressive when the unlicensed version is perfect.
Remember that there were also big campaigns against tape recorders and VCR. They even managed to get VCR vendors to implement a feature that prevents users from skipping ads. So it’s not like it’s simply legal, the media corps were just not as successful in their lobbying as they are today.
I can't find anything about VCR's blocking; I did find a bunch saying the opposite.
There were copy protections that prevented a VHS -> VHS copy being made of some movies. Easily defeated, but they did exist.
My scenario was recording an Over The Air transmission onto VHS using a VCR; not making a backup copy of a movie you purchased on VHS.
Edit: I do recall a campaign against VHS recording of TV shows, but didn't it ended basically saying "Broadcast public == public domain"?. That actually led to copy protections in VHS tapes.
In fairness, it was never legal to make thousands of copies of that VHS tape and hand them out en masse. Which is how you’re getting it when you download it, from someone doing exactly that.
I don’t subscribe to the logic but I guess a part of it can be the lossless factor. Quality of pirated digital content is exactly like the original. If you tape something it usually loses quality. So people seem to care less about that kind of piracy. Which is stupid since going for lossy compressed pirated videos is allegedly not less wrong in the face of law.
Our current favorite show is Bob's Burgers, it's a comfort show we fall asleep to. Prior to signing up with real debrid I got tagged for downloading a 2 year old episode.
We pay for Hulu. We pay for YoutubeTV. We have a working OTA antenna (for when the internet goes out).
My math says I have 3 licenses, yet still illegal to download?
Well it’s an interesting question. From Hulu’s TOS:
a. License. Within the United States and subject to the terms and conditions in this Agreement, we grant you a limited, personal use, non-transferable, non-assignable, revocable, non-exclusive and non-sublicensable right to do the following:
Install and make non-commercial, personal use of the Services; and stream or temporarily download copyrighted materials, including but not limited to movies, television shows, other entertainment or informational programming, trailers, bonus materials, images, and artwork (collectively, the “Content”) that are available to you from the Services.
This is a license agreement and not an agreement for sale or assignment of any rights in the Content or the Services. The purchase of a license to stream or temporarily download any Content does not create an ownership interest in such Content.
While I’m not a lawyer, I’m gonna guess the lines about a revocable license are intended to cover this. Sites like Hulu rotate their content out, which I’m gonna guess means your license to view their content only extends to what’s in their library at that time. Under fair use, you might be able to argue that you can create a backup copy for your own viewing – it does say “temporarily download,” but doesn’t say you have to download it from them – but legally you’d probably be obligated to delete your copy once Hulu gets rid of it regardless.
Also, the TOS does specify that circumventing their copy protection is a TOS violation. While the DMCA grants certain exceptions to the copy-protection rule for fair use, I don’t think it requires Hulu to continue to serve you content or not revoke your license if you break their TOS. Kinda reminds me of Red Hat’s use of TOS to enforce terms that go above and beyond the GPL. They can’t exactly stop you 100%, but they can refuse to do business with you, which makes it a lot harder.
Not to disparage your reply, because it’s well thought out and written, but doesn’t it seem to you we’re hiding behind legalese?
I want to buy a turkey. I have money. I will visit a farm, pay for the turkey (if the price is agreeable to both parties) and I now own that turkey. I will then do whatever the fuck I want with that turkdy, from raising it as my child, to cooking it for thanksgiving, to cloning it if I have the technology. Sure, I might not be able to return it in some cases. But that’s a living fucking thing, and nobody can tell me how to use it.
Now - I want to buy a movie. I have money. I will go to the cinema, but it’s not playing anymore. I will look for it on TV, but it’s only on one channel, only while I’m at work. I will look for it on the internet and it’s available on one website, where I need to make an account and provide quite a lot of information about me. So I make the account and click through their shitty prompts, pay for the movie and now I can only do one thing: stream it?
Excuse you? Who the fuck are you to tell me how I can enjoy my media? What if I want to make a vynil record and listen to it? What if I want to watch it on my old-timey projector? What if I want to burn a frame of the movie onto my morning toast every day for 2000 years? What if I want to put it in a small baggy tied to my balls while I’m fucking the mom of some movie exec, am I supposed to put the entire laptop in the baggy? How the fuck dare you make that distinction for me? Oh, because your site isn’t granting me the right to buy a movie, but to buy a license to watch that movie in whichever conditions you decide? Great - here’s the thing: I have my own license, which says whenever I pay for something, I use it however the fuck I want, and if you attempt to exert any control over my property or how it is used I will literally stab you and bury you in the woods, because I don’t take kindly to corporate fucks who attempt to instruct me how to use the things I’ve bought. Fuck you, you should’ve read my license when you took my money.
There is no “license” here, my dude. I don’t pay for licenses, regardless of what the website wants to charge for. I pay for a product, or a a service. Let’s not hide behind legalese and let’s just acknowledge that these are scummy practices to ensure the wealth of corporations at the expense of the rights of consumers. And until these types of shady “licenses” to temporarily view THEIR PROPERTY are smacked into the fucking ground by consumer-friendly laws, piracy is the only way to have justice in a system stacked against you.
The whole “illegal to download” bit is somewhat misleading. People almost always get in trouble for uploading, which just happens to be a part of how bittorrent works. When you’re downloading, you’re also uploading (Unless you’ve changed your settings).
Add comment