I have to agree. There should be legislation preventing this, or the pirates will be morally in the clear. Which does not help copyright owners. Yes, the pirate stole your content, but since you were going to revoke access anyhow he was stealing from a scammer which is justice.
One extra detail. They reserve the right to revoke your license but they still reserve the right to keep selling the product if the laws allow.
This allows the following hypothetical situation:
1. You buy content A from producer X through a company 1
2. Producer X and company 1 decides to finish the distribution agreement for whatever reason
3. Company 1 revokes your access to content A.
4. Now producer X seals a deal with Company 2 for distribution rights and company 2 has no obligation on giving you access to content A, because why would they.
5. If you want access content A now you have to buy it again from company 2 without guarantee that it will still exist.
If only an anonymous account would appear and name names.
I recently watched A Bug’s Life with my kids. It’s actually a pretty good commentary on the abuses of the ruling class and the norms inability to see their own value:
You let one ant stand up to
us, then they all might stand
up! Those puny little ants
outnumber us a hundred to one
and if they ever figure that
out there goes our way of
life! It's not about food,
it's about keeping those ants
in line.
Right, _access_. To the companies selling cloud content, like a movie or song that can only be used with the internet, you're just buying _access_ to the content.
Because the TOS means they can restrict that access or remove the content, you're really just paying for a key to a door that may or may not exist, to something in the building that may or may not be there, and that building may someday not even be there.
You're really paying for the right to access something as long as the underlying capability enabling that right exists. It's the kind of thing that allows a lot of wiggle room for the sellers and holders of the content.
This is why I prefer buying physical copies of media, like DVDs and CDs. It's mine for as long as I can manage it or a personal copy of it.
Yeaaa. This bothers me, too, on a conceptual level, and I’ve been thinking about setting up a NAS and doing the whole Plex thing. But on a practical level, I’ve “owned” movies and tv shows on (the service formerly known as) iTunes for like 15 years without issue. I question whether, on average, I’d be able to do as good a job, and how much effort it’d take.
If you start and aren’t happy with it, at least you learned something along the way. Time and format shifting are allowed acts under copyright law (though possibly not DMCA), so I’d consider it a great way to backup the things you bought.
Copying something for personal use is perfectly legal, it's the distribution of those copies to the public en masse that most people end up tripping on.
If you just want to archive your collection of optical disks onto a NAS for personal use, you can legally do that.
Also, NAL, but unfortunately, with the exception of Red Book CDs and ROM-Data, archiving commercially published optical media requires circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms. Unfortunately, "space-shifting" was considered and explicitly not added to the list of recommended exceptions to that rule by the Librarian of Congress[0]. It seems like no one appeared to defend this position, and it is not one of the exemptions allowed for circumventing copy-protected works.
One of the patterns I've personally really been noticing over the past couple of years (not related to any big events in those years, just the time period I happened to notice them in) is that a lot of theses situations are a bona fide slippery slope. The further in you get, the harder it is to leave. The sooner you bail out, the less it impacts your life at all.
I started my MP3 collection in the late 1990s as CDs became practical and computers finally got to the point they could rip them. A while back I even went fully legit and stripped out all the, ah, "stuff of dubious provenance", or, err, you know, a friend may have done that. The first streaming music service I've ever used was about a year ago and I'm still using it more for discovery than as my actual music service, because as a result of ~25 years of personal collection building, I don't need a streaming service to have probably something on the order of two week straight's worth of music I like. With a lot of stuff no streaming service has, and that not because I'm some sort of exotic collector but just because I have things that were popular enough at the time but just never made it.
By contrast, if all you did was pay for a subscription music service, you're completely beholden to them.
Obviously I can claim no "credit" here; I didn't "bail out" of a bad deal in 1998, because that "bad deal" wouldn't exist for another decade and a half or so. But the fact I didn't do it out of any sort of foresight doesn't mean I don't end with the same benefits.
More recently, I've been digging myself out of the video subscription crappile, and doing more purchase of media instead of using video streaming services. Again, I had a buildup from the pre-streaming era I could carry in which helps, but at the rate I watch movies anyhow it turns out the delta between just buying things as they strike me and streaming them is not very large in dollar terms. (I don't buy very many things on release day, I do a lot of bargain bin surfing for things.)
I'm not saying this to brag, I'm saying it to show the point. It extends to a lot of things. Best way not to get stuck with subscription features on your car is to put your foot down day one and say I'm not buying that. And this extends to so many things in life; as we correctly tell our children, best way not to get addicted to any drugs is to never touch them at all, and that's not because of the obvious logical fact that if you never do dose 1 you'll never get to dose 1,283, but because there really is a slope there. It's a very applicable principle.
Note, slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of actual slippery slopes in real life. It merely means the fact that you are on a slippery slope can not be correctly logically argued to imply the 100% probability of slipping further down. But I'm not even making a logical argument here in that sense. I'm just pointing out that there are rather a lot of slippery slopes, and this includes some that are really hard to see because they're brand new. In 2001, there simply wasn't anybody 20 years down the slippery slope of using DRM'd hardware who could metaphorically yell up to those of us at the top to tell us "Hey, this kinda sucks! Try to avoid this!"
This is one of the greatest challenges of living in the late 20th and 21st centuries, honestly. The foresight to look at something like "paying for a video subscription" and thinking to look 20 years down the road at what happens if everyone does this is rare, and not terribly well respected when found.
Anyhow, back here on practical Earth land, I really do recommend that everyone who is even slightly interested look into Plex or an equivalent service, because you can turn this process on its head, too. Half-heartedly start acquiring your favorite media physically when you see it on discount for a couple of years and get it into a Plex setup, and before you know it you're far enough down that slope that the idea of being independent suddenly doesn't seem so absurd. You can also use the principle of a slow buildup over time that adds up to more than you'd expect in your favor, too.
great points. I'd even go as far as to say that an apache server on a SOC board that you can throw in a closet with some drives is enough. I am pretty happy playing music through a browser, but i digress. Either way, there are tons of simple solutions.
I don't want to bring out the psych again but i cant help it.
I'd wager that until this point if you didn't or don't have your own physical collection its because of your personality makeup. Since these rug-pulls haven't been going on as often as they have in the last few years, if you've been happy being 'pragmatic' and taking what the services have to offer then you aren't as 'idealistic', otherwise refusing to compromise since you down 'own' a copy.
Likewise if you're a 'big-picture' thinker you can't stand the chance that things become unavailable due to forces unseen, whereas if you 'think-small' then theres no real risk and we can take companies word at face value.
I wouldn't say streaming is more pragmatic; tracks regularly aren't available from well known artists (e.g. Pink Floyd or The Rolling Stones), and it's almost certainly cheaper in the medium term to buy discs, especially if you buy used. You can get CDs, DVDs, and even BDs for <$2 each from thrift stores or ebay. For $15/month, you can get ~90 CDs/year. Within 5 years, that's a sizable collection.
Of course maximal pragmatism would just be to download it. People are plenty willing to share for free, so paying is a form of idealism.
Thats not the equation people are using to weigh ownership vs subscribership.
IF one has the time and knowledge to set up some kind of apparatus which most-tech oriented people in this thread consider trivial which replicates an always on, convenient, and available service to deposit said ripped files in and stream, then it is a little more fair of a comparison. But that initial barrier is not inconsequential.
Average users see a hugely available, instantly installable, solution for a very small fee, in most western countries.
In either case the argument isn't clear what traits are really responsible for the behavior, i cant say i have a solid case either.
I'd also wager disagreeability to play a huge role.
> Obviously I can claim no "credit" here; I didn't "bail out" of a bad deal in 1998, because that "bad deal" wouldn't exist for another decade and a half or so.
You still chose to keep your collection instead of jumping onto streaming only as many did for convenience.
> Note, slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of actual slippery slopes in real life. It merely means the fact that you are on a slippery slope can not be correctly logically argued to imply the 100% probability of slipping further down.
The slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy at all. It's just an observation at even small steps towards the undesirable can often result in an avalanche that you are unable to stop by the time you realize where things are going. You can't prove that anything is a slippery slope because you can't predict the future but that does not make the observation or the call for caution fallacious. Calling it a logical falacy is just a knee-jerk reaction by those trying to downplay the risk.
The reason why I stopped buying digital media; I buy physical books, vinyls etc. (mostly second-hand). That said I do have an Apple One subscription that includes Music, for the convenience of having access to a large catalog of music from any of our devices (mostly my kids use it, in the car, etc.). But if it's something I care enough about to actually own or listen to in the future, I get a physical copy. Also, the authors/artists get more that way too.
(Edit: As for video, I only do streaming, and that's because I rarely if ever watch a movie or TV show a second time, so I don't care about owning it.)
I have an album that I bought digitally in itunes that was revoked and republished identically by the publisher (i think by accident). The consequence is that as far as apple music is concerned, that album is not in my account. The physical files will still activate and play, but I have to copy them manually to every device. Apple support was unable to help.
Microsoft has also multiple times started an ebook store only to later shut it down and prevent the purchased books from being read. The first time this happened in the mid-2000’s I lost over a dozen ebooks.
...and at the time, all previously-bought content (AFAIK) was eligible for upgrading to DRM-free status.
And while I've never had this particular weird problem, I have tens of gigabytes of music in my iTunes library that were never bought from Apple in the first place, which sync to my other devices just fine. No manual copying required.
And, um...how would you even "manually copy" music to an iPhone or iPad? The only way I know of puts it in the Files app, rather than the Music app, leaving it unable to be played "as music" (though you can, of course, still play the audio files one by one).
You connect your iDevice to a computer running iTunes/Apple Music app (PC or Mac). In iTunes settings there is an option to "Manually manage media". Select that. Now you can drag your music to the device and it will appear in the Music app on your iDevice. Videos will appear in the TV app I believe (they have renamed this app from something else but it will play on your device). Only certain media formats are supported. On Audio I think its WAV,AIFF,MP3 and Apple Lossless(ALAC). If you have flac there are plenty of lossless converters from FLAC to ALAC (Lossless to lossless).
For Video I think MP4, and MOV are supported? Maybe more though I dont think MKV is.
For Pictures I think you just copy using the OS to the DCIM folder?
There is a Ukrainian company called Softorino that provides a one click app to just transfer any media with any format to your iDevice and have it magically appear in the right app. It does all the conversion work for you in the background.
Ah, I see. That's not what I would have thought of as "manually copy"; you're still syncing using the built-in software—and, of course, you're doing this for all the songs, not just the ones at issue.
In any case, I'm still very puzzled as to how this could be a solution to the specific problem that was originally described...
Its partly legacy because in the 00s Apple didn't want non-tech savvy people to get frustrated when trying to get their music on to iPods. So when 'docking' your iPod, iTunes would automatically open and you'd have your purchased music right there and you can just drag and drop. They got extended to iPhone when it came out. As the actual on device buying process became better over many iPhone generations then the need for a computer to dock to at all became unnecessary.
> And, um...how would you even "manually copy" music to an iPhone or iPad? The only way I know of puts it in the Files app, rather than the Music app, leaving it unable to be played "as music" (though you can, of course, still play the audio files one by one).
There are a couple of ways. You can import it via iTunes/Finder into the Files container, like you said. The stock Music app won’t read and play it, but third-party music player apps will.
Another option is to import it into your Apple Music library, f/k/a iTunes library.
That way, it’s playable in the stock Music app and available on other devices as well (although it might need an Apple Music subscription, not sure).
The file system on iOS isn't exposed, so you can't browse around in the files and folders and copy it somewhere there.
Instead, each app has its own little container with files, so you can use iTunes on Windows or Finder on macOS to copy it into either a specific app’s container or the Files app’s container.
If you do the latter, then you can access it on the device via the Files app and third-party music players.
The stock Music app provided by Apple doesn't get access to the files in the Files app. Instead, it maintains its own library synced with other devices, with the option to import your music files into that library.
The optimistic reading of this is that this prevents apps from accessing files that they have no business looking into. The pessimistic reading is that this prevents users from messing around with files and prevents them from tweaking or hacking apps.
I think the truth is a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
They don't need to revoke a license.
They can say the "license verification servers are too expensive to keep running" so you need to rebuy the product. This is literally what Adobe has done with previous versions of their Creative Suite.
And this is also why Adobe software is some of the most frequently-pirated software of all time. After all these years and all the other examples of the correct way to do this, they still refuse to see the light of “free for personal use” licensing to get more people trained on and in love with your software, so those that do go on to use it commercially will demand it and have their companies pay the license fees.
And as someone who pirates, I highly discourage pirating proprietary programs that save your data in their locked-in formats.
Your data is more important than to be locked into a data-roach-motel. The companies know this, and count on piracy. From there, the pirate user has MB's of content locked into something they cant convert out of. And then, it's pretty easy to force a sale, or worse yet, a rental.
With non-destructive editing capabilities that gets complicated rather quickly, because then the file format starts depending on the precise implementation of all the various available filters that can be applied.
This is why I can never accept the idea that we're just buying a license. Laws need to be made that ensure once you buy the rights to access a piece of content, that you keep that right regardless of who the current owner is or if the distribution method changes. If I buy a book, I never have to worry about it being taken away or what happens if somebody else gains ownership of a property.
It's not stealing. It's communication. You can't "steal" ideas, information or facts. To steal means to physically take someone's property without their consent.
This is obviously a bit about the definition of words but I've only really heard it called stealing in the US where I think the narrative is pushed by corporate interests. In the UK where I live the offence is generally called copyright infringement because under UK law that's what it is.
You're correct that it's called copyright infringement, but it's not strictly an offence - it's a tort. Copyright holders can in certain circumstances sue for damages, but you cannot be prosecuted by the crown. Making an illegitimate copy for profit or in order to harm the copyright holder, though, is a criminal offence (see section 107 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988[1]).
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
― Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson wasn’t scrambling to pay his mortgage with those ideas. See also: Amazon and open source, why should Amazon be the only one able to make a profit? If the ideas have no value, then all that matters financially is manufacturing and infrastructure
I don't even know what my personal stance on piracy is but the subject is clearly more complex than saying that theft applies only to physical objects.
The fact that some powerful organizations are trying to complicate a matter does not make it complicated per se.
In my country the law criminalizing theft begins thus:
> Stöld
> Stöld beskrivs i 8 kap. 1 §. Stöldbrottet förekommer i tre allvarlighetsvarianter:
> * Ringa stöld (tidigare snatteri): 8 kap 2 §
> * Stöld: 8 kap 1 §
> * Grov stöld: 8 kap 4 §
> Skyddsintresset vid stöld är äganderätten. Endast lösa saker samt del till fast egendom kan ägas.
The third sentence defines property as physical.
Reading texts on international property rights it’s always quite clear what everyone is talking about. “Intellectual property” is sometimes mentioned as an aside with an extra caveat that it is not widely recognized.
Yes, but people are allowed to express a strong opinion on a complex subject without also specifically mentioning all the caveats and possible counter-arguments to their position.
By all means argue back and add the nuance you think is missing, but it's intellectually dishonest and lazy to just say "ah, but it's more complicated than that".
Posting to HN is not like writing a finalized spec or publishing an academic paper. It’s ok to ignore complicated edge cases and speak in generalities. Nobody expects commenters to 100% cover every issue with every post.
I remember one RMS lecture that made me think. He pointed out that the so-called "intellectual property" doesn't really exist. What exists are certain laws, such as patents, copyright, trademarks and so on. Each of these recognizes the benefit to society of temporary restriction of freedom of others to use the ideas that were invented/transmitted by others.
> Each of these recognizes the benefit to society of temporary restriction of freedom of others to use the ideas that were invented/transmitted by others.
I'd say that in the context of intellectual property the correct word would be 'postulates' not 'recognizes'.
Benefit to society is hard to proove or measure. It's implied. What's very easy to measure is a benefit to minority of rich people at the expense of the society.
You can just drop "intellectual" and there will be no fundamental change to the argument, it's only the name of the laws defining "property" that change.
No, you can't. Property exists. You can replace the word intellectual with "personal," "private," "public," etc. But removing it does not work. Property is not a legal fiction. Who the property belongs to is.
Yes, but the association of that laptop with yourself as an owner is an abstract idea. Many mammals do not have such ideas of ownership as an exclusive right, though many will defend territory, mates, and offspring.
It can not be understated how foundational exclusive property rights are to modern society and technological advancement. Since at least the Magna Carta it’s considered a human right. The US Declaration of Independence almost enumerated property as an inalienable right in place of the pursuit of happiness.
How could I have forgotten: the idea of personal property is also essential to Jewish law, predating the Magna Carta by another 2,000 years. That’s at least 3,000 years of at least a portion of humans placing value on private property.
I updated my earlier comment to point out much earlier property laws. As best I can tell, copyright laws are around 500 years old, and about 230 in America. They were always written to give the creator a limited monopoly, unlike property, which is in perpetuity. Personal property is typically not considered to have the wide public value or cultural impact that ideas have.
There’s definitely a deep philosophical discussion to be had here about what value governments provide in return for your tax dollars on property that in reality they allow you to do certain things with, insofar as any human can claim to own any piece of this planet. In the end, it usually boils down to paying for them to defend it from invaders and anyone trying to take it from you, so think about the tax like a protection fee that entitles you to call up guys with guns to make whoever is trying to break that government’s rules about what you can and cannot do with that property you pay tax on stop. Consider US military strength (perceived and actual, as far as we can even measure that) vs rest of world, same with property values and wages in the US vs other places.
> Consider US military strength (perceived and actual, as far as we can even measure that) vs rest of world, same with property values and wages in the US vs other places.
While I agree with your comment, I think the last part is only partly true. The military strength of a country doesn't necessarily correlate with the property values and prices - it is enough to compare, say, Switzerland or the Netherlands with Russia or China. Rather, it is an intricate next of various factors that constantly change.
I’d highly recommend reading the 1840 banger * What Is Property? or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government* by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon of Property is theft! fame.
If you want to know how bullshit intellectual "property" is, ask the simple question of who owns the personal information the ad company collected about me?
Of course, the ad company owns it, because of their hard intellectual work of collecting it.
Me? No, why would I own information about me? What logic of property is this?
If you come to my restaurant isn't in my info that you walked in my door, sat at my table, ordered my food? Why do you think it's your info? When two interact both sides get to remember the interaction.
The question is whether you own information about their food choices that you can sell to a third party without even telling the customer it was collected.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that you have a right to observe, collect data, and sell it. On the other hand, ick.
Just ask TV and car manufacturers who collect telemetry about absolutely everything you do with their products and probably everything that happens on your connected phone and/or wifi network too.
Such things would use up the customer's (electrical) power for the company's profit in ways that were not intended by the purchaser. That is in addition to spying, which it also is.
The question is not if you can "remember" it. That is not what ownership in personal information is about.
The question is whether you can __sell__ the information that I had three double cheese burgers and extra greasy fries to my health insurance provider.
But if I walk into a franchise restaurant with a camera recording, they'll kick me out while happily recording and selling data with their own cameras.
That’s incorrect. One absolutely can steal ideas, it’s even used explicitly in the definition of multiple dictionaries: “to claim credit for another’s idea” [1]; “to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment” [2]. The word steal has many definitions that don’t involve taking physical property, e.g., stealing elections, stealing liberty, stealing base, stealing a kiss, making fraudulent deals, etc., etc..
Says who? Where did you get that definition? Your claim isn’t very well supported by either of the two dictionaries that I linked to, nor any searches on the etymology of steal that I can find. A valid definition is a valid definition. Common usage is common usage. It may be common to refer to something physical that is deprived, but it’s also extremely common and also completely correct to refer to things stolen that do not deprive. You can, in fact, steal ideas, according to the definition of the word steal.
> It may be used in that context in our society
Yes, and that makes it de-facto correct usage! Discussion of idea stealing has been commonplace in business, and academics, and literature, and among children, and …. You can find a never-ending supply of references to stolen ideas online and in print. It seems especially ironic for people on a startup forum to argue that ideas can’t be stolen when it happens and gets referred to regularly.
For me, the etymology of words have more importance because they have a strong connection to the truth of what it is we are trying to convey. Synonyms are a sort of half-truths, constructs we have to use to get by in the world, but IMHO don't correctly resemble the real meaning of what we are talking about.
I did some searching online and I couldn't find an good root example of stealing, it seems related to stealth which I don't think correctly explains the subject we are discussing. I think what we are both talking about is theft. When I looked up the etymology of theft I found it related to fraud, "a fraudulent production, something intended to deceive". and it goes on, "deception practiced for the sake of what is deemed a good purpose;" the word also seems related to defraud, which could be where you are going with this, "deprive of right, by deception or breech of trust or withholding,"
To clarify, I think you CAN deprive someone of an expression of an idea. I incorrectly lumped it into the idea part. Having an idea (and communicating it to the world) vs having an expression of an idea, for me are two different things.
I don't believe there is any good that can come out of protecting ideas from loss or theft, so I don't put too much stock in the idea of IP law.
The expression of an idea is another matter. but I err on the side of "deception practiced for the sake of what is deemed a good purpose".
For me this is really about protecting the common good. There has to be a balance between the dissemination of creativity vs getting compensated for a work.
Right now, copyright, if that is what we are talking about, is way out of balance. Copyrights are mostly owned and wielded harmfully by corporations. When corporations use copyright, to stop, or take away purchased products, or prevent individuals from sharing in the spirit of sharing, that's where I draw the line. When copyright is used in this way, it deprives the public of some common good. I don't think copyright was ever meant to do that.
So respectfully, I disagree with you on this topic, the way contracts and copyrights are being used is harming our society.
Oh hey I almost missed your reply. So yes, correct, the etymology of the words steal and theft, in addition to accepted common usage and modern dictionaries, all unanimously support the notion that an idea can be “stolen”, in direct contradiction to @stcg’s claim 5 comments up. You initially made an incorrect assumption that the word or phrase has to imply that you’re depriving someone of their idea, but that’s not what the definition nor the etymology nor the current usage of the word steal implies. Perhaps that’s the same assumption that @stcg was making, but it’s a bit of a straw man because there is a different valid definition of steal in common usage that does not insist that the thing stolen is also taken away from someone, nor that it’s even “theft” in any legal sense at all. You may have temporariliy forgotten about poetic usage, such as “she stole my heart.” That common usage is hundreds or thousands of years old and obviously doesn’t refer to depriving me of my actual organs.
It’s important to remember that etymology is a tool to understand history, and is not the arbiter of word meaning. In fact, it’s extremely common for the etymological historical roots of words to have very different meanings from what they are now, and to have meanings that are no longer accepted or correct. Often with English, word roots come from different languages, and the etymology has little bearing on today’s usage or accepted dictionary definitions. The arbiter of word meaning is common usage, period. Language is not prescriptive, not defined by dictionaries or etymologies, those are just tools to help us document common usage over time. Language is defined by how it’s used, and when a lot of people say “he stole my idea”, it necessarily becomes correct usage, regardless of what the historical documents say about the word steal. This is one of the most fun aspects of language, but easily misunderstood and often forgotten, especially in forum discussions.
> So respectfully, I disagree with you on this topic, the way contracts and copyrights are being used is harming our society.
How on earth did you arrive at the idea that I said anything at all about copyrights or contracts in this thread? What exactly are you disagreeing with?? I’m so confused by this. It is a wild and completely non-sequitur detour from my perspective.
Metallica made sure that argument doesn’t hold water in court back when they were suing all their fans for downloading their music on Napster. To this day I remind everyone who will listen why I refuse to listen to them ever again whenever their name comes up.
they are greedy hateful bunch, I'm always wary of their fans flashing with Metallica t-shirts and expect them to be the same greedy hateful bunch as well
"Stealing" has been used as a common word for "copying without permission" in the digital age. To try to play word games by trying to walk back the definition of stealing to mean only "taking someone's physical property" is completely pointless and futile unless you're just trying to feel OK with yourself copying without permission.
If I produce and distribute content like music or videos, it's fair for me to want people that want to rent or own it to pay for it. I put a lot of time and effort into it, I have to manage and market it, maybe store it, and I want to make a living at it.
If people are stealing it, ahem, copying without permission, it undercuts my living. I have a right to earning from my work, and you don't have a right to just download it or copy it or distribute it to others without me getting paid for it. It's literally preventing earnings for me that would otherwise happen if you didn't copy it without permission (ahem, stealing).
"Stealing" is morally charged and too associated with the loss of property to be a fair or accurate term here. It's not word games; it's conceptual analysis and a basic understanding of rhetoric.
Digital piracy, broadly speaking, is unauthorized copying. Depending on the context, it could be theft. Sometimes that theft is legal, but people feel it shouldn't be on moral grounds. Other times that theft is illegal, but people feel it shouldn't be on moral grounds. Sometimes, it's just not theft at all.
Yeah but if you sell them something and they click “buy” or “purchase” and not “rent” and then you revoke the license years later you’re the thief, not the person downloading what they purchased on utorrent.
I’m increasingly convinced that the right of first sale must extend to copyrighted work licenses to individuals to rebalance the benefit to society. Movies, video games, and music are all “sold” primarily in a way that prevents them from being shared, lent, or transferred to others. Books are probably the only medium left that is still primarily physical (71% in 2022).
You really don't. If you don't work on things that are profitable at the moment you don't have any innate right to earn anything from your work. Right to earn comes from specific agreements with employers. Earning might also come from innate profitability but it's not a right then as the profitability is ephemeral thing.
When the people who sell it to us are free to revoke access at any time, then there's no walking back being done by us. We're just recognizing that the accepted state of things was reneged on by one party and they can't insist on being in the right when we decide we're not obligated to follow their arbitrary rules anymore.
Tl;dr: Supreme Court ruled bootlegged/pirated media does not constitute theft as it does not deprive the legal owner of his/her property. That’s why they had to invent the term—“Copyright infringement”
Of course you can steal information, there's no reason why the notion of theft ought to be limited to physical goods, we're not living in the stone age. 90% of what we do and own exists in digital form. We can take possession of it, protect it, lock it away, attribute ownership to it as much as we can do to any physical property. If you disagree I'd appreciate if you could tell us your credit card information.
People just try to rationalize their behavior and play silly word games because they're attempting to avoid the simple fact that piracy is robbing other people of their labour.
Kant gave us a good principle, universalizability. If everyone pirated, creators would not get compensated, therefore they could not sustain themselves and it would be obvious that the value of their work is being stolen. Evidently, pirates are free-riders and their theft just isn't evident because enough people usually compensate for it.
If everyone pirated, the only people who would create content would be people doing it purely for the sake of art or their own enjoyment, far more people would be personally involved in creating art (in music for example, there would be far more people going to see local performances if there were less music produced as mass media due to loss of profitability), mass media would be reduced and more art would be local (and still physical), increasing the richness and diversity of the media landscape.
In my opinion, that would be a far superior world to the one we live in.
How would you create Titanic locally? Who would invest the massive amount of money required to make a film, especially one like that, without expecting a return?
How would you create the Encyclopædia Britannica locally? Who would invest the massive amount of money required to make an encyclopedia, especially one like that, without expecting a return?
People who want to see it created and are able to rally other people to help them of course.
That's not to say that no copyright means no way to fund big projects, you just have to collect those funds up front or rely on generosity - both of which are less likely to succeed because copyright makes the result into something you "own" rather than society and people are less inclined to fund your own private enrichment.
It might have come out 50 years later than it did but then it might have been done thousand times cheaper made by a handful of people using appropriate technology for fun.
Does society really benefit that much by seeing piece of entertainment 50 years earlier at the cost of millions of dollars?
If making a movie about going to space costs more than actually going to space maybe you shouldn't do it and wait instead till video creation technology advances enough so that single person can do it as passion project? Maybe what copyright enables is just a pathology?
That’s a whole different discussion. I was replying to a comment that seemed to suggest that we could have a remotely comparable but decentralized entertainment industry somehow.
I’m not interested in a conversation about whether we really even need entertainment, that’s a whole different premise.
> If you disagree I'd appreciate if you could tell us your credit card information.
I'm not talking about being obliged to share. Of course people should have the right to not share their credit details. My point is that if you receive information from someone, then choosing to share it with a third party is not stealing.
Actually, an obligation to share information is a restriction on freedom just like copyright, which can prohibit sharing information.
Right, so when you give your credit card info to a vendor, they are free to pass it on. They have no obligation to keep it private between agreed upon parties.
> they're attempting to avoid the simple fact that piracy is robbing other people of their labour.
It's not. A pirate is just another non-customer. There's robbing involved when someone chooses not to buy something. Watching a movie at a friend's house isn't robbing the producers of anything. Neither is buying something second hand. These are all non-customers of the original creator.
That's a huge stretch to say anyone that watches or listens to pirated entertainment would never pay for it. I wish people that use pirated entertainment would just admit that they don't want to pay for it.
It's the same stretch as saying people pirating content will never pay for it. All non-customers are simply not paying a creator for content. It doesn't fucking matter why they're a non-customer. From the perspective of a media publisher a pirate is no different than someone buying media second hand or never watching it in the first place.
If I buy a used Blu-ray I'm not giving a dime to Disney. I get to watch the Avengers all I want without ever paying them anything. They have lost nothing because I didn't take anything from them nor prevented them from selling a copy of the Avengers to someone else.
If you replaced my second hand copy of the Avengers with a pirated copy, nothing would change about the situation. Disney was deprived of nothing. The same is true if I rent it from the library, borrow it from a friend, or just never watch it. To Disney I am simply a non-customer.
And if you read or watch much about all the musicians reviewing their Spotify Wrapped this year vs how much they were paid, you’d see that we’re already there. The value of their work went to music streaming services and everyone using their music in their productions, very little made it back to the creators.
It works very differently, as getting a free digital copy of anything don’t leave others without it. There’s no shortage of the product. If I steal a piece of bread from a shop, it won’t be there. If I pirate an episode of whatever tv show, it won’t disappear for others who were to buy it. Company won’t see a difference if I won’t buy the product otherwise. Even the opposite, it’s net positive for the company, as more people familiar with the product may come back to it later and buy it, or make others buy it. See Windows, Photoshop. Or for books, I may download expensive books to read, and if I see the book is worth buying, I may buy it if I can afford it. And/or I may tell others the book is great, so they will buy it. And in the end it gives the company more benefit then me not ever touching their product in the first place.
That's a coherent position, but it is also perfectly reasonable to argue that it's not because you have a copy and have not removed the original.
Edit: Note that this doesn't inherently make piracy okay, since it may deprive the owner of revenue or other benefits; there's a difference between objecting to piracy and saying that it's exactly theft.
I mean, why do you think we really got away from the idea of tying currency to something physical? Money and property are just ideas that enough people agree about to matter. If you don’t agree, too bad and good luck convincing all the others that you’re right, especially with all the resources and power that the winners under this system have gained under it.
what word would you use if you hired a lawyer or accountant to do some paperwork and when they finished you just copied the documents and then didn't pay them because "it's not stealing, it's just communication"?
In the case of cars (the go-to object for all analogies) the bad guy is charged with "unauthorized use of a motor vehicle". That's not stealing either.
You’re using one of the intransitive definitions but general speaking it’s the transitive forms that apply to digital content, ideas, information, etc.
1. to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
2. to take away by force or unjust means
3. to take surreptitiously or without permission
You may not want stealing to mean that… but that’s irrelevant to reality.
The point is that stealing has traditionally meant denying the rightful owner the thing that has been stolen. What is going on here is that a copy has been made without permission - piracy is copyright infringement, this is different to stealing.
Now there has been a lot of effort by the media industry to equate copyright infringement with stealing, I think because the public at large doesn't really understand infringement as a terrible thing. Stealing appears in the 10 commandments, so in our judeo christian societies it's a home run to get 'right thinking' people on side.
Also in these transitive definitions, stealing is about taking. And in the case of piracy (communicating information to others without permission of the original source), nothing is taken.
The person that came up with the idea still has it. The photographer still has the picture. The programmer still has the program.
It's just about what another person may do with it, the one receiving the picture. May they also send it to someone else? We could have different ideas about that, but calling it "stealing" is inaccurate.
Taking can simply mean “to gain or acquire”. So, once again, incorrect. Sorry.
I’m sympathetic to the moral argument you’re making—though when the raw goods are digital too I think it’s an impractical & ill conceived one—but both legally AND linguistically… it’s incorrect
Which dictionary defines taking as simply gaining or acquiring something?
If you "take" something from someone else it generally means that they no longer have what you took.
Hot take, take a photo, take part, take the bus, take a left, take a shower, take pride in your work, take a joke, take something apart, take my word for it, take a while, take an oath. Being over precious about definitions is unwise.
Curious choice of example. I know what you mean of course, but the point is words shift meaning.
For a counter-example connected to your choice, I was recently made aware of the Latin word for "to abduct", and how that word may well be why it took so long for spousal abuse to become recognised as an offence — to paraphrase your own question to demonstrate how this goes very wrong, how can you "abduct" someone you live with?
Say one counterfeits a hundred dollar bill perfectly. Does he steal? Say he is able to do this in large quantities. Does he steal? You still have you hundred dollar bill. No loss to you right? Wrong. Your money’s worth is lessened by the counterfeiting, the copying. That is what they mean by stealing: you are decreasing the value of their products by providing identical copies outside of their control.
Copying movies is copying things congress said you can't, a crime distinct from both theft and fraud.
Piracy has for whatever reason been co-opted to refer to copying despite that having no relationship to piracy on the high seas, but no one is playing linguistic games to argue that they're the same thing so whatever.
By that definition, whenever I create (on my own) a product that is both superior and cheaper than a competitor's offering, lessening the value of their product, it is stealing.
There are actually people who reason like this. I remember being struck by this attitude when reading Bloomberg's book - effectively morally eqivocating business competition with stealing food out of their children's mouths.
If Alice breaks Bob’s leg, does she steal his mobility? Sure, but criminally she’d be charged with assault or battery or both.
Likewise, the legal definition of theft or stealing does not apply to copyright infringement despite decades long campaigns to get the public to believe that to ge the case. Relatedly, there are similar campaigns to redefine violence as something that offends someone.
Since value is only defined by what people are willing to pay for it, and lacking any extra common rules, these acts of copying simply signal not accepting the demanded price: so the value claimed by the owner was not the actual value, thus they have lost only their self-deception about the value.
If you've managed to create a perfect hundred dollar bill then you've done nothing different to what the bank did. Are both of you stealing?
One way of looking at it is that the banks didn't have to expend a tiny fraction of $100 worth of effort to obtain the dollar bill, whereas any normal person would have to. The question is does the bank deserve that $100? Especially at a cost to everyone else (who are largely unaware/tricked).
Personally I'd class that as "fraud" but it all comes under a similar umbrella.
Theft is taking something you don't deserve, without the other party's consent.
Fraud is taking something you don't deserve, with the other party's _misplaced_ consent.
So yes, in the case of copying music for example, I agree - you're copying someone's idea, which is essentially taking the product of their work without their consent. Their work is no longer scarce, and so loses half its value. It's not really any different to stealing half the money they've worked for, other than that it seems almost impossible to stop you without creating paradoxes such as this topic.
It's detrimental as they no longer have the same incentive to do that work and so society doesn't progress.
You've taken the reward from the person that did the work and shared it amongst the whole of society who didn't work for it. It's pure socialism - and we can see the effects of it in the quality of modern music.
But that isn't what it means in the context of theft, and linguistically the distinction is clear unless you are being disingenuous. There is absolutely no linguistic foundation for equating theft and duplicating information.
Legally the distinction is also clear - transgression of copyright law is specifically given the term "copyright infringement" in law in English speaking countries and in international agreements. A person cannot be convicted of theft for copying information. The US supreme court, among others, ruled on exactly this:
You seem to be using a dictionary with very short entries. Mine contains 10 different meanings of the verb "take" and one of them is "obtain, gain, acquire".
Dictionary definitions and legal definitions may or may not overlap. If not discussing the legal definition, than steal could mean someone enjoyed an appropriately licensed copyrighted work secretly or in private.
> To steal means to physically take someone's property without their consent
That's one meaning. As with many English words that one has several. Here are several examples of how "steal" is used in English for things that involve other than taking physical taking of property:
• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.
• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.
• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".
• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.
• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.
False. When someone without your permission copies your source code, plans or inventions, which are not physical things, is this not theft? What about the non physical bits and bytes in your Dropbox or bank account? That's just like, an exchange of information, man. Why must the "physical" qualifier be there?
One does not merely copy the numbers in a bank account when committing theft. The key part is depriving the original owner of the use of the item.
Whether you think piracy is right or wrong, there is a crucial difference between traditionally understood stealing or theft, in that the original owner no longer has the thing. With copyright infringement that’s not the case.
As for piracy, of course it's wrong, though far less serious than what I responded to.
> depriving the original owner of the use of the item
When someone invests to make a film, do you think the use of the resulting film to the owner is to watch it or sell it?
To break it down, did someone invest millions to make millions, or did someone pay millions to watch one movie?
You know the answer and thus we know that stealing a copy without paying does does in fact deprive the original owner of the use of the item, which was always to sell copies of it, that's the reason and criteria for its existence.
At small scale though the industry still makes do, so it's less serious than stealing for example, a company (e.g. their information). Every act of piracy also wasn't technically a stolen sale, because not everyone stealing would ever have bought it if stealing wasn't an option.
Well actually (Yeah I’m going to well actually you) many movies are quite literally produced in such a way that structures the production companies to not make any money and instead shift any profits up the pyramid while extracting the maximum value of possible tax credits and grants offered any number of political entities, as well as disbursing themselves from several liabilities.
On paper many incredibly successful films lose money. The game is rigged. The industry more than makes do.
People are free to draw their own lines. I pay for some things and don’t pay for others as far as digital content goes. The structure of it doesn’t even necessarily fit into this clean cut idea however. If I pay for Prime and download something that I could watch via prime ( and I do, because I’d rather watch it in my preferred video play whenever and not only if I have an internet connection or on specific devices or god forbid the thing I’m watching or intending to watch in the near future slips off the service) what is the math in that?
Copying something does not remove the thing from the original owner, hence these are different acts.
Referring to such things as theft or stealing is lazy and incorrect, regardless of relative severity.
The fact you use the term “stealing” in your justification of the act being “stealing” kinda points to your own circular reasoning there, rather than a good defence.
We can agree it’s wrong without polluting the semantic space. Otherwise we may as well just call everything “murder” or “terrorism” and be done with it.
> The key part is depriving the original owner of the use of the item.
I know that’s been a tribal shibboleth of piracy since the 2000s, and I’m sympathetic to the moral argument to this view… but it’s just factually untrue (both in terminology AND in law)
It’s not though, in law, as they are different crimes. And that’s where copyright infringement even is a crime rather than a civil matter as it is in many places.
Correct! The parent post here isn't really productive, I also have some misgivings on this school of internet debate where a disagreement needs to start with any of:
- False.
- Incorrect.
- Nope.
Is it just me or is this needlessly smug? Again, the parent isn't productive, but a terse "You are wrong." in the grandparent isn't really a good way to start a productive conversation either.
I can agree with that, though when something is patently false, I don't think it's wrong to point this out clearly. A misinformed reader could miss the nuance and mistake facts for options, which in this case could land someone in jail.
As for smugness and the format of posts, you sure don't live as you preach.
All rights are fictitious. All laws are made up. They're simply defined to provide a guide for liberty and order. They're not always enforced. People's defined rights are different over countries and years. Slaves had their rights defined by others throughout history, and many groups considered slavery justified where the master had rights to the slave and the slave had rights defined by the master. Saying copyright itself is fictitious doesn't mean anything.
Copyright rules make sense in protecting inventors and product owners. Maybe you've been neither and can't understand how the lack of this protection harms inventors and owners to the benefit of plagiarists. It's much easier to plagiarize than invent or produce, so without copyright protection, inventors and product owners basically become giant fat cash cows ready to plunder by passers-by that can just copy and paste. Removing copyright would turn the market completely feudalist and chaotic.
Throwing copyright statutes away is also chaotic. Reverting to common law? I'm not sure what you mean there. Just however people feel at the time? We've already evolved past the caveman era.
> The defining characteristic of common law is that it arises as precedent. Common law courts look to the past decisions of courts to synthesize the legal principles of past cases
Or was it that you were unclear what _rm specifically was saying?
Things were always this far. There has been almost 2 decades since Amazon deleted the book 1984 from every Kindle. Since then, those things never stopped.
The only thing that is different right now is that some large and powerful corporations are being defrauded too, instead of just people.
The sooner we accept that and dispose of the bizarre “deification” of the rich the sooner we can discuss deprecation of their influence and reach.
The apathetic kowtow to a handful of aging out government brown nosers who lobby to insulate themselves is sad.
1980s Reagan economy is not immutable physics and we have no obligation to believe the stories of the rich about their success. There’s a whole lot of behavioral science being leveraged, and intentional PR propaganda tossed around to obfuscate the rich are “just people”
You're conflating "large and powerful corporations" with "rich people". This is a mistake. Your post is not really wrong, but doesn't address anything in the one you replied to.
Sure, and it would be great to see some combination of reduced profit and increased responsibility. As others in this thread have mentioned, there's no real reason to play along with the illusion that corporations are people. They should have fewer rights than humans, and the government should play rougher with them when they get out of line.
What are large and powerful corporations under the hood? It's only an abstraction to facilitate business, but the reality is just a few people making decisions. Don't make the mistake of giving a physical existence to companies.
Enough people believe the "hallucination" for rich corporations to behave noticeably differently from rich people, notably in their response to being defrauded, which is how you got onto this topic. I'm not even trying to talk morals here, just make accurate explanations and predictions.
Oh you’ve polled all the people and learned they really believe? Most just “follow orders” and I’m guessing if pressed would see no value to the hallucination. Anti-corporatism is everywhere; how many actually believe as you say? I doubt that many believe and it really just seems beneficial for you to patronize and “correct” others.
Accuracy relative to the dying and long dead’s ignorant political babble is a ridiculous stat to min/max to dial in correctness. Stay in the centrist lane!
Rather than have a forward facing conversation, you reach for history. There’s little point in continuing this conversation
Following orders is close enough to believing as to make no practical difference. Emphasis on practical. Anti-corporatism is a) not the same as thinking their existence is meaningless (rather the opposite in fact) and b) irrelevant if they don't act on it.
And really, mostly only law enforcement needs to believe the "hallucination" for it to have real effects. You, know, those guys with guns who will hurt you if you don't do what they say?
I don't think our positions are actually that far apart. It's just that, as far as I can tell anyway, you're trying to make a stand on some point of terminology while I'm trying to be reductionist and understand the dynamics.
It's also relatively easy to write this legislation. If you:
- sold licenses that are no longer usable to access the work (i.e. if you invalidate by any means already sold licenses)
- don't put work in the public domain/don't make it freely usable without a license when the copyright expires
then you lose the protection of copyright & associated (DRM/reverse engineering) laws for said works. Multiple violations can extend that to "all your works".
Instead of getting into a shouting match over whether piracy is or isn’t stealing, here’s an interesting story.
Bill Gates made an interesting comment regarding software piracy in the 1990s. At that time, software piracy was rampant in China, and Microsoft’s Windows operating system was one of the most pirated products. In response to this situation, Gates remarked that if people were going to pirate software, he would prefer they pirate Microsoft’s software.
His rationale was strategic: if people in China became accustomed to using Microsoft’s Windows and Office software, they would be more likely to continue using these products in the future, including in business environments where legitimate software licenses are more commonly purchased.
(Whether things worked out as he envisioned is a slightly different matter.)
> (Whether things worked out as he envisioned is a slightly different matter.)
Well, actually they did, at least in ex-USSR, and I think in Eastern Europe too.
After not ever having a single legitimate license in 1990s and early 2000s (and being laughed upon if you had one), by late 2000s Microsoft business took off handsomely.
the same goes for most professional software, like the adobe suite. if people pirated, it's because they're not professionals yet. once they are, they're more likely to buy the software they're used to and not the competition.
Piracy isn't exactly a zero-sum game, there is a cost associated with it. Pretending piracy doesn't hurt revenue is a shaky ground to stand on; now whatever it hurts the artists revenue is a different question, with interesting arguments for how or why modern copyright might not provide the intended outcomes.
It's not even as straightforward as that. Most serious studies on the topic have demonstrated that piracy not only does not lead to lost sales, but in fact it leads to increased sales instead.
It's how companies like Microsoft or Adobe could grow and gain uncontested monopolies. Because, due to piracy, price was no longer a good enough differentiator. And it's why "Linux on the desktop" never happened.
There aren't many studies on this topic and the available ones are bullshit, as they don't take into account second order effects of piracy, one of which being the rise of streaming with DRM, which also concentrates power in the hands of a few Big Tech companies.
Piracy is one of the biggest reasons for why we have monopolies. The phenomenon is now repeated with ad blockers. And the irony of the situation is that people point at monopolies to justify piracy or the use of ad blockers.
Indeed, just because some big corps can handle the lost revenue in return for pricing competitors out and exposure, doesn't mean piracy doesn't impact revenue.
Going from "big corp can handle lost revenue in return for market dominance and exposure" to "it doesn't hurt revenue" is absurd.
I would assume, that this is partly because one can get familiar with the pirated product and then many people decide it is worth buying or supporting the creator. Or spread the word about the existence of the product.
He made hundreds of thousands of dollars from those streams, “twelve dollars” was ironic understatement about his dissatisfaction with the compensation Spotify pays artists.
Life isn't fair. If I didn't like a movie, I can't unsee it and get my money and time back. That's just a fact of life. In the same way, people can share content since physics doesn't prevent it. We should just accept these limitations of how we can control each other.
I think this is reasonable stand. Piracy does affect revenue, but probably quite a bit less than anyone makes it out to. I believe most that pirate would not have paid in first place, either because they don't value it high enough or they do not have enough money to pay for it.
Not that actions of those selling does not likely contribute much more to loss of revenue, mainly by making content unavailable. Availability or pricing compared to product is often sub-optimal.
Every study done on the matter shows piracy correlates with sales. If we are to stop pretending, we should start with ending the myth that piracy hurts sales. There is no evidence whatsoever of that.
> Calling BS on that because no one is going to pirate unknown movie/song/software.
I've done it. I'd bet that most people who have pirated anything have.
If you were around for the Napster days you'd know that people would often download things they'd never heard of before and had no idea if they'd like it or not (and that was when it could take many hours, even days, for a single album to download!). Piracy is a great way to try out new things. Napster led to an increase in CD sales as people were discovering new artists and music they'd never heard on the radio or MTV (https://www.zdnet.com/article/study-napster-boosts-cd-sales/)
The objection to P2P file sharing was never about money. It was about power and control. It was about gatekeeping. The RIAA wants to decide what you can and can't listen to and what is popular. They don't want their new artists/albums to have to compete with everything ever released. They know piracy would increase sales. They don't want to give up the control over our culture and they don't want the internet to cut them out as useless middlemen. With computers and the internet we don't need them for distribution or advertising. We can do it all without them.
Perhaps the gatekeepers you describe are the same ones who pushed the term 'piracy' this way; to describe any human who copies chunks of 1s and 0s they feel protective of.
Meanwhile, real pirates really steal real physical goods from real people.
Copiers and pirates are not the same thing, not even close.
A lot of the music I listened to in college was because friends gave me copies. Then we'd end up going to shows together, and would even buy CDs, which we'd promptly copy among each other. In fact, sharing was probably the only way for lesser known bands to find an audience at the time since they obviously weren't on the radio.
People are going to pirate unknown movie/song/software because no seller is going to give it shelf space, making it all but unavailable to the general public through 'normal' channels.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I often download obscure games I see on steam to see if they’ll actually hook me or not. I pay for what I actually am able to sink my teeth in to.
The vast majority of movies I download are me going out on a limb. In some cases I’m subscribed to a service they’re available on. I still download them though because I’d prefer to use my own player on my own terms. You can’t even get higher than 720p on Netflix on PC without using edge. Horseshit. It is also not infrequent that there is no way for me to pay someone to watch it online. I’m not going to buy a used copy of a DVD/blu-ray to watch something I’m interested in. Ain’t nobody making money off a used copy. Is resale of used media ethical?
It's more like proofing / sampling: maybe I want to pay your company to print my magazine, but first I want to see if your printing process gives good results. So you print me a copy for free; if I like it, I'll pay for the real thing.
Or when you're at a stall and they give you a bit of cheese to try, or some bit of cake. They know that, if you like it and you can afford it, you'll buy more. The costs to them are small, and the return is worth it. This is just trading-101.
Free labor abused on a systemic scale is completely different. It's like I asked you for a cheese sample as big as what I need to serve a party of 50 people I'm paid to organise.
Artists can make money during live concerts instead. As it has always been. The artist that writes stuff once and reaps benefits forever is a horrible heresy.
What about artists who are not performing artists? Not many people are going to pay to watch someone with just basic guitar or piano skills and an ordinary singing voice write a song, no matter how great the song turns out to be.
They might later pay to watch and listen to excellent instrumentalists and singers perform that song, so concerts might work for them. Presumably the composer can charge those performers...but how much?
You usually can't figure out the worth of a song beforehand, so if it is going to be a one-time upfront payment from the performers to the composer it is hard to figure out the right price.
You can wait until after the song has been released and see much the concert tour makes and how many people buy copies of the song or listen to it on streaming services and that gives you a good idea of the worth of the song.
Upfront you'd have to agree on how the worth is calculated and how the price is calculated from that. But this is then going to depend on how much revenue the song brings and so sounds an awful lot like a royalty arrangement, just with a lump payment at the end of the license instead of more frequent smaller payments along the way.
> Piracy isn't exactly a zero-sum game, but there is a cost associated with it.
There is zero cost associated with piracy. Zero.
At best, there's an expectation of profit that's not met. To argue that, you need to show how copying a file translates to a potential sale being converted to a no-sale, and there are plenty of evidence that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted work drives demand up.
> Pretending piracy doesn't hurt revenue is a shaky ground to stand on
Go ahead and show exactly where copying a file hurts anyone. You're trying to pass off your personal assertions as axioms, but it's on you to prove that copying a file without the consent of someone hurts anyone.
Go ahead.
> now whatever it hurts the artists revenue is a different question
If anything, artists are the least impacted counterpart as they literally get paid a small fraction of the whole income.
At all the public libraries I've used they only let me checkout something if the total number of copies already checked out is less than the number of copies the library has licenses for. If the number checked out is not under the number of licenses they make me wait until one of the checked out copies is returned.
That's still no different from the content creator's point of view than a non-sale or pirate. The practical limitations of libraries is immaterial to the fact I can view content without paying the creator anything. Carving out some logical exception for content pirates is ludicrous. They're functionally no different than non-customers or library patrons.
The physical limitations of libraries are immaterial. Patrons are non-customers of the content publisher. They're doing the same exact thing pirates are doing, experiencing some piece of content without paying the original publisher. The same thing as if they watched a movie on broadcast TV, listened to the radio, or bought that content second hand.
If you're going to argue against piracy you're also arguing against libraries. The differences between a pirate and a library are mostly statutory.
There is thousands of hours of paid work to produce any kind of software or game. It doesn’t matter if the end result is burned into a physical disk or not. What’s of value here is not the 1 cent piece of plastic but the content.
When you copy content that has a cost, if the company is not offering it to you, what do you call your action ?
I mean, really, you spent 5 years working on a game with no salary. Then a day before launch day someone just makes a copy of it and distributed it « for free » in the internet. How are you going to make a salary out of it ?
Games are always pirated if they are even a little bit popular. I work in the games industry, and games I worked on are always pirated, but the more popular they are, the more copies will be sold legitimately.
People make two choices when they pirate - moral, and economical. If economically they cannot afford the game, they weren't going to pay. If morally they are against paying for a game (like if the game company is associated with suicides, etc), they weren't going to pay. There are some people that will pay if piracy isn't available, but not that many.
Anyways, after the income goes around, and all the exec, upper management, and publisher salaries are paid, the piracy or lack of it probably makes about a $1 difference to my weekly earnings. I put a lot of artistic and creative effort, blood, sweat, and tears into it. If it costs me $1 to make people enjoy it, so be it.
In the AAA games industry, piracy is a thing. People talk about it. And most people have only very mild things to say about it, except for execs. Execs make a disproportionate amount of money off games for what they do, and they do kinda have a lot of time to sit on their hands sometimes, so they can fight these piracy battles, die on these piracy hills.
My example was a illustrate a point. It could be a game or a productivity software, movies, music anything.
You can find any reason to steal, economical, hunger etc the point I making is that the motivation to make a copy does not make it legal.
Do we tolerate some form of theft for moral or other reasons ? Yes sure. But because I, as an individual, have my own reasons not to pay for something and decide to make a copy of it, that does not transforms my action to a perfectly legal thing.
Maybe we can’t do anything about software being copied but that doesn’t magically make laws and IP disappear with it and makes copying software legal ?
I was answering to the comment « nothing is taken ». Because the content is the result of an effort from other people being paid, the content has value. The fact that we can make infinite copies of it makes a single copy worthless because it’s not being burnt into a piece of plastic ?
There are moral principles, and legal principles. Legally, you are right. But the moral perception of piracy is shifting, and broadly speaking, this entire debate is in the moral/philosophical realm.
Legal systems ultimately enshrine the human morality in law. Common law - through case law, civil law - by committees that the legislators consult, religious law - by morality described in legal texts. We're not talking about any of it though. We are talking about day-to-day things, like what does it mean to steal, what kind of consequences it has, are these consequences real or supposed, and other such things.
Law is generally blind to externalities of an action. An action itself is legal, illegal, or undefined in law. We're not in this domain if we talk about the consequences of piracy or how someone might feel about it. We are having a conversation on morals.
Shifting morals will eventually shift the law, of course.
I completely agree with you.
It’s shifting but we cannot consider it as already shifted.
Some comments are going into this direction of the whole debate behind us and laws not applying anymore. Our feeling about it has changed but my country can still sue me if I make a copy without respecting the terms of the seller.
Maybe tomorrow a global business model will emerge and the whole notion of possession will kind of disappear because everything will be a subscription.
Or maybe we will pay a flat fee to whatever organization and use anything as much as we want and copies will be worthless because they won’t be sold individually anymore
That sense of the word “take” is fairly consistently used of physical things, where you are depriving another of possession (with or without permission).
—⁂—
(Just for fun, The Devil’s Dictionary (not a work to be taken particularly seriously):
> TAKE, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.
I quite like that way of putting it because it’s the megacorporations that are the pirates when they steal their DRM content back, because they are acquiring it from you so that you can’t have it, by force if they have to but they prefer stealth.)
It’s no wonder that certain parties are so very interested in gutting consumer protections in US government at every level so they can continue these consumer-hostile practices unchallenged, but it’s hard to get voters to care about these issues, especially in a two-party system.
At this point I'd rather the legislature (1) just stop, and then maybe (2) roll back what's broken. Don't try to follow up horrendously broken laws like the DMCA with more broken laws to try to arbitrarily patch things up. I'll vote for any politicians who advocate for picking a commit sometime before the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act and doing a git --hard reset to that.
This is why web3 is a thing, so you don’t have to make laws, the tech can make the laws unnecessary. We are trying to do this for content at Darkblock. You buy it, you own it.
I have to agree. There should be legislation preventing this, or the pirates will be morally in the clear. Which does not help copyright owners. Yes, the pirate stole your content, but since you were going to revoke access anyhow he was stealing from a scammer which is justice.