Things got weird when we went digital.
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.
Piracy is just reverse time shifting. It’s going to be on FTA TV at some point, I’m just making it more convenient to watch now.
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 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.
Let's get crazier.
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?
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.
"Piracy isn't stealing" doesn't require a qualifier. It's objectively a separate, lesser crime. That correlation is just the result of effective, aggressive marketing that conflates the two. It was so effective that everyone misremembers the "you wouldn't steal a car" ad.
Thanks for that trip down memory lane. I was just a child when I saw that, and my first thought was "but... But when I steal from someone, they don't have it anymore. If I download it, they still have it"
lol. You give an ad spot way too much credit
Call it "illegal copy" (because fuck customer rights with "usage licenses") and we're good.
Isnt the free market supposed to self-regulate?
If companies can exploit it, why shouldnt we?
No, free market isn't "supposed" to self regulate. That's silliness. The only people who say that have no understanding of the concepts.
Regulation is required. Unfortunately with regulatory capture it's not happening.
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 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 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.
"Piracy" has never been stealing except for the boats and parrots kind.
It's not stealing if it's been stolen before! Arrr
Theft isn't specific to property, you can steal services too.
The water is certainly muddy with digital media, but this is just another oversimplified argument.
If you need to do mental gymnastics to feel OK about pirating then...idk find something better than this.
See comments below for more mental gymnastics
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"muddy waters" is a saying, I don't think you should take OP literally. The Rest you've written seems to agree with their sentiment btw.
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.
I'm all for piracy but I still try to spend money where it morally makes sense to me.
I'll buy, rent or subscribe to content from actual creators or artists or developers if I know I am supporting their livelihoods or careers.
I'll pirate content if I decide for myself that the content has already paid for the livelihoods of the creators or workers who produced the material and now it's only the title holders and corporate interests that are profiting from the ownership and entitlement of controlling the content for commercial reasons only. For me this is mostly just big budget movies, old films and commercially produced music.
To me, anything that's already paid to help the original artist or creators should be made public. Locking it away and making people pay for the privilege of the content just to make more profit for someone else is piracy itself. This is especially true for films and music that are so old that the original artists and creators and owners are multi millionaires or just no longer exist.
I may be wrong but that is my own personal view of collecting digital content.
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
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.
They say we've got it all wrong, it's not the items we're stealing. It's he money they think they should've gotten from that item.
Look at the shit sony is apparently intending to do. Total bullshit.
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