You seem to be under the impression that people and corporations get equal treatment under the law.
You seem to be under the impression that they should. At what point does one person's right to get richer override other people's right to have a decent life?
Since that abomination called “Citizens United” was imposed on us decent living people (in the US)
Frankly this catch phrase never made any sense to me, from a logical point of view.
It assumes that:
If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
And if buying =/= owning then pirating =/= stealing, because you can't own it otherwise.
But the justification in the second statement is completely irrelevant to the first statement. You still own it without buying. It's still stealing.
UNLESS - we examine what "stealing" is. This is where the arguments about being in a digital space vs. a physical space comes in. Where the question is raised: Is making an exact copy really "stealing"? Or, consider what is being "stolen"? The original item? The idea? We need to think about this more.
But it's here the argument should be made and here the debate should be. That's where "pirates" have a chance of winning. Let's get rid of this flawed, easily repeatable, but fundamentally incorrect catch phrase and come up with a better one already. One that makes sense.
*(Nevermind that most of you technically aren't even pirating, you're just downloading the fruits of someone else that pirated.)
I was locked out of my EA account for half a week due to a bug on their end. I downloaded a game I own(lease?) so I could play over the weekend.
Is this pirating?
I think the problem is that theft is the wrong crime to compare to. Piracy is more akin to toll skipping.
I don’t think the phrase supposed to be a logically consistent justification, but rather a way to voice their discontent with/encourage opposition to the increasing degree of control that corporations exert over products you supposedly “bought” from them.
It hasn’t been possible to take full ownership over purchased media since the dawn of copyright law—buying a book doesn’t mean you can run it through a photocopier and sell it at the nearest flea market, after all. Even so, it wasn’t until the advent of software licenses that this rhetoric became popular, as you literally cannot “own” a piece of media that is only available through licensing. Licenses are also largely unregulated: while you were always bound by relevant laws, you are now also bound by the terms of the license, in which the licensor often reserves the right which often reserves the right to change the terms or terminate the license as they see fit. As if relentless regulatory capture was not enough, corporations have engineered a world in which you are effectively at their mercy, and a lot of people are understandably upset by this. So, if these people are deprived of any legal means of owning the media they wish to own, they resort to piracy. Of course this isn’t “justified” in the traditional sense, as stealing something that isn’t for sale is still stealing, and authors/publishers/etc. are not obligated to sell their works, but to them it doesn’t matter, as the underlying social contract of media creation and distribution has been violated.
What field uses =/= to mean !=?
!= isn't universal, i've mostly seen it used in programming.
Otherwise ≠ is the symbol we use in maths and generally the more common one.
=/= is just the worst rendition of ≠ for people that don't know how to write it or are too lazy to go find it.
It's a shorthand way of writing ≠ digitally without needing to know the alt code or where it is in your mobile devices keyboard
It's important never to forget who sets the terms of commerce, wages, and employment.
All the peasants can do is game the terms they set. And the owner class that sets those rigged terms, and their doting class traitor sycophants, rage against even that.
"you you you... You're just supposed to eat cat food in the dark crying if you can't afford to enjoy life, while we laugh about your subsistence at the country club! No fair!"
Imagine if we could hook up Bittorrent and Bitcoin somehow, and made it so you could create a torrent of your work and get some money when people download.
And then people who seed it could maybe get a little cut for helping to host things. And you'd buy tokens and you'd know that almost 100% of the money goes to the artist, and the artist has control over the entire process.
That would be neat, but I'm sure someone here will explain why this is unworkable and stupid. Which is why I posted it.
Eight hours later, and no one disagreed.
I think you might be on to something
99% of revenue would go to the first copycats that can feasibly pretend the works are theirs, and dominate the space with their own seeder bots.
Democracy is nice, but…it needs a bit of regulation and enforcement. You’d end up slowly building up a lot of the rules that currently dictate digital purchases, sans corruption.
Stealing a rental car is still car theft.
If the rental car was advertised as a car you can own, you paid the price for owning the car and they get you on the fine print. No sir, then its not theft.
Making exact copy of rental car is not.
In the same way that taking a photo at a museum is theft
I mean yeah, but digital copies of something are definitely different then a literal car.
Yeah, if they could print effectively infinite copies of the car at almost zero cost then it would be comparable
No one expects to be the owner of a rented car. That why people ask "are you the home owner or a renter?"
Most of the back and forth is predicated on the idea that the digital world works the same as the digital one. It does not!
In the physical world you cannot produce and exact copy of something for zero dollars.
In the digital world you can make many copies at effectively zero cost.
Stealing, theft, is predicated on taking something from someone so they no longer have it.
Making a digital copy does not steal or remove access.
The whole argument, which I would posit is deeply flawed, is that pirating removes imaginary potential profits for reselling the thing copied (not stolen). If that's so then prove it. Prove that at some point in the future I, or any other given person, would have bought that digital thing. Unless you've invented time travel you just can't.
Copying digital content isn't theft and pirating isn't the right thing to call it.
We have to figure out how to better frame or address the digital world that just fundamentally doesn't operate the same as the physical one.
So just like you can't prove that none of the pirates would have bought it if pirating didn't exist? But which is more likely, that sales would stay the same or that more people would buy the products if piracy didn't exist?
You're not entitled to the fruit of someone's labor without compensation or their consent, even if you pinky swear that you'll compensate them at a future date.
"Stealing, theft, is predicated on taking something from someone so they no longer have it."
So if I purchase a product and then its taken away due to service closure or 'updated' to be so different as to no longer be recognisable that would be theft surely.
If buying isn't owning,
Then it's time to get communism
Buying something is owning. That has never changed.
You don't purchase digital goods. You buy a license to use them, under the conditions you agreed to. Piracy explicitly breaks those conditions 99.9% of the time.
So no, it isn't stealing. It's just plainly illegal. And it hurts everyone from the original artist to the multi-billion dollar company that distributes it. Whether you think that is immoral or not is up to you.
Yes, that is the small text they use to justify it, but that's not how they advertise it. When Amazon Prime wants me to pay for a movie it doesn't say "License it now!" It says "Buy it now!"
If you go digging into the EULA you'll see it being called a license, but no effort is made to actually make that clear to the customer.
Furthermore, being technically legal doesn't make it acceptable. If someone opened a bookstore, and put some treatment on all their books that caused them to suddenly disintegrate after a year, it doesn't matter if they have on all their receipts that "books are not guaranteed to last longer than a year" or that they "aren't doing anything illegal". It's still a bullshit business practice that shouldn't be tolerated.
When it says "buy it" you asuume the it refers to the content - they'd probably argue it refers to the license.
It’s worth stating this has basically always been true for books. You can buy paper. Buying bound paper with words on it is not quite the same. You can’t produce a movie from that idea, and state “I invented this idea from a bundle of bound pages I bought, that already had some words on them.”
You never owned the original reproduction rights to the book’s content. That never mattered much until copying and pasting became so easy.
We have another one.
Slavery used to be legal. So it was okay?
Right now „selling“ stuff and saying its just a license you fool is legal so it is okay?
This must be why blockbuster failed, people just grabbed whatever and left saying it’s not stealing because blockbuster lets them rent it
This topic is so stale
An unfunny meme - ah - the OP is German. Nevermind. Do carry on.
BRB in my to keep a rental car without paying.
"Piracy isn't stealing? Does that mean stealing also isn't stealing? Checkmate!"
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