Piracy, in today’s context of unauthorized sharing of digital content, is wrongly condemned as immoral theft. However, it is not piracy itself that is immoral. Rather, it is the greed-driven laws and practices that censor knowledge and creative works to maximize profits. At its core, piracy is about sharing information and creative works with others, which should be seen as a moral good. 🤑
Agree 100% and I’ve been seeing this “debate” in other instances and communities recently
Piracy is moral and ethical. Small businesses are not the targets. I would download a car, I would download a better life if I could
The article is well written and all, but that “Copyright © 2023, all rights reserved” at the end is ultimate hypocrisy.
Have to change the footer part. Sorry :(
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I’m not going to argue for/against the article. However,
we need laws and policies promoting open access and sharing of knowledge, not maximizing profits through contrived scarcity
As a fan of FOSS (and the Open Source community in general), I completely agree with this. Sharing knowledge can do a lot of good.
Isn’t there already laws for that? Fair use being one of them. And I read about some right to archiving too. Which allows archive.orgs efforts.
Copyright has evolved from a limited monopoly on a work of a handful of years, into an entitlement which has diverged sharply from the original intent of the law. It’s time to bring the law back into balance with its intentions of promoting the creation of new works, while granting the public free access to those works after a reasonable time. Lifetime plus seventy years is not reasonable.
Edited to add - consider the number of great artists whose works never commercially benefited them. Not because of “piracy”, but because their work was not known or recognized. Still, they made their great works because they were compelled to do so by their existence.
How can I pirate Adobe Lightroom, if it’s impossible for me to own it by paying for it?
Honestly, I would pay some decent mulah for a standalone current version of Adobe Lightroom that doesn’t try to suck me up into the cloud. It’s silly event pirators and cracker teams can put a pretty fully featured yearly version, and Adobe does not.
Hard to argue against piracy with the current system of copyright that only serves giant corporations. Guess it’s human nature to try to consolidate power…
Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it’s reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can’t. It’s because I can’t buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that’s no longer licensed or available.
Plus, it’s only going to get worse now, with Streaming services and online platforms delisting anything even that might not make a profit because they don’t want to pay residuals. I’m not big on pirating new releases, but that’s because I think we should support artists. I also think we should call for the creators to be paid more of the profit share vs. the money people at the top who seem to do nothing but fire people and shoot down good ideas to try to make everything the same carbon copy live service.
I also don’t have to pirate new stuff, because it’ll old stuff on sale at half price (or less) soon enough, and with all the bugs fixed and the features added the way it should have been at launch. My backlog is so huge that I won’t have time to go through it anyway before I die. So there’s another reason I don’t care much about new games. If I’m still interested in them a year or more later when they’re on sale and fixed up, I’ll buy it then.
As for stuff like Anime and Manga. Anime subscriptions are surprisingly cheap, and so are monthly manga subs if you know where to look. Viz’s Shounen Jump ($3) Vizmanga ($2), Azuki.co ($5), Mangamo (also $5 last I checked)… so long as you only subscribe to one at a time and rotate, you’ll probably never run out, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying it one volume at a time $10 each or whatever.
Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it’s reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can’t. It’s because I can’t buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that’s no longer licensed or available.
'Tis why I’m a data hoarder. Any TV show, movie, album, book, comic, video game (up to the n64 era, I’m not made of money for storage space lol), stand up comedy special, basically anything I’ve ever enjoyed in my life, I got that shit on disk. Anything 100% irreplaceable is backed up, but otherwise it ain’t going anywhere till shit breaks.
Dafuq, man, do whatever illegal activity you want as long as you’re ready to face the consequences… But don’t pretend you’re acting ethically…
I have pirated shit too. Chances they’ll catch me are very low, so I don’t care. I also target corporations, never small businesses. But pretending I’m a saint because I’m “sharing information”? That’s delusional.
At least learn to accept what you are without sugarcoats and coping mechanisms.
It’s only illegal/unethical if you view it from the perspective of capitalism. On most fronts it’s actually ethical. I know it’s difficult to grasp due to heavy advertisement on IP law, but IP barely provides more than it takes away. Shit 3d printing exploded once IP was no longer in effect. Coronavirus vaccine would be available for 3rd countries (Now they pay way more per shot than they should)
Not to mention piracy actually preserves media that is culturally significant. (insert monopoly IP story here) Piracy does seem like a way to protest against a broken system.
Except piracy peaks at the recent releases. That isn’t about media preservation, it’s about seeing the new shit for free.
For some hard to impossible find stuff it can be useful but that’s not what it’s mostly used for.
The media preservation is a side-effect from it, you can’t exactly have it both ways. :) Also seeing new shit for free is not the same as losing profits. People who would pay yet pirate are not the majority. Media is fucking expensive.
I’m not arguing for lost profits, I don’t really care except for the writers and other creatives should get paid. But pirates should just admit that they want shit for free, this holier-than-thou act is annoying and crumbles at the first step. Before arguing for the ethicality maybe come up with a solution or at least disapprove the new media piracy. Because that’s a huge, huge side-effect. More like the effect and media preservation is tacked on positive side effect.
I doubt they do not admit they want and enjoy shit for free.
Before arguing for the ethicality maybe come up with a solution or at least disapprove the new media piracy.
There is no solution I can think of, unless something radical like UBI. Also I can’t disapprove the new media privacy, because I find it more positive than negative. Some people losing money (negative), me not getting beaten up on the street for fun by teenagers because they are bored (positive).
One of the arguments for pirating new media is the demo effect. If you want to play a game, you don’t want to spend money then realize you don’t really enjoy it. Used to be a standard, now demo versions are non existing. Bought a few games after finishing them and enjoying. Same with movies.
If your problem is with getting beaten in the streets you could just wait for it to arrive on the streaming platforms. That’s anyway when the good quality torrents come out. And if for some reason the movies aren’t released in your region, you could always access them through VPN or there are also other solutions.
I don’t really buy the demo effect in this day and age when there’s let’s plays of every game and they’re more accessable than torrenting a game. I’ll admit that some percentage will buy games/movies/media after torrenting so there can be a slight positive effect when it comes to sales. But at the end of the day, people just want to consume everything for free.
The beating up on the streets is a common example in post-soviet countries. Where many children and young adults are fascinated with banditism and wreak havok upon regular people. Being able to play computer games and watch movies changed that part a lot. Pirating here became a cultural norm and there are the laws are not enforced
Demos are making a slight comeback on steam. For some new titles.
So what you’re saying is that people should create content and expect no money in return?
Please explain why content creators, like Hollywood, would create content they can’t monetize.
Software developers should work tirelessly for months to deliver software that they should just give away because fuck capitalism?
You can create content and you can monetize. No one is taking that away. Even FOSS licenses allow it (look up Krita on Microsoft Store as an example). The problem everyone sees is when you take a piece of information as hostage, just to monopolize on it. There are of-course other reasons why people create, not just money. Think about thousands of indie game developers, bands, artists etc. A lot of them are passionate about an idea, hobby and wish to share that with the world. A lot are fame attracted. It’s a pity they are forced to work a shitty job and can’t allow themselves to truly embrace their hobbies.
I know little about hollywood and it’s inner workings, or the scene of indie video creators, so have no argument about it what so ever. Years ago I do remember reading on EU research which showed that music sales and movie sales drop while game sales increase due to pirating. Also I love seeing when pirates encourage to purchase from the creators they enjoy to additionally support them.
If indie creators aren’t creating content for money, they can go ahead and give their work away, nobody is stopping them…
But stealing from people who actually want to monetize on the content they created? Maybe they want to grow their business, maybe a lot of workers depend on that income, maybe the company needed that extra income to avoid closing a branch, maybe they were in debt…
Go ahead and steal, I don’t care. But don’t think highly of yourself for doing so, that’s such bullshit.
If pirating wasn’t illegal a lot of industries would die. So let’s keep it illegal and unethical, so people actually purchase the products that keep these industries alive and thriving.
I came here expecting to get tips on piracy and instead I saw a bunch of people claiming they were doing God’s work. Insane.
No what’s bullshit is you coming to a place about piracy while not believing in the free exchange of media and information. It is unethical to prevent people from doing so not the other way around.
I believe in FOSS because it is voluntary effort. I don’t believe stealing from someone who doesn’t want to give their work for free is ethical.
You’re clearly borderline communist, so I guess there’s nothing I can say to change your mind. You think everyone should work for free for you, it is your born given right to get all their effort freely, even if they don’t want to give it to you for free. Gotcha.
I am libertarian. I believe in the maximum amount of personal freedom possible. You have the right charge for something and I have the right to not pay it. And it’s not stealing it’s copyright infringement. It’s making a copy.
I don’t believe it is ethical to block other people’s happiness behnd a paywall. If you make something that could make the world a better place and then not share it, you are objectively making the world a worse place. How is that morally right?
But stealing from people who actually want to monetize on the content they created? (…appeal to emotion…)
It’s not stealing, it’s copying data my dude. If they want to monetize on software, they can completely. SaaS exists and it’s everywhere. Me downloading a piece of software and running on my machine doesn’t actually cost them anything either. And they are not losing sales, because I would not have bought it otherwise. I dislike being forced to pirate, and would love my fellow friends not being forced to use Photoshop for example just because it’s an industry standard. It’s closed, it’s very limiting, but they can’t use Gimp due to limited collaboration possibility after, so using a pirated piece of software to convert to and from correctly just to work with it seems more than reasonable.
I came here expecting to get tips on piracy and instead I saw a bunch of people claiming they were doing God’s work. Insane.
I know it seems insane, but there are other schools of thought than the dominant capitalism model we live under. Religious communities also seem insane. For bloody sake Kopimism also exists. The problem everyone sees is that your only argument is lost sales (which is valid and correct under capitalism) and there are other points that must be acknowledged. Some may argue, they are more important than what money can measure.
You can say capitalism is not important all you want. The fact is that people need money to feed their families.
If pirating was much more widespread, industries would die and workers would have no jobs. That’s a fact.
The only thing stopping piracy from growing are laws.
Capitalism is important, never said it wasn’t. It actually gamifies our choices as producers, also helps by providing a metric of desires. The fact is people need food and it works well (we will ignore the subsidies on food production) to produce it and distribute it. The taxes works as a great tool to force you into the game. The problem pirates see, is that you can monopolize on a production of a product and ruin the game for all. For example when during a crisis someone starts selling water for 25 dollars a bottle due to being the only available provider at which point that is seen as unethical and stealing as ethical. So with this view people see it ethical, because there are tribalisism reasons why you more or less must have consumed a piece of media in order to fit in.
If pirating wasn’t illegal a lot of industries would die. So let’s keep it illegal and unethical, so people actually purchase the products that keep these industries alive and thriving.
You fail to realize that piracy is what is actually contributing the most behind the scenes. Artists gain more from exposure than to direct purchases of their products. If piracy was illegal many musicians wouldn’t be so famous/well known because not so many people can/are willing to make a purchase in order to discover something. Actually going to concerts and buying merch contributes to musicians much more than buying their songs for $2 on the Apple Store or whatever. Music labels and distributors keep the majority of the revenue anyway.
Also what you actually call “stealing” is actually just sharing digital data. Nobody is taking away anything from anybody. It’s not a physical good with limited availability. The people who pirate digital products wouldn’t be buying it regardless (for whatever reason that might be, it doesn’t matter), essentially it doesn’t make any difference to the creators. The difference between purchasing a game for example and the difference between pirating is the same as the difference between purchasing the game and NOT purchasing the game. Let’s not even get into DRMs where they make the experience worse for paying customers by tanking game performance. Or forcing to always be online to play single player games. The list can go on and on.
Pirating in 2023 is the only ethical way of consuming media. I’m done paying greedy corporations for a ridiculously fragmented entertainment industry where an individual has to subscribe to different services just to watch different seasons of the same show because they somehow decided to remove content I wasn’t done watching. Or renting a movie on Prime Video just to find out I need to purchase a specific device to watch it in HD when my machine is more than capable of playing 4k.
The only way I’d pay for digital content again is if they provide some sort of convenience over piracy. I happily pay for my Spotify subscription because it is actually a good service, at a good price and most importantly it’s convenient! I can listen to whatever song I want from one single subscription using only one app on my phone.
I used to pay for YouTube premium, I downloaded a bunch of videos to watch offline while on a trip where I knew I didn’t have internet access only to find out that in order to watch the videos I downloaded I needed to be online in the past 3 days. So I couldn’t even watch them because of some nonsensical, anti-consumer policies. So I downloaded a third party app that gives me premium features (and more) that allows me to actually watch videos offline.
I came here expecting to get tips on piracy and instead I saw a bunch of people claiming they were doing God’s work. Insane.
You came here looking for tips but you’re getting a reality check instead. I think it’s awesome.
I have pirated games that I would have bought if I didn’t know how to pirate it.
That, right there, counters everything you said. It is stealing because I’m not paying for something I would have payed.
Imagine getting in a concert without paying and saying “it isn’t stealing because there’s free space and the sound is shared”. Is that how you live your life?
No, I’m so sorry, your low quality response doesn’t disprove any of my points. You didn’t even try because you know you can’t.
In your case choosing to pirate = choosing not to buy. If you chose not to buy without pirating it would’ve been the same thing. You were never forced to buy anything, don’t convince yourself otherwise.
Yes. You’re literally using Lemmy which is exactly what you just described. FOSS has used this model forever. Is it so hard to believe that people will make things because they want to, not because of money?
Yes, they can work for free on Lemmy because they have other jobs that are paying them actual money.
And those jobs can pay them actual money because their software is protected by laws that make pirating illegal and unethical.
In your mind FOSS developers had a net income of $0?
For one laws don’t decide what is ethical or not. But for two you can still make money working on FOSS. There are donations and companies like Valve for instance pay for the development of proton and DXVK. Etc.
Yes, and Valve can pay for the development of FOSS software because their main products are protected from piracy by laws.
You see, the money always comes from products people buy… Not from products people share for free.
And people can still pay for the product if they want to. I pirate every game and then buy it if it’s good. You can have free software and still make money these things are not mutually exclusive. You don’t need piracy laws for money to change hands.
How is it delusional?
Digital product are duplicable for free, and we artificially limit that in order grant more money to publisher.
It’s like we could duplicate food for free, jesus-like, and we should say “mh no no, I don’t care if people is dying from hunger, you can’t copy my food without paying”.
And don’t start with the “compensating the creator” argument. It’s a necessity, of course, but there are thousands of ways to do it better than how we are doing today (where basically all the profit goes to publisher and IP owner).
There are a lot of other arguments to make about ethics of Piracy, like the fact that IP owner stop taking care and making available valuable cultural artifacts as soon as they are not profitable anymore (lots of thing would be lost forever without piracy), and the fact that price are set in western standards so that a game or an ebook is like half the monthly averages salary of some countries. The list go on.
Piracy is THE ethical way. The collective benefit are huge, and you can easily compensate for the individual loss (e.g. making donation and direct purchase for small creators in order to support them anyway).
OK, so tell me what is the incentive for a large software company to hire hundreds of workers if they release software that will be sold once and copied infinetly?
Do you realize that the only reason people actually pay for said software is because pirating is illegal? If pirating was legal, nobody would pay, and companies would have no incentives to hire workers.
My brother in Christ, you really really live in an ideal bubble. That’s not how reality works, you know? People need to get paid for their work, otherwise they won’t work.
If they don’t work, there’s no content for you to pirate. So yeah, pirating needs to remain illegal and it is stealing, which is a crime, otherwise nothing would make sense.
The fact that you can’t imagine any way to compensate workers does not mean it’s not possible.
Look at the FOSS ecosystem (wich btw is the foundation of every private profitable piece of software). Donation and collective foundation can absolutely sustain and promote the creation of both software and cultural artefact. For god sakes, you are writing your comment on a free self-mantained instance of a social network that is running on a free open source software based on a free an publicly available comunication standard.
Do you think people are donating enough money to sustain the families of the instance admins? They obviously have jobs and Lemmy is a hobby or a project for them. They aren’t depending on Lemmy for a living.
That can happen sometimes but expecting the world to work around donations for every piece of software, music or literature is just too naive.
Some instance admins have said that they need to create a monetization strategy because depending on donations isn’t reliable.
I mean, what’s the point of arguing if you have yet decided things cannot be different than how they are now?
There are tons of example of free open source software made by regular employer as a full time job. Tons of example of artist (writers, actors, filmmakers, game developer) that share all their works for free and rely on donations, patreons or other kind of strategy to sustain themselves while keeping access to their art free for everyone.
It’s definitely possible, and it would be incredibly better if whole industries would shift to this and more people would shift from paying/services to other methods of contributing (accordingly to their availability).
Why do you think it can’t be made? What we are going to loose? Million dollars budget movies/videogames? Million dollars marketing campaign? I don’t see how is it a bad things.
Yes, exactly, you would lose the interest of high quality producers and artists that don’t think donations are enough or reliable. Why can’t people put a price on the shit they created? Just because you don’t like the way the system works doesn’t give you the right to dismiss its rules. Imagine if someone violated your fundamental rights because they don’t agree with them in their personal world view.
They created that content BECAUSE they wanted to sell it. If there wasn’t an incentive to sell, they wouldn’t have created it, depriving people of the content anyways.
Keep pirating, I don’t care, but don’t pretend you’re not harming the producers of the content or the industries that feed millions of people. You’re probably also harming legal consumers because companies factor in the losses of piracy and increase prices to match their target revenue.
Agree to disagree
This completely ignores the whole world of FOSS
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You are right, albeit a little rude, but that’s not the point of this debate. Piracy is a necessary “evil” to either get paywalled digital products or to preserve and archive deprecated media.
Wether society deems it immoral and illegal or not is irrelevant. The keypoint in piracy is to operate and remain in the shadows to minimize awareness and action taken against us.
To publicly glorify it is counterintuitive. The people that do so are compromising us all. The best course of action to take for piracy is to do nothing. Nothing that further alerts other adversaries to take action against us.
Sail in the night.
Yes, exactly, piracy is fine as long as it isn’t widespread. But these wackos are saying that everything should be free because copying isn’t stealing.
A little piracy? Nobody cares. A lot of piracy? No good, industries collapse.
It is immoral because it is stealing, even if they can take the loss, it is still stealing. Stealing is wrong in most cases.
Exactly. Some people are a little ignorant, and that’s completely fine and understandable. Humans aren’t all the same. Some like to educate themselves about a certain topic, while others learn something else.
That is perfectly okay. We should ultimately respect everyone’s opinions (Only reasonable opinions based on their current level of knowledge) because it’s not in everyone’s interest to know everything about, say, pirating.
Some like to glorify it and publicy fight for it, because they don’t know any better or are just like that.
Furthermore, you and I know that the vast majority of us, pirates, sails discreetly. Most know that for the system to remain easily pirate-able, it’s prudent to do so hidden in the shadows.
The key is to blend in with the crowd. You are just one ordinary person among many. You don’t draw attention to yourself.
“That’s the [Pirate Sailor] way to learn.”
- Master Roshi
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The people who hired hundreds of workers to develop that media. The workers that depend on that business to be productive in order for their jobs to be on demand. The families of those workers that need money to buy food and pay rent.
Are pirates wearing two eye patches now, are they blind and can’t see how the world operates?
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It’s not my fault you didn’t understand my very clear point. You can read it again if you want.
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I just told you… They may get the money for the job, but if the industry they work on isn’t generating any profits because everyone is sharing the content, then the industry dies and so does the demand for these specialized workers.
Is that too hard to process?
The reason why those industries aren’t dead is precisely because pirating is illegal and a criminal activity which makes most average consumers want to get the products legally.
If those industries die that’s great. The only ones left will be the people who actually want to be there rather than the ones who are only after money.
We have a really easy example. I want the social media industry to die so here I am on Lemmy. If Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and so on die that is a positive. Then the only thing left will be the free and open fediverse run by volunteers.
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Yeah, wow, is this sub satire? These ridiculously superficial arguments shouldn’t convince anyone past a teenager who is stoned out of their mind.
It’s like communisn had sex with piracy and a bunch of people with messiah complex were born.
I want my good ol’ piracy back, in which we all knew we were criminals downloading shit because we didn’t want to pay, I could use that money to buy a burger or something.
You’re just mad with that fact that other people might have different reasons to pirate content other than just being a cheapskate lol
Some people also believe the earth is flat, which is at a similar level of objective thinking.
IMO it’s healthier for people to be honest with themselves and embrace the morally grey vs theories that apply only in a vacuum where their actions have zero consequence or chance of negatively affecting someone else.
I don’t know why people even feel the need to justify themselves here where anonymity is a thing.
I just don’t find it constructive to assume everyone does something for the same reason, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to me, that as well as defeating the point of any conventional structure.
People do nearly everything in self interest. They want something and they try to get it. There may be some secondary justification, but it boils down to that.
Piracy is absolutely self interest, nobody is arguing against it. Pirates have the choice not to purchase and leave it at that.
