The media companies have done an end run around the very foundation of how computers work in an attempt to keep from changing their 20th century business model.
All digital data is a copy. It's fundamental to how computers work. That is terribly inconvenient for a business model that prefers to sell physical objects, but as computer science doesn't allow for that, they instead chose to reframe the issue in moral terms ("You wouldn't download a car!") and use tremendous lobbying power to force that view into law.
Reasonable people can argue about creators being paid for their work and how digital distribution plays into that, but don't try to take modern technology/physical reality and impose your more convenient business model on it and on everyone else.
People going to prison for copying movies is disgusting and immoral.
I'm an app developer. I implemented all of the tricks I know to make it as difficult as it gets for the paid versions of my apps to be pirated. And I also try to detect if the user is using adblockers to make so that they can't use my free apps without seeing the ads. But I'm not at all against the user being able to bypass my security measures. Nobody is stealing from me by not GIVING ME MONEY THEY OTHERWISE WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN ME. I'm not entitled to anything. If someone has the knowledge to bypass my security tricks, good on him. He have one less bill to pay. I grew up very poor, and I still live on a 3rd world country. I do not remember to have paid for any software in my life, so I won't be a hypocrite. To compare making a copy of an intangible thing to stealing something "real", like a cookie from someone elses jar is absurd. If 10 million people make 100 million copies of one of my apps, I'm not being robbed of anything. If one guy takes for himself an Iphone I bought yesterday, he is in fact robbing me of my resources. Not earning possible hypothetical future income does not equate to stealing realized gains of the past. Copyright law as it stands today is an incongruent reliq of a time when technology did not allow for things to have no associated costs of reproduction.
These aren't new arguments, really... but when I steal a cookie from the cookie jar, there's one less cookie in the cookie jar. When I steal a movie on a torrent site, the copyright owner didn't lose a copy of the movie.
One can argue that it represents an economic loss insofar as the person who stole it isn't going to buy a copy now, but a response you often hear to that is relatively few who pirate content would have paid for the content if piracy were unavailable.
What if you sneak into a movie theater to sit in a near-empty auditorium for a 2pm Tuesday matinee. Nobody has "lost" anything, as in your cookie jar example. Does that make it OK?
I have actually long-wondered how theaters would fare if they pro-rated seats based on demand. Charging just a dollar or two for a Tuesday matinee seat otherwise expected to be empty would certainly drive ticket sales, and with them concession sales. What does the theater have to lose?
Totally agree that matinee prices are not low enough to match demand. I defended the MoviePass business model vigorously, see my comment history. (with that said, they do have to reimburse studios for each ticket sold, so the theater doesn't have full discretion)
But that's totally irrelevant to this conversation. If the theater is charging $5, or $2, you still can't just sneak in the back door without paying.
I hope that you would agree that if you sneak into a movie theater to sit in a near-empty auditorium for a 2pm Tuesday matinee, then it's something very, very different from theft?
Like, people can argue if it's as bad as theft or not as bad than theft (I would definitely argue that it's substantially less bad than theft, but I know that some people would disagree), but no matter what, such an action is not theft, it's something else.
> Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing?
People have said it better than me, but in short: Disney and friends have legally stolen public domain from all of us and erected a barrier between us and our human right to access to our culture. I therefore consider it my moral right to take back what should be mine - I may not have the means to buy the laws that would make it legal, but I have the technical means to do it and therefore I do.
So yes, I consider it the right thing to do. Civil disobedience, if you will.
I do listen to music, and lots of it. I have a YouTube Red subscription (or whatever Google has decided to rename it this week), mostly for supporting small creators on Youtube (when they don't have a Patreon / I don't watch enough of their stuff to fit them in on Patreon). So basically all music from major labels I listen to, I do through Youtube (or Youtube Music, when I remember to open the right app up). But that's a small fraction of my listening habits.
Mostly I like stuff from small, independent artists - a lot of which I've discovered through Youtube, and a lot of those Youtube videos were probably copyright infringement (unauthorized uploads). If I listen to something more than a few times, I buy it on Bandcamp- last month I spent over $100 on Bandcamp purchases.
For creators I really love, as mentioned earlier, I fund them directly on Patreon. This adds up to over another $100/month.
If I dropped the YouTube Red subscription - which is, due to their comically low revenue share, practically indistinguishable from piracy for artists in economic terms - I don't think I'd be in a meaningfully different position, ethically, if I chose to continue consuming music from major labels without a license.
On the other hand, if I stopped buying things on Bandcamp and instead listened to music from small artists through YouTube Red, I'd feel awful, and I'd consider that to be rather unethical, even though I'd have a license.
You called it "taking something you know you're not supposed to take", and the thread has been responding to the "taking something" part alone.
Whether or not I believe it's the right thing to do seems like it'd depend on how much respect I have for copyright law, and whether any harm it causes is sufficiently abhorrent to me according to my personal ethics.
The economic argument is part of assessing the harm it causes.
You're absolutely right- this is an ethical issue. Perhaps it's a moral imperative to not pay massive conglomerates for a "license" to view content, or perhaps it's just a good idea to not support the privatization of culture. Personally, I won't judge you if you decide to pay off Disney to stay out of legal trouble, but...you know you're doing something wrong, right? Same if you're supporting Spotify's exploitative business model, even if you try to justify it by pointing at the scraps actual artists get.
Oh, you mean you're trying to say unauthorized copying is unethical? Oh, darn it, scratch that. Sorry!
If you weren't going to buy it anyway, yes it's absolutely the right thing to do. Your utility increases, nobody elses decreases. Total utility increases therefore it is ethical.
Even if we could agree on what constitutes fairness wherein exactly lies the utility value of fairness?
Scenario A) 5000 people paid and enjoyed it
Scenario B) 4500 people paid and enjoyed it 50000 people enjoyed it without paying.
We can pretend that the percentage lost is equally taken from all people that participated in the production but it beggars belief to imagine bobby the grip got paid less because you pirated Indiana Jones. The reality is that the funds earned from the creative efforts aren't divided like friends sharing a Pizza gains and losses overwhelmingly hit the pockets of those whose interests in the matter are directorial or financial.
Ultimately creative work already enjoy such a ridiculously slanted treatment with insane punishments, public resources invested in policing, and terms that perfect enforcement would yield such a very small increase in utility for companies focused on creative work and much less for those actually engaged in it that it isn't worth the decrease in utility gained by more free distribution of creative works.
Fuck fairness if it results in a net negative utility for society I'm not interested in promoting a schoolyard notion of fairness at the expense of society.
>Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing? Is this something you feel you have the right to do?
Some philosophers (like Max Stirner) would argue that not only are those questions irrelevant, but that their whole basis (morality and right) are categories which become real and exert their influence only due to our own reification of them. That is to say, to someone unconvinced of morality (and in particular what other people say about morality), and further unconvinced by the legitimacy of the state and its opposition to the individual, the questions would be laughable if only it weren't so tragic that to many they extert their control over us and we let them.
I like that. I saw a cookie jar and I took one. I didn't bake them myself, and it's not my fault they stole your recipe and gave the cookies away for free.
Heh, your example completely skips the fact that someone went out and bought the ingredients, bought an oven, spent the time to prepare the dough, spent money on the electricity to bake the dough, spent the time to take it from the oven, bought a jar, put the artwork on the jar, rented a café, and finally placed the jar with the cookies on the display.
So.... the smartass "just took a cookie" the hard worker just spent time and money for everything else ;)
I don't understand how all the people here, who all want to be the next Bill Gates and make a ton of money selling software, services, or Juiceros, think it's "ok" to steal content. (The same content that they probably deny they watch because it's not hip enough.)
Thinking about your comment is bringing up a number of interesting threads of thought.
Bill Gates made a ton of money and wasn't necessarily following either law or moral guidelines to do so.
The success enjoyed by Bill Gates was hard earned. Success is a destination at the end of a journey that is too hard for a lot of people.
Bill Gates' software is some of the most pirated software ever.
Bill Gates is one of the richest people ever.
Can anyone become anywhere near that scale of rich without being morally or ethically bankrupt?
What crime 'piracy' in comparison to the business practices of the highly successful / profitable / rich?
I don't know the answer to those questions, and I don't pass judgement as it's subjective, but they're the places my mind went in relation to your comment.
Stealing has a specific meaning. It is nonsensical to describe failure to follow copyright law stealing. Nobody calls exceeding the speed limit stealing velocity nor jaywalking "stealing the street".
Rich people convinced other rich people that it would be a good idea to let rich people decide which bits I'm allowed to transmit to you in order to maximize the revenue of people who for the most part are in the business of licensing creative work not actually doing it.
With zero chances of influencing the law on this or most other issues I can either choose to be a slave to it or not.
Only slaves and cowards obey their masters even when they aren't being watched.
I jaywalk too when its safe to do so. "Find me in New York for this quarter!"
I am a tv producer. Stealing is if I invest years of blood, sweat, and capital into a project with the paradigm that in a free market exchange you can pay in some form to view it or not and happily find some alternative way to enjoy your time. Nobody is forcing you to watch what I make and you won’t die if you don’t watch it.
The creators like myself you valorize don’t exist in a vacuum. If distributors who finance the projects upfront with risk capital don’t get paid then there is nobody to pay me for making content and thus content does not get made. Financing the speculative production of a movie or tv series is inherently high risk.
Let me flip the script a little michaelmrose. What do you do for your money and why should you not have to do it for me for free?
>you can pay in some form to view it or not and happily find some alternative way to enjoy your time. Nobody is forcing you to watch what I make and you won’t die if you don’t watch it.
That's kind of the point. Whether I pirate your work and watch it or I watch paint dry for an hour doesn't affect your bottom line, because you weren't going to get my money either way.
TV budgets are higher than ever even while piracy is easier than ever before. The only thing that could possibly kill tv would be jacking up the costs enough to keep users from enjoying them legally. I myself pay for hulu and netflix and I figure that contributes sufficiently to the shows I enjoy.
It really doesn't matter what I do. My employment is an arrangement for services rendered same as yours. At the absurd limit where nobody paid for anything and absolutely everyone pirated everything nobody would be forcing you to work for free. Your employer in that scenario would have totally and wholly failed to secure an arrangement with customers to voluntarily transfer their money to your employers pockets and thus justify their existence. You wouldn't work for free you would just do something else.
In reality if its really easy to pay and even mildly frustrating to pirate it seems like a reasonable balance of paying customers and freeloaders is apt to make you all healthy and wealthy.
1a : the act of stealing specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
Much like violating copyright isn't similar in nature to commandeering ships on the high seas its not much similar to the taking of real property in that the owner isn't deprived of anything and in fact is wholly unaffected and absent from the transaction.
Actual property is the necessary resolution of the inherently rivalrous nature of property while Copyright is mandate that I limit what data I transmit to another party so as to avoid transmitting any patterns of bits that could reasonably be argued to be owned by any entity on the premise that this limitation will create an intangible good that can serve as an incentive to encourage creators to trade in it.
If congress contrary to the rest of our interests grants you sole ownership of the color red I wont be a thief if I opt to paint my house that color.
Really this is a tired subject having been debated endlessly since the 70s. Anyone still using it is apt to have staked out their position and decided they care more about the emotional import of the word thief than reasoned argument.
Bill Gates is your example? One of the worst examples you could have chosen, because he both engaged in piracy and was one of the top "victims" of piracy all the while he was becoming the richest man in the country.
