this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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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.
Huh. Never quite looked at it that way, but you are right. I can see how physical book is a form of a license to read a literary work. It is however naturally impossible to revoke. It would be the same if digital content had no DRM - which is generally not the case.
So I guess DRM and you not being able to download and use content outside the company's ecosystem is the real issue here.
You can buy those movies on physical medium though.
Yes, scams exist. I never claimed that things like your hypothetical situation would be moral, or should be tolerated.
Yet you think the shit corpos are doing isnt just scamming you out of your money?
It's got nothing to do with copyright. It's about ownership of a copy. You buy a CD, you own it. You "buy" digital media, it can get taken away from you. That should not be permissable. Yes, I know it's legal, but it shouldn't be, and in a just society, it wouldn't be.
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Bro is just incredible how there is people defending this multibillions dollars companies. The studios don't care about the author or the creator. They don't care about the actresses or the singers. They don't care about you as the consumer of this media. They only care about PROFIT.
Sources :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hollywood_labor_disputes
https://apnews.com/article/actors-strike-ends-hollywood-5769ab584bca99fe708c67d00d2ec241
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/17/business/hollywood-actors-sag-aftra-strike-by-the-numbers/index.html
As you can see these executives are not compensating the actors , the writers. The actual creators of these movies and series you said " wE sHoUldN't pIrAtE" are not even getting their good deal and let's not talk about the music industry which is the same or worst situation for the creators.
I don't see how piracy hurts anyone.
Some pirates just want a free demo before they buy it, others pirate stuff they already bought for convenience reasons, or decide to pay for a license if they like it and want to support the creators, and the third type of pirate never would've bought anything to begin with, so no lost sales in any conceivable way.
So it doesn't hurt the content creator because a minority of pirates actually compensate them for their work?
If piracy didn't exist at all the "never would've bought it" people wouldn't have a choice but to compensate the content creators in order to enjoy their work. They probably wouldn't buy all the content that they consume at the moment and would instead be playing less games or watching less movies, but they would still be doing something with their free time and money and it would profit others (and potentially themselves).
Those are valid points, I agree.
I think we have to get to the bottom of why people pirate things. Some just don't give a fuck and want everything for free, even though they could afford it. Being pissed at those people as a content creator is perfectly understandable, everyone should be fairly compensated for their work.
It's just that when companies do their best to make being a legitimate buyer an objectively bad experience, that's a point where I'm not opposed to piracy at all. Adobe comes to mind. Fuck those guys, they just ruin everything.
But if we look at video games, Steam has become so nice over the years that many people rather buy there than to pirate, which says a lot.
What's funny about that is that people don't own anything they buy on Steam either. Valve can turn around and ban your account for no reason and you'll have no recourse against them. They have complete control over the distribution of content through their platform, not the users. They (and probably the publishers as well) can decide to remove a game from their servers completely and it will be just too bad for you if you purchased it.
Yeah, you don't own anything you buy there.
(Well, some games on Steam are in fact completely DRM-free, but that's another story)
The main difference is that Steam is overall so much more customer friendly than say Ubisoft or EA, to the point these other stores realized they can't miss out on the sales they get by distributing their games there.
Steam offers a lot more features and ways to deal with your games. For example, once you're logged in, you can still access your games even when offline, which other launchers don't allow you to do. Infuriating when the internet is down and you thought you could still play one of your singleplayer titles.
And they even go so far as to still provide games that were taken down to those who bought them before, which I don't think any other platform does.
But in the context of the current conversation, Steam is no better than any other option that isn't DRM free (there are DRM free games on Steam but you can't download the installer itself, you download the game through Steam and then can copy the install folder elsewhere as backup).
Yeah, I was just trying to say that maybe piracy would be less of a problem if customers were actually respected
Do you know any platform that only offers digital stuff that's not buyable in a "good" way? Because I don't. That pirates pretend to ride some moral high horse is a cope that's incredibly disrespectful towards creators.
I feel in online communities like the Fediverse there is an active community of people who do not respect work of people who aren't working in tech or science. Or maybe it's predominantly a disrespect for creatives? I see this in discussions about AI image generators as well. And it's basically the same set of arguments that try to suggest artist should work for free.
They just have to add "get a real job and do your hobbies in your free time" and we have full circled back into the boomer mindset.
I'm gonna draw a hard line though, one between individual creators who do honest and fair work, and big corporations that exploit anyone who wants or needs to aquire their products legitimately.
Because legal or not, what some companies are doing is just completely fucked. Again, Adobe.
Yes, there's a million reasons to rationalize piracy to yourself.
I think it's fair to say that, at least occasionally, one of those reasons isn't true and it hurts the creator.
It's just my impression of things based on what I've seen, but if that's objectively wrong, I want to learn why
And on the general topic of rationalizing piracy:
Don't get me wrong here, it is within the sellers rights to impose rules and restrictions about how the product is to be used. That's not a bad thing per se.
But some of these restrictions are just stupid, and only hurt legitimate customers.
Sure, take me for example: I've pirated movies which I very well could have paid for, but just didn't want to.
Yes, I agree that sellers can impose those restrictions. Yes, I agree that those restrictions can hurt legitimate customers.