Right, I agree with that, but "because if you copy something, you don't take it away from its owner" is a valid reason, and completely unrelated to the fact that buying isn't owning. Even if buying WAS owning in all situations, your comment would still be true. That's my point, the analogy in the meme is useless, and arguments like yours should be the main talking point.
Alk
joined 2 years ago
Exactly. This has always been a problem to some extent, but back then no company ever revoked that license or even cared what people did with it unless they sold pirated copies. So it wasn't a problem for us either.
I fully agree with the general message, but this particular anecdote doesn't really make sense to me and can easily be waved off by anyone who disagrees with it.
If buying isn't owning, that means it's renting or borrowing.
If you pirate it, they get no money and therefore cannot rent it out to you. You cannot just steal a movie from the movie rental store or a car from a car rental place. That's stealing.
Sure, it's infinitely reproducible but that's not what this meme says. That's an unrelated argument for piracy. It draws a direct connection between the 2 relationships of buying + owning and pirating + stealing. However, one has nothing to do with the other.
When someone owns something, they are allowed to rent it out and take it back at any time. It's always been that way and that's valid.
The real argument should be "if there was no intention to buy in the first place, then piracy isn't stealing" or something like that.
Let me rephrase. I agree that piracy isn't stealing, but the fact that buying isn't owning does NOT prove that at all, nor does it have anything to do with it. It's a reason people pirate, sure, but it in no way proves that piracy isn't stealing. The phrase is an if;then statement. If one thing is true, it MEANS the other is true, which just isn't the case. Both can be true sure, but proving the first half does not prove the second half. Making one true does not instantly make the other true.
This will not make anyone at ubisoft mad. In fact, they will be glad that such a poorly crafted argument is being used against them, since it's 0 effort to disprove and dismiss it. We should raise other arguments that are logically sound if we want to convince anyone - friends, family, lawmakers - of anything.
Am I completely missing the point or is this analogy completely nonsensical?
On a side note, I condone piracy and nobody should ever give money to large media corporations. But if we use stupid arguments like this it makes us easier to dismiss.
Edit: I'm looking for discussion here. If you're going to downvote me, at least tell me why you think my argument is wrong. I'm here to learn.
I can't believe monogatari isn't even on here. What?
When people without computers were let loose onto the web.
I recommend https://njal.la/ for a privacy respecting domain name provider. It was established by The Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde.
I like to think that he forgets, keeps trying and then makes a new post about it
I can see that, that's a good point. However, it's so easy to misconstrue that phrase into an objective statement of "the relationship between buying and owning directly creates the relationship between piracy and stealing" and the average person, lawmaker, etc can easily get confused when the "ones who own all the content" try to disprove that statement even though it's not the statement we're trying to make.
What is literally said in the meme is incorrect, even if it means something completely different. We need to say what we mean, not make a catchy analogy that's technically incorrect and easily used against us.