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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)
Well, they do. It’s when humans and lawyers get Involved that things become unjust and unbalanced. The law itself is quite clear, otherwise.
I think that’s their point, that they don’t get equal treatment under the law.
If a lawyer can twist it around, then we never really had the same protections.
Frankly this catch phrase never made any sense to me, from a logical point of view.
It assumes that:
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If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
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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?The digital area is something I haven’t looked much into so I can’t really comment on that but I know regarding physical media the relevant US laws only really make exceptions for things you’ve done yourself. Just because you own a physical copy of Pokemon Yellow doesn’t mean you’re allowed to download a copy of it from off the Internet. You’re allowed to make and use a backup from a physical cart you own. This is why emulators can’t (legally) include ROMs, ISOs, BIOS files, encryption keys, etc. as those are the copyrighted materials that you’ll need to make a copy of yourself to legally use emulators.
To my knowledge (not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) what you did is indeed piracy because you downloaded it. If you had cracked it yourself you probably would have broken some licenses and whatnot that you had agreed to with EA, but I don’t believe that would have been piracy.
Either way EA is very much unlikely to do much anything about it as for the most part the industry only cares about the sources of pirated materials. They generally only ever go after people distributing pirated materials so they’ll (legally) attack torrent sites, ROM sites, and other such distributers. The most you’re likely to ever get personally is a strongly worded letter (possibly a C&D) to your ISP from some AAA video game company if they notice you seeding a torrent for their game as then you’re being a distributer of pirated materials.
Outside of that I’ve never heard of them coming after anyone for having the entire collection of GBA titles on their thumb drive or emulating Halo having never owned an Xbox or playing the latest Sim City without always online functionality. I’m not saying it can’t or won’t happen, but you’d make headlines if it did.
Yeah. I’m sure it’s not entirely legal. I don’t think anyone would want to bring a lawsuit because it could set a precedent.
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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!=?It’s a shorthand way of writing ≠ digitally without needing to know the alt code or where it is in your mobile devices keyboard
Yeah in programming we just use
!=:!: NOT=: EQUALIt is not a composite expression but a single expression made up from 2 letters. And this is not a widespread notation.
!= 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.
Yeah =/= is honestly a little confusing. I know
!=isn’t universal though, gotta start making sure to use≠insteadYou’re definite not wrong, I actually went to use “!=” first. But then thought if someone wasn’t familiar with programming they might not get it, so I went with the “=/=” hoping it would make sense to more people. Forgot that we’re on lemmy and the audience here would generally understand lol. Didn’t know ≠ existed though, will probably use that from now on. Nice!
I like this! Would I be able to bother you to post this to https://lemmy.ca/c/actual_discussion
I feel it would be a really worthwhile topic to dig into and you’ve articulated it well!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
This isn’t the point being made, and I think why you think it’s illogical
Theft requires you deprive someone of an item, not that you get something without buying it. If your definition of theft were accurate then getting a free game would be piracy, which is silly
UNLESS - we examine what “stealing” is
Theft of a persons property without intent to return. Legally piracy and theft are different, not just semantically. There’s no discussion to be had about what stealing is as it’s not what’s happening
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Piracy technically isn’t stealing, it’s intellectual property reproduction license violation. Clever bastards those lawyers. You basically don’t purchase the music, you purchase the right to reproduce it for non-commercial purposes.
Exactly. If I stole an item that belongs to you, I’m denying you the possession of that item, and you’ll either have to acquire another one, steal it back, or just not have it at all. When someone commits an act of digital piracy, they aren’t denying anyone the possession of it, therefore it isn’t the same as stealing.
Calling it theft is, in my opinion, emotionally manipulative and prevents any serious discussion on the ethics of piracy.
Even the word piracy is a bit suspicious to me; original pirates robbed ships in international waters and were considered enemies of mankind, so calling a much lesser act piracy sounds very manipulative… I wonder where the word piracy was first used to describe copyright violations, can’t seem to find anything about it.
Piracy was used as far back as the 1700s to refer to illegal copies of books or unauthorized publishing outside of publishing monopolies. In general, I get the feel of breaking monopolies, turning to less savory methods to get what is owed, and liberating goods from the hands of wealthy hoarders.
For a while, the U.S. publishing industry was based on pirating British books, many of which were previously pirated from France. The only significant difference between the usages is the freeing of information vs keeping goods for oneself.
That’s interesting and informative, thank you.
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!”
You can pare this down significantly. Piracy isn’t theft. They are different things.
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.
Imagine YouTube reposts stealing merger ad revenue but it’s your main revenue instead.
That’s definitely a hard problem we’d have to solve.
“What we need are stronger copyright laws.”
- Disney lawyers, probably
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.
Eight hours later, and no one disagreed.
I think you might be on to something
🤔
You don’t need special digital scam money to do this. You can just go buy the thing directly from the creator/the creator’s agent. If the creator wanted to go through the trouble of self-publishing, they’d have just done that.
If buying isn’t owning,
Then it’s time to get communism
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.
“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.
Yes.
The concept you bring up applied before the digital world took off as well.
For those of us who were around when the whole “YoU WoULdN’t StEaL a CaR!” argument against piracy was being made, it was a false equivalency when it came to ownership back then too.
Copying a song off the radio onto a tape cassette was not the same as breaking into a car, hot-wiring it, and driving off in it. Someone copying a song from the radio onto a cassette was not preventing others from listening to it.
Yes. This is not about theft. It’s about intellectual property rights and royalties via cloning a non-physical creation. They just masquerade it as theft because it helps their argument. It’s disingenuous of them.
This must be why blockbuster failed, people just grabbed whatever and left saying it’s not stealing because blockbuster lets them rent it
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Stealing a rental car is still car theft.
Bad comparison.
It’s more like buying a car, driving it for two years, then the manufacturer decides they no longer want to support the car so it auto drives off in the middle of the night
No you can’t have a refund
Don’t even need the auto drive off aspect.
A better comparison is where the car will no longer start no matter what you do to it. But you own the body/frame.
But like if someone stole it in those two years it would still be theft.
It’s a perfect comparison, it’s just not proving what you think it’s trying to prove. It’s proving that the If/Then statement is wrong and makes no sense if you think about it. It’s not proving that piracy is theft.
Piracy isn’t theft, but this isn’t why.
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.
Fuck yeah I would download a car
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.
They sure are!
No one expects to be the owner of a rented car. That why people ask “are you the home owner or a renter?”
Do you go to a car store and pay full price to have the car in your car library indefinitely before having the dealer come say “sike, we’re taking that back”?
Ignoring all options to actually buy something to pirate something because you also find offers were you can rent it is just a capitalist mindset. Denying workers money because you want stuff as cheap as possible.
I’m sorry, but did I lay off a thousand people despite record profits?
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?
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Were you under the impression that Amazon was going to assign you the copyright to the song or movie that you purchased? No? Then you understood that you were buying a license and you’re just playing pretend about the confusion.
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.
Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahaha.
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.
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.
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?
That is a false equivalence, and I think you know that.
Feel free to point out where because thats exactly what people mean by the phrase in the post.
Comparing slavery to purchasing digital media might be a good place to start.
Its unimportant which example you use.
The underlying principle is legal ≠ correct. Just because something is legal, its not necessarily morally or otherwise correct.
Selling a movie to someone and calling it a license is highly manipulative and I think you know that.
Yes, I said from the start that it might not be moral.
But that’s exactly the point: companies sell movies to theaters, and then those theaters sell tickets to each viewer. That’s the license they each agreed to. A theater buying a movie off Amazon and then selling tickets to everyone who watched it would probably make some people upset, and would very clearly be illegal.
Talk about mental gymnastics.
You cant sell a limited time license. That is rent, plain and simple. If you pay 3 years rent at once or monthly, its still rent.
If you pay for something and have to give it back, you dont actually become the „owner“.
And thats why people say if buying isnt owning, piracy isnt theft, plain and simple.
An unfunny meme - ah - the OP is German. Nevermind. Do carry on.
It’s not like memes have to be funny.
BRB in my to keep a rental car without paying.
“Piracy isn’t stealing? Does that mean stealing also isn’t stealing? Checkmate!”
I’m not owning the car after payment. And I have to follow criteria when using the car.
So why is that not ok?
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Possessing a physical object is different from digital media. You aren’t copying a car, your possession of it prevents someone else from possessing it.
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Renting a physical object does not mean the option to purchase the physical object and own it does not exist. Nobody was upset with the existence of video rental stores because they also had the option to buy and own the videos. If you purchased a movie from Walmart, Walmart didn’t come to your house and take the DVD away once they stopped stocking it.
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1 and 2 are obvious, so you’re either an idiot and not worth trying to explain every simple concept to, or entirely disingenuous. Either way if you’re going to continue to JAQ off then it’s a waste of time to continue responding.
“if buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing”
I’m still confused how this only applies to digital media. In both cases I am agreeing to terms of services.
You don’t see how “piracy” only refers to digital media? What do you think “piracy” is?
What you seem to are saying is that specifically and exclusively people who work on software, music and digital art should give away their labour for free.
Strawman. What I am saying is when I purchase software, music and digital art, I should own my copy of it and be able to freely use and enjoy it until the end of time. Not until the place I “purchased” it from no longer sells it.
Well, whenever I rent a car, I am agreeing to a rental agreement that outlines the terms. Length of time, extremely fees, and the cost of renting.
If I buy digital media through an online storefront. I am also agreeing to terms. Which in certain cases will see me buying a licence to the media rather than a copy of it.
What I am confused about is how it is fine to steal digital media but not physical items.
I am agreeing to a rental agreement that outlines the terms. "Length of time*, extremely fees, and the cost of renting.
So you don’t see the difference between a specifically defined length of time/conditions on when it will be returned vs “We’ll take the car back at any time without warning while outwardly presenting it as you purchasing the car outright.”
What I am confused about is how it is fine to steal digital media but not physical items.
Because again you don’t understand simple language and think JAQing off is a more appropriate way to get answers than doing a simple search on your own.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_is_theft
Courts have distinguished between copyright infringement and theft.
Lawmakers and people smarter than you have already established there is a difference between piracy and stealing. Your insistence on calling them the same thing is as intelligent as saying “Why can I shoot people in digital media, but when I shoot people from my car it’s illegal? What’s the difference?”
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