Comment by achierius
6 months ago
Can you explain why? What makes them categorically different or at the very least why is "piracy" quantitatively worse than 'just' copyright violation?
6 months ago
Can you explain why? What makes them categorically different or at the very least why is "piracy" quantitatively worse than 'just' copyright violation?
Piracy is theft - you have taken something and deprived the original owner of it.
Copyright infringement is unauthorized reproduction - you have made a copy of something, but you have not deprived the original owner of it. At most, you denied them revenue although generally less than the offended party claims, since not all instances of copying would have otherwise resulted in a sale.
Yes, and the struggle with this back in the day was the *IAA and related organizations wanted to equate infringement with theft.
And to be clear, we javelin the word infringement precisely because it is not theft.
In addition to the deprived revenue, piracy also improves on the general relevance the author has or may have in the public sphere. Essentially, one of the side effects of piracy is basically advertising.
Doctorow was one of the early ones to bring this aspect of it up.
I have about the same concept of piracy these days.
Real piracy always involves booty.
Naturally booty is wealth that has been hoarded.
Has nothing to do with wealth that may or may not come in the future, regardless of whether any losses due to piracy have taken place already or not.
Asked unironically: "What's worse, hijacking ships at sea and holding their crews hostage for ransom on threat of death, or downloading a song off the internet?" ...
The simplest way to put I can think of is a silly set of two hypotheticals.
Imagine mer-people or aliens existed and started armed raiding marine shipping. That would be would be a hostile act of war. Declaring war on the mer-people would be a shame but justifiable in self-defense.
Imagine instead they were decrypting communications and using it to decipher and view our content. The other would basically be acceptable as part of a first contact protocol and exploration as it involves trying to figure out the basics of communication protocols of an 'alien' species. Declaring war on them in response would be a vastly disproportionate act of aggression for violating laws that they had no way of knowing they were subject to and literally could not possibly know.
Maybe the most memorable version of the response is this the "Copying is not Theft" song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
Saying that piracy isn't copyright violation is an RMS talking point. It's not worth trying to ask why because the answer will be RMS said so and will not be backed by the common usage of the word.
You legitimately have it completely backwards. The word "piracy" was coopted to put a more severe spin on copyright violation. As a result, it became "the common usage of the word". But that was by design. And it's worth pushing back on.
Sweden has a political party called "The Pirate Party"(1), and "The Pirate Bay" is Swedish so I think a couple of Swedes memeing before it was cool has a significant impact on making the name stick but also taking the seriousness out of it.
1: https://piratpartiet.se/en/
I don't have it backwards. Language evolved, and piracy got a new definition. It's even in the dictionary. Trying to redefine words like this is futile and avoiding certain words or replacing them with others is a quirk that RMS has.
> RMS
Referring to this? (Wikipedia's disambiguation page doesn't seem to have a more likely article.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Copyright_red...
Yes, quoting the following section:
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