Comment by ninetyninenine
9 days ago
Why do people try to justify theft? That’s what I’m expecting to see in all the comments here. Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.
Don’t get me wrong. I pirate my self. But I’m honest about it. It’s theft. I steal because I’m a cheap ass thief. Why can’t you admit that about yourself?
If someone makes their product annoying and hard to access that’s really their free will and desire. Enshittification is not a crime. When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.
Yet every pirate here tries to justify it. Just admit it.
Piracy is not theft.
We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
It may not be legal, and it may be many other things, but it's not theft.
As to why "people justify it", what's the point of even asking when the article and many comments here explain the reasons? You may disagree with the reasons, but they exist and they are coherent.
> We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
That's only true when you ignore many, many common usages of the word "theft". I would hazard a guess that your interpretations are along the dictionary lines of "depriving a person of their property." However, here are some commonly used forms of the word (supported by wikipedia and government sites) that don't fit that definition:
- Wage theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
- Time theft: https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...
- Identity theft: https://www.usa.gov/identity-theft
- Theft of services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services
- Theft of trade secrets: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=TRADE+SECRETS
- Attention theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_theft
- Data theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_theft
- Electricity theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft
- Joke theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft
- Stolen valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_valor
And here are more colloquial usages of theft of abstract things:
- Credit card theft (it's really just the number that is "stolen")
- Password theft (usually "stolen" during a data breach, more numbers being stolen)
- Bitcoin theft (even more numbers being "stolen".)
Here's a very simple explanation for this: In common parlance, "theft" generally means taking something of economic value -- either physical, like property, or abstract, like labor -- from someone without giving any value in return against their wishes.
If you extend this line of thought, you'll see why IP laws exist and why these abstract forms of theft are illegal.
And when examined from that perspective, those coherent reasons are basically just different ways of saying "because I can get away with it."
The proper legal term is copyright infringement. Robbery and theft cover real property, not intellectual property.
"Common usages" of a word are irrelevant. We can't discuss legal concepts without precise terminology. Only the correct words and their precise meanings matter.
Equation of copyright infringement to theft and piracy is propaganda. People do this deliberately in order to draw on the negative connotations of the words. Good faith cannot be assumed if people insist on using these words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
> Theft, meanwhile, emphasizes the potential commercial harm of infringement to copyright holders.
> However, copyright is a type of intellectual property, an area of law distinct from that which covers robbery or theft, offenses related only to tangible property.
> Not all copyright infringement results in commercial loss
> the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that infringement does not easily equate with theft
> Judge Kathleen M. Williams granted a motion to deny the MPAA the usage of words whose appearance was primarily "pejorative"
> This list included the word "piracy", the use of which, the motion by the defense stated, serves no court purpose but to misguide and inflame the jury
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As I said, we already had this conversation ages ago and your side lost.
Shout until you're blue in the face, and you'll be just as wrong.
I've already stated my position, and "because you can get away with it" is no part of it. You must be confusing me with someone else in this conversation.
Half your examples fail to make the point you intend, and are not at all analogous to watching a pirated TV show. A lot of the rest use an informal (not legal, and highly subjective) definition of the word "theft" -- but you knew this.
It's exhausting to keep repeating this. Please read what's been said (hint: these are decades old arguments, we're not going to rehash them here for your benefit).
All of this harkens back to even before the days of the silly "you wouldn't steal a car" (2004) antipiracy campaign. I hope I don't need to explain that stealing a car and pirating a TV show are nothing alike, neither legally nor morally.
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"Piracy" is not theft, it is copyright infringement. Calling it theft is not "honesty", it's just factually wrong. There's nothing to debate on this matter.
> Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.
Nobody is "spinning" anything. We're telling you what we believe and why we believe it.
Actual moral justification involves the realization that all intellectual property is not only unnatural but also fundamentally unjust.
First, copyright is a perversion of reality. The natural state of ideas is actually the public domain. Ideas are infinitely copyable and trivially transmissible. Copyright seeks to completely invert that reality.
Copyright infringement is just reality reasserting itself. It happens every single day at massive scales without people even noticing or caring. It happens every time someone sends a funny picture to a friend. There is no such thing as stopping it, for it is natural, and natural processes shouldn't be stopped.
Second, copyright is fundamentally unjust. It is a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on numbers.
It's absurdity is merely tolerated because it promises well deserved rewards to creators, thereby incentivizing them.
The original social contract was "we're all going to pretend we can't trivially copy your works for a couple decades so that you can turn a profit and then the works will return to the public domain where it belongs".
So when was the last time a work you enjoyed entered the public domain? How many times has copyright duration been extended by now? It might as well be infinite. We're all going to be long dead before our culture returns to us.
They've all made their fortunes a thousand times over but they want to continue their rent seeking and unlike us they've got the trillions of dollars needed to lobby governments and get what they want.
Why fulfill our part of the contract when the copyright holders constantly demonstrate they're not willing to fulfill theirs? There's absolutely no reason to do that. Just stop pretending. It really is that simple.
> When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.
Nonsense. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of an unjust law and arguably a moral imperative.
No. The entire games and movie industry exists because a segment of people don’t pirate.
All the technology created to support those two industries mentioned above are supported by people who paid for their shit.
Your view point twists reality because the financial realities don’t pan out. Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things?
If you pirate you benefit off of millions of dollars used to create the game while you pay for nothing.
Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here.
The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry. Like as bad as law around copyrights have gotten, piracy in totality is fundamentally unsustainable. Ideas cost money to create and someone needs to pay. If not the consumer of the idea than the producer of the idea pays and functions as a charity to the consumer.
> Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here.
No. As I said, we had this debate decades ago and your side lost. This is settled ground; you can shout into the void but you already lost.
You might pirate because you're a "cheap ass" (your words, not mine), but many others don't. They've explained their reasons.
You don't like those reasons? Fine. But don't go around accusing others of your own sin.
Most people just want to watch and play stuff in the most convenient, non-intrusive, frictionless way possible. It just happens that this is often best achieved through piracy, because most legally available platforms suck in some way or the other (or content is not available).
(Before you accuse me of anything: I don't pirate games like you, I have a huge library of Steam, GOG and Humble Bundle games. I also subscribe to Netflix, Disney, HBO Max, Apple, and a couple more I forget. And I pay for YouTube premium. And Spotify -- which removed vast swathes of music I listened to because why not. The streaming platforms mostly suck and so I must occasionally resort to piracy because it's goddamn more convenient!)
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> Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things?
Yours truly.
I have been a proud Steam customer for over 20 years. I have licensed over 200 games on Steam alone. I own multiple video game consoles from multiple generations and have quite the collection of titles for them.
Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators.
> The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry.
The fact of the matter is the industry shouldn't be sustained. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product whose price trends toward zero due to infinite availability. When that obviously fails, they get upset and invoke copyright in order to distort reality until they're profitable.
The simple fact is creators need a new business model. And that business model is patronage. It's the labor of creation that's scarce and valuable, not the finished product. Therefore creators should be paid continuously for the act of creating itself, not the finished product.
Macaulay’s 1841 address is the most vigorous defense of copyright I've ever read:
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
And even he realized that copyright was a monopoly, tolerated only due to the fruits it bears.
He rejected alternatives such as patronage due to fear of suppression. Rich patrons would of course decline to fund works that they didn't like.
That concern no longer exists. We now have technology in the form of platforms like kickstarter and patreon which democratize funding and patronage, greatly reducing or eliminating the risk of suppression. There is no longer any need for copyright.
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