Comment by matheusmoreira
9 days ago
"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!)
If you pirate you used someone’s work without their permission and you caused them to foot the bill for the creation of your product. That is fundamentally immoral. It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here.
That is why axiomatically your justifications are wrong. It’s just not sustainable. On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible and EVEN then if he gets money and the infrastructure is sustainable then the system works and that’s what points to a system that is not morally ambiguous.
I’m capable of admitting my own faults and seeing my own immoral tendencies. Unlike you. I think in your eyes you must be morally perfect because even piracy isn’t wrong to you.
Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating? Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally? I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit. Call me what you want but I’m also not blind to what I do.
People like You pay for all my games and movies. Thank you. If you feel piracy is moral then what I do is moral to you. Thanks for paying for my shit. I don’t think you’re making a smart move for doing that but to each their own… if you think it’s moral it’s not my problem.
Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral? Then maybe pirates like me should be arrested. Or maybe pirating should only be legal for people who do it if it’s convenient and illegal for me.
Piracy is legal when convenient! Well it’s convenient for me to live a life where you pay for my shit. So why arrest me? We need to define convenient. Or maybe it’s just wrong all together? How about that? What do you think makes the most sense? Obviously all rhetorical questions.
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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.
>Yours truly.
What is this? Did you drop the mic? Think about what you just admitted. It's morally right to pirate. So instead of doing the moral thing, you pay extra money for No fucking reason. Congratulations.
>Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators.
But people still can accuse you of being stupid. Not saying that you are stupid, but it's open season in this area. Make sure your arguments are legit.
>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.
So get rid of the entire movie industry and gaming industry? Makes sense. How many billions of dollars and jobs just went down the drain?
>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.
Holy shit. This makes total sense. But then why stop at creators? Why not make the entire economy based off of patronage? Right? If it makes sense for "creators" well everyone in the economy creates shit, so let's do it for everything.
You work for a company? Why is that company paying you? Your work should be OPEN source and free! You program right? So all you're doing is creating ideas. The company shouldn't pay you fuck shit, and the only people who can pay you are people who sign up as patrons.
Here's a genius idea. If you stand by your ideas so much, why don't you start executing on them right now! Go tell your boss, "Hey my work is public domain! you don't need to pay me a dime! but if you want to support me here's my patreon link! Thanks bud!"
Look. Honestly if you don't see how what I suggested makes zero sense and how what I just said completely applies to ALL creators then you're out of touch with reality and human psychology.
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