Comment by ninetyninenine
8 days ago
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.
> 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.
Did you bother reading what I wrote? I'm not afraid of anything. I'm explaining why I think you're wrong even though I think people are justified in pirating because available platforms mostly suck and are anticonsumer.
I will summarize it for you again, then proceed to ignore you:
A- You lost this debate decades ago. We already had it, your side lost. Piracy is NOT the same as theft, either morally or legally.
B- You are the pirate here, not me (well, I do occasionally pirate as I argued elsewhere). Look at yourself in the mirror and answer your own questions about why you do it. Don't assume the rest are the same as you, or that they are cheap ass thieves like you (your own words).
C- It's a quality of service thing for most people.
> Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral?
No, it doesn't upset me at all. Any other things you want to argue?
> So why arrest me?
I don't think you should be arrested. I suggest you take a deep breath and think who you're arguing with and what the actual arguments are.
> someone’s work
We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept.
Intellectual property is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. All information is a sequence of bits, and all sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist. Humans performing intellectual work are merely discovering those numbers.
The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal.
It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you.
That's just absurd and unacceptable.
> It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here.
Not at all. Plenty of creators enjoy sizeable patreon followings. They get paid for their labor, not for the finished product.
Also, physical goods are naturally scarce. Therefore industries producing physical goods are easily supported. Your claim that "any" industry cannot be supported is trivially falsifiable if taken literally.
> On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible
Complete illusion. Only a single copy need ever be produced and sold. Once that copy is available, it can be trivially and infinitely duplicated.
If I have a file on my computer, say a book, duplicating it is as easy as holding down Ctrl-V. By doing that I can literally exhaust my computer's memory by filling it up with copies of the book.
There are no limits to copying other than the physical limits of the computers performing the copying.
Contrast that to the age of the printing presses. Sure, you could copy books by hand but that imposes hard limits to the scale of your operation. Printing presses gave you the power to infringe copyright at scale but you had to be a major industry player to even have one.
It is now the 21st century. Everyone on Earth has globally networked computers in their pockets. The costs of planetary scale copying and distribution of information are measured in cents. There's actually so much information being copied and distributed that determining what's true or false is actually becoming a problem unto itself.
Intellectual property is nothing but an unacceptable restraining bolt on our amazing computer systems, stopping them from realizing their full potential.
> Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating?
No one's "afraid" of anything. We've simply taken it much further than you did.
You "pirate" because it's convenient.
We "pirate" because we believe computers are world changing technology that should not be limited in any way whatsoever just because of utter legacy nonsense such as copyright.
Computers are obscenely subversive. They democratized copying, thereby nearly wiping out entire sections of the economy off the face of this earth. They democratized encryption and privacy, thereby allowing normal people to defeat militaries, spies, governments, police, judges.
Computers are far too important to be allowed to be controlled, least of all for completely idiotic reasons such as preserving the failing business models of last century's entertainment industries. Let Hollywood and the games industry get fully wiped out if they can't adapt.
For the enforcement of copyright requires that they own your computer, and that is unacceptable tyranny which must be resisted at all costs.
> Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally?
No one "needs" to justify anything. Copyright infringement is natural. People do it without even realizing it. There is no need to justify natural processes.
We consciously choose to justify it, because we believe there are higher reasons for doing it.
> I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit.
Unlike you, we actually do give a shit. That's why we spend time thinking about it and debating the issue.
> 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.
You're welcome.
Make no mistake, though. Our reasons for paying for games are probably not what you think. I usually don't pay for the games themselves. I pay for Steam's excellent service.
I guess I'm old enough to remember the time where people had to manually download and apply half a dozen incremental patches to their games in order to get the latest version and play online. Many times I licensed games I already had on Steam just to avoid that. Battlefield 2 is my goto example. I still have the boxes.
Steam was the first ever Windows package manager. Licensing games through it has always been worth it for that fact alone. Anything else just sucks. Gabe Newell is right: it's always been a service problem.
My Steam account contains many games which simply cannot be licensed anymore for any amount of money. Usually because other game companies are trying to push their shitty copies of Steam, just like Hollywood studios keep creating their own shitty streaming services.
There's nothing wrong with competition. The problem is they're competing for the wrong reasons. They don't actually want to create a superior Steam, they want to leverage their copyright monopolies in order to more efficiently rent seek. They create their own stores, then they pull their games from Steam and offer them exclusively on their shitty platforms that nobody actually wants to use. They force people to use their shitty services in order to get access to the games instead of just offering them on Steam.
Well if it's not on Steam, I won't pay even one cent for it. It's quite literally that simple.
> Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral?
Not at all. Your enjoyment in no way deprives me of mine, nor does it offend me on any level whatsoever. Had you asked for it, I would have simply given you a copy myself.
> Then maybe pirates like me should be arrested.
Absolutely not. "Piracy" should not even exist as a crime. If it does, it should not cause anyone to be deprived of their freedom.
The truth is in the name chosen by the monopolists: "piracy". Copying is a crime so victimless, they have to compare it to high seas piracy in order to get people to give a shit. It's just asinine.
> Well it’s convenient for me to live a life where you pay for my shit.
Relax. Copying is literally victimless. There is no "your shit", it's all just files in a computer. The ownership notions of the physical world do not really exist in this realm. The scarcity is completely artificial. It's not real.
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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.
> So instead of doing the moral thing, you pay extra money for No fucking reason.
"No fucking reason" is false. I wrote about the reasons why I pay for games on Steam.
> But people still can accuse you of being stupid.
I'm okay with that.
> Make sure your arguments are legit.
Testing my world views is the reason why I come here.
> How many billions of dollars and jobs just went down the drain?
Not a factor. Jobs that depend on intolerable monopolies shouldn't exist in the first place. Society will adapt. It must.
> But then why stop at creators? Why not make the entire economy based off of patronage?
Because we're talking about artificial scarcity of ideas, not tangible goods which follow natural economic principles. None of this applies to car manufacturing or food production.
> Your work should be OPEN source and free! You program right? So all you're doing is creating ideas.
I don't even disagree with you. That's why I barely even bother with licensing. I just pick AGPLv3 to maximize freedom and leverage.
I'm more radical than Stallman in this area. Stallman believes in and relies on copyright. I don't.
> The company shouldn't pay you fuck shit, and the only people who can pay you are people who sign up as patrons.
It's not that easy.
I work on my own projects because I personally care about them. They are rarely aligned with and might even be opposed to company interests.
I get to do whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want. I also get to walk away at any point for any reason, including no reason.
I'm not an employee. I have no boss. I have no deadlines. I have no obligations to anyone, least of all corporations.
If companies want developers to work on their stuff on a regular basis, they have to pay for it. Why would anyone care otherwise?
> Here's a genius idea. If you stand by your ideas so much, why don't you start executing on them right now!
I don't work in the software industry. My aversion to intellectual property is one of the reasons why.
I do have a GitHub Sponsors. For about a year, I had exactly one sponsor. Now I have zero.
I am also opposed to advertising in general. I try very hard not to talk about my own projects unless it is socially acceptable to do so. Others have independently submitted my work here and on other sites. I was also invited to post about one of them on reddit once.
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