Comment by the_af

> 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.