Comment by wilg
4 days ago
Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.
4 days ago
Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.
Your values are outdated and impractical. You've obviously stalled at the "law and order" phase of moral development which enables the parasites who are abusing copyright law in order to extract every cent from us.
I don't think the idea of "paying creators for things I want" is outdated or impractical. Law and order is the foundation of civilization, and just because some dumb companies charge more than you want does not mean you are righteous for breaking the social contract.
You're not paying creators. You're paying the extraction machine that squeezes artists dry.
Someday you'll pass the 'edgelord' phase of development (hopefully).
Lol, I sincerely hope not.
> The problem is that its unethical
The article is basically a list of examples of how companies that offer legal options often use unethical business practices (sometimes to the point where they should be illegal).
I don't agree with all of their examples, such as conflating removing access to a purchased title with removing a title from a streaming service, but I can certainly understand why people are frustrated.
My issue is not understanding "why people are frustrated", it's that people think that frustration entitles them to take things they do not need from artists and creators who are trying to make a living.
If your argument for piracy being unethical revolves around royalties, consider Hollywood accounting and how studios are actually screwing the creative types, regardless of sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Also consider that the rights to works aren't necessarily held by their creators.
I'm sorta in the same boat there. There are plenty of people willing to give their work away, sell it DRM free, or sell it at a lower cost (offsetting the fact it is licensed). Plus you have things like libraries and the public domain. There are more than enough alternatives, in many cases, to avoid supporting sketchy business practices. But a lot of people become fixated on getting a particular thing.
The vast majority of the money goes to middlemen, rights holders, investors, executives and other suited up parasites.
If you want artists to make a living, you need to end shareholder capitalism, not reinforce it.
> The problem
There is no problem, just pirate it.
> its unethical (and illegal)
I guess I'll just keep doing it then, and someone else can keep crying about it on orange computer reddit website
If the best you got is "you can't stop me", that's true, but not really very relevant to what is good and right.
> good and right
For who?
I really hate the ethnical argument because It's so much weaker than people who use it imagine it to be.
As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations.
I'm not saying I have answers on how to build a better system, but the current one is neither ethical nor ideal - It's just creating (taxable) markets so business and gov is on board. The certainty with which people claim this setup provides great value to society is bullshit. The only certainty is that there are big businesses with vested interests and small creators who think their only ticket to sustainable income is their copyright (and having the --option-- requirement to sell it entirely, sublicense and all, to YouTube or Amazon).
This is word salad. People are making things that you want so they can make a living and you can have something you want. This is a win-win. The only problem is you have to pay for things which people only offer in exchange for money. You can cheat them, but it's not cool to pretend you're doing it for some big amorphous moral fight.
You call my comment word salad, but the model you present of supply-and-demand is so shallow it can't be used to explain why copyright was first created, and what problem it solved.
Something that legislation about copyright usually does get right.
This Santa Claus version of reality is exactly the kind of mainstream ignorance I was complaining about.
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Except, in many cases, they will not sell you the superior product, for any amount of money.
It's not that hard to imagine a better system. Abolish all copyrights
It's easy to imagine that as a world where no one funds any thing resembling research or content because it will get instantly ripped off.
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Again, pirating doesn’t stop you or anyone else from sending money to the copyright holder via whatever means the copyright holder prefers.
Most copyright holders prefer you sending money for them in the way they ask you to, which is by purchasing it in the way they are offering it. And it's completely hilarious to suggest that most pirates are somehow Venmoing the artists directly. 99% of content has no way to actually do that.
That’s a nice way of saying they’re full of shit. They want stuff for free, and that’s the whole of it.
It’s reasonable to not want to do that, even if it’s not the most severe kind of unethical or illegal act.
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I didn’t suggest anything about the link between pirating media and buying media, and that’s not relevant to my point. The point is, if you want to support a creator financially, then by all means do so. And if you want a DRM-free copy of a work, and piracy is the only way to get that, then by all means do so. Neither precludes the other.
I ask a remote computer using an open protocol to send me stream of 3 million bytes, once, and then it sends me those bytes. Explain how this is unethical.
Mind talking me through the ethical problems of copyright infringement? I'm not a fan of copyright in general, and from that perspective, I fail to see the problem in copying files.
I prefer the artists who make the work I enjoy not to starve. That is a moral/ethical principle.
Sounds like we need economic and/or social reform if people are starving.
That problem is largely irrelevant to copyright infringement. All copyright infringement (within a rounding error, exceptions obviously exist) doesn't actually hurt plucky artists from whom starvation is a real threat. Copyright infringement is largely a problem for corps who lose out on some money (money which almost certainly doesn't drip down to the actual artists).
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Setting aside works whose rights are in dispute, have been sold or whose creators are long dead, can you elaborate on this in light of what we know about, for example, Hollywood accounting? If you want to put money in the hands of your favorite living artists, there are more efficient ways than buying their work through a middle man and hoping they live up to their end of the bargain. Buy merch directly through them, for example. More independent creative types tend to have things like PayPal for this as well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
There are some cases, such as the "I purchased this and then they removed the media I had purchased" cases being discussed in other parts of the thread, where the artist has already been compensated for the media they created. In those cases (specifically those cases), I feel like the people who then say "F it, I'm not buying it twice just to make Sony/Apply/Disney/whoever richer" and go download a pirated copy are ethically in the right: they compensated the creators in return for the right to watch the movie as many times as they wanted, and a third party (the middleman/distributor) then took that away from them. That the legal terms of the purchase said (in the fine print) "this is a license that can be revoked at any time" does not make what the distributor did ethical. What the distributor did was legal but not ethical.
You can look up Gabe Newell's quotes on this, but the reason for piracy often has more to do with the fact that the pirate product is better (or more respectful to the user, or less hoops to jump through) than economic reasons.
Especially for people outside of the US, licencing and region locks can make it extremely technically difficult to source and play a genuine piece of media - whereas the pirate one takes 3 clicks.
This is an international website. Many people here come from countries where pirated CD and DVD stands were part of the local marketplace or mall. Your harping on ethics just won't be relevant to those fellow readers.