Comment by zephr_c@lemm.ee on Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

Are they stealing a ride?

I don’t like this analogy, because there’s a real, albeit small, cost to the subway of that free ride, in terms of fuel and increased maintenance. Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”

It should be a free service anyway. Without free public transport, democracy does not exists. Same reason healthcare and education should be. So sure, you are “stealing” a ride - something that should be yours anyway because people are not born with the ability to travel kilometers of cityscapes, something that is now mandatory to survive and thrive.

You’re also potentially blocking a seat that could be used by a paying passenger, and the operator will statistically run more/longer trains at higher cost to cope with increased demand.

Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”

You know that the pirated files were stolen in the first place, right? Movies and video games aren’t just sitting out in the open free for somebody to snatch up like apples on a tree. They end up in the hands of scene groups by somebody in the studio taking an unauthorized copy of the product and distributing it.

Lost sales are damages, as demonstrated by the courts hundreds and hundreds of times over now.

Ever heard of “ripping” a disk, a stream, or a download? Movies, series, and video games get paid for by someone who then proceeds to make unauthorized copies, they very rarely come from anyone at the studio.

Lost sales are “legal” damages, which doesn’t mean they’re actual loss of anything, since people who were not going to pay, are worth exactly $0.

It’s different when bootleg copies get sold, since then there is an actual payment that isn’t going to the right person.

Does you license plate say “PRIVATE”? Because this is some real sovereign citizen logic, using definitions of terms that the rest of the world doesn’t agree with.

Ever read the message at the beginning of a rip? You know, the one with the FBI logo on it. Remind me what it says?

using definitions of terms that the rest of the world doesn’t agree with.

Like which one exactly?

Ever read the message at the beginning of a rip? You know, the one with the FBI logo on it. Remind me what it says?

There is none. Some rips used to come with a “Ripped by [some nick]” and a scene group logo, but they’ve grown out of fashion.

Just kidding, I know you meant this one: https://youtu.be/CXca40Z01Ss

Like which one exactly?

“people who were not going to pay” is not one singular group, but you use this as if everybody who isn’t going to pay is part of the same demographic. Some people won’t pay because they don’t want it in the first place. Some people won’t pay because while they want it, they can’t afford it. And some won’t pay but will take it anyway because they feel entitled to it.

Painting all these groups with the same brush is disingenuous at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst.

If you are using the FBI as some benchmark of morality or moral behavior I have a bridge to sell you

Morals and laws are not the same thing.

Many scene groups actually purchased the games and cracked them, I’ve read NFOs that say “buy the game, we did too”.

People recording in movie theatres have to either sneak into the theatre or buy a ticket themselves.

Someone scanning a book to post online had to have bought it or borrowed it.

Yes some games are cracks of illegitimate obtained leaked copies or other unscrupulous methods.

I have played pirated games in the past but my Steam library has thousands of dollars worth of games I bought, many of which I wouldn’t have if I weren’t interested in these type of games to begin had pirating games not been possible.

Sure, the opportunity cost from piracy’s “lost sales” to the publisher/licensor is non-zero. But how many sales that would have happened varies greatly on the perceived value vs. price of the product, and how available it is. If it’s not in stores anymore and can only be bought from scalpers on eBay, the publisher cough Nintendo cough doesn’t see that money anyway vs. pirating it.

I have hundreds of CDs, which are bought and paid for. Tell me, again, how making copies and (hypothically, of course) giving them to friend[1] incurs a direct cost to the CD producer?

Nearly all pirated content was most likely originally purchased once, and ripped. There’s no evidence that much of it is from shoplifted DVDs.

Nearly all pirated content was most likely originally purchased once, and ripped. There’s no evidence that much of it is from shoplifted DVDs.

There’s no evidence that “much” of it is from purchased DVDs, either.

100% of the dozens of DVDs in this household were purchased. You have a few in your house that were shoplifted as a counter data point, maybe?

No, they’re just stealing the fuel and wages the employees should be getting for maintaining the train.

“Trivial” is not “zero”.

And yet literally infinitely more than the “cost” of piracy, a point you refuse to acknowledge because it shows how stupid this false equivalence is.

Can you quantify the cost of piracy?

And neither can you, or publisher lawyers, which is why it’s called piracy and not stealing in the first place.

The publishers lost the fight to call it theft or stealing, as to use those terms is slander and libel due to how inaccurate they are.

So even legally, you’re wrong to say it’s stealing or theft, especially when your only evidence is your own vague assumption that the creator lost money (they didn’t) using your own presumed and deluded “quantified” cost of the piracy (not theft, or lawyers would call it that)

So are you arguing that turnstile jumpers are harming the company, but they are not stealing the service / train / ride? Like the literal word “steal”.

Yeah alright makes sense. Sometimes it hard to know what people are exactly arguing about.

Ok, then make the trains a public service, collect taxes for it and make puplic transport free.

Analogous to the whole “piracy” discourse: Manage more media like libraries.

That would be a great idea, and could even help combat climate change.

And poverty, car crash deaths, lung cancer from pollution, etc.

Honestly a similar solution can work for media, we can use government to fund many small creatives and studios, breaking up publisher monopolies and possibly even doing some social good by allocating specific funds to black/white/native/hispanic/whatever creators to not only encourage creative endeavors for all communities but also build lasting cultural heritages.

That would require the government to work for the people, instead of against them, though, so I doubt we’ll see it anytime soon.

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