An unfunny meme - ah - the OP is German. Nevermind. Do carry on.
This must be why blockbuster failed, people just grabbed whatever and left saying it’s not stealing because blockbuster lets them rent it
Frankly this catch phrase never made any sense to me, from a logical point of view.
It assumes that:
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If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
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And if buying =/= owning then pirating =/= stealing, because you can’t own it otherwise.
But the justification in the second statement is completely irrelevant to the first statement. You still own it without buying. It’s still stealing.
UNLESS - we examine what “stealing” is. This is where the arguments about being in a digital space vs. a physical space comes in. Where the question is raised: Is making an exact copy really “stealing”? Or, consider what is being “stolen”? The original item? The idea? We need to think about this more.
But it’s here the argument should be made and here the debate should be. That’s where “pirates” have a chance of winning. Let’s get rid of this flawed, easily repeatable, but fundamentally incorrect catch phrase and come up with a better one already. One that makes sense.
*(Nevermind that most of you technically aren’t even pirating, you’re just downloading the fruits of someone else that pirated.)
If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
This isn’t the point being made, and I think why you think it’s illogical
Theft requires you deprive someone of an item, not that you get something without buying it. If your definition of theft were accurate then getting a free game would be piracy, which is silly
UNLESS - we examine what “stealing” is
Theft of a persons property without intent to return. Legally piracy and theft are different, not just semantically. There’s no discussion to be had about what stealing is as it’s not what’s happening
!= isn’t universal, i’ve mostly seen it used in programming.
Otherwise ≠ is the symbol we use in maths and generally the more common one.
=/= is just the worst rendition of ≠ for people that don’t know how to write it or are too lazy to go find it.
Yeah =/= is honestly a little confusing. I know != isn’t universal though, gotta start making sure to use ≠ instead
It’s a shorthand way of writing ≠ digitally without needing to know the alt code or where it is in your mobile devices keyboard
I like this! Would I be able to bother you to post this to https://lemmy.ca/c/actual_discussion
I feel it would be a really worthwhile topic to dig into and you’ve articulated it well!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
I don’t think the phrase supposed to be a logically consistent justification, but rather a way to voice their discontent with/encourage opposition to the increasing degree of control that corporations exert over products you supposedly “bought” from them.
It hasn’t been possible to take full ownership over purchased media since the dawn of copyright law—buying a book doesn’t mean you can run it through a photocopier and sell it at the nearest flea market, after all. Even so, it wasn’t until the advent of software licenses that this rhetoric became popular, as you literally cannot “own” a piece of media that is only available through licensing. Licenses are also largely unregulated: while you were always bound by relevant laws, you are now also bound by the terms of the license, in which the licensor often reserves the right which often reserves the right to change the terms or terminate the license as they see fit. As if relentless regulatory capture was not enough, corporations have engineered a world in which you are effectively at their mercy, and a lot of people are understandably upset by this. So, if these people are deprived of any legal means of owning the media they wish to own, they resort to piracy. Of course this isn’t “justified” in the traditional sense, as stealing something that isn’t for sale is still stealing, and authors/publishers/etc. are not obligated to sell their works, but to them it doesn’t matter, as the underlying social contract of media creation and distribution has been violated.
I was locked out of my EA account for half a week due to a bug on their end. I downloaded a game I own(lease?) so I could play over the weekend.
Is this pirating?
The digital area is something I haven’t looked much into so I can’t really comment on that but I know regarding physical media the relevant US laws only really make exceptions for things you’ve done yourself. Just because you own a physical copy of Pokemon Yellow doesn’t mean you’re allowed to download a copy of it from off the Internet. You’re allowed to make and use a backup from a physical cart you own. This is why emulators can’t (legally) include ROMs, ISOs, BIOS files, encryption keys, etc. as those are the copyrighted materials that you’ll need to make a copy of yourself to legally use emulators.
To my knowledge (not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) what you did is indeed piracy because you downloaded it. If you had cracked it yourself you probably would have broken some licenses and whatnot that you had agreed to with EA, but I don’t believe that would have been piracy.
Either way EA is very much unlikely to do much anything about it as for the most part the industry only cares about the sources of pirated materials. They generally only ever go after people distributing pirated materials so they’ll (legally) attack torrent sites, ROM sites, and other such distributers. The most you’re likely to ever get personally is a strongly worded letter (possibly a C&D) to your ISP from some AAA video game company if they notice you seeding a torrent for their game as then you’re being a distributer of pirated materials.
Outside of that I’ve never heard of them coming after anyone for having the entire collection of GBA titles on their thumb drive or emulating Halo having never owned an Xbox or playing the latest Sim City without always online functionality. I’m not saying it can’t or won’t happen, but you’d make headlines if it did.
I think you would technically be since what you agreed to by accepting the EULA is that you would have the game on your EA account and would rely on their services to play it, you don’t legally have the right to play the game if it’s fine into your possession another way.
And they fit sure have provisions about downtime and access issues in the EULA.
This topic is so stale
Please explain to me how a lack of ownership over things that you buy is a stale topic?
Has this been solved in a meaningful way? Is the problem getting better?
No, but repeating the same phrase in memes all over Lemmy for 862nd time doesn’t make anything to solve the problem, it just irritates many.
Absolute majority of Lemmyverse is already in favor of piracy, it’s a circlejerk, move on.
I’m gonna be completely honest here; I made the meme to see how much attention such a simple (and probably idea-stolen) post could get. I’m not disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a very important topic, but I’m too lazy to defend my statement in the comments.
How is it not stale? The inaccurate and dishonest framing of a situation from this meme isn’t going to convince anyone of anything.
Nobody gets charged with theft for downloading movies and music. They get hit with copyright infringement. Doesn’t matter if you buy physical media that you owned or digital media that you licensed, either way you never purchased the copyright.
It isn’t about what the charges are it is about what people think. If we redefined the crime of murder as “foo” and charged people the same way it isn’t like murder went away.
Whatever value copyright was supposed to give us it has failed to do so. Abolish it.
Most of the back and forth is predicated on the idea that the digital world works the same as the digital one. It does not!
In the physical world you cannot produce and exact copy of something for zero dollars.
In the digital world you can make many copies at effectively zero cost.
Stealing, theft, is predicated on taking something from someone so they no longer have it.
Making a digital copy does not steal or remove access.
The whole argument, which I would posit is deeply flawed, is that pirating removes imaginary potential profits for reselling the thing copied (not stolen). If that’s so then prove it. Prove that at some point in the future I, or any other given person, would have bought that digital thing. Unless you’ve invented time travel you just can’t.
Copying digital content isn’t theft and pirating isn’t the right thing to call it.
We have to figure out how to better frame or address the digital world that just fundamentally doesn’t operate the same as the physical one.
The concept you bring up applied before the digital world took off as well.
For those of us who were around when the whole “YoU WoULdN’t StEaL a CaR!” argument against piracy was being made, it was a false equivalency when it came to ownership back then too.
Copying a song off the radio onto a tape cassette was not the same as breaking into a car, hot-wiring it, and driving off in it. Someone copying a song from the radio onto a cassette was not preventing others from listening to it.
Yes. This is not about theft. It’s about intellectual property rights and royalties via cloning a non-physical creation. They just masquerade it as theft because it helps their argument. It’s disingenuous of them.
“Stealing, theft, is predicated on taking something from someone so they no longer have it.”
So if I purchase a product and then its taken away due to service closure or ‘updated’ to be so different as to no longer be recognisable that would be theft surely.
What you pay for through platforms is a limited usage license. Get a physical copy or just buy DRM free games if you want to own them
Physical copies are still just purchasing a limited usage license purchase.
Technically, even purchasing DRM free games are again just a limited usage license.
So just like you can’t prove that none of the pirates would have bought it if pirating didn’t exist? But which is more likely, that sales would stay the same or that more people would buy the products if piracy didn’t exist?
You’re not entitled to the fruit of someone’s labor without compensation or their consent, even if you pinky swear that you’ll compensate them at a future date.
I suppose we should just start throwing people “likely” to do crimes in prison preemptively!? That’s not how anything else works. Why would it work like that here?
Likely?
The second you illegally download copyrighted content you’re committing a crime. The fact that you intend to potentially buy it at a later date doesn’t matter, just like you can’t leave a store with a TV and tell them “Don’t worry, I promise I’ll be back in two years to pay for it!”
As soon as you release something to the world, you have given up some control over the thing- otherwise, people would have to come to you to see/hear your art, which would limit the profits considerably.
At face level you would expect that, but a lot of the people I know that pirate do it to that way they can see how the game or movie is and then if they like it they buy it afterward. Game Demos are rarely a thing nowadays and otherwise they just wouldn’t have bought it in the first place. Under this scenario they are actually gaining more profit than if they were to heavily combat, but corporations/non-indie studios are shortsighted and would rather chase a fictional lawsuit case then actually make a profit.
