It doesn’t matter if it’s a CD, a Film, or manual with the instructions to build a spaceship. If you copy it, the original owner doesn’t lose anything. If you don’t copy it, the only one missing something (the experience) is YOU.
Enjoy!
Of course, if you happen to have some extra money for donations to creators, please do so. If you don’t have that, try contributing with a review somewhere or recommending the content, spread the word. Piracy was shown to drive businesses in several occasions by independent and biased corps (trying to show the opposite).
Devil’s advocate: “If you copy it, the [original] owner doesn’t lose anything…”
They loose the right to distribute it or not distribute it to who they choose. As the owner, it’s technically their right to deny access to the work, and you are taking that right away from them.
I’m not a shill, and I am never going to be a customer of big media. If I can’t get it without charge, I’d rather go without. But, I am taking that right away from the owner. I sleep ok.
Based on this interpretation libraries are stealing from book publishers and food banks are stealing from grocery stores.
Libraries and food banks have their inventory paid for, though. Neither one of them accepts stolen goods. What are you talking about?
So if I torrent something from someone who paid for it, it’s like checking it out from a library’s collection and not piracy. Got it.
/s?
You’re right, it’s not a perfect analogy. I was more pushing back against the supposition that the depravation of a potential sale equates to theft.
That said, media that is pirated comes from somewhere. Many times that content is ripped from streaming providers directly, which means someone has paid for the content initially. Other times the content is ripped off a blu-ray, which also means someone has paid for the content already. Cam recordings require someone to pay for a ticket (or someone to work at a theater but at that point we’re getting in to semantics).
At this point I’ve completely lost the context of what we’re even discussing here. Oh, right. OP said piracy isn’t stealing. Stealing/theft/larceny requires real property to be taken from its owner. Digital piracy does not meet that definition, full stop. OP is technically correct. Is it copyright infringement? Sure. Is that moral? Idk, I can’t dictate your morals but I don’t have any moral objection to it myself.
Technically, they are, as they also deny them the option to distribute books and food.
“Books” and “food” are not someone’s intellectual property so that’s okay. If brand A were to sell “BRAND B SUPER FOOD” (let’s assume this is a known brand of Brand B), that would very much be problematic.
In the case of books, if you wrote the “super personal top secret book” and a library somehow got a copy without your permission and made it public, you’d be pissed too and they’d deny your right to distribute or not distribute.
What? No. Denying the option to distribute something is not theft.
Your point about Brand A selling something named a derivative of Brand B makes me think there’s a misunderstanding here. This would fall under the realm of trademark violation, which I wasn’t aware was being discussed.
if you wrote the “super personal top secret book” and a library somehow got a copy without your permission and made it public, you’d be pissed too and they’d deny your right to distribute or not distribute.
I’d be pissed that the library somehow stole the physical book from me or that they hacked into my computer and stole the books manuscript file from me, which both would be examples of actual theft. If I sold the library the physical book and an epub version with DRM, the library removed the DRM, then began loaning out the DRM-stripped epub I could potentially be mad, but it certainly would not be because of theft because no theft would have occurred in that scenario.
That right is something they should not have. Streaming services greenlight shows, get them made, then cancel them after two seasons to prevent artists getting residuals.
Then if they lose popularity they pull them off the site and even the people who worked on them can’t see them anymore. Animators have to rely on piracy just to show people their own portfolio. That’s where respecting copyright leads.
The copyright owner is just whoever fronted the money, and the only reason we’ve decided they “own” anything is because people with money have decided money should be the most important thing in our society.
Perfect example of this is the movie Dogma. Kevin Smith has stated he would love to do a follow up on it, but he as the creator can’t because the IP is owned personally by Harvey Weinstein, and he refuses to give money to Harvey to license or buy it because obvious reasons. So, his own creation is locked away from him because a monster put up the money for the original before Kevin or most people knew they were a monster.
Yup, copyright doesn’t help artists. Its main purpose is to allow the hoarding of property into the hands of the wealthy, just like basically every other property relation under capitalism.
We can see with things like patreon that people love to support artists they like even if most of their work is free. We really don’t need gatekeepers to make art happen.
They still have the right to distribute it. It’s not like reddit, who not only claim the right but also apparently claim ownership of any content you publish there, while providing no consideration (payment) in return.
However, as you say, they have the right to deny you, and by copying you are subverting their rights. That’s still not theft, though, which is why copyright infringement is a separate offense.
Theft is a crime, copyright infringement is a civil matter.
not only claim the right but also apparently claim ownership of any content you publish there, while providing no consideration (payment) in return.
That’s not entirely true.
The payment is hosting your content for free on their servers that provide reasonable uptime and unlimited retention. You can choose to carve out your own place on the internet and post your content on your own hosting if you want, but a lot of people choose Reddit, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, because the tradeoff is agreeable.
a lot of people choose Reddit, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, because the tradeoff is agreeable.
A lot of people choose those sites because they don’t understand the trade off, because the site is presented as “free of charge” while the exchange of your data is a secondary transaction hidden in the fine print of the terms and conditions. It is NOT and exchange of data for access to the service, not at the point of sale, not the way they present it.
There is also a nuance in that you have to grant them rights to your work in order for them to legitimately host the material. This is essential, but they use it as an opportunity to claim far more rights than are necessary, without any fair exchange.
The “right to control distribution” is utterly unenforceable in a world with computers and the internet. The only way to enforce that right is to have centralized institutions with absolute control over every computer.
I can understand a need for controlling personal information in order to protect the user privacy. I can even get behind the idea of having to control dangerous information, like schematics for nuclear weapon systems. I do not support the idea of moving towards a world where the NSA has a rootkit on every computer because capitalism can’t be bothered that artists make enough to eat.
Maybe there is an inherent problem with a social system in which so many people struggle to make a living. And maybe the solution isn’t to create artificial scarcity in computer systems where information can be shared freely.
Is it actually ethically acceptable to control distribution of something that naturally shares itself?
Before computers, it actually required some energy to copy the content of a book. With computers now, the action of reading an ebook will actually copy it from the hard drive to the ram. If your book is on the cloud, there’s even more copying going on. It actually takes more efforts to erase temporary copies (ex: from local cache)!
Digital copying is not the same as physical copying.
The problem is that when everyone is using their right to deny access to their works to make people give them money, and there is only so much money you can reasonably spend on entertainment and so on per month, people end up abstaining from a lot of things they could otherwise have taken part in for no extra cost.
I think that the things we pirate have a value: music, movies and games have a value because they are cultural products and vulture is important, software like photoshop has a value because it is a useful tool. Putting up barriers to accessing these things means destroying this value. Having a system where the main way to make money of e.g. music is to paywall it has the “destruction” of a lot of value as its outcome. In some ways streaming platforms like spotify are better in this regard but then that means giving the platform a lot of power over music discovery for example. Spotify doesn’t really do a good job of paying its artists either which is its supposed ethical advantage over piracy.
This is one of the few actually interesting counterpoints to piracy. The rights of the artist for the use of their work is a very nuanced topic. For instance, most people would say that parody and satire are very important forms of expression that ought to be protected. But those often dance the line of “infringement” in the eyes of the courts.
On the other hand, it feels wrong to say that an artist has to accept their work being used for evil purposes, like a group of neo-nazis using an open source font in their propaganda materials, or a group of religious extremists using a musician’s backing track in their efforts to convert people.
I lean pretty strongly for the rights of the consumers of art to do with it what they want, but I admit it gives me pause on some of the edge cases. Very complicated issue.
Devil’s advocate: “If you copy it, the [original] owner doesn’t lose anything…”
They loose the right to distribute it or not distribute it to who they choose.
They already lost that right when they gave their product over to a licensor or distributor. Especially more in some industries such as book publishing.
Piracy has always been stealingᵢ. Violently. Using ships, or boatsᵢᵢ.
What you’re calling “piracy” — falling into the “intellectual property” mafia’s trap by borrowing their malicious misnomer — is just plain old sharing.
Copying what we like (sometimes changing and adding our own ideas to it) and sharing it with other people, so they can like, share, and change it too.
It’s how human culture works and has always worked!
Copyright (another intentional misnomer, since all it does is restrict the right to copy — and share, and modify — cultural works) is, at least in its current form, not only detrimental to culture (and its spread and preservation) but an attack on human nature itself.
Sharing, in these dark times when destroying cultural works seems to have somehow become more profitable than commercialising themᵢᵥ, has become not only an essential part of human nature, but a moral imperative for anyone who cares about art, culture, and social progress.
As for the hypothetical profits we are supposedly “stealing”, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, sharing not only doesn’t cause a loss on profits, it increases themᵥ. It’s free advertising.
It’s not about profits. It’s not about authors’ rights. It’s never been. It is, and has always been, about control. About deciding who and when can have access to culture, and who can’t. When we can be human, and when we are not allowed to.
I — Well, sometimes mostly murdering, I suppose, if there was not enough to steal; and of course there was the whole letters of marque thing, which made it political and complicated. But mostly stealing, OK?
II — It being on navigable water is what distinguishes it from pillaging, if I’m not mistaken.
III — In the borrowed words of Sir Terry Pratchettᵥᵢ, “The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”; sharing stories, and any other form of culture, is what distinguishes us from other species. It’s what makes us human.
IV — And even before. “IP” wranglers have a long history of not being reliable custodians of the cultural works they claim responsibility for, and sharing has many times been the only way to preserve said works after their (often malicious) mismanagement.
V — There’s studies, too, if Gaiman’s account is too anecdotal for your liking.
VI — GNU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Using the term “piracy”, instead of “filesharing”, was always pro-corporate framing. In his 2010 essay “Ending the War on Sharing”, Richard Stallman wrote:
When record companies make a fuss about the danger of “piracy”, they’re not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term “piracy” is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.
non-commercial file sharing is not piracy, the industry just re-defined it because they don’t want anyone to share stuff.
