this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Piracy isn't stealing anyway. You're not removing the data from the original owner.
But the original creation cost time and money, which you're not reimbursing the creator for. The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn't cost anything.
It's like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure it's not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldn't even happen if everyone acted like this, or the organizers would have to pay for it all by themselves.
If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you "bought". Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.
under what ethical system?
Mine, obviously. But feel free to correct me if you disagree with something.
How do you feel about jumping the turnstile at a train station?
Amoral at worst. Public transportation shouldn't have a fee at use. Tax the rich, invest in transport
Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?
A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being "removed" in that situation either.
Ah, in that case, no that is also not stealing.
What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.
Who is losing resources when you hop a turnstile?
The transportation authority who maintains the trains and stations.
Jumping a turnstile and taking a physical, actually scarce resource is not comparable to duplicating a digital, artificially scarce resource.
The train requires ongoing maintenance and can only hold a finite amount of people. Taking the train seat for free takes away something from another person. Downloading media does not use any ongoing resources, and does not take anything away from another consumer.
Comparing the morality of physical goods to digital goods are not really a good comparison specifically because of the artificial scarcity brought on by making something digital to try to make it more expensive doesn't map to the real scarcity of physical goods.
Again, I have to ask: How do you think those digital goods are made in the first place? Somebody labored to create it. They deserve to be paid for it.
Not sure why this is such a hot take.
That is a false equivalency.
The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven't paid for.
Pirating takes away a possible purchase. You haven't actually used any of their resources or cost them anything.
If I wasn't going to buy it anyway they haven't lost anything.
If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you've actually cost them resources.
I don’t get this logic at all. Piracy doesn’t take away a possible purchase. There is an assumption that the media downloaded was ever going to be paid for. In 100% of the cases where I downloaded pirated content, I was never going to pay for the product, even if it was available to me by other means. Further I cannot remove a sale from someone when I never possessed the money to pay for it anyway.
I believe most people that pirate cannot afford to buy digital releases or pay for streaming services etc… (not all cases of course). In these situations nobody loses. The media companies didn’t lose anything because I was never going to buy it, and it wasn’t stolen because they still possess the media.
Edit - I agree with you Lmaydev I replied to the wrong comment.
And media costs money to make.
If you weren't going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That's the thing, if you're interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
But not to copy, which is what you are asserting is being "stolen". No one is claiming that turnstile jumpers are taking away money from train manufacturers. You're having to mix analogies, because copying something isn't theft.
I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. The point is that in both examples, somebody is exploiting somebody else's labor without paying.
There is no labor in making digital copies.
You are trying to blur the line between the media/art/music/film, etc, and the reproductions of it.
Artists do deserve to be paid for their work, but artists do not deserve to maintain ownership over the already-sold assets, nor whatever happens to those assets afterwards (like copies made). If you want to say they should retain commercial rights for reproduction of it, sure, but resell of the originally-sold work (e.g. the mp3 file), and non-commercial reproductions from that sold work? Nah.
They didn't put in labor towards that. To say they did expands "labor" far beyond any reasonable definition.
You're trying to blur the line between what is and what should be. We don't live in an ideal world.
Yup, many people (like you) consider copyright morally okay, and many people (like me) consider copyright infringement morally okay.
Not an ideal world for either of us, I guess.
But by this definition then, it should be ok for only one person to buy the item and then just copy and give it to everyone else, and the original author receives payment from a single item?
I don't agree with this at all. There are tons of things someone might want to use or have but not enough that they'd be willing to pay for it. Or over a certain amount of money.
The origins of most of all western countries' wealth comes from theft, full stop.
That's only the case for pre-Bluray release content. Most of it was just captured from rips, Amazon Prime or Netflix.
Depends on the circumstances I guess, but no matter how I feel about it people jumping the turnstile aren't stealing the train.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno, I mean are the train company allowed to take my money and then go "sorry we fell out with the fuel company so we're just gonna keep your money and not take you to your destination. Soz babe x"
You wouldn't download a train?
In that case you're actually using a limited resource: space on a train. And by occupying it you're preventing someone else from using it (assuming a full train). Copying media doesn't cost any resources (ignoring the tiny amounts of electricity) or interfere with anyone else's ability to use that resource.
They don't compare.
What if that train is regularly running under capacity, or you are just standing?
You're technicall still using the company's resources (it costs some energy to run the empty train), so I still don't think it really compares to piracy.
But since they are miniscule compared to what they are wasting by running largley empty trains I think it's morally ok in that case.