this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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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.
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?