The entire issue with these arguments, though, is that the opposition parties just answer those claims with “then you shouldn’t be ingesting that content”. If you aren’t willing to pay for it, then you don’t have the right to view/listen/stream it. Free market a-holes will always, correctly, bring up that the market works by putting out products and people paying for what they support and not paying for what they don’t support. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose which pieces or parts you support or don’t and there’s no way to give companies that type of feedback because they don’t care.
That’s a fine argument that they might have, but piracy still isn’t stealing. If someone steals something from me, I am deprived of that thing. If someone copies my intellectual property, I am hypothetically impacted by loss of income, but I can still use that information.
They can say it’s morally wrong for someone to use or copy information against the owners wishes or without paying. They are welcome to that argument. None of us are obligated to care about their opinion.
If they can claim customers don’t own something, especially physical items, after purchase because they are being pedantic over how people interact with intellectual property, we can and should absolutely use the same distinction to distance piracy fromt theft.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
I don’t agree. I think your trying to compare this to wage theft, wherin an employee is promised or legally guaranteed some income based on hours work, where after both parties have agreed to this the employee has performed the work and the employer is withholding some of the pay. This case is stealing - the trade was completed and the employer is in possession of an asset (eg the pay that they are entitled to) - this is not a physical thing, but it is a real thing, with real physical value, and in removing that the employer would stealing that asset. Obviously there’s a garguntuam difference here because both parties had agreed to exchange assets and the employer has taken ownership of that pay per the agreement. If someone decided to do that same work, absent agreement, obviously they can’t claim wage theft because they didn’t have any entitlement.
To be intellectually honest, you’d compare piracy to plagiarism. But that’s (correctly) not as alarming as stealing which is why we need to mislead people to make it seem worse.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Entering without permission (in your example, paying) is trespassing. It’s fine argument to say that it’s morally wrong and that you shouldn’t do it. It’s blatantly wrong to claim it is stealing.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Digital content is the same way, insofar as piracy is more akin to trespassing than theft. It’s an abstract argument to say not buying something is harming owners or creators, who are you (or anyone else) to dictate what people buy, or to attach some morality to that?
You say it harms creators, but the evidence says that pirated games make more money. I imagine your claim is based on an assumption that people who pirate stuff do so at the expense of people buying it. Have you bothered to explore that assumption any further? You might be surprised.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
Piracy is quite literally not stealing. Stealing is an act of removing something from another’s possession, into your own. That is simply not what piracy is, and trying to falsey equate different crimes is every but as absurd as “stop pretending driving 5mphover the limit isn’t murder, it’s wrong and trying to justify the morality of it makes you look silly”
No. I am not comparing to wage theft. You’re just making a semantic argument rather than a substantive argument. Sure, if you want to argue semantics, then I’m viewing it as trespassing or service theft. Either way, you’re depriving a creator of income. If it’s a smaller creator, then you’re stealing money from them because, otherwise, you wouldn’t get the experience of ingesting their content. You’re entitling yourself to the experience of ingesting their work without contributing to your end of the contract. You’re only making the argument in the way you are because larger studios pay the creators on a contract basis. The truth is, though, that those creators don’t get hired if their content doesn’t result in material sales (whether physical or digital) of the content. No one invests in content that doesn’t make money and the excuse that “it still does make money even if I pirate” is just mental gymnastics.
Your second argument is also dishonest - the “no one is losing any money because the person wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” argument. That’s just an extension of the second part of what I said above. If piracy is ok for one person, it has to be ok for all and if it was ok for all, then the content wouldn’t make money. TV shows don’t get renewed. Sequels don’t get made. Sure, maybe the original content made money because some people were honest and paid for it but you are depriving a creator of an income because, had everyone paid, they’d have more work and more income coming in.
All this is to say that I’m fine with piracy. Sometimes you can’t afford it. Sometimes it’s not available legally. Sometimes it’s just a superior experience where you’re not forced to watch ads or deal with DRM. These are all fine. But to try and justify it as deserved or go through these mental gymnastics to claim it’s not stealing is just nonsense or arguing semantics. Just admit you’re stealing/trespassing and not holding to your end of the contract and admit that you’re harming creators.
Then I’ll try a third time. My claim is that theft deprived the owner of their item. Piracy does not do this, ergo it is something different than theft.
My second argument is to preempt the inevitable “pure economic loss” claim. It’s a tangent, and is not a claim that 100% piracy is sustainable, simply that the assertion that piracy causes commercial products to fail (as piracy exists today) is factually and demonstrably wrong.
My third point, which you again chose not to address, is that equating piracy to theft is as stupid as comparing speeding to murder. They are different crimes and should be treated as such. You know what an actual comparison to theft is, which is the whole basis of the OP? A product a user has paid for being removed by the publisher because they chose to incorporate drm that is no longer sustainable, wonder why nobody calls this theft (in fact it is closer to theft than piracy). Oh wait no I don’t, I spelled it out in the first post - piracy = theft is propaganda to hurt the little guy, the big players are manipulating the system such that they are above the same laws we play by.
Be fine with piracy or don’t, I couldn’t give a shit either way. That is irrelevant to the points I’ve raised.
You’re still arguing semantics and not the substance of my position.
The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content. You cannot honestly claim that they are not deprived of something by piracy. Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.
The second argument is a straw man. No one is discussing whether piracy causes failure. We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, whether directly or indirectly, and the needless justification being shown here which pretends that there is no effect.
The third point is another semantic argument and a straw man. No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action. The only comparison of crimes that was made was a suggestion that, regardless of the crimes, two different ones can still have a deprivational effect. And why are you bringing up the DRM situation? I already said that was justified. It’s not theft because you’re not paying for the product, you’re paying for a license. Theft would be paying for a product and having that taken away from you. You bought the license knowing, in advance, that that’s what it was when you bought it. Ignorance is not an excuse for making claims that aren’t factually true.
Your entire response is irrelevant. You’re not addressing anything that was actually being discussed. Instead you’ve focused on the difference between piracy and theft as a semantic argument instead of a substantive one and continue to do so. The social contract for goods and services is that both parties are entitled to the “fruits” of their labor - one party creates and the other ingests and money is exchanged for a good/service. Piracy breaks that contract by allowing one party to ingest without providing the creator an equal good or service in exchange. The further entitlement on display here trying to justify this theft is childish.
The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content
That’s a claim you’ve made. Prove it. The evidence shows that more more pirated content has higher profits. If you can’t quantify that (even if only at a macro level), then it’s a worthless claim.
Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.
That’s the whole point. Not all crimes are equal, not all crimes are even immoral. Arguing it’s wrong because it’s illegal or right because it isn’t is a monstrously flawed position to take.
…We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, …
Which there’s no evidence of ever happening. You’ve presented no case for why piracy is immoral
No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action.
Obviously you don’t understand what a straw man is. That was supporting the previously raised point not not all crimes are equal by pointing out a comparable case that everyone agrees with. Theft, like murder, has definition, both in common language and legally. Neither of those are piracy. The claim that piracy is theft is purely corporate propaganda hammered into the population with this dipshit ads from the 2000s. The fact that you’ve so entirely bought into speaks volumes to your ability to think critically.
It’s not a claim I’ve made. If you haven’t paid for something you’ve used or ingested, you deprived the creator of income. That’s a fact. And the argument about profits is a straw man because that’s not the same thing. People who ingest media talk about it and that convinces others to ingest it. Whether people who pirate content talk about it is irrelevant to the fact that they stole income from the creator to watch it in the first place.
Secondly, no one is arguing that it’s immoral because it’s illegal. That’s also a straw man. I’m arguing it’s immoral because you’re entitling yourself to the fruits of someone’s labor and creativity without holding up your end of the social contract.
Which there is no evidence of ever happening
Bullshit. The entire premise of piracy is ingesting something you didn’t pay for. There is literally a 100% correlation of evidence because, otherwise, piracy wouldn’t be an idea.
And I don’t know what a straw man is? You’re literally arguing against a point that I’ve never made. I have pirated content. I’m not claiming any high ground here. I just wish people would stop pretending like piracy isn’t theft when it is. You’re stealing income from a creator who is charging for their content. They’re not giving it away for free. You taking it without paying is depriving them of income and entitling you to get something that you didn’t trade in good faith.
I mean if I am not paying either way me ingesting that content or not makes 0 difference to the producer. It is the same logic as throwing excess food to the trash so homeless can’t eat it.
It does, though, by the argument they’re making. If you could only ingest it by paying for it, you’d have to have paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to.
The very fact that you’re watching it without paying kind of proves that point.
The producer and publisher paid a cost for you to have heard and develop an interest in their products. So yes, it makes a difference to them if that investment turns into you using the content but not paying for it. You’re suddenly a target audience without returns.
Then you don’t get to ingest it. “I want it” isn’t any more of an argument than if it was a physical item.
For me, personally, piracy in this case is justified and can even serve as preservation of art. But to pretend that people are somehow entitled to it is childish.
Edit: If Stargate was the only thing you were pirating, you might have a point but let’s be honest… it’s not. People don’t pirate one show because they can’t watch and the subscribe to a piracy forum.
Says the “free market a-holes” I mentioned in the comment you replied to… In this case, they’re also right if we’re being honest and acknowledging that piracy is depriving the creator of income for their work.
It does matter though - The price paid to the creator was based on the prospect of X number of sales or Y numbers of adverts. Almost everyone who presently is trying to get their creative works seen is hoping that being seen helps them to “make it” and be able to write or sing or whatever as a full time job.
He who pays the piper calls the tune. Don’t complain that modern media is garbage that doesn’t cater to you while also saying middle class soccer moms can sponsor everything.
The entire issue with these arguments, though, is that the opposition parties just answer those claims with “then you shouldn’t be ingesting that content”. If you aren’t willing to pay for it, then you don’t have the right to view/listen/stream it. Free market a-holes will always, correctly, bring up that the market works by putting out products and people paying for what they support and not paying for what they don’t support. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose which pieces or parts you support or don’t and there’s no way to give companies that type of feedback because they don’t care.
That’s a fine argument that they might have, but piracy still isn’t stealing. If someone steals something from me, I am deprived of that thing. If someone copies my intellectual property, I am hypothetically impacted by loss of income, but I can still use that information.
They can say it’s morally wrong for someone to use or copy information against the owners wishes or without paying. They are welcome to that argument. None of us are obligated to care about their opinion.
If they can claim customers don’t own something, especially physical items, after purchase because they are being pedantic over how people interact with intellectual property, we can and should absolutely use the same distinction to distance piracy fromt theft.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
I don’t agree. I think your trying to compare this to wage theft, wherin an employee is promised or legally guaranteed some income based on hours work, where after both parties have agreed to this the employee has performed the work and the employer is withholding some of the pay. This case is stealing - the trade was completed and the employer is in possession of an asset (eg the pay that they are entitled to) - this is not a physical thing, but it is a real thing, with real physical value, and in removing that the employer would stealing that asset. Obviously there’s a garguntuam difference here because both parties had agreed to exchange assets and the employer has taken ownership of that pay per the agreement. If someone decided to do that same work, absent agreement, obviously they can’t claim wage theft because they didn’t have any entitlement.
To be intellectually honest, you’d compare piracy to plagiarism. But that’s (correctly) not as alarming as stealing which is why we need to mislead people to make it seem worse.
Entering without permission (in your example, paying) is trespassing. It’s fine argument to say that it’s morally wrong and that you shouldn’t do it. It’s blatantly wrong to claim it is stealing.
Digital content is the same way, insofar as piracy is more akin to trespassing than theft. It’s an abstract argument to say not buying something is harming owners or creators, who are you (or anyone else) to dictate what people buy, or to attach some morality to that?
You say it harms creators, but the evidence says that pirated games make more money. I imagine your claim is based on an assumption that people who pirate stuff do so at the expense of people buying it. Have you bothered to explore that assumption any further? You might be surprised.
Piracy is quite literally not stealing. Stealing is an act of removing something from another’s possession, into your own. That is simply not what piracy is, and trying to falsey equate different crimes is every but as absurd as “stop pretending driving 5mphover the limit isn’t murder, it’s wrong and trying to justify the morality of it makes you look silly”
No. I am not comparing to wage theft. You’re just making a semantic argument rather than a substantive argument. Sure, if you want to argue semantics, then I’m viewing it as trespassing or service theft. Either way, you’re depriving a creator of income. If it’s a smaller creator, then you’re stealing money from them because, otherwise, you wouldn’t get the experience of ingesting their content. You’re entitling yourself to the experience of ingesting their work without contributing to your end of the contract. You’re only making the argument in the way you are because larger studios pay the creators on a contract basis. The truth is, though, that those creators don’t get hired if their content doesn’t result in material sales (whether physical or digital) of the content. No one invests in content that doesn’t make money and the excuse that “it still does make money even if I pirate” is just mental gymnastics.
Your second argument is also dishonest - the “no one is losing any money because the person wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” argument. That’s just an extension of the second part of what I said above. If piracy is ok for one person, it has to be ok for all and if it was ok for all, then the content wouldn’t make money. TV shows don’t get renewed. Sequels don’t get made. Sure, maybe the original content made money because some people were honest and paid for it but you are depriving a creator of an income because, had everyone paid, they’d have more work and more income coming in.
All this is to say that I’m fine with piracy. Sometimes you can’t afford it. Sometimes it’s not available legally. Sometimes it’s just a superior experience where you’re not forced to watch ads or deal with DRM. These are all fine. But to try and justify it as deserved or go through these mental gymnastics to claim it’s not stealing is just nonsense or arguing semantics. Just admit you’re stealing/trespassing and not holding to your end of the contract and admit that you’re harming creators.
Then I’ll try a third time. My claim is that theft deprived the owner of their item. Piracy does not do this, ergo it is something different than theft.
My second argument is to preempt the inevitable “pure economic loss” claim. It’s a tangent, and is not a claim that 100% piracy is sustainable, simply that the assertion that piracy causes commercial products to fail (as piracy exists today) is factually and demonstrably wrong.
My third point, which you again chose not to address, is that equating piracy to theft is as stupid as comparing speeding to murder. They are different crimes and should be treated as such. You know what an actual comparison to theft is, which is the whole basis of the OP? A product a user has paid for being removed by the publisher because they chose to incorporate drm that is no longer sustainable, wonder why nobody calls this theft (in fact it is closer to theft than piracy). Oh wait no I don’t, I spelled it out in the first post - piracy = theft is propaganda to hurt the little guy, the big players are manipulating the system such that they are above the same laws we play by.
Be fine with piracy or don’t, I couldn’t give a shit either way. That is irrelevant to the points I’ve raised.
You’re still arguing semantics and not the substance of my position.
The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content. You cannot honestly claim that they are not deprived of something by piracy. Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.
The second argument is a straw man. No one is discussing whether piracy causes failure. We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, whether directly or indirectly, and the needless justification being shown here which pretends that there is no effect.
The third point is another semantic argument and a straw man. No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action. The only comparison of crimes that was made was a suggestion that, regardless of the crimes, two different ones can still have a deprivational effect. And why are you bringing up the DRM situation? I already said that was justified. It’s not theft because you’re not paying for the product, you’re paying for a license. Theft would be paying for a product and having that taken away from you. You bought the license knowing, in advance, that that’s what it was when you bought it. Ignorance is not an excuse for making claims that aren’t factually true.
Your entire response is irrelevant. You’re not addressing anything that was actually being discussed. Instead you’ve focused on the difference between piracy and theft as a semantic argument instead of a substantive one and continue to do so. The social contract for goods and services is that both parties are entitled to the “fruits” of their labor - one party creates and the other ingests and money is exchanged for a good/service. Piracy breaks that contract by allowing one party to ingest without providing the creator an equal good or service in exchange. The further entitlement on display here trying to justify this theft is childish.
That’s a claim you’ve made. Prove it. The evidence shows that more more pirated content has higher profits. If you can’t quantify that (even if only at a macro level), then it’s a worthless claim.
That’s the whole point. Not all crimes are equal, not all crimes are even immoral. Arguing it’s wrong because it’s illegal or right because it isn’t is a monstrously flawed position to take.
Which there’s no evidence of ever happening. You’ve presented no case for why piracy is immoral
Obviously you don’t understand what a straw man is. That was supporting the previously raised point not not all crimes are equal by pointing out a comparable case that everyone agrees with. Theft, like murder, has definition, both in common language and legally. Neither of those are piracy. The claim that piracy is theft is purely corporate propaganda hammered into the population with this dipshit ads from the 2000s. The fact that you’ve so entirely bought into speaks volumes to your ability to think critically.
It’s not a claim I’ve made. If you haven’t paid for something you’ve used or ingested, you deprived the creator of income. That’s a fact. And the argument about profits is a straw man because that’s not the same thing. People who ingest media talk about it and that convinces others to ingest it. Whether people who pirate content talk about it is irrelevant to the fact that they stole income from the creator to watch it in the first place.
Secondly, no one is arguing that it’s immoral because it’s illegal. That’s also a straw man. I’m arguing it’s immoral because you’re entitling yourself to the fruits of someone’s labor and creativity without holding up your end of the social contract.
Bullshit. The entire premise of piracy is ingesting something you didn’t pay for. There is literally a 100% correlation of evidence because, otherwise, piracy wouldn’t be an idea.
And I don’t know what a straw man is? You’re literally arguing against a point that I’ve never made. I have pirated content. I’m not claiming any high ground here. I just wish people would stop pretending like piracy isn’t theft when it is. You’re stealing income from a creator who is charging for their content. They’re not giving it away for free. You taking it without paying is depriving them of income and entitling you to get something that you didn’t trade in good faith.
I mean if I am not paying either way me ingesting that content or not makes 0 difference to the producer. It is the same logic as throwing excess food to the trash so homeless can’t eat it.
It does, though, by the argument they’re making. If you could only ingest it by paying for it, you’d have to have paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to.
The very fact that you’re watching it without paying kind of proves that point.
The producer and publisher paid a cost for you to have heard and develop an interest in their products. So yes, it makes a difference to them if that investment turns into you using the content but not paying for it. You’re suddenly a target audience without returns.
I’m willing to pay for it, but I’m not allowed to do so
For example, Amazon/MGM still don’t allow me to pay to watch Stargate
Then you don’t get to ingest it. “I want it” isn’t any more of an argument than if it was a physical item.
For me, personally, piracy in this case is justified and can even serve as preservation of art. But to pretend that people are somehow entitled to it is childish.
Edit: If Stargate was the only thing you were pirating, you might have a point but let’s be honest… it’s not. People don’t pirate one show because they can’t watch and the subscribe to a piracy forum.
Says who? You? MGM?
Says the “free market a-holes” I mentioned in the comment you replied to… In this case, they’re also right if we’re being honest and acknowledging that piracy is depriving the creator of income for their work.
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It does matter though - The price paid to the creator was based on the prospect of X number of sales or Y numbers of adverts. Almost everyone who presently is trying to get their creative works seen is hoping that being seen helps them to “make it” and be able to write or sing or whatever as a full time job.
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He who pays the piper calls the tune. Don’t complain that modern media is garbage that doesn’t cater to you while also saying middle class soccer moms can sponsor everything.
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Says the guy not paying for shit that he’s still enjoying. What an entitled child.
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If you don’t need it, why are you stealing it?
Nonsense. It matters to the person who made it if they’re getting paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to watch it.
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That’s irrelevant. If everyone pirates the content, then that creator doesn’t get hired and paid again/anymore.
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So you’re entitled to do it just because everyone isn’t? What a crock of shit. What makes you special and exempt from what others have to do?
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No one is talking about sustainability. The population is sustainable even though some people murder. That doesn’t make murder ok.