Filesharing isn’t piracy. It’s filesharing.
Piracy is when you attack a ship and steal its cargo.
But, of course, it was difficult for the RIAA to have a war on sharing, so they had to use a different term with sinister connotations and implant it into the public consciousness.
And it worked! You never hear anybody talk about “filesharing” anymore.
Real pirates steal stuff. So-called digital “piracy” isn’t piracy at all. This is just propaganda for the business model that the establishment is trying to hold onto.
It doesn’t hurt IP holders to “pirate” their data. It is no difference to them whether you were to pirate it or to have never been born at all in the first place. Their profit is the exact same either way. Their business model is imaginary and they want to force it on everyone else.
To be more precise: it is actually beneficial for big corporations if you pirate their media, as opposed to you having never been born. The sole act of you ‘consuming’ their media is positive for them, since you’ll almost definitely see their logos (advertising to you), and you may spread the word to people who may pay for it (advertising by you).
As you said, it’s all pretty much propaganda to brainwash us into trying to be ‘good citizens’ (obedient consumers).
I don’t even call it piracy, because piracy has a definition that this doesn’t meet. I call it what it is: unauthorized reproduction. That’s it. That’s all “piracy” is, it’s literally just unauthorized reproduction. Doesn’t sound nearly as scary and dramatic when you call it what it actual is, does it?
Piracy is when you board a ship, kill or kidnap its crew and steal the cargo. Copying a file is nothing like that.
The copyright holder is only actually harmed if I would have paid them otherwise. Since I never would have paid for the movie nothing changes for them. Nothing is stollen because they would have no idea someone had a copy unless they check.
These days (at least in my country) I can’t own movies, games and watch or play them at my will
Companies like Netflix, Amazon are lending movies but not making them free for you. And then they wonder why piracy is rising
Tbh for a student like me, piracy is the only option. If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing
Disclosure: I have been sailing the seas for years, but…
This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.
The original creator/owner is at a loss when data is copied. The intent of that data is to be copied for profit. Now that the data has been copied against the creator/owners will, they do not receive the profit from that copy.
Yes yes the argument is made that the pirate would not have bought the copy anyways, but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire for people to obtain paid copies of the data. At the very least it gives people an option not to pay for the data, which is not what the creator wanted in creating it. They are entitled to fair compensation to their work.
It is true that pirating is not directly theft, but it does definitely take away from the creator’s/distributor’s profit.
Cool argument, except a huge quantity of pirated works aren’t “owned” by the creator or even a group that funded it, but instead by parasitic companies that abuse capitalistic tools to actually steal value from those creators.
I have thousands of purchased games. 3 categories here:
1: obtained as part of a pack (humble gog etc)
2: purchased AFTER trying out via pirate copy to know if it is my kind of thing
3: picked up early access due to demo or general interest from being a known smaller dev/studio (hare brained for example)
With less and less access to shareware and viable demos, piracy is often the only conduit to prevent me getting ripped off of $80 for something that looks like a shiny sports car but end up being another “buy $800 in dlc for the full story!” Ford pinto.
Additionally, I now flat refuse to fund the likes of Denuvo, and wish that piracy actively hurt the bottom line of companies deploying that kind of anti-user shit.
I dislike investors as much as anyone but someone had to fund development. At least until we get UBI
or even a group that funded it
I noted I’m ok with investors.
I’m against parasitic groups that feed on properties and prevent money getting to the actual dev folks.
Adding on to say: no. It doesn’t cost the creator anything when a pirated copy is made. They potentially miss a sale, but if their item wasn’t in a store where someone may have made a purchase you wouldn’t call that actively harmful, right?
In addition, most media the creators don’t actually make money from the profit. Most of the time they’re paid a salary, maybe with a bonus if it does particularly well. The company that owns the product takes the profit (or loss), not the actual creators.
Also, a lot of media isn’t even controlled by the same people as when it was made. For example, buying the Dune books doesn’t give money to Frank Herbert. It goes to his estate.
This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.
It does though, since no harm is being done.
The original creator/owner is at a loss when data is copied. The intent of that data is to be copied for profit. Now that the data has been copied against the creator/owners will, they do not receive the profit from that copy.
They also don’t receive profit from not copying, unless there’s a purchase made. By your logic, watching something on Netflix or listening to it on the radio is actively harmful to creators, which I think most people can admit is absurd.
but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire for people to obtain paid copies of the data.
You made this assertion, but don’t really back it up. If you were correct here, being able to copy cassette tapes or burn cds would have killed the music industry decades ago. Piracy is the original grassroots promotional method.
At the very least it gives people an option not to pay for the data, which is not what the creator wanted in creating it.
That’s a separate argument and doesn’t relate at all to the supposed financial harm.
They are entitled to fair compensation to their work.
That’s a loaded assertion. If I sing a song right now, what am I entitled to be paid for it? And you’re ignoring that most of the “work” of being a musician (in most genres at least) is playing live performances, the experience of which cannot be pirated.
It is true that pirating is not directly theft, but it does definitely take away from the creator’s/distributor’s profit.
I don’t think it’s definite at all. Most of what musicians make these days is from merch and ticket sales, which piracy contributes to by bringing in new fans.
You have some very entitled opinions, if everyone thought like you no one would create digital media. You’re free to not watch movies or listen to music but it’s pretty asinine to take things without compensating the creator and claim no wrongdoing
Edit: I assumed it would be pretty obvious I was talking about digital media that needed a budget but apparently not. Of course anyone can make digital media for free in their spare time but you’d need some kind of income to support that hobby. FOSS is the same but you need some income to survive.
You have some very entitled opinions
Nah, the entitled opinions are coming from the “pay me, but you can’t own media” folks.
if everyone thought like you no one would create digital media
If everyone thought like me, people could buy digital media in convenient formats at reasonable prices, and buying media would probably still be a lot more popular. My Bandcamp library is in the tens of thousands and growing. I support digital purchasing more than most, when it’s done well.
but it’s pretty asinine to take things without compensating the creator and claim no wrongdoing
As the whole crux of the thread makes clear, no taking is involved. You might want to go re-read the OP again, speaking of asinine.
People do it for clout or for love. Sure, the Hollywood blockbusters would cease being made but that might be an overall social good IMO.
I agree with Brian Eno who describes how, if we had a universal basic income, we would see more artists creating content just for the hell of it. He also explains how there is no “genius”, there is instead what he calls “scenius” where it is an entire artistic scene which breaks new ground but only one or two happen to go viral.
I assumed it would be pretty obvious I was talking about digital media that needed a budget. Of course anyone can make digital media for free in their spare time but you’d need some kind of income to support that hobby. With UBI that would change
Piracy is somewhat similar to vigilantism to me. My ability to consider it a negative is directly related to how fair I consider the legitimate methods available to be.
If similar efforts were focused on consumer protection laws as we do IP protection, I don’t think pirates would have much leg to stand on, and they’d be seen in more of a negative light.
But since consumers are regularly fucked by corporations, all I see is two sides both doing bad shit and I’m not feeling all that charitable for the faceless megacorp. I also dislike pirates who pirate from small time creators. But that’s about as far as I can care given the state of things.
We should be focusing on stronger consumer rights to truly fix the problem for all sides.
having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire for people to obtain paid copies of the data.
According to who?
I guess herein lies the potential fallacy of my statement. Decreased desire is a Subjective observation.
One cannot draw a direct correlation, but there is data to conclude that not having a piracy option will boost sales of data initially, at least when it comes to games. (Hence why publishers continue to use Denuvo)
Counterpoint: When Louis CK (prior to being outed as a sex pest) released one of his comedy specials on his website DRM-free for $5 he became a millionaire almost overnight.
https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/drm-free-experiment-makes-loui.html
Price point matters, too.
It also jives with early Steam Sales when Valve would cut titles like
Left 4 DeadCounter Strike down to 90% off, and they would sell so many digital copies that they were actually making more money off the lower price.https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/
Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.
But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …
Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.
Devil’s Advocate: Many pirates would have not paid for access to that media so to say it takes away from the creators profit isn’t exactly true since one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale.
Devil’s Advocate Part II: There is s significant amount of research that supports the notion that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.
I personally am an example of part II. I pirate a lot of music but I refuse to use Spotify because of how little it pays artists and I have also spent significant amounts of money buying music from artists I enjoy via Bandcamp or buying from the artist directly because I know they get a bigger cut of the profits that way.
Ironically, piracy develops more ethical consumers
Because people don’t want to pay for shit content. Let’s take pirating out of the equation. If I read a book I borrowed and I really like it, I would buy. If the content was trash then I wouldn’t. Same goes if I watch a movie, listen to an album, or eat a microwavable burrito at a friend’s or family member’s house.
I’d rather download some bicycles, but yes.
I wished, we could pirate food.
Dont let them catch you with your pink pineapples or you might get in trouble:
Less of a problem now.
Also, even for such an expensive-ass pineapple, it really was darn tasty. Maybe I lucked out, but it was second place only to ones I’ve had in Thailand.
The amount of people that take these moral high roads is fucking ridiculous.
Well, the faceless mega-corp made it difficult to purchase or stream
I don’t like that I have to play the game on Steam
Akshually I’m just copying it, so it’s not theft
There are too many streaming services, so I shouldn’t have to pay for ANOTHER service
I’m not depriving the content creator or publisher from any money, since I wasn’t going to pay for it regardless
Just fucking own up to it. You are downloading content that you did not pay for. I don’t take some enlightened stance when I download a movie; I just do it. What I’m doing is not right, but I still do what I do. I don’t try to justify it with some bullshit political take.
We all have our line on what we deem acceptable or not. The only piracy that, in my opinion, could have a leg to stand on is when it is actual lost media. No physical copies available, no way to stream or pay for it. Anything else is just the lies we tell ourselves to justify our actions.
Just admit that you could pay for the content if you wanted to, you just choose not to, because you are a pirate. You are depriving someone somewhere from a sale or some other form of revenue.
Edit: I worded “Just own it” poorly. Clarified it to “Just own up to it”. That was the original intent, just an oversight on my part.
Why is no one mentioning here that the business model shouldn’t exist? If a copy can be made basically for free, there is no reason not to make it basically free. We should be providing everyone with the means to live regardless of their ability to sell stuff. If everyone was free to do whatever they please because their existence was provided for, people would still make media, because people love making things like that.
Of course that might mean that in the short term, while we don’t do this, pirating might mean that some things stop existing. I’d be completely fine if all Hollywood movies and other shit disappeared overnight. Maybe then people would finally come to the understanding that our current model of doing things sucks.
Are you suggesting that all art should be free?
Capitalism is at the heart of your question. Art should be valued. Artists should be paid. Neither of those things requires capitalism or copyright laws. If as a society we funded artists properly none of this would an issue. The line that copyright is good for artists is total bullshit. It’s a smokescreen that corporations use to prop up the system they created and benefit the most from.
Especially if the creator(s) is deceased.
Are you suggesting only the wealthy are deserving of art?
Only the wealthy can afford art? Music? Movies? Graphic Novels? Video Games?
Are you being obtuse?
almost nobody can actually buy any of those, only a license
Eventually, yes. If everyone’s needs are provided for, there is no requirement anymore to extract value from art, one can just make it and share it freely.
Copyright should be abolished.
Disagree
The problem with almost every pro-piracy argument like this is that they fundamentally require a significant percentage of the population to disagree with it. “People who can pay will pay and I’m not taking anything from them” only works for as long as both the general population and retailers regard piracy as wrong and keep funding all those games, movies etc for you.
Heck, all you pirates should be upvoting anti-piracy posts like this, we’re the ones keeping your habit funded…
The problem with almost every pro-piracy argument like this is that they fundamentally require a significant percentage of the population to disagree with it.
This assumes that people who are ok with piracy are also against paying for content. That’s a nice fantasy and it makes anti-piracy people feel good about themselves, but it doesn’t reflect reality.
People who can pay will pay and I’m not taking anything from them” only works for as long as both the general population and retailers regard piracy as wrong and keep funding all those games, movies etc for you.
This assumes that ‘pro piracy’ people are against artists getting paid for their work. Seeing as how pirates tend to purchase more legal content than the ‘general population’ that is clearly not the case.
There could be a million different reasons why someone might ‘pirate’ a piece of media, and simply not wanting to pay for it is usually pretty low on the list. That attitude also relies on the assumption that every single piece of content that is copied is something the ‘pirate’ would have paid for in the first place.
As an artist, my job is to inspire people, to make them feel, to share my experience with them. I have absolutely zero problem with someone who can’t afford to pay for my work pirating it. I also appreciate the ones who do pay, but I would still be making art even if no one paid, because while the money is nice it’s not the point of it for me. Id much rather someone copy a work of mine and enjoy it than not enjoy it because they couldn’t pay for the privilege.
I understand that some ‘artists’ are in it for the money and that’s fine. It doesn’t mean I have to agree with them that they deserve to get paid for every eyeball that falls upon their work, regardless of the circumstance.
Heck, all you pirates should be upvoting anti-piracy posts like this, we’re the ones keeping your habit funded…
Have an upvote from me for being the hero we don’t deserve and protecting the mega-corps bottom lines. Truly you are a modern day Jesus.
I just got reminded of that sick anti piracy ad that would play before every film back in the 2000s lol
YoU WoUlDn’T dOwNlOaD A Car!?!?!
You’re damn right I would; get me a 3D printer big enough…
I wouldnt download a car, but that’s only because im fanatically anti car.
Because cars are bad. There should not be cars.
Would you download a train?
Yes. Yesyesyesyesyes. Fuck yes.
But would you download a bus?
Depends on file size, and if the train download is done.
Heathen! Buses are as cool as trains :)
Theyre fine. Busses are fine. Im not going to shit talk buses, neither shall i glaze them whwn there are trains around.
I am 100% down for sailing the high seas. But let’s not sugarcoat it, this analogy is always been kind of crap.
Somebody went to your mailbox took out your paycheck, made a copy of it, put the original back in your box, went to the bank and cashed it.
Theft still took place. You’re probably still getting paid. Maybe it got taken up by insurance and everyone’s premium goes up a tiny fraction, maybe it got taken up by the bank or by your business.
It’s still an incomplete analogy but it’s a little bit closer.
That’s not to say that the vast majority of piracy isn’t people who wouldn’t pay anyway. And back in the day, you certainly got more visibility in your games from people who were pirating.
But now that advertising is on its toes and steam exists, I won’t think they’re getting any serious benefit from piracy and I don’t think that they’re not losing At least modest numbers of sales.
This is a horseshit analogy.
Stealing money from your account is theft, it’s not still there afterwards.
The concept I think you might’ve been looking for is opportunity cost in that pirating deprives an artist of potential sales. Which is a fair point, but it is still not the same as stealing since it does not deprive the artists of their original copy.
It’s also all done in the context of a system that is not run by artists and does not primarily benefit artists, but is instead run by and benefits middlemen.
but it is still not the same as stealing since it does not deprive the artists of their original copy.
The artist has ownership rights to all copies, not just the original; it’s literally in the word “copyright”.
It is common for artists to not own their own work. Taylor Swift bought back her own work, Michael Jackson bought Paul McCartney’s work from the record company (which annoyed Paul because he would have done it otherwise).
also theft is not a crime either.
I’m pretty sure if someone stole everything you own you’d see it differently
insurance exists;
Hahahahaha - keep telling yourself that. Until the insurance fails to pay out and you’re homeless, with zero possessions and everybody doesn’t care
sounds like the problem is with capitalism then.
No, the problem is you trusting a capitalist system to make you whole again. Under any other economic system in the world if you steal someones personal property- it’s a shitty thing to do.
But here we are with that being the status quo. I despise thieves who believe it is ok to steal things that people have worked hard, not necessarily in a monetary way to get things. And supporting them shows a complete lack of empathy. I pity you for that
Name a crime
It’s only a crime for poor people
