The only damage that exists from piracy is to the copyright holders profits…
Since the copyright holder is usually a corporation that is owned by shareholders, the majority of which are richer than all of us combined, ask me if I give a shit and I will show you my field of shits to give, and you will see that it is barren.
Eat the rich. Or Luigi them… I don’t care.
I downloaded a car. I love my Tisla Model C
More like pissla
also theft is not a crime either.
I’m pretty sure if someone stole everything you own you’d see it differently
insurance exists;
I have a lot of monetarily worthless stuff that means a lot to me. Souvenirs from trips, some heirlooms from my grandparents, stuff like that. Not gonna be worth anything in insurance but means a lot to me… it’s a dumb take that theft isn’t a crime.
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.
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
Using insurance means your premiums will go up, meaning you are still going to pay for it. There is also some emotional damage depending on how the theft happens.
It’s only a crime for poor people
Name a crime
Just pirate shit bruh like what [email protected] said. Y’all keep yapping about ethics and shit but still proceed to do it nonetheless.
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…
Nah, I want all those companies to burn. If they can’t afford to make new stuff because of piracy then there won’t be stuff to pirate. I am totally fine with that. There is a life to live beyond just consumption, you know?
Nobody is forcing you to consume any of the media you feel you need to pirate.
Just live beyond consumption. You can do that, you know?
Thanks for your service
You forget the alternative mindset:
An active desire to see traditional ways of funding to disappear, and the media along with it.
Sure, we’d all like that, but pretending that piracy is some sort of noble way to bring about a collectivist creators’ paradise is yet more self-serving fantasy.
Nah. Id pay artists if i could.
And in fact do tip them pretty well at the jobs they take to pay rent when im in LA.
What we need is for parasitic creativity destroying shit stain ip-troll ghouls to get the guillotine, so they arent parasiting on every fucking artist.
We need a society that values humanity and art.
Because as is, there kind of isnt a reliable systemic way to support them. Capitalism prevents it.
I hate IP trolls as much as the next person, but that feels almost like a non-sequitur
Thats what studios are, though.
Thry don’t make the art. People make the art.
You people behave like you believe that artists got gathered up under threat of violence, put into these companies and are being forced to work there against their will…
If they dont, they kinda don’t get to do their art. It’s a whole thing.
Id say ‘or they starve/die on yhe street’ but that’s what they get service jobs for.
The idea is that you support creators out of the appreciation and not because you’re forced to.
This seems to work as a model for YouTubers and podcasters. They usually have most of their stuff available for free, and people pay them money, and more often than there is no reward for the money, other than satisfaction of supporting the creator.
This is obviously one example, and it only works for periodic installments, but it is a working alternative to the system, where people who don’t want or can’t pay don’t do thatThis seems to work as a model for YouTubers and podcasters
No, it doesn’t. They’re still being paid by YouTube/Spotify a flat amount based on the number of views - which are being paid for by ads and premium subscriptions.
Which means: people pay (one way or another) first, consume the content later.
a flat amount
Nope, the amount is anything but flat. For bigger youtubers the ad money start to be significant, and for bigger podcasters spotify pays something, but for the most, amount of money from ads is negligible.
deleted by creator
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?
I am subscribed to 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.
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 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.
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?
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?
the buisness model is essentially croud funding the movie after the movie is produced. Hollywood doesn’t need the money, but triangle staff does.
Might I suggest the problem is capitalism. Without the everpresent threat of homelessness and starvation forced on us by the landlords, rampant price gouging of necessary goods like food, and the anti-lottery we all play every single fucking day with our own health, artists wouldn’t need nearly so much compensation for their work. Piracy wouldn’t matter, or even be required as a concept. I dream of living in a world without capitalism, but we don’t. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
I too dream of living in a post-capitalist world. But I’d bet dollars to donuts that people will pirate things regardless of the cost. They don’t want to pay anything for content.
I think pirating scientific papers is a good thing all around. The research isnt funded by the selling of access to those papers, much on the contrary.
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.
I usually can’t, actually. Not immediately anyway. But that doesn’t stop me from paying for it when I can. Done it with plenty of games. And if I didn’t have that option, which I primarily use for games I’m not entirely sure I’ll stick with, well… I just wouldn’t buy it. Full stop. Wouldn’t be a consideration at all. There is no lost sale here, only the potential to fall in love with it enough to buy it when I eventually can.
Not saying this is some moral high ground. It’s not. But plenty of folks just can’t afford to gamble on whether or not they like something and end up paying it forward when they can.
When I return from the library instead of the bookstore it is with the deepest shame.
Why are you stealing from libraries? Not cool, man
Yeah, me too. Especially when I only have a scale model PLA print of the car I downloaded.
This is a specious analogy. e-books from libraries are already heavily controlled and are usually quite expensive to provide. Physical copies have their own inbuilt limits to distribution.
You’re treating copyright like it’s some sort of hardline moral stance against consuming any media you haven’t directly paid for, when actually it’s more like a very long list of compromises to balance the conflicting requirements of creators’ needs to be compensated for their work versus society’s need to benefit from that work. This is why lending libraries, fair use etc are legal and piracy isn’t.
No, I’m providing a counter-example and rejecting the argument that only lost media entitles you to consume media for free.
And I’m saying that it’s a strawman, because that’s not the principle copyright law operated on in the first place.
Yeah, OP’s take is like that of petulant child arguing semantics as though it changed a thing. Doubly cringe for adding that second section at the bottom where he depicts his opponent giving up and agreeing with him.
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.
So a little more in depth:
So, a little more in depth:
Im poor as fuck. So the option isnt ‘buy/pirate’ its ‘pirate or get nothing’. Fuck you if you think i should live without art.
The artists generally do not recieve profit when a copy is streamed/sold. It simply is not done; their unions are too weak. This is blatant corporate propaganda.
The entire mechanism to do that is fucked anyway, even if it were hooked up to something. I’m sorry, but i wouldnt deal with that shit show for free. Even new releases or classics have to be hunted down like cult films, and then even if i buy them, i lose them at some arbitrary later date. Music was the last thing i tried to pay on, and i just could not keep a cohesive collection together-at this point, if it’s not on bandcamp, i assume the artist doesn’t want money. And even bandcamp has disappeared tracks i paid for, reducing me to local backups. So fuck em.
I’m sorry. I really would love to support art and artists, but it simply isn’t possible to do that systemically within capitalism. There is no clear systemic option. Just ways to lick corporate boot and waste your fucking time.
although
I bet i do actually pay artists-cast crew and musicians at least-more than you do. When i dine out, rare as that is, in los angeles, i tip ~30% in cash. So i am actually supporting the arts, while you, my boot licking friend, are not. Youre supporting the corporate ghouls who feast upon them.
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.
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.
Before piracy there were demos and shareware, which let you see if your machine could handle the game or content and give you a vertical slice, and let you show it to friends for word of mouth advertising.
Then, Steam put a two hour refund window with no questions asked, which helped a lot of “this crashes on start, I can’t open this at all on a RTX 4090/high end PC, 15 FPS in the fog, etc”.
Developers learned from that and they began padding/gating content behind two hours of gameplay, so you wouldn’t know until 3-4 hours in that the game was grindy dogshit (SCUM, Ark, Empyrion, and countless other Early Access and sometimes full release titles like NMS on launch day for example).
So the correct thing to do, and it’s what I do: Pirate the game, make sure it runs/works and is fun and there’s no “gotcha” traps or hidden DLCs or other predatory mechanics involved, and THEN pay for the full title on Steam+DLCs and just continue the save.
My Steam Account has actually already been flagged over a dozen times for this because my primary savegames are like Razor1911.sav, and so far it’s still in good status because I am actually spending a couple thousand/year on content.
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.
This is what I do. I don’t want to get burned by a shitty product.
Ditto on Spotify. I have big love for piracy of FLAC for my personal music server, but I also have a decent rack filled with physical offerings from my favorite bands.
My Bandcamp collection is also getting up there, since a few of my favs say they are treated well there, and it’s FLAC friendly as well.
Physical media or merch directly from the band is absolutely the way to go every time if possible.
I’m having trouble finding a link to substantiate it, but I remember in the early 2000’s a group of artists having to sue their record labels because of the lawsuits on file-sharing users. The record labels said they were doing it for the artists, but the artists had to sue the record labels to even ever see a penny from the fruits of those lawsuits. The record labels were just pocketing the money for themselves while saying it was “for the artists.”
Anyway, long story short is that kind of behavior from the recording industry made me want to give money directly to the artists and cut out these selfish middlemen who did nothing but claimed all the profits.
Surely you’re not saying that record labels are dishonest?!
Not enough clutching
Not sure if this is related. https://steelguitarforum.com/Forum10/HTML/003331.html
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.
There’s another comment further up about a statistic showing that people who pirate content are more likely to spend more money on content as well compared to people who don’t pirate content. It seems that there’s a correlation between people who pirate things and people who care about the ethical treatment of creators. Stuff like people who pirate music from Spotify and then spend money to buy the music from the band on Bandcamp.
In that context, I have an even harder time caring about people pirating from the megacorps when they’re supporting creators at the same time. That’s closing in on Robin Hood style activities at that point.
There is absolutely a connection between how shitty corporations are treating their customers with how likely those customers are likely to stop paying and start sailing.
Netflix in its prime was the GOAT, showing a very significant decrease in piracy. We’re only seeing a rise now because of the proliferation of streaming companies. No one wants to pay for 4+ streaming services.
Great point here.
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
Eh, to an extent. If they are original funders, I agree. But when you have people or groups buying rights to music/movies/tv/etc to claim royalties in perpetuity, especially after the original creatives die, those people can fall into a pit of uncapped rusty rebar.
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.
Which group would that be then?
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.
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.
if everyone thought like you no one would create digital media
This is obviously incorrect.
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
Corporations profiting from copyright laws they helped write deserve to have their profits stolen in any case. Not gonna lose any sleep over it.
The people who make shit normally dont get paid anyway.
They get paid. They just don’t get a share of profits. They are usually paid a salary or, increasingly more commonly, are paid as a contractor.
Yeah but me streaming doesnt get them more paid, and it’s a fucking pittance anyway. Ive kniwn people who couldn’t really afford to live, working on projects that made ridiculous profits. Sorry, union too weak, cannot use to bludgeon me into the absolute shit show tgat is paying for media.
not actually true
Not from consumption. Most of that money is for execs/investors,
Investors became investors by paying creators for their work in advance without knowing what they’d produce. It’s incredibly short-sighted to say “hey, the creator already got their paycheck so my purchase makes no difference now”.
Maybe it would help to think of it as paying the creator for their next game.
Thats a pretty story, but completely unconnected to reality. If it worked like that, id be okay with it.
Also, when you pay for stuff, abd like it, and want to revisit it later you usually cant. And that always makes me feel like a fool. I don’t like feeling like a fool. I don’t like paying to feel likeva fool. I don’t like expecting a thing i like to be there then it not being there; that ruins my day. And the sheer fucking regularity of this makes. Me think it’s going to keep happening.
When you steal it, they cabt steal it from you, 'cuz they don’t know you have it.
Thats a pretty story, but completely unconnected to reality. If it worked like that, id be okay with it.
What do you think an investor is then?
the pirate would not have bought the copy anyways, but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire
Also, the person deciding whether or not they “would have” paid for it, has a strong incentive to kid themselves that they wouldn’t. Imagine if cinemas worked that way, and you could just walk in and announce that you weren’t going to buy a ticket anyway and since there’s a seat over there still empty it’s not going to cost them anything for you to sit in it. They’d go out of business by the end of the week.
Also also, either the thing you’re copying has value that arose from the effort of creating it, or it doesn’t. If it’s of value, then it’s reasonable to expect payment for it. It’s it’s not of value, then you shouldn’t miss not having it.
Also also, either the thing you’re copying has value that arose from the effort of creating it, or it doesn’t. If it’s of value, then it’s reasonable to expect payment for it. It’s it’s not of value, then you shouldn’t miss not having it.
Doesn’t this contradict the whole rest of the argument? It either has value or it doesn’t. It being available for free somewhere doesn’t change the value. If it’s not of value, then they shouldn’t miss you having it.
Not really, because obviously nobody who sincerely believed it was of no value would spend their time downloading it. The contradiction is in simultaneously claiming that something is of no value and therefore shouldn’t be paid for, whilst still expending effort to illegally copy it, this proving that it did have value. The only way to square it would be to claim that you’re the one who created new value by the act of downloading it, which is blatantly nonsense.
it’s not blatant nonsense. jesus fucking christ you people lack a brain.
the art/media/fucking whatever intellectual “property” = no intrinsic value, worthless itself
the labor to create the art = valuable
the labor to distribute the art, be it through “legitimate” or pirated means = valuable
it’s that simple. there needn’t even be any long moral/ethical arguments. piracy is righteous because information deserves to be free. there is no way to enforce ownership of information without wanton violence from the state.
Podcasters and medium to small youtubers work like that (bigger also get some money from ads, but for medium to small, Patreon is the main source of revenue). You can get their shit for free, but they would like you to give them some money after if you can.
The scale is a bit different, but the scheme works.It works for anything small scale enough for its creators to be able to do is as a side hustle that may or may not pay off. Try funding a triple-A game that way and see how far you get.
Ironically, it’s actually doesn’t work on a small scale. It works on a medium scale, big enough to have a stable audience, not big enough to get lucrative deals from brands.
It might not work to support a lifestyle of AAA company CEO, and it might not work at pushing out hundreds of unimaginative boring microtransaction machines, but I would say it’s just a bonus
I for one would definitely download a car, if I did not already own one I really like.
I’d happily let’s others download mine, if it didn’t affect me or my car in any way.
Yeah, why the fuck not?
Obviously, something made in a specialized vehicle manufacturing plant will be better/more durable/whatever, but given the option between downloading a car vs spending a year’s salary to buy one… I’d rather download one.
Unless my wages get better (which they are not) or cars get cheaper (which they won’t), I’ll continue to have this opinion.
There’s a nontrivial number of cars that cost more than a house did in the 80’s and 90’s. So it’s entirely possible for someone to spend the same dollar value on their home, when purchasing it in the 90’s, as they do 25 years later, buying a house in the 2020’s.
Stupid.
Same. Its not a fancy car, but its had no problem in almost a decade and gets good mileage. Download it all you like
I attempted to download a car once, but front wheel got stuck in my router. Was huge mess
I had the same issue!
In 1992 I started downloading a car, the server is still downloading…
I’m picturing a guy sighing with his hands on his head, staring at most of a car with the front wheel stuck in the router. Like, he can figure this out, just give him a minute. Maybe he needs a walk to clear his head. The pieces are there.
Hey man, you can’t park that here
I’d rather download some bicycles, but yes.
I wished, we could pirate food.
Pff. You really think food grows on trees?
I used to think that too, but it’s day 144 and still no tomatoes!
(Referencing a meme for those who are confused)
A lot of people used to pirate food, but as our housing was pushed from houses to apartments, they took that freedom from us. If you still live in a house, you can still pirate a lot of food in your yard.
If you have a window, you can still pirate some foods.
Dont let them catch you with your pink pineapples or you might get in trouble:
The problem is that the producer’s business model is based on making and selling copies. You’re not taking an original work, no, but you’re also not paying for the produced content.
Let’s expand the pig analogy.
A farmer has a sow and any piglets that it has are for sale. You steal a piglet. You haven’t stolen the original sow, but you have stolen the piglet you now have because you didn’t pay for it.
Your example is about physical goods.
Software is at its core just digital information a computer can use.
Knowledge/Information (that is not personal information) should be free.
You can make a argument that software developers still must sell copies of their code to make a living but if you look at the reality of software that appears to simply be some kind of bias. You can make software that is free and still make a living they are just not always related.
The software that runs the world’s infrastructure is increasingly FOSS, from critical cybersecurity to vending machines. Even big corporations are increasingly getting involved in using and making open source components for their proprietary fronts.
As a linux user everything i need can be done legally with free software, not only is it free is most of the times vastly superior then a paid product.
Ever needed software on windows to find the installer got bundled with spyware and then the final program turns out to be a trial before Requiring a subscription? That is only because they need to make money.
On linux, you install it, it’s only the thing you actually need, and it works. No bloat, no enshitification. Some person or group realized there was value to be created, created it and as a result the entire world won collectively.
I have a few products of my own that i hope to publish some day and i already vouched to never make them proprietary, My dad called me insane not to try to profit. I call it nothing but ethical to make the best value for humanity that i can. My very common office job provides enough liveable wage and work/life balance for my family and still find time to do such.
Piglet is still there in the morning though.
Maybe lightly used.
That analogy doesn’t work at all because the Sow produces a finite (and rather small at that) number of piglets over a given timespan.
It’s more akin to you getting a piglet/sow elsewhere. Now your piglet/sow need is satisfied and you won’t buy anything from this farmer.
(Edit: And even then you took that piglet/sow away somewhere else, reducing supply there, which will make it more likely for this farmer to get a sale in the future.)
It’s not a problem though. If you as a pirate want the business model of selling copies to not exist anymore, everyone always pirating would achieve that and not be a problem.
The problem is that the producer’s business model is based on making and selling copies
This is all too vague to actually understand the effect of piracy. The economic impact depends how much piracy replaces actual purchases.
When I was a teenager, I would pirate a lot of music. At the time, I had very little money to spend. This copying did not replace any purchases. On the other hand, me not buying music right now is a lost purchase since I could spend money. That’s why I spend some money every month actually buying music from bandcamp or whatever, which offsets the revenue that the musicians would otherwise lose.
Also, if the artist has other revenue streams, it doesn’t matter as much. Musicians for example don’t make a lot of money off of streaming nowadays, and a lot of their revenue comes from merch and concert tickets etc. So if you spend money there, copying doesn’t really bankrupt the artist.
Of course each type of media has slightly different mechanics, but in general there are a lot of ways you can do piracy without really undermining the business model of the artists. And very rarely are the effects the same as for theft.
Now make the exact same meme but substitute “AI training” for “piracy” and watch the downvotes flow in.
Because AI isn’t creating a copy of the original thing, it is attempted to replace the original thing for a profit. It would be like if a publishing company took some book, removed random parts of it then replaced them to parts from other books, then sold that instead of paying authors to write books.
Well yeah, because my objections to AI aren’t based on copyright law.
In Canada it’s very hard to get into trouble for piracy unless you make a profit from your piracy.
Or well…until these LLM showed up. That’s the part I take issue with.
This is an interesting argument. I don’t think the two are completely analogous, and the whole thing falls apart once you go beyond consumer level usage due to piracy’s inability to make new things like AI can. While piracy isn’t going to get any game developers or musicians fired, AI image gen very likely will. The more it improves, the harder it will be for companies to continue justifying paying real artists.
That said, you do make a good point that many pro-piracy arguments can be used all the same to be pro-AI image gen. At least at the individual consumer level.
tbf I did do this a week ago and nobody downdooted me https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/comment/11886692
Yeah, cause generally humans downloading things is good and AI downloading things is bad.
Today you can download a car… And then 3D print it for ‘free’.
hold on let me use my 50 different materials 3d printer that has to be bigger than a car to print one. or for me to learn how to make a car from its parts
I was talking about a plastic 3D car model 🤣
Holy fuck this meme is so old it’s probably of legal age to drink
You can tell it’s made the rounds because it has a reaction image nearly the size of the image itself shoved onto the bottom superfluously
