• shrugal@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      But the original creation cost time and money, which you’re not reimbursing the creator for. The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn’t cost anything.

      It’s like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure it’s not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldn’t even happen if everyone acted like this, or the organizers would have to pay for it all by themselves.

      If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you “bought”. Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 years ago

        The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn’t cost anything.

        under what ethical system?

        • shrugal@lemm.ee
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          2 years ago

          Mine, obviously. But feel free to correct me if you disagree with something.

          • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 years ago

            there’s no reason to believe what you claimed. a claim made without justification can be dismissed without justification.

            • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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              2 years ago

              They made a justification. They showed you how people couldn’t make these things without people paying for them.

              • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                2 years ago

                They showed you how people couldn’t make these things without people paying for them.

                but that’s not true. people make things all the time without being paid.

                • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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                  2 years ago

                  people make things all the time without being paid.

                  Less people make things without being paid than those who make things to get paid. That is a common fact we can both agree on. If you need the number of open source games compared to the number of paid games then I recommend you grab those numbers yourself.

            • shrugal@lemm.ee
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              2 years ago

              What unjustified claim did I make that you disagree with? Seems all rather uncontroversial to me.

              • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                2 years ago

                The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn’t cost anything.

                i don’t need to disagree to disbelieve. i do disagree, but without establishing your justification for this claim, it’s kind of hard to argue against it.

                • shrugal@lemm.ee
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                  2 years ago

                  The justification was that creating things has a cost, even if a copy doesn’t, and that we should distribute that cost as fairly as possible among the people benefiting from the creation.

      • MaggiWuerze@feddit.de
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        2 years ago

        Would you call it Piracy if I lend a bluray from a friend? I didn’t pay for it and yet I’ve watched it.

        • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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          2 years ago

          To further the thought experiment. I digitize my Blu-ray and put it on a private tracker to share with ONLY my friends. Is that piracy?

          Copywrite laws are antiquated at best and need to be destroyed at worst.

          If you need more proof look at bullshit like how Paramount+ until recently couldn’t show flagship shows like Picard in Canada because the rights were given to Crave.

          So as a consumer I want to go to the owner of the property and I can’t watch it because the owner told me they gave a copy of it to someone else.

      • jamesravey@lemmy.nopro.be
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        2 years ago

        I dunno, I mean are the train company allowed to take my money and then go “sorry we fell out with the fuel company so we’re just gonna keep your money and not take you to your destination. Soz babe x”

        • Chozo@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?

          A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being “removed” in that situation either.

          • Unaware7013@kbin.social
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            2 years ago

            Jumping a turnstile and taking a physical, actually scarce resource is not comparable to duplicating a digital, artificially scarce resource.

            The train requires ongoing maintenance and can only hold a finite amount of people. Taking the train seat for free takes away something from another person. Downloading media does not use any ongoing resources, and does not take anything away from another consumer.

            Comparing the morality of physical goods to digital goods are not really a good comparison specifically because of the artificial scarcity brought on by making something digital to try to make it more expensive doesn’t map to the real scarcity of physical goods.

            • Chozo@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              Again, I have to ask: How do you think those digital goods are made in the first place? Somebody labored to create it. They deserve to be paid for it.

              Not sure why this is such a hot take.

              • mkhoury@lemmy.ca
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                2 years ago

                How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?

                • Chozo@kbin.social
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                  2 years ago

                  How much should they be paid for it?

                  However much they’re asking. They put a price tag on it for exactly this question.

                  In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?

                  Not really. Civil disobedience is about refusing to follow a law, not choosing to break a law. There’s a difference between the two concepts; one involves going about your day as normal and ignoring laws, and the other is going out of your way to break a law. Piracy is no more a form of civil disobedience than looting a grocery store is.

                  • mkhoury@lemmy.ca
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                    2 years ago

                    Ah, that’s not my understanding of civil disobedience. I prefer this definition: “civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/)

                    I suppose the piracy aspect might not be public enough to count as civil disobedience though, unless you count as public the noticeable cumulative effects of all piracy.

          • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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            2 years ago

            That is a false equivalency.

            The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven’t paid for.

            Pirating takes away a possible purchase. You haven’t actually used any of their resources or cost them anything.

            If I wasn’t going to buy it anyway they haven’t lost anything.

            If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you’ve actually cost them resources.

            • Chozo@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven’t paid for.

              And media costs money to make.

              If I wasn’t going to buy it anyway they haven’t lost anything.

              If you weren’t going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That’s the thing, if you’re interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.

              If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you’ve actually cost them resources.

              How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?

              More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.

              • Zworf@beehaw.org
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                2 years ago

                The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.

                The origins of most of all western countries’ wealth comes from theft, full stop.

                More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do.

                That’s only the case for pre-Bluray release content. Most of it was just captured from rips, Amazon Prime or Netflix.

              • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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                2 years ago

                And media costs money to make.

                But not to copy, which is what you are asserting is being “stolen”. No one is claiming that turnstile jumpers are taking away money from train manufacturers. You’re having to mix analogies, because copying something isn’t theft.

                • Chozo@kbin.social
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                  2 years ago

                  I feel like you’re being intentionally obtuse. The point is that in both examples, somebody is exploiting somebody else’s labor without paying.

                  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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                    2 years ago

                    There is no labor in making digital copies.

                    You are trying to blur the line between the media/art/music/film, etc, and the reproductions of it.

                    Artists do deserve to be paid for their work, but artists do not deserve to maintain ownership over the already-sold assets, nor whatever happens to those assets afterwards (like copies made). If you want to say they should retain commercial rights for reproduction of it, sure, but resell of the originally-sold work (e.g. the mp3 file), and non-commercial reproductions from that sold work? Nah.

                    They didn’t put in labor towards that. To say they did expands “labor” far beyond any reasonable definition.

            • Chozo@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.

      • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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        2 years ago

        Depends on the circumstances I guess, but no matter how I feel about it people jumping the turnstile aren’t stealing the train.

        • Are they stealing a ride?

          I don’t like this analogy, because there’s a real, albeit small, cost to the subway of that free ride, in terms of fuel and increased maintenance. Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”

          • Chozo@kbin.social
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            2 years ago

            Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”

            You know that the pirated files were stolen in the first place, right? Movies and video games aren’t just sitting out in the open free for somebody to snatch up like apples on a tree. They end up in the hands of scene groups by somebody in the studio taking an unauthorized copy of the product and distributing it.

            Lost sales are damages, as demonstrated by the courts hundreds and hundreds of times over now.

            • jarfil@beehaw.org
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              2 years ago

              Ever heard of “ripping” a disk, a stream, or a download? Movies, series, and video games get paid for by someone who then proceeds to make unauthorized copies, they very rarely come from anyone at the studio.

              Lost sales are “legal” damages, which doesn’t mean they’re actual loss of anything, since people who were not going to pay, are worth exactly $0.

              It’s different when bootleg copies get sold, since then there is an actual payment that isn’t going to the right person.

              • Chozo@kbin.social
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                2 years ago

                Does you license plate say “PRIVATE”? Because this is some real sovereign citizen logic, using definitions of terms that the rest of the world doesn’t agree with.

                Ever read the message at the beginning of a rip? You know, the one with the FBI logo on it. Remind me what it says?

                • jarfil@beehaw.org
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                  2 years ago

                  using definitions of terms that the rest of the world doesn’t agree with.

                  Like which one exactly?

                  Ever read the message at the beginning of a rip? You know, the one with the FBI logo on it. Remind me what it says?

                  There is none. Some rips used to come with a “Ripped by [some nick]” and a scene group logo, but they’ve grown out of fashion.

                  Just kidding, I know you meant this one: https://youtu.be/CXca40Z01Ss

          • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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            2 years ago

            Operating a train is not creating a train. And media does not require resources to operate, so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.

            • Chozo@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.

              Using, no. Acquiring, yes.

              • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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                2 years ago

                No, nothing was lost when the copy was acquired, because copying does not remove the original. Literally, nothing is lost.

                • Chozo@kbin.social
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                  2 years ago

                  Lost sales are considered damages, so yes something is lost.

                  EDIT: This is worse than arguing with SovCits.

                  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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                    2 years ago

                    Bruh, no one in here is arguing about legality, we’re arguing about morality, and no one but corporate shills buy into “potential sales” having value.

                    You’re trying to argue against what people just fundamentally, intuitively understand; copyright is a legal construct (not a moral one) that is 99% bullshit.

      • Kalash@feddit.ch
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        2 years ago

        In that case you’re actually using a limited resource: space on a train. And by occupying it you’re preventing someone else from using it (assuming a full train). Copying media doesn’t cost any resources (ignoring the tiny amounts of electricity) or interfere with anyone else’s ability to use that resource.

        They don’t compare.