• homicidalrobot@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    The car goes away when you drive it off. Replacing the car would take power to run multiple assembly and formation machines, and resources for each part.

    When you download a movie, it doesnā€™t go anywhere, you simply use a miniscule amount of power to make a copy.

    No one has lost anything and the product is still available where it was. Copying is not theft. When you steal, you leave one less left.

    How many lemmy commenters can make the same false equivalence analogy in one week?

    • 0ops@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I know, I know, I figured someone was going to bring this up, and personally thatā€™s part of the reason I justify my own piracy (cause Iā€™m broke and movie studios arenā€™t), but two things:

      1. The cost of creating, copying, and distributing a good isnā€™t strictly relevant to the transaction of said good. If the original owner doesnā€™t want me to have access to a good without paying for it, and I take it anyway, thatā€™s stealing. The labor and capital required to create, copy, and distribute that good isnā€™t relevant to that transaction, only my moral justification for stealing it anyway. Which is fine, imo, just be honest with yourself. Youā€™re stealing, and itā€™s justified. Stick it to the man

      2. Assuming that it is relevant, making digital media isnā€™t free. I can get away with piracy only because thereā€™s enough people paying for the media to make it worth it for the studio. At least one other commenter pointed this out, but if everyone pirated, who would be making movies and video games? So to keep the system going, imo, only pirate if you werenā€™t going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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        11 months ago

        At least one other commenter pointed this out, but if everyone pirated, who would be making movies and video games? So to keep the system going, imo, only pirate if you werenā€™t going to buy it anyway - piracy or nothin.

        Youā€™re missing another optionā€¦ And one that most people seem to continue to purposefully forget. When Netflix first startedā€¦ It was a good product at a worthwhile price. Lots of people gave up pirating. Music was the same thing with Spotify and such services. Piracy is only getting worse again because the companies that ā€œproduceā€ the content canā€™t keep their heads out of their asses and the services that cut back on piracy are now worse than what we left originally. As someone who had purchased these services for YEARSā€¦ Thereā€™s nothing but greed on their endā€¦ They canā€™t be mad when people respond with their own form of greed, they made the first move here. They could have continued making money from people who otherwise wouldnā€™t have paid. They chose this path to some extent.

        • 0ops@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          I think my last sentence includes your ā€œmissing optionā€, actually. Take streaming for example, Iā€™m not paying for 6 different streaming services. I canā€™t, I wonā€™t, and Iā€™m not going to juggle them every couple months either. So I pirate. Even if for some reason I couldnā€™t pirate their stuff, I just wouldnā€™t watch it. Either way, they donā€™t get my money.

    • TehPers@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      If everyone who would buy a digital product pirates it instead, then itā€™s clear that they have been harmed by the piracy. This whole ā€œownā€ vs ā€œrentā€ vs etc argument is completely tangental as is the definition of ā€œstealā€, unless pedantry is the purpose of this post. Itā€™s clear that piracy can be harmful.

      ā€œBut they lost nothing physicalā€ is an extremely shallow argument that ignores that not everything with value is physical. If I copy your idea as-is and make a product out of it before you, you can always come up with new ideas, right? Itā€™s not like you lost something physical. Clearly you havenā€™t been harmed, right?

      If someone who wouldnā€™t purchase a digital product pirates it, then itā€™s less obvious whether the creator got harmed by it. Also, to be clear, the discussion over digital ownership is still important.

      • jeremyparker@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        Itā€™s got nothing to do with whether itā€™s physical. Cars are different from movies because the movie can be reproduced infinitely without resource cost (or, very minimal). If you steal a rental car, they have to buy a new one. If you pirate a movie, they havenā€™t lost anything.

        • TehPers@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          If you pirate a movie, they havenā€™t lost anything.

          Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value? Otherwise if everyone pirates the movie, then they lose nothing and have no incentive to enforce that people purchase it before watching it.

          There are a lot of ways to justify pirating digital content. Pretending as though digital content has no value is not one of them, unless you really and truly believe that creators of digital content deserve no compensation.

          • jeremyparker@programming.dev
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            11 months ago

            First off, I was specifically addressing your concern about the car & itā€™s physicality. Value of physical objects is directly related to the scarcity of the resources; digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.

            Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value

            Secondly (and thirdly in a sec), this is the fundamental misapprehension that surrounds piracy. Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale. In terms of music (I read a study about music piracy a few years ago), this is rarely the case, and in fact, it was the opposite: the study found that the albums that were pirated more resulted in more sales, since the albumā€™s reach was extended.

            Thirdly, one of the core issues with the entertainment industry at the moment is that the streaming services have no way to gauge the draw of a specific show, movie, or song, since subscribers just donā€™t approach their subscription that way - you donā€™t subscribe to Spotify because your want to hear Virtual Cold by Polvo; you subscribe because you want to have access to their entire collection, as well as all the other awesome 90s noise/math rock - even though, letā€™s be honest, you really just listen to Virtual Cold over and over.

            As a result of this clusterfuck, streaming services canā€™t correctly apportion payment to their content - they do an elaborate split of the profits. So - the best way for the ā€œcontent providersā€ (ie copyright holders) to increase profits is to reduce the amount of content on the streaming service - so the profits are spread over fewer titles.

            This is massively hurting the production companies - please note none of these fuckers are getting any sympathy from me, this is just an explanation - theyā€™re having a hard time finding a balance between how much they can spend given that half of their productionsā€™ profits are pennies. (Oops, forgot one element: because of streaming tech, no one buys films in tape or DVD or whatever - which was half of a filmā€™s profit.) Do they make a bunch of huge budget action movie sequels that fill the theater seats? Or do they make smaller-budget films with smaller profit margins?

            Itā€™s a shitty situation, and I donā€™t know what the answer is - but I know that the answer isnā€™t whatever the fuck this is. And, until they figure their shit out, Iā€™m just going to step outside the market for a bit.

            Iā€™m not living in some dream world where piracy doesnā€™t reduce profits. I know that the underground bands that I like are usually supportive of piracy because it helps them more than it hurts - and when it comes to film and TV, when those companies complain about piracy , itā€™s just like those bullshit shoplifting claims - attempts to turn their ā€œline not go upā€ on poor people. Piracy is a grain of sand in the Sahara - they have way bigger problems than that - though I do think increased piracy metrics might help encourage them in the right direction.

            Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.

            • TehPers@beehaw.org
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              11 months ago

              To be clear, Iā€™m not against piracy as a whole, but at its core if a potential buyer pirates something, then that is an opportunistic loss, and thus there exists a value to what was pirated (or rather the sale of it).

              digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.

              There are a number of ways to price digital content. You could price it based on cost of production split among an estimated number of sales plus a premium, or based on what others in the industry price it at. Regardless, to the creator of that digital content, each sale of that content has value, and while the copy itself might not, the transaction does.

              Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale.

              I ā€œdemoedā€ Minecraft before buying it, and you can bet I recommended it to others as well. There are plenty of instances where piracy can be a good thing, however I was never trying to state otherwise. In my original response, I had called out that piracy by people who would not otherwise purchase a product was less clear. There are also people who ā€œpirateā€ content theyā€™ve already purchased, and those who pirate like I did to demo a product before buying it later. In your case, you also have a justification for it when it comes to music. However, the point was that piracy can be harmful (as is shown by my extreme example of everyone pirating something), and therefore the sale of the content being pirated has value. They arenā€™t charging just because they feel like it, theyā€™re charging because theyā€™re selling a product, and the product had a cost to produce, even if it was mostly just an initial cost.

              The debate around digital product ownership is an important one, and if youā€™re voting with your wallet by pirating the content, then by all means I wonā€™t stop you. However, the idea that you arenā€™t ā€œstealingā€ because you pirated digital content rather than purchasing a license to it is a distraction from the real problems of digital ownership that the article covers extremely well, most of which stem from lack of control over your copy of the product. Using piracy to try to effect change makes sense, but only because that piracy can harm the creators/distributors. If it didnā€™t harm them, then they wouldnā€™t care about the piracy and wouldnā€™t be interested in changing.

              Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.

              Ditto.

        • Sonori@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          So by that logic, if I were to hack your computer, copy the data, and put sell it to some group for them to use, would that be theft. You still have your data, you havenā€™t lost anything directly, and while the group I sold it to may use a saved credit card or password to harm you I didnā€™t, so would what I did be considered theft?

          Similarly, if I just sold the information gained by it to advertisers, marketers, your friendly neighborhood stalker, etcā€¦ Would that have been theft? You werenā€™t harmed, the demonstrably valuable information was just taken without your consent and given to a third party that wanted it.

          • jeremyparker@programming.dev
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            11 months ago

            I just wrote like a 10 page response to another comment on that same post I made so I donā€™t think I have the energy to go too deep on this - so, to keep it short:

            1. I was just rebutting that personā€™s claim that a car and a digital object have the same relationship to value, and they donā€™t; physicality requires resources that ā€œdigitalityā€ doesnā€™t.

            2. I feel like you mightā€™ve agreed with me in the second part? Or, if not, I think you managed to destabilize the entire data economy in like 2 sentences, so, fuck yeah.