Piracy is Good:The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge
Piracy is Good:The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge
Nature Wants Information to Be Free.
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This person seems to be living in a fantasy world where people don’t need to make a living with content that they’re making. In an ideal world where people don’t need money to survive, this position is also ideal. In the real world, it’s completely unsustainable.
You seem to be under the impression that the folk making the thing are also the ones seeing direct compensation from sales and that largely is not true
The author didn’t make that distinction, why should I?
You seem to be under the impression that piracy has no effect. That is untrue.
Any proves? The pirates are not the potential byers that you, as a hypothetical content creator, had lost, they either want to try before they buy, or won't buy even if they had no choice.
If that was the case, they wouldn’t get to ingest the content. As it stands, they are ingesting the content without paying the authors of said content. They’re violating the social contract between a creator and the end-user.
Lol. Social contract? It's not a social contract if it is written in paper by lawyers of only one side. It's terms of service, which poorly transcribe rules of material world to the world of information.
I could copy your comment, and use it's text as I would like. Have I stolen your comment? Have I violated social contract between us by doing so?
It is a social contract. We’re not talking about contracts or terms of services. We’re talking about the most basic social contract of any society in existence - you do/give something for/to me in exchange for me doing/giving something for/to you.
Did I make my comment with the expectation that someone would pay for it? No? Then your comment is nonsense.
Yeah, my analogy was bad. Haven't put enough thought in it. But now that I did thought on the topic, I still can't agree with you, here's why:
If we were talking about our good old physical world, you'd be correct. For example we can take such thing as tipping: in the US you absolutely must tip. If I'll go to the US I still will be expected to leave a tip, even though I'm not a local, and I will absolutely break a social contract if I do otherwise. Kinda obvious.
But here's a thing: first of all, social contract is a consensus inside of a group. If there's no consensus, there's no social contract. There could be some, of course, if we look at a smaller set of people. But, here's one more: the people in the Internet are not as divided as in real world, they're all mixed up almost in every way they could be, so there's no social contracts about the Internet, if we're talking about it as a the whole of course, and so there are definitely none on the piracy topic. Where I came from, piracy is fine. Where you came from it is almost a crime. We have different social contracts irl.
So yeah, when you said that pirating is a social contract violation, what group of people you meant as the context? Because we're currently on c/piracy, here it is the norm. And if there was a social contract on the discussed topic on lemmy, there would be no such community as the one we're currently chatting in.
You could say that piracy violates our agreement on that stealing is bad, I might've said that you can't steal the information, since you're always only copying the original, but that would be not true. One could steal the information. My point is that piracy is different from stealing. What's the distinction you may ask? Giving the credit I say. Here is the example: you're a compositor. I steal your song if I copy it, maybe add some minor details (even though this step is completely optional), and then release it as if it was mine. This is stealing. Cutting webcomics' watermarks and posting them that way, is also stealing. But if you upload your copy of a product you purchased, without covering original author's name and claiming it yours, it's sharing, don't you think? Louvre pirated Mona Lisa by scanning it and sharing the scan online. You could see Mona Lisa for free. Does it lessen the amount of people wanting to visit the Louvre? I doubt that:)
Your argument is flawed. If you’ve ever purchased any kind of media for money then you are aware of the social contract. If you have a job where you do a service for someone in exchange for money, you are aware of and understand the social contract. The only subsection of people that this wouldn’t apply to is people who have only ever purchased physical goods and never paid for a service and I have to imagine that number is near zero.
As far as the “stealing” comment, you’re stealing the income from the creator. You’re not stealing the media if you’re not depriving someone of it. We can agree on that. If you make use of something without paying for it and it wasn’t given to you as a gift, you are stealing the livelihood from the creator who made it with the expectation that they would be paid for its use. Sharing something in this context is just semantics. If it wasn’t given to you with the intent to be shared, then that’s breaking another social contract.
There’s no other way to put it except that people would stop making art the way they do if they couldn’t make money off it. We live in a world where we need to make a living while trying to make the things we’re passionate about. There are very few people in the chain that make so much money that they can afford to do it while people “share” their work without paying.
And would they? Why are you assuming that pirate is a non-buyer? And have you read what I wrote? Are you really can't see the problem in your logic, or are you intentionally ignorant because my statements are not to your liking, or because you have too much ego to admit that you are wrong? Just wondering.
Yeah, all your assertions are being disproven by the simple fact that a pirate could still buy the product. And a good pirate will buy the product if everything is to his liking.
Moreover, pirating is a more aggressive competing environment. What does it mean? Art evolution. If you are happened to be a pirate, you try products, and then finance them how ever you would like. It's almost like a selection in agriculture. You like the sweet apples, but want them to be even sweetier? Select the sweetest of them, plant them, grow them, reiterate until you're happy. Because now what y'all are planting are all the seeds you have, in a futile hope that the next time you will get lucky.
About all that "lost income" racket. To me it almost seems like a thoughtcrime: how can you detect if I thought something wrong, and in our case, how could you detect if I have copied your art? Is there a growing debt on your bank account? Because the key, the character feature of stealing, essential thing on why we call it a bad thing to do is that you, as the creator, lose a copy of your product. You don't loose anything if someone pirating your product, quite the opposite — you get more recognition. And the more recognition you get, the more valuable your products are.
And back to the purchasing after pirating, even if the pirate won't pay, even if we take the worst case scenario, where my point is all wrong, and pirating is stealing, who will be the income stolen from? The creator? Three times ha! It would be the corporation. Corporation has already paid the creators for their job, and the corps won't dense their financing of the creator if his work made a huge success. Well, they could do it, but just a little compared to their income. And if the creator goes, they still have the income. So even now the creator won't be harmed.
And once again about the social contract, because as far as I can see, you didn't read my comment properly. Let's check the more or less common definition of it, and put it in simple words: social contract is a consentive agreement on what you should do and what you shouldn't. If there's no penalty mentioned on what if someone don't follow a rule, the only measure against them will be public disapproval, where banishment is the highest measure of one. In my social environment there is no penalty (judicial or by the crowd) nor public disapproval for piracy. I ask you once again, which social contract am I violating, my dear enlightened monarch? What is in social contract and what isn't is defined by the current society you're in. There's nothing about piracy in mine.
I could also mention that most paid digital products have a free alternatives, and therefore their nominal value falls in the bottomless pit by the rules of economics. I could've again repeat about end user's freedom to copy the product he paid for, and your inability to distinct whether he copied it for himself, or to share it with someone. I won't cover the problematics of your logic in case if someone "illegally" uses legally obtained software by borrowing someone's hardware on which the software is stored. My comment is already huge enough, and you haven't shown any will to understand other one's point. Just as it was in my analogy earlier, I plant this apple tree in a futile hope that this time it will grow. Why am I doing this? Maybe I just enjoy the gardening, lol.
This is all a bunch of distracted nonsense. If someone pays for it, then they haven’t pirated it. If someone already pirated it, why would they then pay for it? Maybe because they feel guilty and want to support the author? The entire premise behind pirating is that you’re taking/ingesting something without paying for it. Now you’re being dishonest, moving the goalposts of the discussion, and being condescending instead of addressing the actual points. If you can’t have a discussion that sticks to the topic at hand, and have it honestly, there’s no point in engaging with you further.
what a delusional low-effort argument. Do you create anything opensource or for free on the internet? or Do you create anything at all? If not who are you to decide what the hypothetical content creator thinks?
Everyone would prefer things for free if they could get away with it online, doesn't make it an ethical argument.
So let's say if people could pirate things from other sources that the creator themselves, why would anyone bother to create anything at all.
Exactly… in a world where money is a requirement, who would ever make new content if they knew people were just going to share it for free?
Have you heard of opensource software? No? Because you're using one right now. It's exactly free and shared willingly by it's authors:)
Thanks for proving my point. The authors willingly shared it. They put it out into the world with the intention of it being shared freely. That is not the case for pirated media/content. If OSS was released with a different license, it would be just as much theft as piracy if the writers of the code didn’t intend for it to be free or shared willingly.
Well, if you can't provide reasonable arguments, why won't I help you? Not that I haven't thought about all pros and cons I could imagine on the topic and it didn't disprove my original point. And not that not providing any evidence for your opinion to prove, waiting for opponent to imagine it for you, is making you, as a collocutor, as interesting and valuable as a scarecrow.
But to the point. If you will read my responses to other people here (idk why would you do that but anyway) you'll notice that I've already used this example, but since all your arguments are all the same, I'm not seeing a problem here. So here it is: Louvre had pirated Mona Lisa. They scanned the original, and then posted it to the Internet. Now you can see it online for free. Before it happened, it required you to go to the place to see it, now you don't have to. Did Mona Lisa lost in value because of it? Does no one goes to Louvre nowadays because of the fact that all the works you could see there where scanned and posted online?
You could argue that Mona Lisa is unique and it's scan is not a full copy of experience you meet if you go to the museum. Well, it's just like if you download a game from torrents — you still won't get all the author provided for his customers: you won't get patches, you won't get online features, in other words, you won't get the service. But you also won't get some the troubles: just as I don't have to buy tickets to France, spend my time and money, now I don't have to buy before I try. Of course I am not a stupid, I understand that author needs to eat, so of course I would buy his product if I liked it.
If you think about it, in terms of mentality, it's not that different from what we have with lemmy. And it's also a more healthy consumer culture due to it's grown selectiveness. You see, nowadays in game industry the piracy is almost dead. You might be happy because of it. I don't know why would you be, because the unkle Sam told you that it's a bad thing? Anyhow, let me stop you for a moment, and think: what did it lead to?
If you remembered all the problems the industry, and especially AAA games today have, you got the point and can skip this paragraph. If not, let me describe: since now the habit of preordering the games you like became as wide spread as it could be, since customers finally got that muscular reflex of buying everything good-looking, we have a huge creativity and quality crysis. Why would game studios polish their game, why would they try to invent something new, why would they hire qa team, why would they do all of that, if the customer paid full price for a preorder as soon as they showed him a little fancy trailer? And since the customers are so obedient, companies could make them eat shit. You can't own a copy of a game by Ubisoft anymore, no, if you check their agreement, it says that you can go fuck yourself, because now they can do whatever they would like with your uplay game library, and if you've read what I wrote here at least somehow attentively, you can conclude that all of that are your, misters "piracy is wrong", your all fault. You can go and preorder ten more games after seeing their "promising" trailers, god riddance, fellow non-pirater.
None of what you said makes any sense or argues the points I’ve made. My point was about the intent of the author. If the author didn’t intend for their work to be freely given away or “shared”, then it’s immoral to steal income for them. Plain and simple. Address that point and stop bloviating about things that aren’t relevant.
None of what you said makes any sense or argues the points I’ve made
🤡🤡🤡 How could anything make sense to you if you're not even trying to analyze what people say? Don't you see how contradictive your thinking is by reading my example with Mona Lisa? Or it's not okay to pirate, if the author is alive, but it's absolutely fine if the author is dead? Did Leonardo da'Vinci intended to share his artwork online? You may say that da'Vinci haven't lost anything when louvre shared the scans, and that's exactly what I already have talked about with you in the neighbouring comment branch.
Address that point and stop bloviating about things that aren’t relevant.
Stop trying to make a good face during a bad play. Discussions are made to identify the truth. If you're trying to manipulate everwhom's opinion or ignore your opponent's arguments instead of stating ones yourself, then you're nothing but a windbag. It's either you ignored what I said or you're really that stupid, in either way with each comment you more and more resemble a clown to me.
If everyone would prefer things for free, then why are we even discussing this topic here? I mean, if it was so, you would've been a pirate too. And if your point is right, then why, for instance, do I have over a hundred games on steam, even though I've pirated a lot. Most of the pirated games I've bought later.
what a delusional low-effort argument. Do you create anything opensource or for free on the internet? or Do you create anything at all?
Lol, the first sentence literally fits everywhere. I could say exactly the same about your comment, but I won't, since unlike you, I can prove my point without belittling or insult attempts, or, by appealing to the personality behind the arguments, but not to the arguments themselves, like you did in your next sentences. Anyway. Do I create anything? Yes. Is it finished? No. Will it be opensource? Yes. Does it matter in the current context? No. Why? Because if you just look around, you would see that the world is not as simple as you imagine it. If everyone would prefer things for free, then why lemmy still exists? Why anyone bothers to willingly pay it's authors even if it gives no advantages? Why blender foundation still stands? There're lots of "why".
If not who are you to decide what the hypothetical content creator thinks?
If you're asking this question, then maybe you have read my comment poorly. I've never assumed what a hypothetical content creator thinks. I only pointed out that one should not consider pirated copies as a lost profit and pointed out why.
So let's say if people could pirate things from other sources that the creator themselves, why would anyone bother to create anything at all.
There was some cases in the game industry when the original game creators posted their own game on torrent trackers, and said that anyone could pirate their game. Guess what? The games still were successful. Each of them. Some even got additional support after that. Yeah, financial support by pirates. Sounds paradoxical, huh? The world is not just black and white, it's all shades of grey.
this was the most popular response when this was posted on lemmy or kbin a couple months ago. seems the author is pushing a new wave with bots or alts? we'll never know but some of the response seem identical to me.
The author of the article or me, the author of the comment?