this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Theft isn't specific to property, you can steal services too.
The water is certainly muddy with digital media, but this is just another oversimplified argument.
If you need to do mental gymnastics to feel OK about pirating then...idk find something better than this.
See comments below for more mental gymnastics
People who assert property rights (including limited monopoly rights on intellectual property) are doing mental gymnastics too. We're just used to them, thanks to a century of propaganda after the great depression.
The current state of wealth distribution a century later doesn't seem to carry the promise that capitalism can be fair.
In fact, IP maximalism (Thanks, Walt!) has denied the public a robust public domain, and our courts struggle to do the mental gymnastics to understand why we have a public domain in the first place.
That is to say, the US and EU have totally lost the plot.
Property rights aren't even fair. Big guys assert them, and little guys have them taken away. A good comment: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/5648831
If I were to steal cable, I would be using the cable company's resources to deliver content to my house without paying for it. If I were to set up an inductor under a power line to steal power, I would be depriving the power company of power they could have sold to somebody else without giving them anything in return.
When I torrent something, I don't even put any additional load on Netflix's servers. With their current monetization scheme I don't even make the show's producers any less money.
And when you subscribe to 1 or 2 rotating streaming services and only torrent for personal archiving purposes, you aren't even depriving the streaming services of any revenue.
When you steal cable, you don't deprive the cable company of anything.
wrong.
I torrrented a gratis OS called Arch the other day. Please understand torrenting doesn't equate to copyright infringement.
It was clear from context what was meant, i.e. torrenting copyrighted content. Let's not be disingenuous about this.
It’s not gymnastics. It’s a pretty easy step. Corporations fuck you over. You fucked them over. No mental gymnast skills required for that
I buy water, I own it. It just passes Thur my body or shower and pipes. That's like saying you don't own your tires as they wear away. You can own consumables. I get your underlying point about theft is more then taking away something. You could be depriving someone of money they would have made. Same with copyright theft. Someone buys your product and copies it then sells it. They didn't steal from you directly but still caused harm. Piracy is a service issue, if things you buy on that service don't work people will stop using that service. I'm not going to download 12 game launchers to play the games I want, I'll stick with steam. Same way with tv/movies.
"muddy waters" is a saying, I don't think you should take OP literally. The Rest you've written seems to agree with their sentiment btw.
Ahhh, thanks I misunderstood. I do agree but also I have a Plex server. I started it when I worked at blockbuster. Technically even ripping your Blu-rays can be illegal so, you have to find your one morals and not rely on laws.
Copyright infringement causes less harm than the copyright itself. Piracy causes less harm than the cruelty and greed in production and distribution of mainstream media. Less harm is caused by theft than by a system that willfully starves the public and vaults away excess to drive demand and market price.
No artists should go hungry but then no non-artist should either. And yet in our system artists are enslaved and had their work taken from them so that enterprisers can live in luxury while the rest of us toil, undernourished.
How much media production does piracy fund?
You're asking a loaded question.
You could be asking can we get quality content without the artifice of intellectual property to which the answer is yes, and has been demonstrated time and again.
You could ask how many artists get wealthy from producing copyrighted content to which the answer is very few In fact most creators who are good enough to get published by record labels or publishing houses see so little of that money they can't turn it into a full time career, largely do to Hollywood Accounting but the labels and publishing houses get a lot of money from having controlling ownership of that content.
You could ask what harm is caused by intellectual property laws to which I can reply their expansion from a monopoly limited to a decade or so extended to life + nearly a century has denied the public a robust public domain which was the whole point of copyright inserted into the Constitution of the United States in the first place. It's made worse because we don't know what all is copyrighted or patented, judges don't know what can be copyrighted, and what is considered fair use, or how art even works. (e.g. Not every blockist painting owes money to Pablo Picasso's estate). It's a tangled mess with a ton of precedent that favors richer legal war-chests, and has caused a pronounced reduction both of the quantity of content getting made and the quality of that content.
So maybe you should ask better questions.