Piracy, in today’s context of unauthorized sharing of digital content, is wrongly condemned as immoral theft. However, it is not piracy itself that is immoral. Rather, it is the greed-driven laws and practices that censor knowledge and creative works to maximize profits. At its core, piracy is about sharing information and creative works with others, which should be seen as a moral good. 🤑
The article is well written and all, but that “Copyright © 2023, all rights reserved” at the end is ultimate hypocrisy.
Have to change the footer part. Sorry :(
How can I pirate Adobe Lightroom, if it’s impossible for me to own it by paying for it?
Honestly, I would pay some decent mulah for a standalone current version of Adobe Lightroom that doesn’t try to suck me up into the cloud. It’s silly event pirators and cracker teams can put a pretty fully featured yearly version, and Adobe does not.
Hard to argue against piracy with the current system of copyright that only serves giant corporations. Guess it’s human nature to try to consolidate power…
I’m not going to argue for/against the article. However,
we need laws and policies promoting open access and sharing of knowledge, not maximizing profits through contrived scarcity
As a fan of FOSS (and the Open Source community in general), I completely agree with this. Sharing knowledge can do a lot of good.
Isn’t there already laws for that? Fair use being one of them. And I read about some right to archiving too. Which allows archive.orgs efforts.
Agree 100% and I’ve been seeing this “debate” in other instances and communities recently
Piracy is moral and ethical. Small businesses are not the targets. I would download a car, I would download a better life if I could
You guys are deranged… Every movie you download had huge amounts of work behind it, those people need money too.
Sure, a studio makes hundreds of millions making a shitty marvel movie, but it does still legitimately cost them tens of millions to make - they just make revolting middle of the road crap so it sells to idiots everywhere.
That’s why there’s no good movies any more - it’s too risky to tell a good story, now that we’re all pirating them
The instant there’s no money in it, you’ll see there will be no movies made (and that’s precisely why the last 20 years of movies have generally been rubbish).
The studios are fine, and by all means steal Deadpool 53 or whatever off them, but don’t pretend you’re being noble in the process.
At least own up that it’s theft.
Similarly - It takes real skill and experience to make and record music (and if anything that’s gotten a while lot cheaper than it used to be!), but the artists that aren’t in the radio would be gutted to hear your downloading it.
That’s also why merch is so important to a bands bottom line - it’s got away less middle men in the line taking a cut
Theft is when you deprive someone of one of their possessions. How is sharing content the same as doing that? The only “theft” going on here is content producers trying to steal the meaning of the word theft.
If people need compensation for their content production (and they really should) then that can be provided for by patronage, by donations, by society in general. Putting the round peg of that responsibility into the square hole of each person “consuming” the content makes zero sense in the grand scheme of things.
Theft is taking somebody’s property. It doesn’t require that you “deprive” the owner or that the “property” is a possession.
I think the theft isn’t in the bits themselves, but in the license to ‘play’ the bits (be it the mp3 or movie).
Creating content isn’t trivial, and the creators deserve to be compensated for that. That is where the theft is - withholding compensation.
You cannot deny you’re getting a free pass at someone else’s expense, surely?
On the other side of the coin, however, it is also found that when artists don’t seek to control the content too closely, the piracy often results in increased sales (this is a vague memory, I’m stretching out on a limb, here!). I think this is largely why YouTube generally has everyone’s music on it (cos they’re monetizing the plays via ads - deplorable, but better than theft).
Personally I think it’s quite common for people to pirate an album to check it out and if they find it ‘worth it’, that’s often covered into a sale. I don’t think that translates at all with movies however…
I would somewhat agree that pirating a just released movie is an immoral thing, and generally I don’t do it. However, the main issue here is the copyright law. Just look at it: content producers almost always are forced to transfer the rights to producers, then they don’t get a penny from it. Producers then hold those right for eternity, even though, realistically, you get the most of the profit from a specific content (book, movie, game) in the first year from the release date. I would change copyright law, so that original authors would always have access to revenue and management of the content, and so that the right to distribute would be held for no longer than 3 years (maybe even less). Then it fits perfectly into the paradigm of piracy for the data propagation and conservation
@flambonkscious @RedCanasta And the people who made that work earn approximately 0.1% of what you pay for the work. The other 99.9% goes to shareholders. Wouldn’t it make more sense to give the workers 100%, or even 10% of the normal price?
So I agree with piracy, however one thing to keep in mind is that our economy and productivity are only in existence because of the land and equipment (as well as the labor) that it takes to produce them.
If 100% of income went to the workers, there’s nothing to pay for equipment and land that is also necessary for production. Ugly as capitalism is, the end result is a productive economy. A lot of the wealth is captured in land and equipment.
Now, you can argue that the workers should own the land and means of production. That I could agree with. But you simply can’t produce anything without paying for land and equipment plus labor.
Dafuq, man, do whatever illegal activity you want as long as you’re ready to face the consequences… But don’t pretend you’re acting ethically…
I have pirated shit too. Chances they’ll catch me are very low, so I don’t care. I also target corporations, never small businesses. But pretending I’m a saint because I’m “sharing information”? That’s delusional.
At least learn to accept what you are without sugarcoats and coping mechanisms.
How is it delusional?
Digital product are duplicable for free, and we artificially limit that in order grant more money to publisher.
It’s like we could duplicate food for free, jesus-like, and we should say “mh no no, I don’t care if people is dying from hunger, you can’t copy my food without paying”.
And don’t start with the “compensating the creator” argument. It’s a necessity, of course, but there are thousands of ways to do it better than how we are doing today (where basically all the profit goes to publisher and IP owner).
There are a lot of other arguments to make about ethics of Piracy, like the fact that IP owner stop taking care and making available valuable cultural artifacts as soon as they are not profitable anymore (lots of thing would be lost forever without piracy), and the fact that price are set in western standards so that a game or an ebook is like half the monthly averages salary of some countries. The list go on.
Piracy is THE ethical way. The collective benefit are huge, and you can easily compensate for the individual loss (e.g. making donation and direct purchase for small creators in order to support them anyway).
Yeah, wow, is this sub satire? These ridiculously superficial arguments shouldn’t convince anyone past a teenager who is stoned out of their mind.
