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. 🤑
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…