this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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But the original creation cost time and money, which you're not reimbursing the creator for. The moral thing to do is to pay your share of that if you make a copy, even if the copy itself doesn't cost anything.
It's like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure it's not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldn't even happen if everyone acted like this, or the organizers would have to pay for it all by themselves.
If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you "bought". Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.
Would you call it Piracy if I lend a bluray from a friend? I didn't pay for it and yet I've watched it.
No, because it's so widespread and natural that it should be expected and already accounted for in the price. But there is no hard line imo, and simplified examples often fail to capture all the aspects that go into the decision. E.g. I'd say paying for one person at a concert and sneaking in another would basically be piracy, even though the two situations are very similar on a surface level.
I think it's about reasonable expectations both parties of the agreement can have, based on established social norms. If you buy a movie for personal consumption you should be able to expect that you can watch it whenever you want, and also share that experience with friends and family. And at the same time the seller should be able to expect that you limit it to a reasonable number of personal contacts, and don't start to sell it to strangers or run a movie theater, because that expectation was used to set the price.
So if piracy was "widespread and natural" it'd be bueno?
If that would be possible then yes, or course.
That's bascially the Start Trek future, where everybody's needs are met and people can just do whatever they want. It doesn't "cost" anything to create stuff, so it's fine to copy everything for free. But that's not the reality we are living in. In our's somebody has to pay for things, and if everyone pirated everything then things couldn't be made anymore.
An example where it kinda works is open source software. People don't charge for copies, because they expect to get help with their work and also be allowed to use other OS software without paying for it. As long as that balance holds it works out fine, but there are a lot of projects that required too much investment from the creator's and didn't provide enough back for them to keep going. And even there, companies profiting from OS projects are expected or even required to pay it back, by contributing code and paying for engineers and sponsorships.
To further the thought experiment. I digitize my Blu-ray and put it on a private tracker to share with ONLY my friends. Is that piracy?
Copywrite laws are antiquated at best and need to be destroyed at worst.
If you need more proof look at bullshit like how Paramount+ until recently couldn't show flagship shows like Picard in Canada because the rights were given to Crave.
So as a consumer I want to go to the owner of the property and I can't watch it because the owner told me they gave a copy of it to someone else.
Trust me, they're working on ways to prevent that too as we speak.
under what ethical system?
Mine, obviously. But feel free to correct me if you disagree with something.
there's no reason to believe what you claimed. a claim made without justification can be dismissed without justification.
What unjustified claim did I make that you disagree with? Seems all rather uncontroversial to me.
i don't need to disagree to disbelieve. i do disagree, but without establishing your justification for this claim, it's kind of hard to argue against it.
The justification was that creating things has a cost, even if a copy doesn't, and that we should distribute that cost as fairly as possible among the people benefiting from the creation.
that's doesn't follow
Idk what to tell you but: Yes it does. We can't really argue if you refuse to elaborate your point.
when you drive over a bridge, do you tip the engineering form? the contractors? they're the ones who created this experience for you.
I pay taxes, those were used to pay the people who build the bridge. And yes, taxes should be fair. If it's a private bridge then the owners have every right to demand a fee for crossing it.
not the owners: the designers. what if I copy the bridge and put it in my front yard: do you think I owe royalties to the engineering firm?
Yes, of course. They created the design, it cost them time and money, you want to use it, so you should pay part of those costs. Or to put it differently: You both use the design, why should they be the ones to pay for its creation, and not you?
they still have the design. I haven't taken something from them. I don't owe them anything.
Who says you can only owe something if you take something away first?
Think about how rent works. The building or appartement will still be there, loose value over time and need repairs whether you live there or not, yet you still owe the owner rent if you do.
rent is immoral
No it's not. Why should someone let you stay in a building they payed and/or worked for, without you paying for a share of the upkeep, repairs, insurance etc., and the fact that the building exists in the first place?!
if you feel like rent as it currently exists even vaguely approximates the kind of model you claim you haven't been paying attention. rent is, at its core, having other people pay for something because you own it. landlords are infamous for not paying for upkeep and repairs. the incentives behind owning property that other people live in lead to bad outcomes for people who can't afford to own.
I'm talking about rent in principle, not how it is often perverted today. You can make just about anything immoral if you add price gauging and not-fulfilling-contractual-obligations to it. There are a lot of rents with fair prices, e.g. almost everything that's not housing, but also apartments from social housing or housing associations.
rent doesn't exist in principle, it exists in practice. and in practice, the history of rent is a history of wealth extraction. if its "perverted" today, it definitely was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. if you aren't aware, this is a pretty basic leftist thing. if property can be held privately, those who own the property can use that ownership to extract wealth from people who need water, food, and shelter, but do not themselves own property. they can use that extracted wealth to buy more property, depriving ever more people of places in which to live their lives without paying somebody else for the privilege. and so on. thus "private property is theft".
in any case, rent isn't an uncontroversial example of how to fairly pay people who do things. rent is deeply political, and has been for most of modern history. it isn't just common sense that we ought to allow people who own things to make money off that ownership, that's a political statement, and one that should require some justification, considering its material impact on poverty, homelessness, and the accumulation of wealth.
This is a completely useless stance when you want to figure out if rent itself is morally good or bad.
There are a lot of instances of rent today that are completely fine. For example, my parents rent 2 rooms of their appartement to university students, and they just ask for a share of the costs they have, proportional to the size of the rooms. That is rent, but free of other influences like profit maximization, and all parties seem to be very happy with the arrangement. Or if you rent a tool or car from a local company, you'll pay mostly for a share of the acquisition and repair costs, and a bit on top so the owners and employees of the company can keep the lights on. There is absolutely nothing wrong about this form of rent.
If you're saying that rent + limited supply + capitalistic profit maximation + corruption is a problem, then I absolutely agree with you, but it would be false to blame that on the rent part of that equation. And I would definitely not go as far as saying that private property in general is bad, expecially not very limited private ownership like a person owning the house they live in or part of the company they work for. Too much concentration of ownership is a problem, not the concept of ownership itself.
hard disagree. we have to examine things as they exist in the real world, not as we would like them to be. if we are only figuring out whether it would be good in principle, we're failing to recognize whether that principle is actually founded on actual observable fact. and the observable facts say that rent has always been a potent tool for capitalists to extract wealth from people.
also disagree. why are these university students renting? schools could be providing housing to students if we invested public funds into that kind of project. what does the necessity of rent for students do in practice? well, the extra costs involved in having to rent space on the market in order to go to school structurally disadvantages marginalized students. students whose parents can cover the rent are able to maximize their time learning, take advantage of more extracurriculars, or save the money they make from a job for themselves, while students who can't have to live in their cars, take jobs to cover costs, or just not get the education they want. the scale of the problem is smaller, but the nature of the problem is the same. those who have not must give their money to those who have in order to have a place to live.
lets just go through this. the supply of available property will always be limited. capitalism is defined by the private ownership of the means of production. corruption implies a system not working as intended. capitalism is intended to maximize profit, capitalism requires private ownership, resources are always limited, and rent requires private ownership. you might as well just say "private property + the limitations of a finite universe + private property + the incentives of private property is a problem". i'm kinda joking, but not really.
this is a problem of terminology. generally when socialists or other lefties are talking about private property, they're talking about land and the economic abstractions of land ownership. socialist politics makes explicit distinctions between personal property and private property. i hear this argument alot, honestly, and if you find yourself making it as an argument against criticisms of private property more than once, i'd just recommend learning a bit more about what socialists believe, because its kind of just talking past what we think the problem is, and how we propose to solve it (democratically, instead of at the whims of rich folks).
you've talked about corporations a couple times, so i do wanna just say that those aren't necessarily reasonable structures in and of themselves. it isn't a given that the owners of a corporation should earn a profit, or that owning shares in a company is something beyond critique. there are more democratic organizational structures that don't concentrate power towards those who have the most stuff.
private property is theft.
And you are accusing me of not properly supporting my claims??
your might owe under almost any circumstance, but almost all of them have to drop with a mutually agreed contract or transfer of property. what circumstance do you think created the debt here? and what if someone walks across my front yard bridge? do they owe the engineers too? it's just silly.
This is going into feasability and away from morality, but ok.
The law is the "mutually agreed contract", and the usage created the dept. You can be expected to know that the design of a bridge might be copyrighted, you can't be expected to know that a bridge is private property and crossing it requires a fee. Ergo it's on you to contact the owner of the design, and it's on you to collect a fee from people using your bridge if that is what you want to do.
why?
Because of the sentence before the one you quoted. I'm sorry, but this is getting silly.
That's a systemic problem, something I wouldn't personally care about. The "system" is just so horribly screwed up and skewed against us that I just no longer care if it works or not.
This rubs me the wrong way too, yes. Though I'm really beyond moral justifications, I just stopped caring.
Same here. The world is unjust so act accordingly.
Which doesn't mean be an asshole to everybody and steal everything you can but be an asshole to assholes and steal from franchises.