1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
💰 Please help cover server costs.
 |
 |
|---|---|
| Ko-fi | Liberapay |
Things got weird when we went digital.
Recording from free to air is legal because of the "time shifting" argument. The show is being broadcast regardless, just because it's at an inconvenient time for you doesn't mean you should have to miss it. It's also worth noting that media producers fought tooth and nail against this.
Piracy is just reverse time shifting. It’s going to be on FTA TV at some point, I’m just making it more convenient to watch now.
The difference is that grabbing it pre-FTA is also grabbing a perfect copy. The quality may not matter to many of us, but to some it does. And because it matters to some, major copyright holders have started to treat unlicensed exchanges as “competition” from a business PoV (which is a concession from strictly seeing it as crime). So their business strategy is to compete with the unlicensed channels by offering perfect quality media at a price (they hope) people are willing to pay (also in part to avoid the inconvenience and dodgyness of the black market).
FWiW, that’s their take and it’s why they get extra aggressive when the unlicensed version is perfect.
Companies pay big bucks for timed exclusivity though. If reverse timeshifting was legal, movie theaters would go bankrupt. I feel like this wouldn't hold up.
I like the way you think, but that's kind of not true these days. We have streaming services and rights holders just straight deleting shit or producing shitty sequels and reboots just to keep the IP out of public domain. IDK about your location but here FTA is basically dead. It's all shitty reality shows being hosted by third rate celebs from other reality shows because they either can't or won't produce or pay for actual content.
Remember that there were also big campaigns against tape recorders and VCR. They even managed to get VCR vendors to implement a feature that prevents users from skipping ads. So it's not like it's simply legal, the media corps were just not as successful in their lobbying as they are today.
I can't find anything about VCR's blocking; I did find a bunch saying the opposite.
There were copy protections that prevented a VHS -> VHS copy being made of some movies. Easily defeated, but they did exist.
My scenario was recording an Over The Air transmission onto VHS using a VCR; not making a backup copy of a movie you purchased on VHS.
Edit: I do recall a campaign against VHS recording of TV shows, but didn't it ended basically saying "Broadcast public == public domain"?. That actually led to copy protections in VHS tapes.
I don't subscribe to the logic but I guess a part of it can be the lossless factor. Quality of pirated digital content is exactly like the original. If you tape something it usually loses quality. So people seem to care less about that kind of piracy. Which is stupid since going for lossy compressed pirated videos is allegedly not less wrong in the face of law.
Let's get crazier.
Our current favorite show is Bob's Burgers, it's a comfort show we fall asleep to. Prior to signing up with real debrid I got tagged for downloading a 2 year old episode.
We pay for Hulu. We pay for YoutubeTV. We have a working OTA antenna (for when the internet goes out).
My math says I have 3 licenses, yet still illegal to download?
In fairness, it was never legal to make thousands of copies of that VHS tape and hand them out en masse. Which is how you're getting it when you download it, from someone doing exactly that.
"Piracy isn't stealing" doesn't require a qualifier. It's objectively a separate, lesser crime. That correlation is just the result of effective, aggressive marketing that conflates the two. It was so effective that everyone misremembers the "you wouldn't steal a car" ad.
lol. You give an ad spot way too much credit
Thanks for that trip down memory lane. I was just a child when I saw that, and my first thought was "but... But when I steal from someone, they don't have it anymore. If I download it, they still have it"
Call it "illegal copy" (because fuck customer rights with "usage licenses") and we're good.
Isnt the free market supposed to self-regulate?
If companies can exploit it, why shouldnt we?
No, free market isn't "supposed" to self regulate. That's silliness. The only people who say that have no understanding of the concepts.
Regulation is required. Unfortunately with regulatory capture it's not happening.
"Piracy" has never been stealing except for the boats and parrots kind.
It's not stealing if it's been stolen before! Arrr
I assume when the purchase happened there was an agreement that said something like this might happen. If not, then people can sue Sony for the stealing. If so, then trying to argue that this means piracy isn't stealing is sophomoric at best.
I don't get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they're doing. We want something and we don't want to pay the price for it because it's either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don't feel guilt about it.
Embrace the reality instead of using twisted logic to try and convince yourself that it's something else.
I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.
Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.
We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.
I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.
Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.
If that's the goal, the better approach would be to not consume the media at all, and being vocal as to why you are doing this. Pirating it just shows them that the demand will still be there, despite how bad they supposedly are as a company, so that they just need to learn how to bone you too. It's like saying "you're a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!" it doesn't make much sense, logically or morally.
it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions.
Clever? Maybe. Sophomoric? Absolutely. By misrepresenting why they are losing access to this media, they are effectively admitting that piracy is actually stealing. As I've said elsewhere, piracy is not the action of a neutral/chaotic good character, as many among piracy circles like to pretend, but the actions of a chaotic neutral character.
But make no mistake about my position. People losing access to stuff they purchased (and probably thought was now theirs) is just another in a long list of reasons I say "fuck those bitches" and have really no moral qualm with pirating content.
Why does “sophomoric” being used as negative in your argument? you imply we are arguing an unsophisticated logic built on foundational information accessible to everyone, not requiring much depth to grasp. Pedestrian justifications should probably be sophomoric lest the justification be inaccessible and easily confused.
My opportunity to truly own media i purchase has been stolen from me, i was requested or offered no consent on the issue from the large companies claiming that not purchasing a revocable license is theft; i previously found thing accessibly priced so i swallowed my tongue, now media companies are again price gouging so we find ourselves in this situation once more.
Pedestrian justifications should probably be sophomoric lest the justification be inaccessible and easily confused.
Simple arguments that people can understand and sophomoric arguments where people act and argue like children are not one in the same.
i was requested or offered no consent on the issue from the large companies claiming that not purchasing a revocable license is theft
Then sue them because you would have a strong case.
Or pirate like I do, but don't pretend that it's something that it isn't.
It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.
Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped -- just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd.. Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?
I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.
You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.
Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?
If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.
Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work
Pedanticism that totally avoids the point. Whether they provide the product or create it, the logic still obviously applies.
You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that.
This also defeats the point that it is some duty to pirate it, because if they have no idea the scope then how many people doing it is not going to affect their decisions there either
Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony?
If we're being pedantic, I never said it helps them. I said it let's them know there is demand there and that not consuming it would be better for the goal.
Thank you. I swear some people must be exhausted with all the mental gymnastics they do for self justification.
In agreement with you! I don’t get why the need to justify. First of all life isn’t about fairness, and people and corporations both need money to survive. Individuals and corporations make all the effort to get more for less.
If there was a need to justify it should be as simple as corporations take things for free all the time, be it tax brakes, labor, IP, whatever and try to get by with it without it being “stealing” it. Artists take ideas, copy, repurpose all the time and get by without “stealing” when they can.
In the seas one should be reasonable and take what they “need” (actually a want) “for less”, without violence, instilling physical harm, and they are good to go. Life isn’t fair.
Above all, like you said, people in general want things for less with the least friction. For some people the seas are dangerous and present too much friction to get in and out unscathed, these people will pay to get something. Sailors do not want to pay and accept some of the risks, and for those sailors that know how to do it well the risks and frictions are small.
There is no need to justify to the ego whether it is stealing or anything else. It is just taking and sharing. And doesn’t the saying goes that “sharing is caring”? ;-)
The ways they try to justify ad blockers as their god given right is equally frustrating. It's okay to use an ad blocker (and you should!). Please stop acting personally insulted when sites then attempt to make your ad blocker useless, it's just how things go.
Advertising is horrible
I used to have Netflix, HBO Max, Youtube Premium, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime and "Videoland". But since I used Linux, I could not stream with a higher bitrate. I could not download for offline playback, I had to jump through hoops to get things to play every now and then.
They also did not always have everything I wanted to see, or I had to pay extra for "premium early access" (Disney).
So I was fed up, learned about using multiple usenet backbones, how to send sabnzbd through VPN's, Radarr, Sonarr and Overseerr. Now I only have Netflix and Youtube Premium for my wife. And Plex for myself. And access to much more content.
And I do not consider it stealing, i consider it to be the natural result of them trying to gouge me while still not providing me.
I’m in the exact situation you are. The *arr suite is a game changer.
I'm all for piracy but I still try to spend money where it morally makes sense to me.
I'll buy, rent or subscribe to content from actual creators or artists or developers if I know I am supporting their livelihoods or careers.
I'll pirate content if I decide for myself that the content has already paid for the livelihoods of the creators or workers who produced the material and now it's only the title holders and corporate interests that are profiting from the ownership and entitlement of controlling the content for commercial reasons only. For me this is mostly just big budget movies, old films and commercially produced music.
To me, anything that's already paid to help the original artist or creators should be made public. Locking it away and making people pay for the privilege of the content just to make more profit for someone else is piracy itself. This is especially true for films and music that are so old that the original artists and creators and owners are multi millionaires or just no longer exist.
I may be wrong but that is my own personal view of collecting digital content.
Nowadays you can almost reach every creator out there, and we use thousands of content and tools.
How would a financially average person can afford to pay these creators in such a scale?
A dollar at a time ... I'm willing to give or donate a dollar, two dollars or even five at a time ... if we all did that with a popular creator, they'd easily be able to reach a lot of money in a short time.
I donate to wikipedia, Open Source Software projects I use, firefox, thunderbird, ubuntu (although I am getting skeptical about this one) and other linux projects .. on top of that I send funds to creators, app developers and lemmy instances and other fediverse projects and those people who maintain the software, servers and communities in the fediverse
In all, I probably spend about three or four hundred dollars a year or more to these projects ... but I know that for the majority of them, the money is going to people that need it .. not to people who just want to add to their wealth after never contributing anything of value other than their ownership of someone else's work.
And if we all did this as users across the board ... these small content creators would have more than enough to sustain themselves and continue creating and maintaining these projects
Thank you for this insightful and humble reply, 1 dollar at the time 🙏
Digital piracy is not theft, by definition. Theft requires taking something with the intent to deprive the owner, copying things does not deprive the owner.
Digital piracy is copyright infringement, which (in the vast majority of cases) is not even a crime. It is a civil offense.
Counterpoint:
I wrote a book. Sold maybe 10 copies. If someone "pirated" my book, they are depriving me of the $2 or whatever Kindle Direct pays.
Admittedly not a significant amount, but it does fulfill the definition, imho.
It explicitly doesn't.
If you have a hard copy book and someone steals it, you're not only losing out on the potential sale price of the book, but the tangible value you have already paid to produce that copy.
Say the book is $12, you get $2, the publisher gets $5 - the book store buys it for $7, and sells for $12 making $5 profit. If you steal from the book store, they've lost a potential profit of $5, but more importantly they've actually lost the $7 they already paid for it. This is what theft is about, the value of a possession taken away, not the potential value.
With a digital book, each individual copy costs nothing. It costs something to make the original, but making a copy is free. Thus the only thing you've lost is the potential profit, which arguably you wouldn't get anyway as the person didn't want to buy from you to begin with - just because they downloaded it for free does not mean they would have paid full price if a free download wasn't an option.
With theft, you have a tangible loss. With digital piracy, the only loss is opportunity to profit.
Copying information is a nonrivalrous activity. To steal inherently requires the owner to be deprived of a thing, and copying does not deprive an owner of a thing. Copying therefore cannot really in "stealing."
They say we've got it all wrong, it's not the items we're stealing. It's he money they think they should've gotten from that item.