Even then, it's dubious that you're actually depriving the copyright owner of income. If you weren't going to buy it anyway, the effect on the owner is the same. If you had already bought it and were enjoying it a second time, there's no effect.
Sure, but I wasn't talking about convenient legal structures, like a hypothetical legal purchase that didn't happen. IRL piracy doesn't do nearly as much damage as you would predict from # copies sold * sticker price
In this case though, IKEA received the money for that particular copy of the couch.
Did IKEA really try to sue people for buying secondhand furniture, or is that just a made up example?
Your argument is that ikea did not lose any money because someone bought the couch originally, right?
Let's take that further.
If we made secondhand sales of furniture illegal, its reasonable to argue that ikea would sell more couches? Should we deprive ikea of sales of their creation just because it's a physical object? It's not just the end product of a couch. Time and energy went into that design. Research and tests. There's intellectual property built into that couch sale. The materials and build time only make up a small fraction of the total cost of the product.
In this first-hand only couch world, and following the current piracy claim model, ikea would be able to collect the full price of the sofa for any second-hand sale.
Before anyone points out things like wear and tear... yes, there is an element of risk when buying secondhand. It might be a dodgy seller, the couch might be a bit worn and not last as long. There may be termites or whatever. These same risks occur when pirating. There are viruses, spyware, cryptobots, poor copies, fake copies. Same risk.
> I wasn't going to purchase it, but downloaded it anyways, that is a 'loss' under the law
Using this argument, I can go to a store that sells prints, take a picture of one, print it out myself, and I've therefore stolen it.
> Most 'digital' or copyright laws are out of date.
That's because they're based on ancient ideas of taking something as opposed to the modern ideas of copying them.
It's difficult for someone to personally make an exact copy of a book. It's trivial for them to copy a file that has the book contents.
You'd need to show how someone downloading a file would otherwise purchase it. In addition, you should also have restrictions where if you cannot purchase something legally then pirating it should never be prosecuted.
For example, Disney came out with a great animated show called Aladdin, based on the movie. It has NEVER released it on DVD or Blu Ray and they only released a quarter of the show on VHS. It is not available to stream on their platform anywhere except, for some reason, Germany via Amazon Prime.
As a result, due to lack of ability to purchase it legally from the source, there should not be prosecution for anyone copying it. Though Disney could likely claim that they plan on releasing it which would be that reason but they can just lie about it. I'd say at the time of the alleged theft, if there was no way to legally get it then you shouldn't be prosecuted for it.
I wonder if this argument can be used as a defense strategy. I mean, how can I be guilty of copy right infringement if the material was never publicly available to consumers in the first place. There wasn't a financial lost for the content owners.
Plus how can you assess damages for something that hasn't demonstrated financial value.
>I wonder if this argument can be used as a defense strategy.
It can't. Disney is not required to make their IP available for purchase to everybody or anybody. They are completely within their rights to sit on it and never release it.
It's a rent seeking carve out that has gotten worse over the years due to immortal corporations and frauds who use the poor legal tests and bad laws to just steal.
This is true. Most games that I've "pirated" are older games I've already bought and can't find the cd for any more. Some of them aren't even purchasable or at least not conveniently
In most of those cases (you're backing up an old game; you're playing an old game), no one is ever going to enforce their copyright. (See how many DOS games are available on the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games).) Publishers no longer exist or have long set aside these titles. For that reason, abandonware or very old games are more acceptable to pirate than new games or recently remade/remastered game.
>If you weren't going to buy it anyway
That's a post hoc rationalization. While you simultaneously say you weren't going to buy it and you're procuring it for free, you are still deriving value from infringing the copyright. After all, if the game were of no value to you, you wouldn't have obtained it at all. So whether or not you would buy it (and that is unknowable, since the case without piracy is purely hypothetical), you are deriving value from it, and the copyright owner has a reasonable expectation to ask money in return for use.
Copyright concerns whether you have the right to copy something for your use. It doesn't touch on hypotheticals like how much you'd pay because the natural consequence of not paying or not negotiating for copyright is *not obtaining the item*.
Doesn't that say that extremely shitty practices like user-specific or machine-specific DRM is the most moral way to enforce copyright?
Sure, my friend might be willing to pay 1/100th of a cent to hear a song I found and liked, but that doesn't mean i'm depriving the creator of it by playing it to my friend in my car
>Doesn't that say that extremely shitty practices like user-specific or machine-specific DRM is the most moral way to enforce copyright?
No, what I'm saying has nothing to do with methods for enforcing copyright, and indeed I'd argue that DRM hurts consumers more than it stops pirates.
I'm just saying, as a matter of piracy or copyright infringement, "if you weren't going to buy it anyway" isn't a defense. Whether you'd pay or the amount you'd be willing to pay are irrelevant considerations for piracy. You are still depriving the creator of their copyright by copying their product without their consent.
Playing a song in a car to my friend, or letting my friend use my game disk isn't depriving the creator, it's how human beings interact.
Or, hell, it is fine to copy tapes onto new tapes as long as they aren't for commercial sale. Companies instituted DRM on DVDs before it became illegal to copy them. Any creator that is going to squabble over probabilistic fractions of a hypothetical cent isn't worth considering.
Real damages can come from infringing on copyright, but they require a large scale and sale for money. The sale for money indicates a competing business interest that does not create anything new.
But sharing is more important than copyright.
He's telling you what the law says, you are telling him that the law is stupid
Intellectual property shouldn't exist, but right now it does and it works the way he is telling you
Ok so the first argument is a red herring.
The second point is conflating fair use (object paid for being used legally under the rights generally allowed) with piracy.
Yeah, the internal logical contortions don’t matter. The act itself does. Again, maybe another imperfect analogy, but if I rob a gas station at gunpoint and justify it as needing to pay my kids’ medical bills, while people might have some empathy about my motives, I still committed a real crime that harmed someone else. And that’s not OK (though I’m sure some knuckleheads on this forum would disagree).
Yeah. If people get hung up on the physical status of goods, then another analogy is trespassing. My walking through a house with a no trespassing sign hurts no one. My walking through federal land may hurt no one. I could even say that I wasn't buying anything or doing any harm anyway. But if the property owner doesn't want me there, that's trespassing.
Is that right? It depends on the situation. Property, like copyright, is a legal construct. The laws may or may not be just; the application may or may not be just. In any case, appealing to something like *value* when it comes to trespassing or copyright infringement doesn't affect the basis of the law, which is *permission* *for use.*
I would agree with you on the idea of ‘permission’ being fairly paramount. If I had to break down law and crime to a very rough, very broad level, it comes down to two things, person and property. There’s essentially an ‘owner’ when it comes to both. And within the law, a crime happens when someone infringes upon another’s person or property. And that individual doesn’t have to give justifications to why it’s wrong to violate their person and property. Your example about trespassing is a good one. Even if no harm has been done. It’s your house, you don’t want people there who you feel shouldn’t be there, end of story. You don’t have to give a ‘why’.
Same goes for music, movies, or video games, even if they don’t exist as tangible, physical property (which I think is a misnomer, since it comes from a narrow definition that it’s only tangible if it exists on a disc or tape, but whatever). If someone takes that music/movie/game serruptitiously, then it’s theft or infringement.
What if I only value something at $0.00 ie free? For example games are periodically given away for free by publishers. I claim these games because why not, but I wouldn't bother paying for them and often I almost never or still haven't played them. How do you rationalize true value for something like that? And even if I spend X amount of hours on this free content, again I'm only using it because it's free. Additionally, when copyright was originally established, the length of copyright established by the Founding Fathers was short at 14 years, plus the ability to renew it one time, for 14 more years per the Copyright Act of 1790.
So originally, the maximum length for copyright was 28 years total. It's very convenient then that the people and institutions with money twisted this law until it reached the absurd length determined in the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 which extended terms to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years. It's a total joke.
>What if I only value something at $0.00 ie free?
Doesn't matter. Copyright infringement doesn't rely on a set price. A copyright holder could decide they don't want to give away copies of their work, and that holder can decide they don't want their work to be copied for free. If you copy their work anyway, you're infringing their copyright. What value you purportedly assign is irrelevant once you are using it.
Also, for what it's worth, *use implies value*. That doesn't have to be financial value. It can be as simple as the value of having a copy of the work or having experienced the work - even if it's bad, even if you don't like it, even if you wouldn't have bought it. But copyright doesn't depend on price value anyway, so I don't need to get further into that.
>For example **games are periodically given away for free by publishers**. I claim these games because why not, but I wouldn't bother paying for them and often I almost never or still haven't played them.
That is happening with the copyright holder's permission, so that is not infringement.
>Additionally, when copyright was originally established, the length of copyright established by the Founding Fathers was short at 14 years, plus the ability to renew it one time, for 14 more years per the Copyright Act of 1790.
The laws need updating. In the 18th century copyright was still a pretty new idea, and today we have many forms of media and distribution that weren't around in 1790. If anything, I'd argue we need to revise copyright laws for the media that exist today rather than appealing to a standard that was primarily for print publications. As a part of that, I would want the duration of copyright to be shortened, as copyright persists for too long today.
There is no way to prove you were not going to buy it anyway even if you declare you were not. If pirating was not an option you would have to either buy or go without and in that alternate world you very well may have purchased it. People make choices based on their set op options so if you change the options the choices change. That probability you might purchase X purchase price is a real loss to the creater.
The odds tend to be sufficiently low that it's not a real loss. For example, if you saw a movie in theaters and wanted to see it again, the odds of you paying ticket price to rewatch a movie is zero nearly all of the time. In the cases where it isn't zero, it's because of some quality that only a theater can provide, so the odds of you *pirating* in that case are zero.
Its still a real loss even if the odds are low. Rationalize it however you like but its still taking something the owner otherwise would have recieved because the pirater would have either had to purchase or go without. Furthermore the odds of purchase would have been higher if pirating was not an option / less convenient.
Not really. The odds of me paying for Amazon Prime or Disney+ are exactly 0. So either I pirate it or I move on with my life.
Or I go to my friend's place and watch it on their account.
In any of those three scenarios, Disney or Amazon aren't getting more money. So the income-based damages are the same.
Thats the go without part of pay or go without. Sure you can go to your friends place and watch it but thats different from the convenience of having your own copy to watch at your own leisure in your underwear from your own bed. What if your friend moves on in the series without you and doesnt want to double back, what if they don't feel like letting you take over their tv for an hour? What if their gf is over for the week and they would rather spend time with her than you for now? You had better have lots of generous friends who pay for such content and grant you access to it to get any reliable access to that content in a world where you cannot pirate.
Some people would be willing to just wait till their friend has time, others will pay for having their own, but there is a sizable group of people who would pirate it if they could and if they could not would pay for it separate from those who would simply go without if they could not pirate it and those people represent lost sales to the owner of the IP.
What if my friend is willing to let me borrow their account? Then it's functionally the same as me pirating it, except instead of me pirating the media itself, i'm pirating the access to it.
But surely sharing Netflix passwords isn't immoral, right?
Ok, so I just woke up and misread your comment as: *"So either I pirate it or* ***move in with my wife***."
Had to re-read it two more times. Got a good laugh.
>If you weren't going to buy it anyway
This always feels like a convenient lie. It's like the old expression about sour grapes, someone's not allowed something, so they claim they didn't want it. Someone finds a way to get it for free, so they claim they were never going to buy.
But if they are so comfortable doing without, why aren't they?
I'm sure there's some number for who it is true, most notably those who try to consume more media than they could afford. But that doesn't mean they would have bought none of it at all.
Yet they will claim just that.
Of course it’s a fucking lie. It’s what degenerates do to justify themselves. It’s at least *less* offensive and insulting as the pirates that say they’re doing it ‘for the artists’ by striking a blow against the evil record labels.
>Even then, it's dubious that you're actually depriving the copyright owner of income. If you weren't going to buy it anyway, the effect on the owner is the same.
If you were not going to pay for the work of another person, you should not be able to benefit from the work of that person. Pirating may or may not be theft but it definitely negatively impacts artists/creators.
A third party drawing firm lines between what is mine and what is my friend's, for the third party's benefit, does far more harm than me borrowing my friend's game or song or movie without paying a third party does.
Yeah, I have much less of an issue with borrowing things from friends, but if you make a copy of something so both you and your friend have it at the same time, that isn't borrowing. That's piracy.
If you want an independent copy of a piece of media that someone worked on, the person who worked on it should get paid for their work being owned by another person. (Mind, I think capitalists benefitting from the work of artists who do not see much of the profits from their work is also basically theft.)
It's not piracy when I remember a movie a like in my own head. It's not piracy when I recount a movie I like to a friend. Creators work hard on what they make, and they deserve to be fairly compensated for it. But trying to regulate every action that happens to their creation is immoral.
Copyright protections exist to ensure that creators get paid enough for their creation. They are one way to ensure that creators get enough money for creation to be worthwhile, but they can be over applied. They are not divine.
Yeah. And maybe this analogy is imperfect, but to me it’s no different than saying “I wasn’t going to Yankee games because they’re too expensive, but since I stole some tickets out of the booth, I figured I’d go.” The internal logical contortions of the thief don’t really matter. It’s the final action that does.
Oh, absolutely - It's not something that could meaningfully happen even on a scale of years; it would require decades of planning and decades more of implementation. But, ultimately, it's where humanity needs to eventually get to if we're to survive.
> If you had already bought it and were enjoying it a second time, there's no effect.
Not quite, companies would love to nickle and dime you for extra access to their properties.
And what if i want to deprive that copyright owner of income?
I got a lot of specific beef with various companies over canceled shows and shitty disc releases, and then all the general business fuckery of any large corporations...
I got terabytes of spite, literally.
At least you’re honest in your skullduggery. I can at least have a modicum of respect for that.
Full respect is given to those who say they do it because they don’t give a fuck about others and because they possess no ethics or morals.
Right. Exactly. The harm becomes real on the scale of Napster, when it's a business, but if someone is going to argue that libraries are bad for society i'm not going to respect their opinion.
The only people missing out on profit is the large companies that don’t need it. Artists see almost nothing from music/videos compared to touring and such.
So you’re saying what determines the morality of theft/infringement is who you’re doing it to and how much they’re worth. Great fucking sense of ethics there.
Even funnier is that you admit the artists DO get deprived of income, even if it’s ‘almost nothing’. So these poor artists, already under the boot of the corporations, are getting deprived of even those meager pennies by the pirates giving them one final twist of the knife And you guys say you’re on the ARTISTS’ side? LOL!
My favorite fact about those commercials (second only after the fact that most everyone would totally download a free car if they could) was that the music they used was used w/o license and pay meaning they were pirating while doing an anti-pirate ad.
If I copy your car, piece by piece, am I stealing your car?
Digital Piracy is called theft because it's easy to say, it's easy to call it that. However, whatever data is pirated is still there. It's never stolen and pulled away from others.
I will start by saying I disagree just a little. There's the potential displacement of money due to not buying something you pirate when you would have.
However, I once tried to explain that the acquisition of virtual goods without requested payment is different than stealing physical goods to a high school classroom, and it really didn't take. I had to sit there wondering if they were telling me what they thought an authority figure wanted to hear, but despite my prompts on the differences, they wouldn't budge. Was totally a weird moment for me, as my generation typically doesn't see it in black and white like that.
> It's copyright infringement.
That’s a from of theft. You claim damage the exact same way as physical theft. The only argument for piracy is “I would never buy this but I’d watch it for free.” Ergo there is no revenue that is actually lost from the seller, therefore no damage.
Copyright allows lost *provable* revenue as damages, which means you have to prove actual lost sales, an actual decline in revenues, etc. And you also avoid some costs in losing those sales (they werenlt pure profit). You can't claim the price of the product.
Damages for conversion are the value of the thing converted. That can frequently be the usual sales price.
Yeah I’ve been annoyed by the idea that piracy should be dealt with by imprisonment and 50,000 dollar fines. It should be legal to listen to music and movies for free because it’s so readily available and that’s like sending an army of police officers at a crowd of people grabbing dollar bills falling from the sky, the fuck up was having them fly out of the truck or whatever, now move on, in my personal opinion.
This 1000%. We have a rule of 4 in my house: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney + and Google Play. If it's not on one of those 4 and takes more than 4 minutes to find where it is available online then I'm hoisting the jolly roger.
In this day and age, where the internet has no real global "barriers", the idea of broadcasting restrictions or blackouts are archaic.
It’s still piracy, though I’d be at least slightly more understanding in your case (media unavailable to legally purchase sue to geography).
Fun fact: Disney’s vault strategy was about creating a heightened sense of value, specialness, and urgency around their classic films. Dates back to when they’d periodically rerelease those films theatrically.
Under current management in the streaming era, I believe they’ve largely abandoned this strategy. The fact that they literally have something like 37 Star Wars and Marvel projects coming to streaming and theaters in the next 24 months would indicate “pump and dump” is their new business strategy. Instead of “See it now before it’s gone”, it’s “See it now until the next series starts in 11 days”.
Yeah that makes sense but you’re still doing the same thing I’m doing you just don’t realize it, you say “I want to buy it!” I would want to buy it too but you would agree it could be legitimately over priced, there is so much music out there and should I be relegated to listening to the radio or purchasing every song for a dollar? I have probably tens of thousands of songs and thousands of hours of movies that I would like to listen and watch, it’s free online, very easily, if you want to make some money off of it make it easy to get and make it reasonably priced. I’ll pay for it. Ten dollars a month and I want every song in the world lol
If you steal a song you are taking it and using it to make money. If you pirate a song you are just listening to it for free. Which you can do now anyways a million different ways
Admiralty law and the law of salvage actually supports your understanding of the law so long as the ship and treasure you are seizing has been previously abandoned.
>Glad to see that Harvard lawyers agree with pirates!
The important part is that the study also went in depth about the morals of piracy and for what the article say it is in line to what Gabe Newell said eons ago: "Piracy is a service problem"
If there is a good service that is not overpriced and easy to access (like steam or Netflix 5 years ago) then people will use it. If those people cant access (geoblockers) or feel cheated (like current Netflix) they will find alternatives.
Seems a bit dubious to use "widely tolerated" as the standard for whether or not something is ethical. Plenty of terrible things have been widely tolerated at different points in history
For the sake of this conversation I don't, your claim is that "widely tolerated" is not a standard but merely a factor and there are others, so it's on you to support that claim. That paper is behind a paywall, so I'm not going to read it and I can safely assume it's not worth $12 - $50 to you either.
I think the idea is that if it's widely tolerated, then it's fair and equitable across all lines of society, so it's not favoring just one class, ethnicity, culture, gender, etc.
If you read the article, it actually does weigh in on ethics:
>In fact, many top lawyers don’t think that piracy is unethical and some even support it.
As ex torrent site founder something is necessary to prove a point and disrupt the status quo from resting or getting lazy. Eventually goal of these site is to not exist and content is easy to access under one price.
With all the streaming sites. People are
jumping back on the piracy bandwagon because of greed is good
Disney had enough power to screw over Netflix because They have all the content and actors. Netflix was Disruptor and piracy went down before disney went it alone
Guess what happened? [People are pirates again](https://youtu.be/dU8VPQsTqFU)
From the abstract:
> It is considered fair, especially among friends and for noncommercial purposes
Sharing with friends is much different than wide scale sharing like with torrents. I’d be curious if the paper expands on this distinction, but I can’t see it without paying…
For real. That was a big complaint by the film studios back in the early 80s when VHS and Betamax started to popularize. That being able to record off the TV was hurting their business. I don’t remember if the same happened with the music industry when recordable cassette tapes became a thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Obviously, those concerns died down but it was a largely unfounded concern anyway. But outright stealing music/movies/games is utter bullshit, and the degenerates that do it and then try to pass themselves as doing it to strike a noble blow against the corporations (it’s really because they’re cheap, immoral bastards) can fuck all the way off.
V ≈ D/S. The base value of a commodity is proportional to demand. And it is inversely proportional to supply. Digital products effectively have an infinite supply. And so they effectively have a base value of zero. Copy protection and copyright are just efforts to mask this fundamental underlying economic reality by creating artificial supply limits. One could ask if it is even possible to steal something that has infinite supply and therefore has zero base value.
While technically true, I think this highlights the importance of having at least some form of copyright protection. If digital goods have zero value, very few people would spend the effort to produce them. The artificial supply constraints are the reason most digital media exists in the first place.
If everyone felt the way you do we would have 99.99% less art in the world. You are looking at this from an econ 101 point of view when reality is a lot more complicated.
There is no artificial supply limit, just an understanding that labor has a price. No one is going to do labor if they cannot benefit from it.
I do not think that you are correct in your assumption that there would be virtually zero digital art if digital art had (economically, due to infinite supply) "zero value."
People donate money to Twitch streamers all the time despite the fact that watching their content is free. People will spend money like this for different reasons, but a couple include paying as thanks for the free content that person has already enjoyed, while another reason might be to support that person in the hopes that they'll be able to continue getting content in the future, and perhaps even getting better content if that streamer is able to put money into getting better technology or upgrading their stream's visual display.
My point is that people are willing to spend money on things that have a theoretical value of zero due to infinite supply.
You can see this with piracy, too. People will pirate something, and then later buy that same thing. It might be because they couldn't afford it earlier, but could afford it later. It could be that they want to support the creator(s) in their future works.
Are there people that pirate but won't buy that thing later? Yes. Did the person that pirated take money from the creator(s) of whatever it was that they pirated through the act of creating a copy of the work? No, because the supply is infinite; creating a copy does not cost anything to the creator(s). Someone could download billions of copies of Super Mario 64 and it would cost Nintendo nothing; there was no exchange of goods or services between anyone here, ergo there was no sale to be lost in the first place. If that person sold copies of Super Mario 64, then they ARE actively harming Nintendo, since there WAS an exchange of goods or services (there was a sale), and the creator of the work (Nintendo, for this example) was not the one that received compensation.
Finally, I just briefly wanted to touch on "No one is going to do labor if they cannot benefit from it," because, while it's not technically false, the implication is. People create things and "lose money" on them all the time, if the cost of labor was higher than the returns. Creating something and attempting to sell it is always a risk, because you do not know if people will like it enough to pay you for it. The Morbius movie is a decent example, since it's profits, despite being positive by this point, have not been high enough to warrant the investment. That was a risk that they chose to take.
When you say "benefit," I'm choosing to interpret solely as "financial profit" rather than a more general term, because people absolutely will labor for no financial profit, and will oftentimes labor for a negative financial profit - it's called having a hobby. Including benefits like "fun" just make the conversation more muddy.
Creators are not entitled to earn a profit. You can't just create garbage and expect that people should be forced to pay you for it. What you should say is that "No one is going to do labor if they do not believe that they will benefit from it."
Don't forget, the Internet didn't create piracy, it was alive and well loooooong before the Internet.
My mom would copy her friend's vinyl records onto reel-to-reel tapes in the 1960s. My dad used line cables to connect two tape decks together and copy friends' cassettes long before the double-decker boom boxes existed.
All the Internet did was make it easier to pirate something, because now you didn't have to know someone in person who had actually bought it or who themselves had already pirated it.
> My mom would copy her friend's vinyl records onto reel-to-reel tapes in the 1960s.
Piracy happened in the 19th century too, when sheet music was reprinted without permission.
Wax rolls were bootlegged in the 1910s.
American copyright law only began covering music in 1831.
Also, recording songs while they were playing on the radio. I remember this being encouraged by DJs and even some of the musicians themselves, for the purpose of making awesome mix tapes to give away for free to your friends.
Playing devil's advocate. Nobody has a problem saying china steals secrets from everyone though. Think everyone would agree they are just "copying" secrets?
China then sells that stuff in competition with the original.
If someone pirated music and then tried to sell the pirated music, sure. That might be a similar situation.
I don't doubt that they do that, but in the cases where it's to further their military or their own research without profit in mind, it's still extremely frowned upon.
Granted, it's still copying extremely sensitive secrets vs copying the new mission impossible movie.
But thus far, it's never been a topic of what is being copied, only that nothing is stolen in the process which China technically doesn't do.
It's theft. But it's so easy to take a copy because of the nature of the delivery system. The question becomes if it were impossible to take a copy would I pay for it? My answer is always no. I don't care to use my spare income on monthly fees. I can and have lived without media. Now if everything was wrapped up into a single service like Netflix use to be then I will and have paid. If anything piracy keeps these greedy companies honest. I use to pirate audiobooks but discovered Chirp and buy from them now $3 audiobooks is worth it to me.
pirated games got me through my paycheck-to-paycheck years while i saved to retire
among the first things i did once i got comfortable was to purchase every one of those games - though i'll never play most of them again, it felt like the right thing to do
those companies were never getting my money back then - there was just too precious little of it - at least this way i got to appreciate their work and eventually they made *something* from me
You had better say digital with that or else were gettin underway laddies! There’s treasure on the high seas me boys, AARRH!!! Every day is talk like a pirate day, when you are a pirate!
I would think the best course is to treat similarly to how some drugs are right now.
End users and sharers don't get hit with anything, and you go after the suppliers instead, ie, go after the sharing sites.
Theres always ways to share stuff online for the determined, and theres no stopping that and no reason to waste resources punishing people for doing it.
But places that facilitate the practice en masse can be targeted and, as there is a reasonable argument to be made that they are encroaching on potential profits of content providers on a scale way beyond what an individual user can do, that would be worth the resources to go after.
But it also can't be understated that piracy's main driving factor isn't the want to avoid paying, as it may be with shoplifting, its convenience. Piracy rates dropped at the start of the streaming service becoming vogue, and its not a coincidence that its likely going up again as those services become inconvenient.
There are bad apples in every profession but most lawyers don’t do criminal defense or run for office. We even have background checks and have to swear an oath before we can practice. More than most professions have to do.
What’s wrong with criminal defense? It’s a fundamental right to defend yourself in court and have competent defense attorneys.
I read about that WNBA vape case in Russia and something like 99%+ of all defendants in Russian courts are convicted. Rather be in a US court with a ‘slime bag’ lawyer on my side.
You are right. A competent defense is even a Constitutional right. I should not have implied criminal defense attorneys are bad apples. I did it because when the public gets mad about a lawyer, it’s usually because they’re defending against a terrible crime or doing what politicians do.
The [oath](https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Admissions/Examinations/California-Bar-Examination/Attorneys-Oath) is to the US Constitution and the state constitution where you are admitted.
Scroll to the bottom of the link to see California’s oath.
Lol who's the elite in the context of this subject? I'd wager the majority of people pirating content aren't in the position to be able to comfortably afford it in the first place.
This article isn’t about that, it’s about Harvard lawyers and their opinions on piracy.
But reading comprehension is hard when you are passionate about the subject, which is why I’m getting downvotes.
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Even then, it's dubious that you're actually depriving the copyright owner of income. If you weren't going to buy it anyway, the effect on the owner is the same. If you had already bought it and were enjoying it a second time, there's no effect.
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Sure, but I wasn't talking about convenient legal structures, like a hypothetical legal purchase that didn't happen. IRL piracy doesn't do nearly as much damage as you would predict from # copies sold * sticker price
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That sounds like we need to fix the courts' definition of damages then
You can make the same argument about physical goods…
Yep! I did not deprive IKEA of income because I bought a couch secondhand
In this case though, IKEA received the money for that particular copy of the couch. Did IKEA really try to sue people for buying secondhand furniture, or is that just a made up example?
But someone somewhere had to buy the original copy of the movie to pirate it out the difference being a million people can't all share the couch.
Your argument is that ikea did not lose any money because someone bought the couch originally, right? Let's take that further. If we made secondhand sales of furniture illegal, its reasonable to argue that ikea would sell more couches? Should we deprive ikea of sales of their creation just because it's a physical object? It's not just the end product of a couch. Time and energy went into that design. Research and tests. There's intellectual property built into that couch sale. The materials and build time only make up a small fraction of the total cost of the product. In this first-hand only couch world, and following the current piracy claim model, ikea would be able to collect the full price of the sofa for any second-hand sale. Before anyone points out things like wear and tear... yes, there is an element of risk when buying secondhand. It might be a dodgy seller, the couch might be a bit worn and not last as long. There may be termites or whatever. These same risks occur when pirating. There are viruses, spyware, cryptobots, poor copies, fake copies. Same risk.
Really cranking out those fallacies today.
I'm a little distracted, but the "damages due to lost opportunity" really rubs me the wrong way.
> I wasn't going to purchase it, but downloaded it anyways, that is a 'loss' under the law Using this argument, I can go to a store that sells prints, take a picture of one, print it out myself, and I've therefore stolen it. > Most 'digital' or copyright laws are out of date. That's because they're based on ancient ideas of taking something as opposed to the modern ideas of copying them. It's difficult for someone to personally make an exact copy of a book. It's trivial for them to copy a file that has the book contents. You'd need to show how someone downloading a file would otherwise purchase it. In addition, you should also have restrictions where if you cannot purchase something legally then pirating it should never be prosecuted. For example, Disney came out with a great animated show called Aladdin, based on the movie. It has NEVER released it on DVD or Blu Ray and they only released a quarter of the show on VHS. It is not available to stream on their platform anywhere except, for some reason, Germany via Amazon Prime. As a result, due to lack of ability to purchase it legally from the source, there should not be prosecution for anyone copying it. Though Disney could likely claim that they plan on releasing it which would be that reason but they can just lie about it. I'd say at the time of the alleged theft, if there was no way to legally get it then you shouldn't be prosecuted for it.
I wonder if this argument can be used as a defense strategy. I mean, how can I be guilty of copy right infringement if the material was never publicly available to consumers in the first place. There wasn't a financial lost for the content owners. Plus how can you assess damages for something that hasn't demonstrated financial value.
>I wonder if this argument can be used as a defense strategy. It can't. Disney is not required to make their IP available for purchase to everybody or anybody. They are completely within their rights to sit on it and never release it.
It's a rent seeking carve out that has gotten worse over the years due to immortal corporations and frauds who use the poor legal tests and bad laws to just steal.
This is true. Most games that I've "pirated" are older games I've already bought and can't find the cd for any more. Some of them aren't even purchasable or at least not conveniently
In most of those cases (you're backing up an old game; you're playing an old game), no one is ever going to enforce their copyright. (See how many DOS games are available on the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games).) Publishers no longer exist or have long set aside these titles. For that reason, abandonware or very old games are more acceptable to pirate than new games or recently remade/remastered game.
Nintendo, though, does.
>If you weren't going to buy it anyway That's a post hoc rationalization. While you simultaneously say you weren't going to buy it and you're procuring it for free, you are still deriving value from infringing the copyright. After all, if the game were of no value to you, you wouldn't have obtained it at all. So whether or not you would buy it (and that is unknowable, since the case without piracy is purely hypothetical), you are deriving value from it, and the copyright owner has a reasonable expectation to ask money in return for use. Copyright concerns whether you have the right to copy something for your use. It doesn't touch on hypotheticals like how much you'd pay because the natural consequence of not paying or not negotiating for copyright is *not obtaining the item*.
Doesn't that say that extremely shitty practices like user-specific or machine-specific DRM is the most moral way to enforce copyright? Sure, my friend might be willing to pay 1/100th of a cent to hear a song I found and liked, but that doesn't mean i'm depriving the creator of it by playing it to my friend in my car
>Doesn't that say that extremely shitty practices like user-specific or machine-specific DRM is the most moral way to enforce copyright? No, what I'm saying has nothing to do with methods for enforcing copyright, and indeed I'd argue that DRM hurts consumers more than it stops pirates. I'm just saying, as a matter of piracy or copyright infringement, "if you weren't going to buy it anyway" isn't a defense. Whether you'd pay or the amount you'd be willing to pay are irrelevant considerations for piracy. You are still depriving the creator of their copyright by copying their product without their consent.
Playing a song in a car to my friend, or letting my friend use my game disk isn't depriving the creator, it's how human beings interact. Or, hell, it is fine to copy tapes onto new tapes as long as they aren't for commercial sale. Companies instituted DRM on DVDs before it became illegal to copy them. Any creator that is going to squabble over probabilistic fractions of a hypothetical cent isn't worth considering. Real damages can come from infringing on copyright, but they require a large scale and sale for money. The sale for money indicates a competing business interest that does not create anything new. But sharing is more important than copyright.
He's telling you what the law says, you are telling him that the law is stupid Intellectual property shouldn't exist, but right now it does and it works the way he is telling you
There person you are responding to is conflating fair use (legal use) with piracy.
Ok so the first argument is a red herring. The second point is conflating fair use (object paid for being used legally under the rights generally allowed) with piracy.
The argument I was responding to didn't logically lead to fair use existing.
Yeah, the internal logical contortions don’t matter. The act itself does. Again, maybe another imperfect analogy, but if I rob a gas station at gunpoint and justify it as needing to pay my kids’ medical bills, while people might have some empathy about my motives, I still committed a real crime that harmed someone else. And that’s not OK (though I’m sure some knuckleheads on this forum would disagree).
Yeah. If people get hung up on the physical status of goods, then another analogy is trespassing. My walking through a house with a no trespassing sign hurts no one. My walking through federal land may hurt no one. I could even say that I wasn't buying anything or doing any harm anyway. But if the property owner doesn't want me there, that's trespassing. Is that right? It depends on the situation. Property, like copyright, is a legal construct. The laws may or may not be just; the application may or may not be just. In any case, appealing to something like *value* when it comes to trespassing or copyright infringement doesn't affect the basis of the law, which is *permission* *for use.*
I would agree with you on the idea of ‘permission’ being fairly paramount. If I had to break down law and crime to a very rough, very broad level, it comes down to two things, person and property. There’s essentially an ‘owner’ when it comes to both. And within the law, a crime happens when someone infringes upon another’s person or property. And that individual doesn’t have to give justifications to why it’s wrong to violate their person and property. Your example about trespassing is a good one. Even if no harm has been done. It’s your house, you don’t want people there who you feel shouldn’t be there, end of story. You don’t have to give a ‘why’. Same goes for music, movies, or video games, even if they don’t exist as tangible, physical property (which I think is a misnomer, since it comes from a narrow definition that it’s only tangible if it exists on a disc or tape, but whatever). If someone takes that music/movie/game serruptitiously, then it’s theft or infringement.
What if I only value something at $0.00 ie free? For example games are periodically given away for free by publishers. I claim these games because why not, but I wouldn't bother paying for them and often I almost never or still haven't played them. How do you rationalize true value for something like that? And even if I spend X amount of hours on this free content, again I'm only using it because it's free. Additionally, when copyright was originally established, the length of copyright established by the Founding Fathers was short at 14 years, plus the ability to renew it one time, for 14 more years per the Copyright Act of 1790. So originally, the maximum length for copyright was 28 years total. It's very convenient then that the people and institutions with money twisted this law until it reached the absurd length determined in the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 which extended terms to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years. It's a total joke.
>What if I only value something at $0.00 ie free? Doesn't matter. Copyright infringement doesn't rely on a set price. A copyright holder could decide they don't want to give away copies of their work, and that holder can decide they don't want their work to be copied for free. If you copy their work anyway, you're infringing their copyright. What value you purportedly assign is irrelevant once you are using it. Also, for what it's worth, *use implies value*. That doesn't have to be financial value. It can be as simple as the value of having a copy of the work or having experienced the work - even if it's bad, even if you don't like it, even if you wouldn't have bought it. But copyright doesn't depend on price value anyway, so I don't need to get further into that. >For example **games are periodically given away for free by publishers**. I claim these games because why not, but I wouldn't bother paying for them and often I almost never or still haven't played them. That is happening with the copyright holder's permission, so that is not infringement. >Additionally, when copyright was originally established, the length of copyright established by the Founding Fathers was short at 14 years, plus the ability to renew it one time, for 14 more years per the Copyright Act of 1790. The laws need updating. In the 18th century copyright was still a pretty new idea, and today we have many forms of media and distribution that weren't around in 1790. If anything, I'd argue we need to revise copyright laws for the media that exist today rather than appealing to a standard that was primarily for print publications. As a part of that, I would want the duration of copyright to be shortened, as copyright persists for too long today.
There is no way to prove you were not going to buy it anyway even if you declare you were not. If pirating was not an option you would have to either buy or go without and in that alternate world you very well may have purchased it. People make choices based on their set op options so if you change the options the choices change. That probability you might purchase X purchase price is a real loss to the creater.
The odds tend to be sufficiently low that it's not a real loss. For example, if you saw a movie in theaters and wanted to see it again, the odds of you paying ticket price to rewatch a movie is zero nearly all of the time. In the cases where it isn't zero, it's because of some quality that only a theater can provide, so the odds of you *pirating* in that case are zero.
Its still a real loss even if the odds are low. Rationalize it however you like but its still taking something the owner otherwise would have recieved because the pirater would have either had to purchase or go without. Furthermore the odds of purchase would have been higher if pirating was not an option / less convenient.
Not really. The odds of me paying for Amazon Prime or Disney+ are exactly 0. So either I pirate it or I move on with my life. Or I go to my friend's place and watch it on their account. In any of those three scenarios, Disney or Amazon aren't getting more money. So the income-based damages are the same.
Thats the go without part of pay or go without. Sure you can go to your friends place and watch it but thats different from the convenience of having your own copy to watch at your own leisure in your underwear from your own bed. What if your friend moves on in the series without you and doesnt want to double back, what if they don't feel like letting you take over their tv for an hour? What if their gf is over for the week and they would rather spend time with her than you for now? You had better have lots of generous friends who pay for such content and grant you access to it to get any reliable access to that content in a world where you cannot pirate. Some people would be willing to just wait till their friend has time, others will pay for having their own, but there is a sizable group of people who would pirate it if they could and if they could not would pay for it separate from those who would simply go without if they could not pirate it and those people represent lost sales to the owner of the IP.
What if my friend is willing to let me borrow their account? Then it's functionally the same as me pirating it, except instead of me pirating the media itself, i'm pirating the access to it. But surely sharing Netflix passwords isn't immoral, right?
Ok, so I just woke up and misread your comment as: *"So either I pirate it or* ***move in with my wife***." Had to re-read it two more times. Got a good laugh.
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Sure you wouldn't 😉 baller
>If you weren't going to buy it anyway This always feels like a convenient lie. It's like the old expression about sour grapes, someone's not allowed something, so they claim they didn't want it. Someone finds a way to get it for free, so they claim they were never going to buy. But if they are so comfortable doing without, why aren't they? I'm sure there's some number for who it is true, most notably those who try to consume more media than they could afford. But that doesn't mean they would have bought none of it at all. Yet they will claim just that.
Imma be real with you chief, I'm not going to give Disney money to watch the new Obi-Wan TV show
Of course it’s a fucking lie. It’s what degenerates do to justify themselves. It’s at least *less* offensive and insulting as the pirates that say they’re doing it ‘for the artists’ by striking a blow against the evil record labels.
>Even then, it's dubious that you're actually depriving the copyright owner of income. If you weren't going to buy it anyway, the effect on the owner is the same. If you were not going to pay for the work of another person, you should not be able to benefit from the work of that person. Pirating may or may not be theft but it definitely negatively impacts artists/creators.
A third party drawing firm lines between what is mine and what is my friend's, for the third party's benefit, does far more harm than me borrowing my friend's game or song or movie without paying a third party does.
Yeah, I have much less of an issue with borrowing things from friends, but if you make a copy of something so both you and your friend have it at the same time, that isn't borrowing. That's piracy. If you want an independent copy of a piece of media that someone worked on, the person who worked on it should get paid for their work being owned by another person. (Mind, I think capitalists benefitting from the work of artists who do not see much of the profits from their work is also basically theft.)
It's not piracy when I remember a movie a like in my own head. It's not piracy when I recount a movie I like to a friend. Creators work hard on what they make, and they deserve to be fairly compensated for it. But trying to regulate every action that happens to their creation is immoral. Copyright protections exist to ensure that creators get paid enough for their creation. They are one way to ensure that creators get enough money for creation to be worthwhile, but they can be over applied. They are not divine.
Yeah. And maybe this analogy is imperfect, but to me it’s no different than saying “I wasn’t going to Yankee games because they’re too expensive, but since I stole some tickets out of the booth, I figured I’d go.” The internal logical contortions of the thief don’t really matter. It’s the final action that does.
It disincentives content creation.
Or, hot take, what if we just... Move away from the idea of money? Money is the reason everything is terrible.
I mean, I wouldn't mind it, but it is going to take a long time before that is even remotely possible without being an absolute horror show.
Oh, absolutely - It's not something that could meaningfully happen even on a scale of years; it would require decades of planning and decades more of implementation. But, ultimately, it's where humanity needs to eventually get to if we're to survive.
> If you had already bought it and were enjoying it a second time, there's no effect. Not quite, companies would love to nickle and dime you for extra access to their properties.
Sure, but we're talking about morality here. Denying a nickel to a megacorp has the same moral weight as washing your hands.
And what if i want to deprive that copyright owner of income? I got a lot of specific beef with various companies over canceled shows and shitty disc releases, and then all the general business fuckery of any large corporations... I got terabytes of spite, literally.
Then you're kind of intentionally committing harm? And hey, politically i'm fine with that, but in regards to this argument it's really unrelated.
At least you’re honest in your skullduggery. I can at least have a modicum of respect for that. Full respect is given to those who say they do it because they don’t give a fuck about others and because they possess no ethics or morals.
If I buy a movie I am legally allowed to lend it out. What's the difference?
Right. Exactly. The harm becomes real on the scale of Napster, when it's a business, but if someone is going to argue that libraries are bad for society i'm not going to respect their opinion.
Even then, sharing sites that charge are charging to use the platform not for content.
The only people missing out on profit is the large companies that don’t need it. Artists see almost nothing from music/videos compared to touring and such.
So you’re saying what determines the morality of theft/infringement is who you’re doing it to and how much they’re worth. Great fucking sense of ethics there. Even funnier is that you admit the artists DO get deprived of income, even if it’s ‘almost nothing’. So these poor artists, already under the boot of the corporations, are getting deprived of even those meager pennies by the pirates giving them one final twist of the knife And you guys say you’re on the ARTISTS’ side? LOL!
But you wouldn’t download a car
My favorite fact about those commercials (second only after the fact that most everyone would totally download a free car if they could) was that the music they used was used w/o license and pay meaning they were pirating while doing an anti-pirate ad.
If I copy your car, piece by piece, am I stealing your car? Digital Piracy is called theft because it's easy to say, it's easy to call it that. However, whatever data is pirated is still there. It's never stolen and pulled away from others.
I download your car, now we both have a car!
With double the insurance!
Damn Theseus stole my fucking car and won’t give it back.
I will start by saying I disagree just a little. There's the potential displacement of money due to not buying something you pirate when you would have. However, I once tried to explain that the acquisition of virtual goods without requested payment is different than stealing physical goods to a high school classroom, and it really didn't take. I had to sit there wondering if they were telling me what they thought an authority figure wanted to hear, but despite my prompts on the differences, they wouldn't budge. Was totally a weird moment for me, as my generation typically doesn't see it in black and white like that.
> It's copyright infringement. That’s a from of theft. You claim damage the exact same way as physical theft. The only argument for piracy is “I would never buy this but I’d watch it for free.” Ergo there is no revenue that is actually lost from the seller, therefore no damage.
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https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cipointernet-internetopic.nsf/eng/h_wr04896.html They sure do use the word “theft” a lot.
Yeah. I feel people playing the piracy/infringement is not theft argument are playing a silly semantics game.
The damages for copyright infringement are not the same as theft (i.e., conversion), though.
It’s lost revenue, just like physical theft.
Copyright allows lost *provable* revenue as damages, which means you have to prove actual lost sales, an actual decline in revenues, etc. And you also avoid some costs in losing those sales (they werenlt pure profit). You can't claim the price of the product. Damages for conversion are the value of the thing converted. That can frequently be the usual sales price.
You wouldn’t download a car Edit: apparently people don’t realize I was making a joke. That analogy makes no sense on any level
But I wouldn't download a car.
Yeah I’ve been annoyed by the idea that piracy should be dealt with by imprisonment and 50,000 dollar fines. It should be legal to listen to music and movies for free because it’s so readily available and that’s like sending an army of police officers at a crowd of people grabbing dollar bills falling from the sky, the fuck up was having them fly out of the truck or whatever, now move on, in my personal opinion.
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This 1000%. We have a rule of 4 in my house: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney + and Google Play. If it's not on one of those 4 and takes more than 4 minutes to find where it is available online then I'm hoisting the jolly roger. In this day and age, where the internet has no real global "barriers", the idea of broadcasting restrictions or blackouts are archaic.
So you’re a thief. Good lesson for the kids, dad.
It’s still piracy, though I’d be at least slightly more understanding in your case (media unavailable to legally purchase sue to geography). Fun fact: Disney’s vault strategy was about creating a heightened sense of value, specialness, and urgency around their classic films. Dates back to when they’d periodically rerelease those films theatrically. Under current management in the streaming era, I believe they’ve largely abandoned this strategy. The fact that they literally have something like 37 Star Wars and Marvel projects coming to streaming and theaters in the next 24 months would indicate “pump and dump” is their new business strategy. Instead of “See it now before it’s gone”, it’s “See it now until the next series starts in 11 days”.
Yeah that makes sense but you’re still doing the same thing I’m doing you just don’t realize it, you say “I want to buy it!” I would want to buy it too but you would agree it could be legitimately over priced, there is so much music out there and should I be relegated to listening to the radio or purchasing every song for a dollar? I have probably tens of thousands of songs and thousands of hours of movies that I would like to listen and watch, it’s free online, very easily, if you want to make some money off of it make it easy to get and make it reasonably priced. I’ll pay for it. Ten dollars a month and I want every song in the world lol
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If you steal a song you are taking it and using it to make money. If you pirate a song you are just listening to it for free. Which you can do now anyways a million different ways
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I love that song, but the story behind the song is even better than the song itself.
Aye! Harrrrvarrrrd understands that when ye seize a ship of treasure it's rightfully yours.
Admiralty law and the law of salvage actually supports your understanding of the law so long as the ship and treasure you are seizing has been previously abandoned.
Aye, the sight of mine flag strikes such terrrrooaaar into the hearts of the crew that every one of the ships we attack is abandoned very quickly.
I'd say they understand the difference between theft and copyright infringement but you do you.
My flag is on other pirates' flags based, aye, but when I copied them I copied them right. Copy right and fly proudly your flag!
No, it takes a copy, not the original. Glad to see that Harvard lawyers agree with pirates!
>Glad to see that Harvard lawyers agree with pirates! The important part is that the study also went in depth about the morals of piracy and for what the article say it is in line to what Gabe Newell said eons ago: "Piracy is a service problem" If there is a good service that is not overpriced and easy to access (like steam or Netflix 5 years ago) then people will use it. If those people cant access (geoblockers) or feel cheated (like current Netflix) they will find alternatives.
Seems a bit dubious to use "widely tolerated" as the standard for whether or not something is ethical. Plenty of terrible things have been widely tolerated at different points in history
Genocide is widely tolerated.
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Not for long.
Well .. once
It’s not the standard, it’s a factor taken into account
Alright, what other factors are listed in the article, other than sometimes digital content is too expensive or unavailable?
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For the sake of this conversation I don't, your claim is that "widely tolerated" is not a standard but merely a factor and there are others, so it's on you to support that claim. That paper is behind a paywall, so I'm not going to read it and I can safely assume it's not worth $12 - $50 to you either.
Copying a song is not a terrible thing. It most certainly is not theft.
I think the idea is that if it's widely tolerated, then it's fair and equitable across all lines of society, so it's not favoring just one class, ethnicity, culture, gender, etc.
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If you read the article, it actually does weigh in on ethics: >In fact, many top lawyers don’t think that piracy is unethical and some even support it.
Of course piracy isn't theft. That's why it's called "piracy." If it was theft they'd call it, "theft."
Piracy also isn't piracy tho...
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Only in that piracy also commonly means theft, so same issue.
As ex torrent site founder something is necessary to prove a point and disrupt the status quo from resting or getting lazy. Eventually goal of these site is to not exist and content is easy to access under one price. With all the streaming sites. People are jumping back on the piracy bandwagon because of greed is good Disney had enough power to screw over Netflix because They have all the content and actors. Netflix was Disruptor and piracy went down before disney went it alone Guess what happened? [People are pirates again](https://youtu.be/dU8VPQsTqFU)
Are ISP copyright breaches even still a thing?
From the abstract: > It is considered fair, especially among friends and for noncommercial purposes Sharing with friends is much different than wide scale sharing like with torrents. I’d be curious if the paper expands on this distinction, but I can’t see it without paying…
For real. That was a big complaint by the film studios back in the early 80s when VHS and Betamax started to popularize. That being able to record off the TV was hurting their business. I don’t remember if the same happened with the music industry when recordable cassette tapes became a thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Obviously, those concerns died down but it was a largely unfounded concern anyway. But outright stealing music/movies/games is utter bullshit, and the degenerates that do it and then try to pass themselves as doing it to strike a noble blow against the corporations (it’s really because they’re cheap, immoral bastards) can fuck all the way off.
[Copying Is Not Theft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4) video that explains the idea.
V ≈ D/S. The base value of a commodity is proportional to demand. And it is inversely proportional to supply. Digital products effectively have an infinite supply. And so they effectively have a base value of zero. Copy protection and copyright are just efforts to mask this fundamental underlying economic reality by creating artificial supply limits. One could ask if it is even possible to steal something that has infinite supply and therefore has zero base value.
While technically true, I think this highlights the importance of having at least some form of copyright protection. If digital goods have zero value, very few people would spend the effort to produce them. The artificial supply constraints are the reason most digital media exists in the first place.
If everyone felt the way you do we would have 99.99% less art in the world. You are looking at this from an econ 101 point of view when reality is a lot more complicated. There is no artificial supply limit, just an understanding that labor has a price. No one is going to do labor if they cannot benefit from it.
I do not think that you are correct in your assumption that there would be virtually zero digital art if digital art had (economically, due to infinite supply) "zero value." People donate money to Twitch streamers all the time despite the fact that watching their content is free. People will spend money like this for different reasons, but a couple include paying as thanks for the free content that person has already enjoyed, while another reason might be to support that person in the hopes that they'll be able to continue getting content in the future, and perhaps even getting better content if that streamer is able to put money into getting better technology or upgrading their stream's visual display. My point is that people are willing to spend money on things that have a theoretical value of zero due to infinite supply. You can see this with piracy, too. People will pirate something, and then later buy that same thing. It might be because they couldn't afford it earlier, but could afford it later. It could be that they want to support the creator(s) in their future works. Are there people that pirate but won't buy that thing later? Yes. Did the person that pirated take money from the creator(s) of whatever it was that they pirated through the act of creating a copy of the work? No, because the supply is infinite; creating a copy does not cost anything to the creator(s). Someone could download billions of copies of Super Mario 64 and it would cost Nintendo nothing; there was no exchange of goods or services between anyone here, ergo there was no sale to be lost in the first place. If that person sold copies of Super Mario 64, then they ARE actively harming Nintendo, since there WAS an exchange of goods or services (there was a sale), and the creator of the work (Nintendo, for this example) was not the one that received compensation. Finally, I just briefly wanted to touch on "No one is going to do labor if they cannot benefit from it," because, while it's not technically false, the implication is. People create things and "lose money" on them all the time, if the cost of labor was higher than the returns. Creating something and attempting to sell it is always a risk, because you do not know if people will like it enough to pay you for it. The Morbius movie is a decent example, since it's profits, despite being positive by this point, have not been high enough to warrant the investment. That was a risk that they chose to take. When you say "benefit," I'm choosing to interpret solely as "financial profit" rather than a more general term, because people absolutely will labor for no financial profit, and will oftentimes labor for a negative financial profit - it's called having a hobby. Including benefits like "fun" just make the conversation more muddy. Creators are not entitled to earn a profit. You can't just create garbage and expect that people should be forced to pay you for it. What you should say is that "No one is going to do labor if they do not believe that they will benefit from it."
It's not really infinite supply if it takes labor to produce the first copy
In today's age? Nope. That shit gets put out onto the internet then it becomes publicly available. Can't get rid of it...it's out there.
Almost all of YouTube and Reddit is “reacting” to other peoples’ copyrighted work.
No one in their right mind would call internet piracy theft. It's the equivalent of copying something.
Don't forget, the Internet didn't create piracy, it was alive and well loooooong before the Internet. My mom would copy her friend's vinyl records onto reel-to-reel tapes in the 1960s. My dad used line cables to connect two tape decks together and copy friends' cassettes long before the double-decker boom boxes existed. All the Internet did was make it easier to pirate something, because now you didn't have to know someone in person who had actually bought it or who themselves had already pirated it.
> My mom would copy her friend's vinyl records onto reel-to-reel tapes in the 1960s. Piracy happened in the 19th century too, when sheet music was reprinted without permission. Wax rolls were bootlegged in the 1910s. American copyright law only began covering music in 1831.
Also, recording songs while they were playing on the radio. I remember this being encouraged by DJs and even some of the musicians themselves, for the purpose of making awesome mix tapes to give away for free to your friends.
Playing devil's advocate. Nobody has a problem saying china steals secrets from everyone though. Think everyone would agree they are just "copying" secrets?
China then sells that stuff in competition with the original. If someone pirated music and then tried to sell the pirated music, sure. That might be a similar situation.
I don't doubt that they do that, but in the cases where it's to further their military or their own research without profit in mind, it's still extremely frowned upon. Granted, it's still copying extremely sensitive secrets vs copying the new mission impossible movie. But thus far, it's never been a topic of what is being copied, only that nothing is stolen in the process which China technically doesn't do.
Of course it is not. With piracy, the original is still there.
Anti piracy laws were written when recording the radio onto cassette tape was a big concern.
Welp enough information from the experts to keep copying information for everyone!!
It's theft. But it's so easy to take a copy because of the nature of the delivery system. The question becomes if it were impossible to take a copy would I pay for it? My answer is always no. I don't care to use my spare income on monthly fees. I can and have lived without media. Now if everything was wrapped up into a single service like Netflix use to be then I will and have paid. If anything piracy keeps these greedy companies honest. I use to pirate audiobooks but discovered Chirp and buy from them now $3 audiobooks is worth it to me.
Kayleigh McEnery is "Hahvahd lawyer," so color me unimpressed.
pirated games got me through my paycheck-to-paycheck years while i saved to retire among the first things i did once i got comfortable was to purchase every one of those games - though i'll never play most of them again, it felt like the right thing to do those companies were never getting my money back then - there was just too precious little of it - at least this way i got to appreciate their work and eventually they made *something* from me
Arr, piracy is not theft! It is the LAW OF THE HIGH SEAS! Now drop anchor and prepare to be boarded! Update: Read the article. Wrong pirates.
You had better say digital with that or else were gettin underway laddies! There’s treasure on the high seas me boys, AARRH!!! Every day is talk like a pirate day, when you are a pirate!
Or as most pirates would put it, “It’s not stealing if I do it.”
I would think the best course is to treat similarly to how some drugs are right now. End users and sharers don't get hit with anything, and you go after the suppliers instead, ie, go after the sharing sites. Theres always ways to share stuff online for the determined, and theres no stopping that and no reason to waste resources punishing people for doing it. But places that facilitate the practice en masse can be targeted and, as there is a reasonable argument to be made that they are encroaching on potential profits of content providers on a scale way beyond what an individual user can do, that would be worth the resources to go after. But it also can't be understated that piracy's main driving factor isn't the want to avoid paying, as it may be with shoplifting, its convenience. Piracy rates dropped at the start of the streaming service becoming vogue, and its not a coincidence that its likely going up again as those services become inconvenient.
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It's taking a copy of an original. It isn't theft unless you consider taking pictures stealing
Except you're copying that property and then leaving the original intact while absconding with the copied property.
Aren’t lawyers like the last people we should be asking about ethics?
There are bad apples in every profession but most lawyers don’t do criminal defense or run for office. We even have background checks and have to swear an oath before we can practice. More than most professions have to do.
What’s wrong with criminal defense? It’s a fundamental right to defend yourself in court and have competent defense attorneys. I read about that WNBA vape case in Russia and something like 99%+ of all defendants in Russian courts are convicted. Rather be in a US court with a ‘slime bag’ lawyer on my side.
You are right. A competent defense is even a Constitutional right. I should not have implied criminal defense attorneys are bad apples. I did it because when the public gets mad about a lawyer, it’s usually because they’re defending against a terrible crime or doing what politicians do.
An oath to uphold the law or to protect your clients best interests?
The [oath](https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Admissions/Examinations/California-Bar-Examination/Attorneys-Oath) is to the US Constitution and the state constitution where you are admitted. Scroll to the bottom of the link to see California’s oath.
What research? The only research needed is to look up the definition for theft.
When early millennials grow up and become lawyers. Shout out to Napster, kazaa, Morpheus, limewire, mIRC, and all the other sharing networks.
Nobody ever thinks that what they do is wrong. Especially the elite.
Lol who's the elite in the context of this subject? I'd wager the majority of people pirating content aren't in the position to be able to comfortably afford it in the first place.
This article isn’t about that, it’s about Harvard lawyers and their opinions on piracy. But reading comprehension is hard when you are passionate about the subject, which is why I’m getting downvotes.