I’m picturing a guy sighing with his hands on his head, staring at most of a car with the front wheel stuck in the router. Like, he can figure this out, just give him a minute. Maybe he needs a walk to clear his head. The pieces are there.

In 1992 I started downloading a car, the server is still downloading…

Would you download a train?

That assumes you were entitled to something that nobody owed you.

If the money was never yours, can you say it was stolen from you?

Cool argument, except a huge quantity of pirated works aren’t “owned” by the creator or even a group that funded it, but instead by parasitic companies that abuse capitalistic tools to actually steal value from those creators.

I have thousands of purchased games. 3 categories here:

1: obtained as part of a pack (humble gog etc)

2: purchased AFTER trying out via pirate copy to know if it is my kind of thing

3: picked up early access due to demo or general interest from being a known smaller dev/studio (hare brained for example)

With less and less access to shareware and viable demos, piracy is often the only conduit to prevent me getting ripped off of $80 for something that looks like a shiny sports car but end up being another “buy $800 in dlc for the full story!” Ford pinto.

Additionally, I now flat refuse to fund the likes of Denuvo, and wish that piracy actively hurt the bottom line of companies deploying that kind of anti-user shit.

Devil’s Advocate: Many pirates would have not paid for access to that media so to say it takes away from the creators profit isn’t exactly true since one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale.

Devil’s Advocate Part II: There is s significant amount of research that supports the notion that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.

I personally am an example of part II. I pirate a lot of music but I refuse to use Spotify because of how little it pays artists and I have also spent significant amounts of money buying music from artists I enjoy via Bandcamp or buying from the artist directly because I know they get a bigger cut of the profits that way.

Piracy is somewhat similar to vigilantism to me. My ability to consider it a negative is directly related to how fair I consider the legitimate methods available to be.

If similar efforts were focused on consumer protection laws as we do IP protection, I don’t think pirates would have much leg to stand on, and they’d be seen in more of a negative light.

But since consumers are regularly fucked by corporations, all I see is two sides both doing bad shit and I’m not feeling all that charitable for the faceless megacorp. I also dislike pirates who pirate from small time creators. But that’s about as far as I can care given the state of things.

We should be focusing on stronger consumer rights to truly fix the problem for all sides.

having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire for people to obtain paid copies of the data.

According to who?

Corporations profiting from copyright laws they helped write deserve to have their profits stolen in any case. Not gonna lose any sleep over it.

This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.

It does though, since no harm is being done.

The original creator/owner is at a loss when data is copied. The intent of that data is to be copied for profit. Now that the data has been copied against the creator/owners will, they do not receive the profit from that copy.

They also don’t receive profit from not copying, unless there’s a purchase made. By your logic, watching something on Netflix or listening to it on the radio is actively harmful to creators, which I think most people can admit is absurd.

but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire for people to obtain paid copies of the data.

You made this assertion, but don’t really back it up. If you were correct here, being able to copy cassette tapes or burn cds would have killed the music industry decades ago. Piracy is the original grassroots promotional method.

At the very least it gives people an option not to pay for the data, which is not what the creator wanted in creating it.

That’s a separate argument and doesn’t relate at all to the supposed financial harm.

They are entitled to fair compensation to their work.

That’s a loaded assertion. If I sing a song right now, what am I entitled to be paid for it? And you’re ignoring that most of the “work” of being a musician (in most genres at least) is playing live performances, the experience of which cannot be pirated.

It is true that pirating is not directly theft, but it does definitely take away from the creator’s/distributor’s profit.

I don’t think it’s definite at all. Most of what musicians make these days is from merch and ticket sales, which piracy contributes to by bringing in new fans.

the pirate would not have bought the copy anyways, but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire

Also, the person deciding whether or not they “would have” paid for it, has a strong incentive to kid themselves that they wouldn’t. Imagine if cinemas worked that way, and you could just walk in and announce that you weren’t going to buy a ticket anyway and since there’s a seat over there still empty it’s not going to cost them anything for you to sit in it. They’d go out of business by the end of the week.

Also also, either the thing you’re copying has value that arose from the effort of creating it, or it doesn’t. If it’s of value, then it’s reasonable to expect payment for it. It’s it’s not of value, then you shouldn’t miss not having it.

Adding on to say: no. It doesn’t cost the creator anything when a pirated copy is made. They potentially miss a sale, but if their item wasn’t in a store where someone may have made a purchase you wouldn’t call that actively harmful, right?

In addition, most media the creators don’t actually make money from the profit. Most of the time they’re paid a salary, maybe with a bonus if it does particularly well. The company that owns the product takes the profit (or loss), not the actual creators.

Also, a lot of media isn’t even controlled by the same people as when it was made. For example, buying the Dune books doesn’t give money to Frank Herbert. It goes to his estate.

The people who make shit normally dont get paid anyway.

So a little more in depth:

So, a little more in depth:

Im poor as fuck. So the option isnt ‘buy/pirate’ its ‘pirate or get nothing’. Fuck you if you think i should live without art.

The artists generally do not recieve profit when a copy is streamed/sold. It simply is not done; their unions are too weak. This is blatant corporate propaganda.

The entire mechanism to do that is fucked anyway, even if it were hooked up to something. I’m sorry, but i wouldnt deal with that shit show for free. Even new releases or classics have to be hunted down like cult films, and then even if i buy them, i lose them at some arbitrary later date. Music was the last thing i tried to pay on, and i just could not keep a cohesive collection together-at this point, if it’s not on bandcamp, i assume the artist doesn’t want money. And even bandcamp has disappeared tracks i paid for, reducing me to local backups. So fuck em.

I’m sorry. I really would love to support art and artists, but it simply isn’t possible to do that systemically within capitalism. There is no clear systemic option. Just ways to lick corporate boot and waste your fucking time.

although

I bet i do actually pay artists-cast crew and musicians at least-more than you do. When i dine out, rare as that is, in los angeles, i tip ~30% in cash. So i am actually supporting the arts, while you, my boot licking friend, are not. Youre supporting the corporate ghouls who feast upon them.

tbf I did do this a week ago and nobody downdooted me https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/comment/11886692

This is an interesting argument. I don’t think the two are completely analogous, and the whole thing falls apart once you go beyond consumer level usage due to piracy’s inability to make new things like AI can. While piracy isn’t going to get any game developers or musicians fired, AI image gen very likely will. The more it improves, the harder it will be for companies to continue justifying paying real artists.

That said, you do make a good point that many pro-piracy arguments can be used all the same to be pro-AI image gen. At least at the individual consumer level.

Well yeah, because my objections to AI aren’t based on copyright law.

Pff. You really think food grows on trees?

A lot of people used to pirate food, but as our housing was pushed from houses to apartments, they took that freedom from us. If you still live in a house, you can still pirate a lot of food in your yard.

The idea is that you support creators out of the appreciation and not because you’re forced to.
This seems to work as a model for YouTubers and podcasters. They usually have most of their stuff available for free, and people pay them money, and more often than there is no reward for the money, other than satisfaction of supporting the creator.
This is obviously one example, and it only works for periodic installments, but it is a working alternative to the system, where people who don’t want or can’t pay don’t do that

Nah. Id pay artists if i could.

And in fact do tip them pretty well at the jobs they take to pay rent when im in LA.

What we need is for parasitic creativity destroying shit stain ip-troll ghouls to get the guillotine, so they arent parasiting on every fucking artist.

We need a society that values humanity and art.

Because as is, there kind of isnt a reliable systemic way to support them. Capitalism prevents it.

That analogy doesn’t work at all because the Sow produces a finite (and rather small at that) number of piglets over a given timespan.

It’s more akin to you getting a piglet/sow elsewhere. Now your piglet/sow need is satisfied and you won’t buy anything from this farmer.

You can tell it’s made the rounds because it has a reaction image nearly the size of the image itself shoved onto the bottom superfluously

I think pirating scientific papers is a good thing all around. The research isnt funded by the selling of access to those papers, much on the contrary.

Why is no one mentioning here that the business model shouldn’t exist? If a copy can be made basically for free, there is no reason not to make it basically free. We should be providing everyone with the means to live regardless of their ability to sell stuff. If everyone was free to do whatever they please because their existence was provided for, people would still make media, because people love making things like that.

Of course that might mean that in the short term, while we don’t do this, pirating might mean that some things stop existing. I’d be completely fine if all Hollywood movies and other shit disappeared overnight. Maybe then people would finally come to the understanding that our current model of doing things sucks.

Might I suggest the problem is capitalism. Without the everpresent threat of homelessness and starvation forced on us by the landlords, rampant price gouging of necessary goods like food, and the anti-lottery we all play every single fucking day with our own health, artists wouldn’t need nearly so much compensation for their work. Piracy wouldn’t matter, or even be required as a concept. I dream of living in a world without capitalism, but we don’t. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

When I return from the library instead of the bookstore it is with the deepest shame.