Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"

• clmbmb@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Have you ever bought something online (movies, games) that you can’t save/download and then the company you have the money to removed that? That is stealing from you. Simple.

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  • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    No, actually I never was in that situation. Is there another incident like that apart from Sony and the Discovery channel?

    And how does that mean all digital products are now okay to pirate?

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  • EatATaco@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If Sony openly stole from these people, a class action case against them should be a no brainer.

    But you won’t see one because we both know it isn’t theft. They’re still garbage and trash, and so I have no problem pirating content, but calling what they did “stealing” is either incredibly ignorant or incredibly disingenuous.

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  • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Pirating software is stealing as well. That’s pretty simple.

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    • Iapar@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They deserve to get money for it. No pirate is against that.

      If we would exchange money for the product all would be fine. Some people would still pirate because they have no money or just don’t want to pay but the majority would pay.

      But as we buy just a license that can be revoked for any reason consumers feel that the system is rigged against them.

      So it is a natural reaction to try to fuck over a system that is fucking you over.

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      • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        People pirate software that is buyable on GoG, itch.io or movies that are on disc all the time. Just because some platforms offer the product with just a license shouldn’t mean it’s now morally justified to pirate it.

        But I see people bringing the statement because of platform like Steam or Netflix.

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    • Patariki@feddit.nl ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I do agree that the workers should be paid, but they have absolutely no say in what the company does at the top. It might be that a lot of them don’t agree with the company’s actions. Only way to remedy that is to democratize companies.

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      • Sway_Chameleon@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.

        In the context you present, he companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.

        Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.

        But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.

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    • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.

      In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.

      Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.

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• EatATaco@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t have a problem with it morally because for things like what happened with Sony where people reasonably believe they bought something and would have access to it forever, but no. So fuck these companies I don’t give a shit about them.

  But you’re absolutely right, and you’ll be downvoted for it. I want a luxury good and don’t want to pay the price, so I take it. It’s the same for virtually every other pirate. It’s not justified, it’s just morally ambiguous. But people need to convince themselves that they are justified, because they don’t want to admit they are commiting a bad act. Literally someone else in this thread is arguing its moral imperative to pirate. Lol

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  • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I want a luxury good and don’t want to pay the price

    There are certainly aspects of this, but the primary reason I pirate is not because of this, and I suspect there are quite a few people for whom this is also true. In the early oughts once I started getting some money and in basically the infancy of the digital media age, I did try to buy stuff the corporate way. And I got burned by it too many times (probably 3-4, but really once is probably enough.) So now I don’t ever even attempt to “buy” something that is digital and DRM encumbered, and I’m more than fine “demoing” a game or whatever. By the time iTunes started selling movies and TV, my purchasing of content I expected to own was limited only to places that released DRM-free.

    These days, I have a little more money that I could be spending on this type of content, but Sony just demonstrated exactly why I -never- will (and they’re just the latest in a long line.) You know that there were people that bought stuff that were still in the middle of watching it or just bought it a few minutes ago who Sony/Discovery effectively just robbed. I’m sure Sony/Discovery just created a many, many pirates with this action.

    Further, there is far more content than I could possibly purchase, so the money I do spend on digital goods, I do so either with the expectation it’s ephemeral (like a subscription service - it’s impossible guarantee they’ll even stay in business) or that I actually own it, eg: DRM free. If I’m out of money to spend, I can’t find a moral or ethical reason that makes piracy wrong, and I think actually it’s likely that it benefits everyone. When I was younger especially, I couldn’t afford much, but I pirated a lot. In Doctorow’s case specifically, I’ve bought some of his books, but that’s only because I was able to download some of the earlier work and then spend the money when I had it. With bands in particular, I can guarantee they have made far more money from me than in a world where piracy didn’t exist.

    If you apply this type of concept to basically anything else, no one would buy it. If you go to Target and grab a t-shirt, and someone whips out a contract -after- you’ve paid which they demand you sign before you can have the shirt that they can come to your home and take it whenever they want, no one would do it. Or that you can’t wear that shirt into a Walmart without getting sued. Or that you can’t cut the sleeves off or turn it into a scarf later. If you went back a second time and bought another shirt and they come and take them both, everyone would look at you like the sucker.

    So yeah, if by some magic piracy stopped existing tomorrow, I wouldn’t suddenly be a Sony/Discovery customer, I’d just take up woodworking or some shit. While some piracy is probably always going to exist that’s as you describe, piracy is a service problem.

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    • EatATaco@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That was just a long winded way - s very long winded way - of demonstrating my point. Don’t get me wrong, weve followed a similar path and probably a major reason why we both say “fuck these assholes” and don’t feel bad about it.

      But at the end of the day you said nothing to change the point that this is a luxury good you want, but don’t want to pay the price, so you take it.

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