Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.
Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
amzd@kbin.social 6 months agoThe action is still harmless. Information should be free.
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Thavron@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Including your personal information?
papertowels@lemmy.one 6 months ago
if information is free, the action would be harmless.
FTFY.
Uncle_Bagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
How is creating a popular a novel any different than creating a popular object? Hundreds of hours of labor go into both and the creators are entitled to the full value of said labor.
Say you have an amazing story about the vacation you took last year, and told all your friends about it. You would justifiably be pissed if you later found out one of your friends was telling that story as if they had done it. It’s the same for someone who writes a book or any other form of media.
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Thank you for saying this. I get downvoted here all the time for reminding people here that the creators of these works need the income from this to survive, pay their bills, and take care of their families. You may not be stealing the movie/book/music or whatever but you are stealing income from the creators. People here don’t like hearing that because it throws a wrench in their mental gymnastics they use to justify piracy.
The only justified piracy is the kind that results from media that is no longer legally available for purchase. In cases like this Sony situation, as this article points out, not only do customers know about this in advance but the industry has been vocally and incessantly warning people about this. Consumers who still have Sony and Adobe money for this stuff are just as much to blame for this. They weren’t willing to not have something on principle so they bought it anyway and these companies took that as a sign that this behavior is ok.
Next time, vote with your wallet and don’t buy their shit in the first place. Find ways to buy things that don’t use this shit and have some self-control and don’t buy the things that do. This whole Veruca Salt “but I want it, daddy” bullshit has put us in this situation and the situation where everything now is a subscription and everyone is harvesting our data. Keep giving them money and they’ll keep giving you more of this horseshit.
AeroLemming@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Piracy can only be considered to be depriving someone of some good if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the pirate would have paid for access to the content had they not had a pirated copy available. Not only is this not true in the majority of cases, it’s also completely impossible to prove in 99.9% of the cases where it is true.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 6 months ago
But they aren’t claiming in they made it though.
I bought a book, I lent it to my friend to read. That shouldn’t be different than copying it so we could both read it at the same time and talk about it.
No one is claiming we done it.
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It is completely different. You can’t loan one book to 300,000 friends. By doing that, you’re stealing income from the author who wrote the book. If you, instead, recommended the book to your friend and then they bought it, you both get to read it and the author still gets to make a living.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 6 months ago
So if I share that book with 50 friends over the course of the year that’s not taking income, but if it copy it 50 times and share it in a day it is?
poopkins@lemmy.world 6 months ago
There is a difference here between lending or resale of a physical product. Can you sell a second hand book? Typically, yes. Can you do mental gymnastics to draw a parallel to reselling a digital version? Evidently, also yes.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Why would reselling a physical copy be different than a digital…?