Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 11 months agoIt 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 11 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?
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
No, it still is. You’re just physically limited to one person until they finish reading which limits the damage. You can’t physically share it to them in one day. Either way, the author isn’t getting paid for their work.
Nelots@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I do see where you’re coming from, but not necessarily. If my friend has zero interest in ever buying said book (or can’t afford to) and would never become a paying customer, there is no downside to sharing a copy. In fact, if they like the book enough, they make even become incentivized to buy themselves a copy or look into the author’s other work legitimately when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
This is how/why I pirate most games. I don’t have the type of pocket money to spend on games I don’t know I’ll love, so I pirate them first. If they’re good enough, I’ll buy the actual game on steam later. Spider-Man, Baldur’s Gate 3, Cassette Beasts, etc. are all games I plan to buy when I can afford to. And I can promise I never would have bought Slime Rancher 2 if I hadn’t pirated the first one at some point and enjoyed it.
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m exactly the same way. The point is that you’re paying for the things you want to see more of. That’s where my prior comments about value matter in this context. If your friend wasn’t interested in purchasing and you share a copy, then there’s no difference on the value side other than, without your purchase, they wouldn’t be able to ingest that content. The risk of the opposite, though, is far greater when there are no physical limitations. Even in the library scenario someone mentioned earlier, the libraries are still paying for the initial purchase and the number of rentals inform their future purchases so the author still retains some value from that and their livelihood is still supported.
Mind you, I’m not against piracy. What I’m against is people pirating and then pretending that it’s not stealing. You may not be stealing a physical item but you’re still stealing value and income from the creator. What you’re doing at least returns value and income to creators whose work you enjoy. I feel like people here ignore that because they’re not personally affected by it.
I own a production company. We make everything from graphics, video, audio, 3D models, to custom per-project hardware builds. A few years ago, a small subset of my team decided we wanted to make a video game for iOS/Android. We released it at 99 cents. On Android, it was available for pirating on day 1 and we had planned for that inevitability so our player stats included a tag in our reporting that recognized that. We only got about 300,000 downloads worldwide on Android and, of those, about half were pirated plays. If 100,000 of those people had paid the 99 cents, that would have been life changing for us, at the time. We could have paid off the house we were using as an office at the time. We blew it off initially as “eh, they probably wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” or “they probably pirated it just because they could and tried it once and stopped playing” but, much to our surprise, the player population that played it the most (over 70,000 that played for at least 10 minutes every day) were the pirates. We even added cosmetic transactions after the fact to try and recoup some of those users and made packs for 99 cents. They kept playing but pirated the packs and used them for free. The game studio side of things died and we shut it down afterwards. If even half of the half of people who pirated and played the game daily had paid any one of the 99 cent costs, we could have funded more content or more games. I find it hard to believe that that many people hated our game but still played daily and didn’t even like it enough to pay slightly more than the cost of a stamp for our team’s work.
You know who pays for our work every time? Movie studios, production companies, video game developers. People shouldn’t be surprised when they’re feeding the very monster they’re complaining about and killing the alternatives and, worse yet, attempting to justify their theft as being moral. Just admit you’re stealing and let’s be adults and figure out a way to not have to keep the existing, shitty system afloat.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Either way the person is losing out, so the end result is the same so it shouldn’t matter in the end. I’m sorry you missed this point.
But hey, throw insults, that’ll get people on your side.
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The end result is not the same. You can’t physically reproduce and share a book fast enough, for free to create the same dent that you can by digitally reproducing something ad infinitum. I didn’t miss the point. Again, you missed the point of the thread that you responded to. You didn’t respond to the main thread on this post, you responded to a comment that the authors of this content deserve the income and value of the media you’re ingesting.
You’re just a dishonest person. I don’t want you on my side. You don’t see the harm you’re causing and then attempt to justify it because you’re a bad person who doesn’t care if you’re hurting people and stealing their livelihood just so you can have something like an entitled child. On top of that, you keep pretending like I missed the point when you keep ignoring the point you responded to. Just go away.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 11 months ago
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 11 months ago