Submitted 9 months ago by kpw@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/
The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
If there is no easy way to own what you buy, then piracy becomes a moral obligation to preserve culture for future generations.
You want something, but you don’t want to pay the cost (either monetarily or because they have made it too hard) and so you take take it. Fuck these assholes companies who try to milk people for every last penny, so I have no moral qualms with piracy, I do it myself.
But, fuck, can we stop trying to paint it as some noble thing? Effectively zero pirates are doing it to perseve culture, instead it’s fulfilling personal desire.
This is chaotic neutral at best, not neutral good.
I think there’s an exception to be made in your argument for abandonware. There are classic arcade games that wouldn,'t exist any more but are widely available due to MAME support.
Internet archive, and a chunk of r/datahoarders, is built for that purpose. Just as people have saved old paintings (aka media) it’s also good for us to save significant pieces of our current culture. Old VHS tapes and CDs are already disappearing. Sometimes finding something is just a little bit more difficult and it’s only going to get worse.
It doesn’t need to have been a noble goal to be a noble result.
For something to be actually and reliable preserved and win against random decay, data loss, disaster, and whatever else will statistically destroy copies, a thing will need to be stored by at least thousands of people. But there is no way to know how many, only that you increase the likelihood of perseveration by storing a copy.
I agree, most people are downloading a thing because they want it. But by keeping that thing, they are also preserving it.
I pirated plenty when I was young and poor, I’m pretty sure that helped form a desire for that sort of stuff which I pay for now.
I bet if I had abstained when I couldn’t afford it, I wouldn’t have spent the money on all the content I buy now
I believe the bulk of pirates are people who wouldn’t have bought the content if they had to pay for it
People who are doing porting work to make Windows-entwined Ubisoft games available on Linux are helping to preserve media for the future. People booting up Limewire are doing nothing.
I have a Spotify subscription that I still pay, but built a library full of FLACs on the side specifically because I got fed up with “right holders” taking songs in and out of my playlists and having the right to deny me access forever.
It literally would be cheaper and easier for me to just use Spotify.
If you pay to own a movie then yes, you should be allowed to make copies of it and keep it forever, even if the seller goes bankrupt in future. You are paying to own the movie.
If you subscribe to Netflix you are not paying to own the content, you are paying for access to their content. Therefore you cannot legally download a movie from Netflix and keep a copy forever.
However, if Netflix don’t make it possible to buy their unique content for permanent ownership, then piracy is the inevitable result and they should address that.
But let’s be honest here, none of you are intending to buy anything.
I spend way more money on streaming services than I ever spent buying DVDs or CDs.
To say that “I don’t intend to buy anything” is a BS accusation. You have no clue about another persons motives.
Like the latest controversy with the internet archives
Piracy was never stealing, it was only copyright infringement.
Stealing is a crime that goes back to the 10 commandments, it’s old. When you steal something you take it from someone else, depriving them of it.
Copyright infringement is a newish crime where the government has granted a megacorporation a 120 year monopoly on the expression of an idea. If you infringe that copyright, they still have the original, and can keep selling copies of that original to everyone else, but they might miss out on the opportunity to make a sale to you. Obviously, that’s very different from stealing something.
The irony is, you pirating today has been shown to influence you buying it later on in a sale. And there’s a good argument to be made about your word of mouth praise helping their sales.
Yup. I’m about to suggest about half a dozen people to watch a movie on Netflix I pirated last night. I have “suggested” to a few dozen people to watch Hulu for Firefly.
They don’t get my money because I don’t give a flying fuck about the extortion of the people this tyrrany that’s been running since Crowley and even longer. Looks free but there was never an end to slavery. It just stopped giving a shit about your color. To counter, goes over everyone’s head one way or another. Doesn’t matter. All life will die on this planet in less than a decade.
As every musician knows, exposure is always better than payment! This is why you shouldn’t offer payment to musicians at your wedding, since they’re getting great exposure already. /s
Biggest personal examples are Minecraft and FL Studio. I asked my parents to buy Minecraft for me after a week of pirating it, and I bought an FL Studio license when I could afford to, nearly a decade after I first used it. I don’t use it much, but it felt right.
yup, pirated jedi: fallen order. liked the game very much, but jedi: survivor wasn’t cracked yet. so i bought a key for 30€.
the problem is: it runs like shit, because it’s a bad PS5 port and denuvo probably also has an effect on that.
i will never buy from EA again.
The war of semantics is about as intelligent as the tweet that went viral where someone criticized trains requiring tickets. “Why are you charging me to get on? You’re going that way anyway.”
An associate of mine defines stealing as, “taking (either by cloning or removing) something (either digital or physical) of which is not of your original possession”
If anyone has a rebuttal, please help.
It’s not really a rebuttal, but by that assessment, a person may not view a webpage, as the browser copies files from a distant browser for viewing.
It’s because that’s not a common definition and it’s not even a good one. No normal person would call cloning stealing. Also, this completely misses lending, gifting, downloading a webpage or even renting. All of those would be stealing under this definition.
Hi, welcome to the Technology community here on Lemmy! Discourse is not tolerated here, so please just tack on your endorsement of piracy and leave your civility at the door.
Stealing is a crime that goes back to the 10 commandments, it’s old.
Not exactly. The original translation from Hebrew was closer to “thou shall not kidnap,” arresting control of a person’s personal boundaries and will, not a violation of personal property, which didn’t really exist as a concept at the time.
Forget about features and prices, how about actual content?
2017 I buy this space shooter game called “Destiny 2”. It has some problems, but it’s decent enough. $60 buy in. The single player story missions took you through four initial planets/moons, the European Dead Zone, Titan, Nessus, and Io, recovering your power and kicking the asses of the space turtles who tried to kill everyone.
Expansion 1, 2, 3 and 4 come out widening the story, adding more locations, Mercury, Mars, The Tangled Shore and the Dreaming City, the Moon… with all the associated story missions, strikes, raids…
And I bought in on those too. Some hundreds of dollars.
Roll forward to 2020, almost 2,000 hours in game. Bungie decides they’re done with story missions and removes them from the game. They also decide that the game is “too big” for new players to get into, and seeking a Fortnite, free to play style audience, removes 1/2 of the content from the game.
Existing players like me drop the game because content we paid good money for and hours we spent exploring, collecting and curating gear, just went up in smoke.
New players now have no onboarding point and are incredibly confused because there’s no story and no real way to get into the game.
So Bungie managed to completely alienate both their existing user base, and the one they hoped to attract.
Oh, and they have now promised not to do it again, but at the same time, haven’t brought the content back either.
This is exactly me. Started in d1 beta. I quit cold the day the removed my purchased content
I feel like I got scammed by Bungie with the shit they pulled with Destiny 2. I will never give them a single dime ever again. I loved that game and they completely ruined it.
I don’t exactly recall when or where I heard/read this quote, but man it is dope
I remember this from the hip hop scene. You know you’ve fallen off when nobody is sharing/pirating your album
I am the guy! I made the quote! Feels goddamn awesome to see it everywhere now!
People are always on here arguing about whether pirating is stealing or not. I do think it’s stealing I just can’t bring myself to give a fuck about these large corporations. They have been stealing from the people for years.
I’d probably argue digital piracy isn’t theft. It’s quality control.
Yeah I really don’t care if I’m stealing in this context, I care if I’m stealing from independent content creators. Another thing is I know I can’t afford all the music I listen to, but I can afford to go to shows of my favorite artists. Piracy is often completely transparent of any content distribution strategies so I find it a great way to explore music.
you cant steal something that isnt fucking physically real
am i stealing smells and sounds from my neighbors
no democrat city judge would side with a corpo over a random joe with a bangin lawyer
Further to that, paying for a product then the seller taking that product away from you without refunding your payment is stealing.
That’s not a fair example, because 5 Euros has an intrinsic value. The theft here is of intellectual property. Here’s an analogy:
Taking a product from the shop without paying and returning the item later is still stealing.
There was a history on Reddit where man stole a few grands of $ in products over a few years at his local grocery shop, and one day when he wanted to return what he stole he was arrested on site.
Some people would call it counterfeiting but we won’t do that , right ?
If you have sex with, but don’t pay, a prostitute, are you stealing?
Put 5 eur in my pocket and i have to dance
The “taking a physical object” analogy doesn’t even give us anything useful.
Most stores of perishable goods don’t want to hold onto their stock; they want to give it away, ideally in a way that makes them money. In many countries, they will even give away the last excess to homeless people that would not reasonably be able to afford it.
If there’s one orange seller in a town that’s put effort into a supply train to bring oranges there, but someone has shared a magic spell that lets them xerox oranges off the shelf, then that orange seller never gets paid, and has no livelihood; it doesn’t help him that he still has all of the oranges he brought to market, he’s not going to eat them all himself.
I expect the morally deprived will answer “Not my problem.” Yet, it’s going to be an issue for them when they try to run their own business.
Netflix and Amazon prime simply won't work with VPNs active, which I use for work and privacy towards my ISP.
I won't compromise my security for their bad services. Living in a non US country, we are also always several years behind on content being offered.
Yeah, nah. The paying customer always pays for the percieved sins of non customers.
Set sail.
With the right VPN they do. Mostly no problems with Proton VPN
Pirated valheim, played 20 hours, bought the game.
Pirated baldurs gate 3 on early access, bought the game with only act 1, that’s how good it is.
Pirated Valhalla, played 5 hours, uninstalled that trash forever.
Started pirating streaming services when they told me that I can’t watch shit anymore because streaming service b and c took the shows, and now I have to pay two different streaming services if I want to keep watching.
We pay for three video streaming services plus Spotify plus Kobo’s monthly plan for audiobooks plus a monthly Microsoft tax for apps and cloud storage plus regular Steam purchases.
Anyway, I just got back into piracy after a 15-year hiatus due to the enshittification of video streaming. It reminds me of how cable TV got ridiculous back in the 90s and so people figured out how to hack the satellite feeds and make pirated VHS tapes to pass around. As Gaben has said, piracy is always a service problem.
I’m still happy with Spotify and Steam. I’m mostly okay with audiobooks, too. However, Amazon is fucking with that service too by making some books Audible-only. For example, you can get Books 2 and 3 of Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time books on various platforms, but not Book 1 because Book 1 is Audible-only! Am I going to reward Audible for that kind of malicious licensing? Haha, no, of course not.
It’s probably worth pirating games just to test play them before buying the good ones for online play
I haven’t pirated games in like 18 years
I’ve never paid for movies, showes, or music lawl. I’ll donate or but merch if I love a musical artist tho
You’re completely right, bluesky is trash
The fact that no product is missing anywhere means it’s not stealing.
If you rent your car from Mercedes and I make a copy of it, the only change is that I’ve not copied your car, I’ve copied Mercedes’.
By this logic no services should be paid.
I think piracy is copyright infringement. But like who cares if some big corpos get infringed upon by some dudes.
I think a compromise on copyright could be a good middle ground in future. In the same way that I’m happy to wait for a game to go on sale before I buy and play it, I’d be happy to wait until a movie or series enters the public domain so I can consume it without paying. Obviously not for hundreds of years, or 56 years. But if Netflix/HBO etc shows and movies became free to watch after 6-7 years, most piracy traffic could be easily captured by legal platforms that are more convenient and accessible to more viewers. I struggle to see how it would not further relegate piracy to a niche activity done by very few, or be bad for the content producers in any significant way
Good topic, good point, terrible writing. I couldn’t finish the article with the author’s ego and personal bias butting into his great story.
If this rhetoric was used in a conservative opinion piece instead of a pro piracy opinion piece, I’m pretty sure it would be banned for calling for violence towards specific individuals.
Guillotine preview image and quotes like:
Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.
Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery.
What a trash article and site. How is this permitted.
Normally people pay to see the circus, but you could just sneak in though. It’s not exactly stalling, so what do you call that? The circus is still there, but you didn’t pay for it. If lots of people start doing that, the circus probably won’t have enough money to keep on performing. Maybe they’ll get rid of the more expensive bits and just keep the cheaper ones in the future.
Heads up! Plex media server with the Plex clients on all your devices is such a smooth experience. Highly recommended. And their “Watch together” feature is so nice for people that prefer to stay in bed and spend the winter binge watching next to a warm body.
the way i see it, on big budget productions anyone who is relying on their paycheck to survive already got paid for their work, and the ones collecting royalties or sales percentages are rich enough that i couldnt care less. smaller independent studios or individual creators are the ones that i will always support, and in cases like itch.io games that are pwyw i will take the free download and figure out how much i will pay based on how much i like the game.
What does that even mean?
Ownership is compromised a bundle of rights. If it’s your bundle, you can split them up however you want, sell whatever kind of limited or unlimited licenses that can come up with, and this applies to real, personal, and intellectual property.
If it’s not theft, why does the greed and unfair practices of the industry matter? Why does there need to be any justification or excuse?
Should definitely have a right to repai; with any other property right you generally have a duty to maintain the access to your interest. I recently unlocked a bunch of premium features in my car. HD radio, comfort window roll down (rolls down 2" with a tap") auto tailgate close (had auto open, but not close, had to hit a button on the lid to close), auto side mirror tilt down in reverse, roll down windows from keyless entry, close tailgate from keyless entry.
If I understand the interface at all, it’s pretty openly accessible (if you have the right OBDii port adapter and software, which ironically you need to buy a license for). Code looked fairly straightforward, and by that I mean it looked like other computer code I’ve seen. Wonder what the original price was for those extras were from the dealership, probably over 10k.
I’ve seen this quote repeated over and over these past few weeks, while noone brothers to actually explain what it means and why. This article is no different unfortunately.
I thought this community was for tech related news, not tech related OpEds.
It’s just a common tactic to draw attention to the weakness of the company and damage to the company’s interests, and it’s not because people can’t speak out at all. Although it is a bit biased to say this, my disgust towards these big companies will not change.
I look forward to this gem being repeated along with “enshittification” by the dunning krugers at large
I find the reaction to this and hbomberguy’s plagiarism video interesting. Both pirating and plagiarism are forms of infringement of intellectual property rights but one is considered ok and even just while the same voices condemn the other.
What makes ok against a faceless corporation but not ok against an independent creator? Should be wrong in both cases.
Rough_N_Ready@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Piracy was never stealing. It’s copyright infringement, but that’s not the same as stealing at all. People saying it’s stealing have always been wrong.
gapbetweenus@feddit.de 9 months ago
One of the great modern scams, was to convince society that unauthorized copying of data is somehow equivalent to taking away a physical object.
Coasting0942@reddthat.com 9 months ago
Jesus didn’t ask for permission to copy bread and fish. It’s a clear moral precedent that if you can copy you should.
What would the Jesus do?
Checkmate Atheists!
helenslunch@feddit.nl 9 months ago
Literally no one thinks that. But you know that already, don’t you?
It’s theft of intellectual property…
ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 9 months ago
So you also believe people shouldn’t need a ticket for a concert, for example?
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s not a scam. It is equivalent to it in some ways and not in others. In a capitalist and globalist society (like the one we’re in), goods have a price and a value. Copying data can be done without a price but it can’t be done without value. If someone created something of value and our society rewards that value with money and people need that money to survive, pay their bills, and support their families, then it’s not possible to copy that data without depriving the creator of its value.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 9 months ago
YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A PURSE
balancedchaos@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
-Character from some movie I pirated
Lemminary@lemmy.world 9 months ago
In this economy with this level of corporate greed, I will download all the purses
Klear@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I would infringe all over its copyright tho
konalt@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You wouldn’t steal a baby!
Coasting0942@reddthat.com 9 months ago
You wouldn’t download fish and bread!
Jesus: hold my wine……
ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 9 months ago
I bet you aren’t a software developer.
grue@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m a software developer, and I endorse the grandparent comment.
puttybrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
If I made software that people cared enough about to crack and pirate, I’d be happy that it’s popular enough for that to happen.
I am a software developer but I’ve only worked on SaAS and open source projects.
iegod@lemm.ee 9 months ago
You need to disconnect the badness with the term stealing because you’re just wrong. Yeah it’s ip infringement. Yes it’s illegal. Yes people are impacted. And still… Not stealing.
Rough_N_Ready@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I have been for over 20 years actually!
otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
You aren’t.
Pratai@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
BINGPOT.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 9 months ago
I am.