If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
I have to agree. There should be legislation preventing this, or the pirates will be morally in the clear. Which does not help copyright owners. Yes, the pirate stole your content, but since you were going to revoke access anyhow he was stealing from a scammer which is justice.
It's how companies like Microsoft or Adobe could grow and gain uncontested monopolies. Because, due to piracy, price was no longer a good enough differentiator. And it's why "Linux on the desktop" never happened.
There aren't many studies on this topic and the available ones are bullshit, as they don't take into account second order effects of piracy, one of which being the rise of streaming with DRM, which also concentrates power in the hands of a few Big Tech companies.
Piracy is one of the biggest reasons for why we have monopolies. The phenomenon is now repeated with ad blockers. And the irony of the situation is that people point at monopolies to justify piracy or the use of ad blockers.
"this is why we can't have nice things"
Going from "big corp can handle lost revenue in return for market dominance and exposure" to "it doesn't hurt revenue" is absurd.
You pirate photoshop because you know it is good. You pirate movie because you know it is going to be good and everyone is waiting to watch it.
I've done it. I'd bet that most people who have pirated anything have. If you were around for the Napster days you'd know that people would often download things they'd never heard of before and had no idea if they'd like it or not (and that was when it could take many hours, even days, for a single album to download!). Piracy is a great way to try out new things. Napster led to an increase in CD sales as people were discovering new artists and music they'd never heard on the radio or MTV (https://www.zdnet.com/article/study-napster-boosts-cd-sales/)
The objection to P2P file sharing was never about money. It was about power and control. It was about gatekeeping. The RIAA wants to decide what you can and can't listen to and what is popular. They don't want their new artists/albums to have to compete with everything ever released. They know piracy would increase sales. They don't want to give up the control over our culture and they don't want the internet to cut them out as useless middlemen. With computers and the internet we don't need them for distribution or advertising. We can do it all without them.
'Piracy' is the wrong thing to call it.
Perhaps the gatekeepers you describe are the same ones who pushed the term 'piracy' this way; to describe any human who copies chunks of 1s and 0s they feel protective of.
Meanwhile, real pirates really steal real physical goods from real people.
Copiers and pirates are not the same thing, not even close.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I often download obscure games I see on steam to see if they’ll actually hook me or not. I pay for what I actually am able to sink my teeth in to.
The vast majority of movies I download are me going out on a limb. In some cases I’m subscribed to a service they’re available on. I still download them though because I’d prefer to use my own player on my own terms. You can’t even get higher than 720p on Netflix on PC without using edge. Horseshit. It is also not infrequent that there is no way for me to pay someone to watch it online. I’m not going to buy a used copy of a DVD/blu-ray to watch something I’m interested in. Ain’t nobody making money off a used copy. Is resale of used media ethical?
Or when you're at a stall and they give you a bit of cheese to try, or some bit of cake. They know that, if you like it and you can afford it, you'll buy more. The costs to them are small, and the return is worth it. This is just trading-101.
Free labor abused on a systemic scale is completely different. It's like I asked you for a cheese sample as big as what I need to serve a party of 50 people I'm paid to organise.
There is zero cost associated with piracy. Zero.
At best, there's an expectation of profit that's not met. To argue that, you need to show how copying a file translates to a potential sale being converted to a no-sale, and there are plenty of evidence that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted work drives demand up.
> Pretending piracy doesn't hurt revenue is a shaky ground to stand on
Go ahead and show exactly where copying a file hurts anyone. You're trying to pass off your personal assertions as axioms, but it's on you to prove that copying a file without the consent of someone hurts anyone.
Go ahead.
> now whatever it hurts the artists revenue is a different question
If anything, artists are the least impacted counterpart as they literally get paid a small fraction of the whole income.
>
Wait until the grandparent learns about public libraries. Just havens of content larceny! People "stealing" content left and right!
Comparing library access to piracy is comparing National Parks to Squatting.
If you're going to argue against piracy you're also arguing against libraries. The differences between a pirate and a library are mostly statutory.
No, it is not.
They might later pay to watch and listen to excellent instrumentalists and singers perform that song, so concerts might work for them. Presumably the composer can charge those performers...but how much?
You usually can't figure out the worth of a song beforehand, so if it is going to be a one-time upfront payment from the performers to the composer it is hard to figure out the right price.
You can wait until after the song has been released and see much the concert tour makes and how many people buy copies of the song or listen to it on streaming services and that gives you a good idea of the worth of the song.
Upfront you'd have to agree on how the worth is calculated and how the price is calculated from that. But this is then going to depend on how much revenue the song brings and so sounds an awful lot like a royalty arrangement, just with a lump payment at the end of the license instead of more frequent smaller payments along the way.
Not that actions of those selling does not likely contribute much more to loss of revenue, mainly by making content unavailable. Availability or pricing compared to product is often sub-optimal.
I have to admit I haven't looked at these studies in their original form, but I guess sales revenue per install is the best metric to tell
Sounds like it has more like the desirability of the game driving piracy than the other way around.
people are copying
and what do you mean by "you're not allowed to"
Copying is often called taking a copy. Even basic usage of the term copying invalidates your point!
As for “not allowed” that will vary by contract/law/agreement/license/etc
This distinction is why it’s usually not downloaders that are punished, rather uploaders: they’re the ones that broke an agreement.
—⁂—
(Just for fun, The Devil’s Dictionary (not a work to be taken particularly seriously):
> TAKE, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.
I quite like that way of putting it because it’s the megacorporations that are the pirates when they steal their DRM content back, because they are acquiring it from you so that you can’t have it, by force if they have to but they prefer stealth.)
When you copy content that has a cost, if the company is not offering it to you, what do you call your action ?
I mean, really, you spent 5 years working on a game with no salary. Then a day before launch day someone just makes a copy of it and distributed it « for free » in the internet. How are you going to make a salary out of it ?
People make two choices when they pirate - moral, and economical. If economically they cannot afford the game, they weren't going to pay. If morally they are against paying for a game (like if the game company is associated with suicides, etc), they weren't going to pay. There are some people that will pay if piracy isn't available, but not that many.
Anyways, after the income goes around, and all the exec, upper management, and publisher salaries are paid, the piracy or lack of it probably makes about a $1 difference to my weekly earnings. I put a lot of artistic and creative effort, blood, sweat, and tears into it. If it costs me $1 to make people enjoy it, so be it.
In the AAA games industry, piracy is a thing. People talk about it. And most people have only very mild things to say about it, except for execs. Execs make a disproportionate amount of money off games for what they do, and they do kinda have a lot of time to sit on their hands sometimes, so they can fight these piracy battles, die on these piracy hills.
Anyways, don't speak for us please.
You can find any reason to steal, economical, hunger etc the point I making is that the motivation to make a copy does not make it legal.
Do we tolerate some form of theft for moral or other reasons ? Yes sure. But because I, as an individual, have my own reasons not to pay for something and decide to make a copy of it, that does not transforms my action to a perfectly legal thing.
Maybe we can’t do anything about software being copied but that doesn’t magically make laws and IP disappear with it and makes copying software legal ?
I was answering to the comment « nothing is taken ». Because the content is the result of an effort from other people being paid, the content has value. The fact that we can make infinite copies of it makes a single copy worthless because it’s not being burnt into a piece of plastic ?
Legal systems ultimately enshrine the human morality in law. Common law - through case law, civil law - by committees that the legislators consult, religious law - by morality described in legal texts. We're not talking about any of it though. We are talking about day-to-day things, like what does it mean to steal, what kind of consequences it has, are these consequences real or supposed, and other such things.
Law is generally blind to externalities of an action. An action itself is legal, illegal, or undefined in law. We're not in this domain if we talk about the consequences of piracy or how someone might feel about it. We are having a conversation on morals.
Shifting morals will eventually shift the law, of course.
Bill Gates made an interesting comment regarding software piracy in the 1990s. At that time, software piracy was rampant in China, and Microsoft’s Windows operating system was one of the most pirated products. In response to this situation, Gates remarked that if people were going to pirate software, he would prefer they pirate Microsoft’s software.
His rationale was strategic: if people in China became accustomed to using Microsoft’s Windows and Office software, they would be more likely to continue using these products in the future, including in business environments where legitimate software licenses are more commonly purchased.
(Whether things worked out as he envisioned is a slightly different matter.)
I can already see that what works for software does not work for movies.
Other topic is also devices supporting DRM.
I would say paying for software new versions makes sense there is work to be done to keep it working on new devices etc.
Paying for the same book or movie again because distribution rights between corporations changed is messed up.
Well, actually they did, at least in ex-USSR, and I think in Eastern Europe too.
After not ever having a single legitimate license in 1990s and early 2000s (and being laughed upon if you had one), by late 2000s Microsoft business took off handsomely.
But also the key point, right? Although I suspect he was correct.
(Also, has very little to do with the purchasing dynamics of movies or music, etc., although those special interests can fuck off...)
Whether you think piracy is right or wrong, there is a crucial difference between traditionally understood stealing or theft, in that the original owner no longer has the thing. With copyright infringement that’s not the case.
I know that’s been a tribal shibboleth of piracy since the 2000s, and I’m sympathetic to the moral argument to this view… but it’s just factually untrue (both in terminology AND in law)
As for piracy, of course it's wrong, though far less serious than what I responded to.
> depriving the original owner of the use of the item
When someone invests to make a film, do you think the use of the resulting film to the owner is to watch it or sell it?
To break it down, did someone invest millions to make millions, or did someone pay millions to watch one movie?
You know the answer and thus we know that stealing a copy without paying does does in fact deprive the original owner of the use of the item, which was always to sell copies of it, that's the reason and criteria for its existence.
At small scale though the industry still makes do, so it's less serious than stealing for example, a company (e.g. their information). Every act of piracy also wasn't technically a stolen sale, because not everyone stealing would ever have bought it if stealing wasn't an option.
Referring to such things as theft or stealing is lazy and incorrect, regardless of relative severity.
The fact you use the term “stealing” in your justification of the act being “stealing” kinda points to your own circular reasoning there, rather than a good defence.
We can agree it’s wrong without polluting the semantic space. Otherwise we may as well just call everything “murder” or “terrorism” and be done with it.
On paper many incredibly successful films lose money. The game is rigged. The industry more than makes do.
People are free to draw their own lines. I pay for some things and don’t pay for others as far as digital content goes. The structure of it doesn’t even necessarily fit into this clean cut idea however. If I pay for Prime and download something that I could watch via prime ( and I do, because I’d rather watch it in my preferred video play whenever and not only if I have an internet connection or on specific devices or god forbid the thing I’m watching or intending to watch in the near future slips off the service) what is the math in that?
You’re using one of the intransitive definitions but general speaking it’s the transitive forms that apply to digital content, ideas, information, etc.
1. to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
2. to take away by force or unjust means
3. to take surreptitiously or without permission
You may not want stealing to mean that… but that’s irrelevant to reality.
The person that came up with the idea still has it. The photographer still has the picture. The programmer still has the program.
It's just about what another person may do with it, the one receiving the picture. May they also send it to someone else? We could have different ideas about that, but calling it "stealing" is inaccurate.
I’m sympathetic to the moral argument you’re making—though when the raw goods are digital too I think it’s an impractical & ill conceived one—but both legally AND linguistically… it’s incorrect
Are you then saying that when Bob sends another copy to Charlie, Bob is taking something? What is Bob taking?
Bob is the distributor in this context however. In most Berne convention states he broke copyright law (technically, but nothing would happen)
Together Bob & Charlie gained or acquired a picture produced by Alice’s work effort that was unauthorized.
That’s stealing. Is it a big deal? Probably not. Still stealing.
I’d say the opposite - it could still be a huge deal to Alice, but it doesn’t meet the definition of stealing or theft.
We have a separate term already for the right to copy something - copyright.
We have a term for copying something without that right- copyright infringement.
Not theft. Copyright infringement.
This is all really pretty simple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
Also, (at least in the US) legally copyright infringement is distinct from stealing.
Also, from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take
Verb, 1, To get into one's hands, possession, or control, with or without force.
Child: "I'm going to go take a shower"
Dad: "Make sure you put it back when you're done."
For a counter-example connected to your choice, I was recently made aware of the Latin word for "to abduct", and how that word may well be why it took so long for spousal abuse to become recognised as an offence — to paraphrase your own question to demonstrate how this goes very wrong, how can you "abduct" someone you live with?
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8380/did-some-c...
Copying movies is copying things congress said you can't, a crime distinct from both theft and fraud.
Piracy has for whatever reason been co-opted to refer to copying despite that having no relationship to piracy on the high seas, but no one is playing linguistic games to argue that they're the same thing so whatever.
One way of looking at it is that the banks didn't have to expend a tiny fraction of $100 worth of effort to obtain the dollar bill, whereas any normal person would have to. The question is does the bank deserve that $100? Especially at a cost to everyone else (who are largely unaware/tricked).
Personally I'd class that as "fraud" but it all comes under a similar umbrella.
Theft is taking something you don't deserve, without the other party's consent.
Fraud is taking something you don't deserve, with the other party's _misplaced_ consent.
So yes, in the case of copying music for example, I agree - you're copying someone's idea, which is essentially taking the product of their work without their consent. Their work is no longer scarce, and so loses half its value. It's not really any different to stealing half the money they've worked for, other than that it seems almost impossible to stop you without creating paradoxes such as this topic.
It's detrimental as they no longer have the same incentive to do that work and so society doesn't progress.
You've taken the reward from the person that did the work and shared it amongst the whole of society who didn't work for it. It's pure socialism - and we can see the effects of it in the quality of modern music.
Likewise, the legal definition of theft or stealing does not apply to copyright infringement despite decades long campaigns to get the public to believe that to ge the case. Relatedly, there are similar campaigns to redefine violence as something that offends someone.
I'd like to add, that revoking a license is about taking someone access away. Only one side is taking something and it's not the pirates.
If that’s your argument… it’s unsound linguistics and legally.
Legally the distinction is also clear - transgression of copyright law is specifically given the term "copyright infringement" in law in English speaking countries and in international agreements. A person cannot be convicted of theft for copying information. The US supreme court, among others, ruled on exactly this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html#:~:t....
Now there has been a lot of effort by the media industry to equate copyright infringement with stealing, I think because the public at large doesn't really understand infringement as a terrible thing. Stealing appears in the 10 commandments, so in our judeo christian societies it's a home run to get 'right thinking' people on side.
I don't even know what my personal stance on piracy is but the subject is clearly more complex than saying that theft applies only to physical objects.
By all means argue back and add the nuance you think is missing, but it's intellectually dishonest and lazy to just say "ah, but it's more complicated than that".
How could I have forgotten: the idea of personal property is also essential to Jewish law, predating the Magna Carta by another 2,000 years. That’s at least 3,000 years of at least a portion of humans placing value on private property.
While I agree with your comment, I think the last part is only partly true. The military strength of a country doesn't necessarily correlate with the property values and prices - it is enough to compare, say, Switzerland or the Netherlands with Russia or China. Rather, it is an intricate next of various factors that constantly change.
I'd say that in the context of intellectual property the correct word would be 'postulates' not 'recognizes'.
Benefit to society is hard to proove or measure. It's implied. What's very easy to measure is a benefit to minority of rich people at the expense of the society.
In my country the law criminalizing theft begins thus:
> Stöld
> Stöld beskrivs i 8 kap. 1 §. Stöldbrottet förekommer i tre allvarlighetsvarianter:
> * Ringa stöld (tidigare snatteri): 8 kap 2 § > * Stöld: 8 kap 1 § > * Grov stöld: 8 kap 4 §
> Skyddsintresset vid stöld är äganderätten. Endast lösa saker samt del till fast egendom kan ägas.
The third sentence defines property as physical.
Reading texts on international property rights it’s always quite clear what everyone is talking about. “Intellectual property” is sometimes mentioned as an aside with an extra caveat that it is not widely recognized.
Of course, the ad company owns it, because of their hard intellectual work of collecting it.
Me? No, why would I own information about me? What logic of property is this?
The question is whether you can __sell__ the information that I had three double cheese burgers and extra greasy fries to my health insurance provider.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that you have a right to observe, collect data, and sell it. On the other hand, ick.
> 1 : one that spies: a : one who keeps secret watch on a person or thing to obtain information
Should we protect all of those too, at great cost to the rest of society?
You can’t make a billion dollars, IP free, and that’s okay with me.
Because US ran out of physical money to pay its debts but wanted to keep the business as usual and the world just let them?
...And unauthorized use of a motor vehicle as a second count.
In the UK you can be charged with theft.
For joyriding and dumping they created the crime of twoccing (taking without owners consent).
A 'twoker' is also a derogatory term for a certain class of person
[1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/107
- sam & max
People just try to rationalize their behavior and play silly word games because they're attempting to avoid the simple fact that piracy is robbing other people of their labour.
Kant gave us a good principle, universalizability. If everyone pirated, creators would not get compensated, therefore they could not sustain themselves and it would be obvious that the value of their work is being stolen. Evidently, pirates are free-riders and their theft just isn't evident because enough people usually compensate for it.
That's a coherent position, but it is also perfectly reasonable to argue that it's not because you have a copy and have not removed the original.
Edit: Note that this doesn't inherently make piracy okay, since it may deprive the owner of revenue or other benefits; there's a difference between objecting to piracy and saying that it's exactly theft.
In my opinion, that would be a far superior world to the one we live in.
I’m not interested in a conversation about whether we really even need entertainment, that’s a whole different premise.
Does society really benefit that much by seeing piece of entertainment 50 years earlier at the cost of millions of dollars?
If making a movie about going to space costs more than actually going to space maybe you shouldn't do it and wait instead till video creation technology advances enough so that single person can do it as passion project? Maybe what copyright enables is just a pathology?
People who want to see it created and are able to rally other people to help them of course.
That's not to say that no copyright means no way to fund big projects, you just have to collect those funds up front or rely on generosity - both of which are less likely to succeed because copyright makes the result into something you "own" rather than society and people are less inclined to fund your own private enrichment.
It's not. A pirate is just another non-customer. There's robbing involved when someone chooses not to buy something. Watching a movie at a friend's house isn't robbing the producers of anything. Neither is buying something second hand. These are all non-customers of the original creator.
If I buy a used Blu-ray I'm not giving a dime to Disney. I get to watch the Avengers all I want without ever paying them anything. They have lost nothing because I didn't take anything from them nor prevented them from selling a copy of the Avengers to someone else.
If you replaced my second hand copy of the Avengers with a pirated copy, nothing would change about the situation. Disney was deprived of nothing. The same is true if I rent it from the library, borrow it from a friend, or just never watch it. To Disney I am simply a non-customer.
I'm not talking about being obliged to share. Of course people should have the right to not share their credit details. My point is that if you receive information from someone, then choosing to share it with a third party is not stealing.
Actually, an obligation to share information is a restriction on freedom just like copyright, which can prohibit sharing information.
That's one meaning. As with many English words that one has several. Here are several examples of how "steal" is used in English for things that involve other than taking physical taking of property:
• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.
• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.
• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".
• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.
• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.
If I produce and distribute content like music or videos, it's fair for me to want people that want to rent or own it to pay for it. I put a lot of time and effort into it, I have to manage and market it, maybe store it, and I want to make a living at it.
If people are stealing it, ahem, copying without permission, it undercuts my living. I have a right to earning from my work, and you don't have a right to just download it or copy it or distribute it to others without me getting paid for it. It's literally preventing earnings for me that would otherwise happen if you didn't copy it without permission (ahem, stealing).
Digital piracy, broadly speaking, is unauthorized copying. Depending on the context, it could be theft. Sometimes that theft is legal, but people feel it shouldn't be on moral grounds. Other times that theft is illegal, but people feel it shouldn't be on moral grounds. Sometimes, it's just not theft at all.
[Dowling v. United States](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/473/207/)
Tl;dr: Supreme Court ruled bootlegged/pirated media does not constitute theft as it does not deprive the legal owner of his/her property. That’s why they had to invent the term—“Copyright infringement”
You really don't. If you don't work on things that are profitable at the moment you don't have any innate right to earn anything from your work. Right to earn comes from specific agreements with employers. Earning might also come from innate profitability but it's not a right then as the profitability is ephemeral thing.
The root of Stealing is to deprive:
deny (a person or place) the possession or use of something.
Says who? Where did you get that definition? Your claim isn’t very well supported by either of the two dictionaries that I linked to, nor any searches on the etymology of steal that I can find. A valid definition is a valid definition. Common usage is common usage. It may be common to refer to something physical that is deprived, but it’s also extremely common and also completely correct to refer to things stolen that do not deprive. You can, in fact, steal ideas, according to the definition of the word steal.
> It may be used in that context in our society
Yes, and that makes it de-facto correct usage! Discussion of idea stealing has been commonplace in business, and academics, and literature, and among children, and …. You can find a never-ending supply of references to stolen ideas online and in print. It seems especially ironic for people on a startup forum to argue that ideas can’t be stolen when it happens and gets referred to regularly.
I did some searching online and I couldn't find an good root example of stealing, it seems related to stealth which I don't think correctly explains the subject we are discussing. I think what we are both talking about is theft. When I looked up the etymology of theft I found it related to fraud, "a fraudulent production, something intended to deceive". and it goes on, "deception practiced for the sake of what is deemed a good purpose;" the word also seems related to defraud, which could be where you are going with this, "deprive of right, by deception or breech of trust or withholding,"
To clarify, I think you CAN deprive someone of an expression of an idea. I incorrectly lumped it into the idea part. Having an idea (and communicating it to the world) vs having an expression of an idea, for me are two different things.
I don't believe there is any good that can come out of protecting ideas from loss or theft, so I don't put too much stock in the idea of IP law.
The expression of an idea is another matter. but I err on the side of "deception practiced for the sake of what is deemed a good purpose".
For me this is really about protecting the common good. There has to be a balance between the dissemination of creativity vs getting compensated for a work.
Right now, copyright, if that is what we are talking about, is way out of balance. Copyrights are mostly owned and wielded harmfully by corporations. When corporations use copyright, to stop, or take away purchased products, or prevent individuals from sharing in the spirit of sharing, that's where I draw the line. When copyright is used in this way, it deprives the public of some common good. I don't think copyright was ever meant to do that.
So respectfully, I disagree with you on this topic, the way contracts and copyrights are being used is harming our society.
It’s important to remember that etymology is a tool to understand history, and is not the arbiter of word meaning. In fact, it’s extremely common for the etymological historical roots of words to have very different meanings from what they are now, and to have meanings that are no longer accepted or correct. Often with English, word roots come from different languages, and the etymology has little bearing on today’s usage or accepted dictionary definitions. The arbiter of word meaning is common usage, period. Language is not prescriptive, not defined by dictionaries or etymologies, those are just tools to help us document common usage over time. Language is defined by how it’s used, and when a lot of people say “he stole my idea”, it necessarily becomes correct usage, regardless of what the historical documents say about the word steal. This is one of the most fun aspects of language, but easily misunderstood and often forgotten, especially in forum discussions.
> So respectfully, I disagree with you on this topic, the way contracts and copyrights are being used is harming our society.
How on earth did you arrive at the idea that I said anything at all about copyrights or contracts in this thread? What exactly are you disagreeing with?? I’m so confused by this. It is a wild and completely non-sequitur detour from my perspective.
If laywer sets up such a contract with you, he can't be a good one.
I'll see myself out...
This allows the following hypothetical situation: 1. You buy content A from producer X through a company 1 2. Producer X and company 1 decides to finish the distribution agreement for whatever reason 3. Company 1 revokes your access to content A. 4. Now producer X seals a deal with Company 2 for distribution rights and company 2 has no obligation on giving you access to content A, because why would they. 5. If you want access content A now you have to buy it again from company 2 without guarantee that it will still exist.
Right, _access_. To the companies selling cloud content, like a movie or song that can only be used with the internet, you're just buying _access_ to the content.
Because the TOS means they can restrict that access or remove the content, you're really just paying for a key to a door that may or may not exist, to something in the building that may or may not be there, and that building may someday not even be there.
You're really paying for the right to access something as long as the underlying capability enabling that right exists. It's the kind of thing that allows a lot of wiggle room for the sellers and holders of the content.
This is why I prefer buying physical copies of media, like DVDs and CDs. It's mine for as long as I can manage it or a personal copy of it.
Copying something for personal use is perfectly legal, it's the distribution of those copies to the public en masse that most people end up tripping on.
If you just want to archive your collection of optical disks onto a NAS for personal use, you can legally do that.
0 - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
I started my MP3 collection in the late 1990s as CDs became practical and computers finally got to the point they could rip them. A while back I even went fully legit and stripped out all the, ah, "stuff of dubious provenance", or, err, you know, a friend may have done that. The first streaming music service I've ever used was about a year ago and I'm still using it more for discovery than as my actual music service, because as a result of ~25 years of personal collection building, I don't need a streaming service to have probably something on the order of two week straight's worth of music I like. With a lot of stuff no streaming service has, and that not because I'm some sort of exotic collector but just because I have things that were popular enough at the time but just never made it.
By contrast, if all you did was pay for a subscription music service, you're completely beholden to them.
Obviously I can claim no "credit" here; I didn't "bail out" of a bad deal in 1998, because that "bad deal" wouldn't exist for another decade and a half or so. But the fact I didn't do it out of any sort of foresight doesn't mean I don't end with the same benefits.
More recently, I've been digging myself out of the video subscription crappile, and doing more purchase of media instead of using video streaming services. Again, I had a buildup from the pre-streaming era I could carry in which helps, but at the rate I watch movies anyhow it turns out the delta between just buying things as they strike me and streaming them is not very large in dollar terms. (I don't buy very many things on release day, I do a lot of bargain bin surfing for things.)
I'm not saying this to brag, I'm saying it to show the point. It extends to a lot of things. Best way not to get stuck with subscription features on your car is to put your foot down day one and say I'm not buying that. And this extends to so many things in life; as we correctly tell our children, best way not to get addicted to any drugs is to never touch them at all, and that's not because of the obvious logical fact that if you never do dose 1 you'll never get to dose 1,283, but because there really is a slope there. It's a very applicable principle.
Note, slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of actual slippery slopes in real life. It merely means the fact that you are on a slippery slope can not be correctly logically argued to imply the 100% probability of slipping further down. But I'm not even making a logical argument here in that sense. I'm just pointing out that there are rather a lot of slippery slopes, and this includes some that are really hard to see because they're brand new. In 2001, there simply wasn't anybody 20 years down the slippery slope of using DRM'd hardware who could metaphorically yell up to those of us at the top to tell us "Hey, this kinda sucks! Try to avoid this!"
This is one of the greatest challenges of living in the late 20th and 21st centuries, honestly. The foresight to look at something like "paying for a video subscription" and thinking to look 20 years down the road at what happens if everyone does this is rare, and not terribly well respected when found.
Anyhow, back here on practical Earth land, I really do recommend that everyone who is even slightly interested look into Plex or an equivalent service, because you can turn this process on its head, too. Half-heartedly start acquiring your favorite media physically when you see it on discount for a couple of years and get it into a Plex setup, and before you know it you're far enough down that slope that the idea of being independent suddenly doesn't seem so absurd. You can also use the principle of a slow buildup over time that adds up to more than you'd expect in your favor, too.
I don't want to bring out the psych again but i cant help it. I'd wager that until this point if you didn't or don't have your own physical collection its because of your personality makeup. Since these rug-pulls haven't been going on as often as they have in the last few years, if you've been happy being 'pragmatic' and taking what the services have to offer then you aren't as 'idealistic', otherwise refusing to compromise since you down 'own' a copy. Likewise if you're a 'big-picture' thinker you can't stand the chance that things become unavailable due to forces unseen, whereas if you 'think-small' then theres no real risk and we can take companies word at face value.
Of course maximal pragmatism would just be to download it. People are plenty willing to share for free, so paying is a form of idealism.
In either case the argument isn't clear what traits are really responsible for the behavior, i cant say i have a solid case either. I'd also wager disagreeability to play a huge role.
You still chose to keep your collection instead of jumping onto streaming only as many did for convenience.
> Note, slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of actual slippery slopes in real life. It merely means the fact that you are on a slippery slope can not be correctly logically argued to imply the 100% probability of slipping further down.
The slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy at all. It's just an observation at even small steps towards the undesirable can often result in an avalanche that you are unable to stop by the time you realize where things are going. You can't prove that anything is a slippery slope because you can't predict the future but that does not make the observation or the call for caution fallacious. Calling it a logical falacy is just a knee-jerk reaction by those trying to downplay the risk.
A company I can not mention because I am certified by them 14x over did that to me, many times.
The licenses were NOT supposed to expire.
I recently watched A Bug’s Life with my kids. It’s actually a pretty good commentary on the abuses of the ruling class and the norms inability to see their own value:
You let one ant stand up to
us, then they all might stand
up! Those puny little ants
outnumber us a hundred to one
and if they ever figure that
out there goes our way of
life! It's not about food,
it's about keeping those ants
in line."participating" is doing a LOT of work there...
Microsoft has also multiple times started an ebook store only to later shut it down and prevent the purchased books from being read. The first time this happened in the mid-2000’s I lost over a dozen ebooks.
And while I've never had this particular weird problem, I have tens of gigabytes of music in my iTunes library that were never bought from Apple in the first place, which sync to my other devices just fine. No manual copying required.
And, um...how would you even "manually copy" music to an iPhone or iPad? The only way I know of puts it in the Files app, rather than the Music app, leaving it unable to be played "as music" (though you can, of course, still play the audio files one by one).
Something doesn't seem right here.
The file system on iOS isn't exposed, so you can't browse around in the files and folders and copy it somewhere there.
Instead, each app has its own little container with files, so you can use iTunes on Windows or Finder on macOS to copy it into either a specific app’s container or the Files app’s container. If you do the latter, then you can access it on the device via the Files app and third-party music players.
The stock Music app provided by Apple doesn't get access to the files in the Files app. Instead, it maintains its own library synced with other devices, with the option to import your music files into that library.
The optimistic reading of this is that this prevents apps from accessing files that they have no business looking into. The pessimistic reading is that this prevents users from messing around with files and prevents them from tweaking or hacking apps. I think the truth is a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
There are a couple of ways. You can import it via iTunes/Finder into the Files container, like you said. The stock Music app won’t read and play it, but third-party music player apps will. Another option is to import it into your Apple Music library, f/k/a iTunes library. That way, it’s playable in the stock Music app and available on other devices as well (although it might need an Apple Music subscription, not sure).
...That's syncing. It's the absolutely normal way to get music onto your iPhone. I can't see any reasonable way to call that "manually copying".
For Video I think MP4, and MOV are supported? Maybe more though I dont think MKV is.
For Pictures I think you just copy using the OS to the DCIM folder?
There is a Ukrainian company called Softorino that provides a one click app to just transfer any media with any format to your iDevice and have it magically appear in the right app. It does all the conversion work for you in the background.
In any case, I'm still very puzzled as to how this could be a solution to the specific problem that was originally described...
at least you still have this option (doesn't justify the system, but just saying that some devices don't even allow that)
Your data is more important than to be locked into a data-roach-motel. The companies know this, and count on piracy. From there, the pirate user has MB's of content locked into something they cant convert out of. And then, it's pretty easy to force a sale, or worse yet, a rental.
Looking at you Adobe, Autodesk, etc.
Stop trying to make fetch happen.
It's a completely fictitious right, akin to converting elementary school playground "stop copying me!" into a cause of action.
The solution to bad legislation isn't more legislation, it's throwing those statutes in a bonfire and reverting to common law.
Copyright rules make sense in protecting inventors and product owners. Maybe you've been neither and can't understand how the lack of this protection harms inventors and owners to the benefit of plagiarists. It's much easier to plagiarize than invent or produce, so without copyright protection, inventors and product owners basically become giant fat cash cows ready to plunder by passers-by that can just copy and paste. Removing copyright would turn the market completely feudalist and chaotic.
Throwing copyright statutes away is also chaotic. Reverting to common law? I'm not sure what you mean there. Just however people feel at the time? We've already evolved past the caveman era.
Maybe you're not familiar with the term? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
> The defining characteristic of common law is that it arises as precedent. Common law courts look to the past decisions of courts to synthesize the legal principles of past cases
Or was it that you were unclear what _rm specifically was saying?
The only thing that is different right now is that some large and powerful corporations are being defrauded too, instead of just people.
The rich are just people.
The sooner we accept that and dispose of the bizarre “deification” of the rich the sooner we can discuss deprecation of their influence and reach.
The apathetic kowtow to a handful of aging out government brown nosers who lobby to insulate themselves is sad.
1980s Reagan economy is not immutable physics and we have no obligation to believe the stories of the rich about their success. There’s a whole lot of behavioral science being leveraged, and intentional PR propaganda tossed around to obfuscate the rich are “just people”
“Rich people” in a fiat economy is due to the valuation of their assets, often but always, large stakes in corporations.
All of which is politically correct hallucination. None of it exists as immutable physics.
The mistake is yours for memorizing vacuous political statements.
Accuracy relative to the dying and long dead’s ignorant political babble is a ridiculous stat to min/max to dial in correctness. Stay in the centrist lane!
Rather than have a forward facing conversation, you reach for history. There’s little point in continuing this conversation
And really, mostly only law enforcement needs to believe the "hallucination" for it to have real effects. You, know, those guys with guns who will hurt you if you don't do what they say?
I don't think our positions are actually that far apart. It's just that, as far as I can tell anyway, you're trying to make a stand on some point of terminology while I'm trying to be reductionist and understand the dynamics.
That said:
“Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” Ambrose Bierce 1906
Some of them were also doing the defrauding, and got a positive net profit, while many weren't. Things are way more complex than "the rich did it".
- sold licenses that are no longer usable to access the work (i.e. if you invalidate by any means already sold licenses)
- don't put work in the public domain/don't make it freely usable without a license when the copyright expires
then you lose the protection of copyright & associated (DRM/reverse engineering) laws for said works. Multiple violations can extend that to "all your works".
At this point I'd rather the legislature (1) just stop, and then maybe (2) roll back what's broken. Don't try to follow up horrendously broken laws like the DMCA with more broken laws to try to arbitrarily patch things up. I'll vote for any politicians who advocate for picking a commit sometime before the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act and doing a git --hard reset to that.
Unauthorized copying has never been stealing, no matter what Disney wants you to think
And no, it's not always "it's just profit", sometimes it's a shortsighted chase of the next stock value high with complete disregard for the future since lack of accountability is pretty much built-in into the higher classes of managers
I do continue to download some pirated items but largely I just checked out of modern media mostly because the cost of participation is too much. At least online there are some services that video essayists release on which aren't too bad (Nebula isn't horrible, but still is a bit annoying).
I'm fearful of the day that searching "[some specific functions I want] + FOSS" and looking for repositories that have what I'm hoping for will stop working, since it's been fairly successful for me to find software that doesn't come with all the modern tech world non-sense. Some of the most simple applications like DaisyDisk for macOS or the Redirector plugins for browsers are absolute gems that have made my life objectively better and more convenient, and the teams behind these programs have shown repeatedly they aren't interested in anything else besides just having their programs work. It was very easy decision to donate to these teams/buy the apps because it was the most simple transaction ever, and the programs work as well or better than they did when I first installed them. Same with games from GOG -- I love that I have bought HoMM3 one time, and I think more than a decade later, I can still use the same installer, get the installer again, and enjoy my game wherever I want, and it's a completed game that can be further improved by mods.
Real and workable models for selling tech exist and it works without DRM -- I know for corporations it's not enough money coming in and they "need" to monetize every last drop of blood out of everything, but it's not like these business models are impossible or even bad; just different and a bit calmer than the corporate non-sense we have today. And the alternative models without DRM and data pilfering are definitely something I am willing to buy into, since there looks to be a pretty damn good chance I'll be able to actually use the stuff I'm buying how I want to.
The same could almost be said of movies and TV series on Netflix years ago, but hasn't been remotely true for a while now, ever since the splintering of streaming into warring content owner kingdoms.
Guess which types of media I haven't even considered pirating, and which media I've given up on getting legally.
Unfortunately, Plex also wants to charge me to stream my own music, so the first step to find a new media player that isn't subject to enshittification.
Jellyfin and I had a bad going-through with handling. Minutes to pull up even a single discography. These days, it plays videos and that's it.
Shit. I was considering switching my music library over the Plex, since they already both live on the same hard drive...
Ever since services like Steam existed I have pretty much pirated zero games, it's just too much hassle compared to clicking the Buy button on Steam (and if it's too expensive, the next season sale is always just around the corner). In comparison, my 90's self owned pretty much zero bought games.
Or as our Lord and Saviour Gaben ;) said:
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates."
Still spot on.
Origin, Blizzard, uPlay et al failed to challenge Steam largely because they lack both features and catalog; it's not clear they even intended to take on Steam, because of the lack of content from other publishers.
EGS is worth special attention because it both has content from other publishers and has dumped considerable cash into the goal of unseating Steam. I think it comes down to features: the EGS store has generally been a sub-par experience, and they purposefully refused to implement features like Community Scores, Forums, and other metasocial features that make Steam what it is.
They underestimate the value of player reviews, community scoring, forums, guides, workshop and so on. Even if most of users of most games don't avail themselves of those features, they're important features for retaining the most die-hard of users; who in turn form the core of the social draw to use Steam.
Because copying is theft. I kid...
The more important point is though that the Steam DRM is hassle-free for the user. For instance games (with macOS ports) I already bought for PC I can also just install on my Mac, with save games automatically shared between the two. I don't have to buy a separate Mac version (as would be the case with Xbox vs Playstation), nor do I need to pay extra, so there's no incentive to pirate the Mac version.
Game piracy today is still easier than clicking the buy button, and it's also free. We're not ripping individual files from sites anymore these days, most games are neatly packaged up into one-click install repacks.
Just look at the industrialization of healthcare in the U.S. - and especially at the prices of some life saving medications. A gun to the head is the business model.
These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further."
EVERYBODY under Capitalism, aside the owner class, is getting exploited.
It's not 'if you're getting screwed'. It's 'how much'.
This is only because most people have never even had a thought to challenge the status quo of how capitalism works.
--
p.s. some basic math for the down voters. the most basic model with loans issued and serviced in one cycle.
D = total deposits
k = fractional reserve multiple. (iirc ~23 in US?)
r = interest rate. we'll keep things simple, and assume bank interest rate is same for depositor (rd) and borrower (rb) but usually rb > rd.
B = total loans issued = k * D
I = total interest earned = B * r
L = total liability of banker to depositors = D * (r + 1)
I' = total interest liability of banker to depositors = D * r
F = Fictional money created on loan issuance and destroyed on loan conclusion = D * ( k - 1).
X = Exploited wealth from public at large where interest paid for fictional money is wealth extracted structurally by the banking institution. X = I - I' = F * r
It's a nice chunk of money*. So X is wealth extracted from the society that must use a debt instrument that is created by fractional reserve banking. It is structural and "owner" and "worker" alike, anyone who has to make non-fictional interest payments, is affected.
* B = "United States Total Loans was reported at 12,228.056 USD bn in Oct 2023" /G
from Google "Depending on the terms of your loan, you may expect to pay as much as 50% of the mortgage in interest. The point at which you begin paying more principal than interest is known as the tipping point. This period of your loan depends on your interest rate and your loan term"
50%. k-1/k of that is wealth extracted from society. @k=23, 22/23 ~ 95%. Chew on that. The X factor.
So whether you are Elon Musk borrowing billions or Joe Schmoe borrowing for a car or a student for a loan, the overwhelming portion of the interest you pay is wealth extracted by a mechanism that were it not enforced by law, it would be blatant fraud.
Also, terms like “pirate” and “rockstar” are fun to use. Maybe we like to use names that distract us from the purely abstract, digital reality.
Rent movie XYZ for $x
Rental period: perpetual
Cancelable: at will with x days notice
Remedies if cancelled early: none
1. most consumers don't care. For them if it's longer than some months it's basicaly perpetual. Buying for them is a raw deal because they treat media like a rental and forget about the purchase in the long run.
2. streaming services pretty much "solved" this problem already. There's no notion of owning anything on Netflix and people are fine with that. The age of digital purchases is fading (except maybe for games. But even then, there are more f2p models out there).
I remember decades ago watching closely the new crop of televisions released each year — getting nerdy about the specs, features (back when TV's were dumb, expensive, and the new annual crop always exciting, shiny). I began to notice that a company like Sony would produce a suite of TV's that were the same in more ways than not — but there seemed to be features that were simply neutered on the lower price-tier devices.
I could imagine some marketing hack coming to the engineers and telling them which features to gimp on the base model, which ones to exclude on the next tier....
I must be both naive and old-fashioned to think that companies would compete by trying to both keep their prices lower than their competitor and their features superior. Sony (and of course others) decided to compete with themselves instead.
Then when I started amassing a huge DVD collection a couple decades ago, it became increasingly annoying that I would have to sit through ads on the DVDs before I could watch the film I had paid for.
Trailers, coming-attractions, also-available-from-time-warner are ads.
I finally started to rip my own DVDs and have done so ever since.
I personally installed VLC for a number of folks simply because it allowed them to watch DVDs without advertisements. It was a meaningful draw.
Then Netflix came and offered a low-barrier service with a decent catalog and, importantly, no advertisements. I'm of the impression that the broadcasters and studios have hated that aspect of it the most, and are hell bent to return to forced advertisement views.
It also comes down to the side of the consumer. Almost every-time people would pick free+ads over paid+no_ads. now, lower_pay+ads over higher_pay_to_remove_ads is a much more dubious premise, but the moder pricing tiers suggest that some do go for it.
It goes beyond the headline, though. We should rejoice that we have a writer that can make such boring-ass societal degradation interesting.
I never "bought" any TV shows on my Playstation (or any Pantone colors on my Adobe) because I knew this would happen, but... the key sentence fragment of the article:
this is the foreseeable, inevitable result
If I subscribe to a daily newspaper, you can steal it off my driveway in which case you steal from me and not the publisher because I never owned the content. If you sell my newspaper then you've stolen from the publisher even though I paid the publisher for that printed copy.
It's really not that hard. Original pirates could steal from dozens of merchants, share holders, and sailors in various ways and degrees, monies paid to monies earned, to monies owed, to monies potentially gained, by seizing the cargo of one vessel.
Now, if that should be allowed without an explicit mention on the purchase page is certainly something to argue in court.
Stealing a container on the high seas is damn near impossible, doable but a challenge.
The middle ground would be taking under tow floating containers that fall off of ships in bad weather - but I daresay that comes under salvage.
The Barbary pirates enslaved about 1.25 million people between 1530 and 1780 (and it was a massive threat in the Middle Ages and ancient times we just don't really have reliable figures).
It was such a massive threat that coastal villages all but disappeared throughout much of Mediterranean Europe. The barbary pirates went as far as Ireland, England or even Iceland to murder an enslave people.
This was an issue up until the 1800s (the first foreign war the US fought was against Morocco and Tripolitania) when the European powers finally took a break from fighting each other to do something about their common enemies who were terrorizing their subjects for centuries.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535109/
Interpret that how you want ;)
Only business models that rely on monopolies are harmed.
And the entire concept of property is built on monopoly. Are you saying you don’t believe in property?
Ditigal media isn't physical, and in this case the physical media was on a closed ecosystem and attached to a server to stream or at least check in to verify. You wouldn't need all this with a plain ol' DVD, but you got advantadeges in that that movie played on any PS device you logged into.
If you want DRM free digital media, don't buy the above.
A fallacy is a "mistaken belief", so of course it is wrong. And you should look more into the concept of free riding. For that a good introduction would be The philosophers arms episode about free riding.
And what is that about private property? Where did that come from? We are talking about different concepts here, it is about markets and business models. As long as we don't honestly debate how outdated our modes of consumption are, piracy would be a natural response to artificial scarcity.
My point is that piracy is a natural response to a predatory practice. And that is what I think, that the current state of how the market is configured is anticonsumer, and therefore piracy is a natural response to it. It's not a matter of who is right or wrong. Everything is less than ideal in this whole affair.
Who decides what is "morally" ill gained? There's quite a good case that benefiting without work, e.g. through capital gains, is ill gained.
Profiting from ownership without working (free riding of its own) is a questionable and often questioned item of a social contract.
so rising physical theft over the pandemic means that stealing is legal? School shootings are going to be legal in the US overtime? What a horrible model for a social contract.
>Profiting from ownership without working (free riding of its own) is a questionable and often questioned item of a social contract.
Sure. But fact is that CEOs do do a lot of work to direct companies. We can question if that deserve whatever their pay is or their competency, but I hope no one thinks CEOs literally sit around doing nothing all day. Can we at least agree that burning a company down to the ground takes a non-zero effort?
Stockholders profit from ownership. CEO's salary is a salary (although stock and options maybe not).
No. The content of the social contract is whatever benefits those who adhere to the social contract. It's not a popular vote, what is good isn't up to what the most people think it is.
pointing out flawed reasoning with flawed reasoning is well, a fallacy by your words?
Your link there is an obvious one: it doesn't take into account colluding data over if the most pirated stuff comes from the most popular artists who have the most demand for tours. It doesn't take into account artists who can't afford tours (so, most of them) and how too much piracy will just get them cut out of the publisher's already crappy deal.
>My point is that piracy is a natural response to a predatory practice.
okay, I believe piracy would exist even if media was dirt cheap and we were in an economic boom. Some people just don't value media and if they want to take the time to pirate it over spending the money, they would. I'm pretty tired of the Just World Fallacy here that people never steal out of convenience.
How do you stand on the idea that someone desperately poor, who cannot afford a text book that would be transformative to their life, pirates said book. Is that still immoral?
There are many examples of piracy where no one loses out yet someone does benefit.
Painting such a complex subject with such a broad brush makes it seem like we’re just talking about your particular feelings rather than something universal.
Which is fine, but you’re making claims of generality without presenting a cogent argument.
What I am claiming presumes only that you live in a modern society, and therefore you participate in the social contract. Given that, what I am saying is then a conclusion of that.
I am trying to get to specifics but you keep waving your hands about this stuff.
And I’ve given lots of specifics. It’s just not a complex concept.
I'm very confident that in the majority of cases, people who download stuff would not have bought it at any price that the publisher would accept, if piracy wasn't an option. Which means that by the definition of harm I think you are using, the majority of cases would not be immoral. It seems to me the immoral cases would be the exception.
I guess it makes more sense if you also say that consuming something without paying for it is immoral even if you would never have paid to consume it. I find it hard to agree with that though, as I don't see who's harmed.
Besides, "harm" here is not the core of my argument. Doing moral wrong is. It is wrong to lie to obtain something, and it is wrong to benefit from ill gotten gains.
These acts are wrong themselves, regardless of whether or not they cause pain directly. This is not a hedonist argument, the cause of pain through harm in all or even many cases is not necessary for the act to be wrong.
I suppose I could say everyone that disapproves of piracy is just a copyright lawyer
Also I didn't say I'm not wrong in the comment you replied to. So what are are you talking about?
But keep on denying reality, as it's working out so well for you... :)
immoral, no. Unethical, yes.
That said, I'm glad libraries of all kinds (lending, little free, bookstore giveaways) help give more ethical access to such resources. You don't need the latest and greatest textbook to obtain knowledge.
With all that said, were talking about deluxe media, not foundational knowledge. why does the topic always shift to hyperole when talking about a song/movie/game being pirated? Are we really comparing pirating The Avengers (2012) to finding a way to learn arithmetic?
They suffer the same problem though in that morals and ethics do not have one universal standard. So something may be unethical to you but not to me but both be in the bounds of reason, or indeed the law.
You seem to accept that there is indeed ambiguity if you believe there to be a difference between a book pirated for a reason that helps someone, and a movie for entertainment in terms of piracy.
In addition, whilst you and i have access to libraries, this is very far from being common the world over.
Why then is it hyperbole? It’s just a simple example to show that piracy can in some cases harm no one and help someone. To wit: not all piracy is bad.
You claim that is unethical - which is all well and good, we do not share quite the same set of ethical values.
If a company has a monopoly on something, you cannot just go somewhere else to get something equivalent - that's the thing about monopolies, in a lot of cases, you simply don't have a choice.
I can't say the same about someone who "needs to play GTA V" (it was already free at some points. So you're not just entitled but inefficient in your frugality).
we can take down big pharma first and then worry about DRM on media you want to consume. It's not all or nothing.
Of course, pirating an indie band's song is a lot more in the questionable area (and not done nearly as often, since piracy by nature focuses on the more necessary/popular products) but that's not what's under discussion.
What other things do you feel are "tearing society apart", and how important are they to you compared to this?
IP, and specifically copyright are fairly new legal additions. The redefinition of time limited copyright to something extending past normal lifetimes especially so. EULAs and DRM enforcing copyright beyond book-style possibilities is new, and ongoing as we speak.
I'd say we see the public at large rejecting part of the law because it is not consistent with the social contract in their heads.
Powerfull entities trying to force the law outside the social contract's support is working, but not completely, and that's what's tearing society apart.
The line of reasoning is that copyright falls outside current social contracts. So the general rule of piracy is that it is illegal but amoral. Morality of copyright violations should be determined by other criteria.
Besides, the fact that piracy is rampant is a demonstration of copyright's necessity. If the works were so worthless that trying to charge for their consumption would be pointless, then why are so many people determined to illicitly gain access? And if the works would be made anyway, why weren't they until it was profitable to do so?
The argument you're making dies on a number of fronts, but the one I tried to address originally was the only legitimate line of inquiry. Your ad populum redefinition of the social contract doesn't work, as what is good/bad doesn't get voted on or collectively decided. The best rational argument is what wins in an ethics conversation.
Yes they do. Copyright and patent trade agreements kill and they kill a lot people.
If anyone is interested in the topic, a good first entry point paper to understand how this works and impacts:
> "What is the impact of intellectual property rules on access to medicines? A systematic review"
> "With very few exceptions, the articles in this review found that the introduction of patents following implementation of TRIPS rules and pharmaceutical-related TRIPS-plus IP provisions are associated with an increase in drug prices, consumer welfare losses and increased costs to consumers of pharmaceuticals and national governments."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9013034/
This paper alone should probably get you depressed, but if that gets you going, read "Information Feudalism" by Peter Drahos, then you'll understand how people in power truly have no respect for human lives in developing countries.
rent from the library, ask for a friend's copy, take out more loans.
>For a researcher in a developing country for research papers?
contact other researchers and ask directly. Maybe they can also share some stuff with you, especially if they are the author.
These are speedbumps not roadblocks. People can and have gotten around them even with little resources. Universities obviously have these resources, researchers generally want to encourage other researchers (even if only to validate their own research).
>Nobody dies, but a lot of people fall behind
Yes, an unfortunatle reality of all life. If I had to choose, free media is not even in the top 20 things I'd try to make more accessible to such people, though.
That's the bit we're disputing. It's not "clear" and it's not "obvious".
I hope you do realize that it’s your own opinion.
First, I never violated a license agreement I signed by buying a product.
Also, my moral isn't yours, clearly. In my mind, sharing information is moral, withholding it is immoral. I think there is degree to this (clearly a State, or government officials, or state agents withholding non-vital information is extremely immoral, whereas it's less immoral to do so for a company), but clearly, I think of proprietary code, unshared patents and copyright of a song or artistic creation immoral.
And you very clearly benefit from all those things you claim are immoral, and the systems that brought them about, so I find myself skeptical to your claim they’re bad. It seems more like you disapprove of your inability to satisfy your sense of entitlement. After all, if you dislike these concepts so much, why do you want the very things they’ve produced?
Listen, the only social contract I have is respecting the laws of my country, and the contracts I agreed to sign. No laws in my country prevents me from downloading whatever piece of art or content I want. None. I just cannot share it outside of friends and family. Which I don't.
Also, I think I've download 3 pieces I didn't have a license for: Skyrim, Mass effect 1 and 2. I now own them all on steam. So my sense of entitlement is great, thank you. I was never into TV or movies, and my father digitalized his 500 CDs and probably trice that number from the public library, so even early 2010s when I was a broke student, I never had to find download links for the music I wanted to listen at the time (now I find out that this isn't enough and just download the music from YouTube).
When you pirated those works, you committed an immoral act, as the owner of the work did not give you permission to access those works. Broke students don't get to play games for free just because they want to. You're not entitled to whatever you want, especially when the alternative is that you are in no way harmed. You would have survived, thrived even, if you didn't have those games.
Because I had the permission from the first, and a bit earlier when I bought oblivion in a second hand game store, the work producer didn't gave me permission either.
Also, I just thought about it, I'm on a plex server owned by a college friend since 2017, did I broke the social contract by uploading my CDs on it? Or by listening to CDs my friend group put on it. Let's be honest, it's mostly my CDs, I have a truly huge collection, but it was also music we got from the school's nfs, on /share/music. Did that broke the social contract too? Knowing that we have a law that tax every sales of storage, even reconditioned HDD or smartphones.
I am quite certain you do not really hold this position, otherwise you would almost certainly pulbish your real name, home address, bank account balance and other information on your profile. Withholding all this information would be quite immoral.
Also, software and art are not "information", they are a separate thing. And copyright and patents don't prevent anyone from disclosing said "information", on the contrary. They allow artists and software companies to share this information without worrying that others will profit from their work.
Everyone imagines that Disney or Microsoft wouldn't exist in a world without copyright, but the opposite is true. They would freely copy any competitor while using their marketing and sales teams to convince everyone to give them (most of) the profits from their work. It's a lot easier for Disney to make money off your original screenplay than it is for you to make money off Mickey Mouse.
And I'm not equating art and information. I agree that art have the right to be reserved for the artist. I disagree that the recordings themselves have the same rights. And especially the 'master recording' concept that can prevent an artist to play his own songs on stage. I'm on Swift's side against Scooter Braun basically.
It is not immoral to download content illegally when the alternative is a revocable digital token being sold fraudulently.
By officially asking for new Terms of Service maybe?
That hasn't been working out so well lately, thus the whole "alternative methods" thing being pretty popular in some circles these days.
There's no better moral standpoint in either, it's always a case by case basis.
Perhaps you need to re-read things a bit? :)
Heh Heh Heh
Guess that's what we're both thinking about the other person then. No worries. ;)
Either way, when one party breaks their contract, you sue them in a court of law. You don't seek remedies on your own.
So - prior to the existence of copyright - was it immoral?
And how do laws related to fair-use etc affect it's morality? "Immoral" implies something fairly clear-cut and universal, not the kind of thing where there are complex provisions defining a range of exceptions, differing between jurisdictions.
In summary - you are massively oversimplifying a complex topic so I'd have to disagree almost entirely with your formulation.
The violation of the social contract comes when you agree to terms you intend to our letter decide to violate, or in the case of the consumer pirate, when your benefit from the ill gotten gains of the person you know to have deceitfully obtained to copied work from its owner.
I get the point of social contract, but most people do not form it because it was established before in most cases. Not to mention that this assume you live in a democracy and that social contract is not of sort (it is what it is or we will kill and prison you).
So I don't think it is appropriate to make it appear like this was a choice everyone makes. It is not immoral to violate social contact (slavery was social contract but the moral thing was to oppose it -just example not comparison-)
The very fact that you pirate the work demonstrates you buy into the social contract at least enough to benefit. And if you benefit without contributing/consenting, you're considered a "free rider".
So we're shifting to "taxation is theft" now? Maybe one day we can explore the cosmos and truly settle our own land (given that 99%+ of earth's land has been claimed by some social contract). Alas, born too early.
>So I don't think it is appropriate to make it appear like this was a choice everyone makes. It is not immoral to violate social contact (slavery was social contract but the moral thing was to oppose it -just example not comparison-)
hyperbolic metaphors aside: sure, if you oppose the social contract and your government allows it, try to change it. But I think "make digital purchases ownership" is a very small tree to bark up in modern society.
All good then. :)
Again, you're imagining something to exist in some kind of concrete form when it really doesn't. That you want the world to operate in some perfect way is ok, but not being able to comprehend that's not the reality just sounds like mental issues. :/
Be honest: how much did you know about social contract theory before this conversation?
So are you saying that a provider "selling" some content and then removing it from your library is as bad as you pirating it in the first place?
Besides the remediation is not to pirate the copy back, that’s vigilantism. You would need to find a way to prove they took something they shouldn’t have.
That seems unbalanced to me. Why is the onus on the customer to prove that, rather than they just pirate it and the onus is on the seller to prove that they took something they shouldn't have?
That seems to be the attitude taken towards people making copies (aka Pirates). I'm suggesting that if the company is assumed to be innocent when actually stealing by removing the customers' copies, then it would be appropriate to assume that pirates are also innocent, especially as they are not stealing anything and just making a copy which is alleged to be unauthorised.
The consumer pressed a button labelled "Buy" and paid their money.
Yet later on they've been deprived of this same said item - which they purchased - yet you're claiming it's not "moral" of them to fix the problem by alternative means.
You've a strange sense of morality. :(
Doubly so for something like a garage sale. They might ask if you can share other things with them.
Of course, per the article it seems the sellers are often turning around and saying "hey I know I sold you this, but now I'm going to change/revoke it remotely" which is also a breach of social contract. So an eye for an eye I guess.
Pieces of paper/text shouldn't be able to dictate what is moral outside of common sense. The world I describe above would become a worse place for everybody.
Here, the problem is that the artist put a lot of time into making the song because there is the expectation of that term and the ability to extract money out of it. Without this expectation, none of it would feel immoral for either of both side.
Consent is a really hard thing to guarantee. You have already lost. There is no moral stance to have here, its all made up agreement.
And you can claim I've "lost", but you have no justification for it.
Futher, it’s debatable whether clicking “I agree” on a pages-long EULA where there is no realistic expectation that people actually read the text, is really agreement.
There's such a high power imbalance there that I find it intellectually dishonest to say that it is a free-willing contract between two entities. In my decades of Internet use, I haven't once set a single clause on a contract I've "agreed to" with a service. Those agreements were always even more one-sided than Treaty of Versailles, and the upper limit of how far they'd push was almost always what the local regulations permitted.
Therefore I ask, can you exist on this digital world without ever accepting one EULA in your life? or moving the goal post: can you exist on this world without accepting one-sided agreements, like, all the time? It's not an agreement if you had no real choice to begin with.
The insidious nature of piracy is that it's so completely unnecessary. There are no "but I'm starving" kind of arguments to be had here.
In practice, new entertainment entices more people into consuming it. For example lets say your group of friend suddenly became huge fan of some unknown show, you didn't see it but they keep talking about it for days. You then notice that it costs $500. You indeed have the choice to not watch it, its not like you ever felt the need to before it has been mentioned to you, but won't you?
This example is a bit excessive but these kind of events happen all ever the case for entertainment that cost a fraction of it. The problem is that it stacks up.
As for your immoral accusation, its perfectly fine if you think this way, but I also believe that it is perfectly fine to think the opposite way. The only things companies can lose from piracy are potential sales, and ultimately if people aren't willing to pay for it I believe that it is fine for the company to shut down. Why should they be forced to pay for something they can access without causing any harm?
>For example lets say your group of friend suddenly became huge fan of some unknown show, you didn't see it but they keep talking about it for days. You then notice that it costs $500. You indeed have the choice to not watch it, its not like you ever felt the need to before it has been mentioned to you, but won't you?
sure, life is all about compromises. I had plenty of rich friends take things for granted in grade school that my parent literally could not afford. I probably "lost" some rich friends because I could not engage in such actiities. Such is life.
I grew up not expecting to get everything I wanted when I wanted it. Practicing restraint and prioritizing my needs over my wants is a core part of my character. So hearing people act like they need to watch Game of Thrones but can't pay HBO or whatever falls on deaf ears. I simply never watched Game of Thrones, life did move on.
>As for your immoral accusation, its perfectly fine if you think this way, but I also believe that it is perfectly fine to think the opposite way.
I care more about hypocrisy than morals, and a lot of the "pro-consumer" arguments come off a hypocritical. They compare it to people breaking into your house but are happy in most other contexts treating the digital commons as different from a physical one, despite that cost of the commons coming from some often non-government entity.
And honestly, it's just the dishonesty that bothers me the most. Some just don't want to say they do bad things. At least own up to it. I pirate, sometimes I just don't care. I'm not a good person. There, easy.
>and ultimately if people aren't willing to pay for it I believe that it is fine for the company to shut down. Why should they be forced to pay for something they can access without causing any harm?
logistically, the company shutting down hurts the people who caused it the least. So I do feel bad. CEO has a million dollar eject button and the rest of the airplane of underpaid artists are stuck in a nosedive. Maybe I couldn't save it, but I at least don't want to say I didn't chip in.
morally, a company that produces value that has all of what is valued stolen is a downer.
Sometimes you indeed have to cope, not everything can be accessible. But in the case of digital data it is definitively possible, and people are independently distributing torrents, not like movie studios have to distribute their own work for free.
More digital piracy would also overall mean less production, and so less expectation from consumers, and less barriers for the people who cannot afford everything (or anything really). Going back to a more "organic rate" of story telling. Stories have always existed after all.
> And honestly, it's just the dishonesty that bothers me the most. Some just don't want to say they do bad things. At least own up to it. I pirate, sometimes I just don't care. I'm not a good person. There, easy.
Maybe that I am a bad person too then. But its a pretty quick reasoning, am I really to blame for downloading bytes over the internet? Why couldn't you blame all the creators for expecting this sort of income? am I to blame if their work only has value when imposed?
what kind of awful logic is this? We have decades of free (and "free" as in beer) knowledge and media alike available with no ethical quandries. Why do we need to pirate the copyrighted stuff? For all its gripes, Youtube and Tiktok have indeed provided ore entertainment than one can consume for "free".
But for traditionally premium media, Look no further than the music industry to see how this leads. Spotify is a race to the bottom and artist basically don't get any money from their actual music anymore. Great for consumers (it's all free with ads or paying a one time subscrption to remove ads), awful for those wanting to sing professionally.
We're seeing it in gaming as well, and people hate it more than ever despite the "game" itself becoming free these days (can't pirate what's ultimately a thin client that companies give away for free). The value comes from exploiting scarcity of resources. People say it's ruining gaming, but it seems to be the exact kind of endgame for someone who can't afford $40-60 games but wants to play the latest and greatest. You spend your time or your money. Or both.
>But its a pretty quick reasoning, am I really to blame for downloading bytes over the internet?
yes. you're not entitled to all bytes. This decomposition of media to "just data" doesn't work at all in the favor of respecting art. are you really to blame for "just grabbing trees?", or "just grabbing reverbs in the air"?
> am I to blame if their work only has value when imposed?
Yes? If you value a product and you choose to not pay for it but consume it anyway, how are you not to blame? You didn't haggle with the creator, you didn't leave any feedback suggesting to make it cheaper or more accessible, you didn't offer any argument to how contributing this to a metaphoical library would benefit them.
You saw a piece of candy on the shelf and chose to pocket it. That would be considered unethical. No survival mechanism to appeal to (you don't need candy to survive), on extra context to justify your action. Many do it because risk is low and they value the item.
And honestly I don't care when people do it. I'm no snitch and Nestle already took into account X% of theft when pricing the item. But the worst thieves are the ones that whine that "well I deserve this I had a hard life". Just accept you did a bad thing and reflect on if you want to repeat those actions again. Don't pretend society owed you a butterfinger or that you're toppling the Nestle empire by grabbing a single piece out of some 7-11.
Are consumers responsible for encouraging people to sing professionally? If they aren't being paid enough, maybe that they should choose a different career. Its a rough thing to say, but this wouldn't have happened to begin with if the music industry didn't become that big due to copyright.
> This decomposition of media to "just data" doesn't work at all in the favor of respecting art. are you really to blame for "just grabbing trees?", or "just grabbing reverbs in the air"?
Trees are physical. I don't believe that I should dig up your tree to put it in my garden. But I should have the right to take its picture and try to grow the same.
Bytes are bytes, you are the one imposing their values. Copying more files doesn't steal money from its author.
> Yes? If you value a product and you choose to not pay for it but consume it anyway,
These are only products because we have laws allowing them to be. It is mostly an artificial market. Without copyright these authors would probably do something else. Just because they decided that their work is worth money doesn't mean I should give them. Otherwise maybe that I should bill you for looking at my eyes if I decide so, would be unethical not to.
> You saw a piece of candy on the shelf and chose to pocket it. That would be considered unethical.
If I could duplicate that candy and leave with it, I would. Is it unethical? You are really trying to make the comparison between intellectual property and physical matter, but one can be duplicated and freely shared while the other cannot.
The problem is that you assume that author must be a job, while I do not believe that they should be particularly protected. There will be less of them and its not necessarily a bad thing. If you wanna get paid get funding beforehand.
So you end with victim blaming? They can sell their art however they want, for whatever price they want. And traditional capitalism say they will succeed or fail based upon those dynamics. Theft is a factor that well, cheats the entire system.
I think it's ironic you have such a stance on a web site made for getting that exact funding. You think those VC's are funding stuff that can be easily stolen and produce no profits back for them?
Ideas should just not be treated the same as physical properties. They aren't. The market will adapt.
I don't see how to interpret this as anything other than performative asceticism. Once you've judged that you cannot or will not pay, you've put yourself in a situation where watching vs. not watching has no material impact on anyone in the world. You'd have to explain why it makes you a bad person to download it from someone who willingly shares it with you (and who you might even make feel good for having shared). What exactly is the part where you've done something bad?
Where does the bad action happen? If you download it and delete it without watching, was that bad? All you've done is tied up a pirate's capacity to upload, so if anything you're the good guy, right? And it's the actual watching (which affects no one) that carries moral weight? Is watching at a friend's house (or borrowing their DVD) okay? What if your friend had ripped it to their computer, and you stream it from them, but you make sure not to watch at the same time as them, so they never "had more DVDs being used than they owned"? Or was it the creation of a copy? What if you just send all of the incoming packets straight to /dev/null and never have more than ~1500 temporary bytes at a time?
What if I get all of my entertainment value from simply downloading everything I can because I'm such a rebel (or because I'm someone on /r/datahoarder), but I never actually watch it, so in principle it didn't really matter whether I even downloaded the right thing?
It's hard for me to see how the "morality" doesn't essentially boil down to the axiom that what is morally permissible is to follow the law and impermissible to break it, which is IMO a pretty weak perspective. The law seems to be a little too full of special-cases here to think it got it precisely right morally (e.g. if you can borrow but not stream; convenience is immoral?), and surely most people wouldn't agree that e.g. drug use or abortion are immoral because they are illegal in some jurisdictions.
For reference, I don't have a TV and have never watched GoT because I'm just not interested in it. I entertain myself other ways like pondering this sort of nonsense. I don't really see much difference with some counterfactual world (or with some hypothetical person) where I find it worth my time to watch, but not worth (my time + $50) to buy it on ebay and watch. Or (my time + $120) to get the UHD one.
The people who most caused the company to shut down would be people like me that just weren't interested in the thing at all, and yes we are affected the least, and I don't see why anyone should feel bad about that. That's how it should be. People who pirate, if they have any effect at all, will create mindshare by talking about it to people who will buy it. That is still preferable for the company over me changing the subject when someone talks about GoT.
I would love for all of these media companies to go out of business though so they would stop pushing for treacherous computing.
Well value is subjective. You couldn't pay some people to consume certain media and other have people spending hundreds on virtual skins.
That's all the invisible hand is about. Finding the sweet spot and accepting that some will not value what is offered. Or at all.
>The people who most caused the company to shut down would be people like me that just weren't interested in the thing at all, a
Sure, but at the same time you aren't their paying audience. Why should you be frustrated when a company metaphorically locks their door? As a thief that is just a basic expectation of the "job". Find an easier target or get better tools. If people didn't steal to the point where it impacted business, the act of selling door locks wouldn't be a million dollar industry. That now extends to the digital realm.
I can sympathize with greedy practices, but I don't know how you expect someone to bemoan your lack of ability to obtain free media (especially when there's ALREADY so much free media out there).
>I would love for all of these media companies to go out of business though so they would stop pushing for treacherous computing.
Don't like it, don't buy it. I don't like making that dismissal but I also don't line imposing my personal will on society. Which you're doing at this point. There will be people who just want convinence over free media and companies found an audience. Adapt to that or find media you do want to support.
Or just steal, I guess. Again, I don't care. Just don't be pompous about it like youre defending the integrity of software.
I complained that e.g. my computer has functionality in it that's designed to disobey me, its owner, and instead obey them, some unrelated party I have no business with. These sorts of chips do not belong in my computers, but you can't buy ones without them. Similar functionality will no doubt be used in the next 10 years to force you to use a compromised OS (e.g. with built in adware and spyware) if you want to do e.g. online banking. The trend is obvious to anyone paying any attention.
My house doesn't come with someone else's locks. All of the locks are mine. I and only I have the keys. And I can change or remove them whenever I like. There's no access door for Disney to come in and inspect my bathrooms.
And yes I think it should be illegal to sell a product that's designed to sabotage itself. I don't own a Blu-ray drive (no reason to, again I'm not interested), but my understanding is that a disk can tell the drive to revoke its keys and essentially brick itself. That should be criminal, and is actual destruction of property.
Anyway, I'll note that I still don't see an answer of what precisely is morally wrong with filesharing. Which of the acts I listed is the bad one? Or is it something else?
What is worse about downloading a movie than e.g. deciding to spend your $20 on marijuana (which is illegal everywhere in the US, and is in fact a crime, unlike downloading a movie, which is a civil matter) and watch the clouds go by?
For what it's worth, I don't do drugs or these days even drink. I've never found marijuana to be appealing. But I don't think people who do partake are bad for doing so. I feel much the same about people downloading movies. It doesn't affect anyone else, so I don't see an issue. If anything, the drugs have more of an impact on others. Some of my neighbors stink up the whole street, which is unpleasant on my walks.
> you agree to the terms when you license the song.
that agreement is a law, no?
i agree to the copyright because a metaphorical gun is held to my head by law — if i break the copyright agreement then law has power to persecute me. i don't see how that's any different to a layperson.
you can split hairs all you want about agreement vs law, i'm not interested in that. there's a reason i didn't go to law school, those sort of debates are boring and annoying. yet here i am...
The law isn't relevant here. The agreement you make is.
this is just a pointless exchange now.
In the current world it’s rarely like this. Now it’s “we as a production conglomerate loaned an artist 500k to produce some content that we expect to make a profit on, made them use our very expensive in-house resources (at MSRP), and we pay them $0.03 for every $1 we make until they pay off that loan”.
The perception those conglomerates want to spread is that there is a direct social contract between you and the artist who’s work you are pirating, but the real contract is between you and the conglomerate themselves. Even if (and usually especially if) that conglomerate screws over the artist.
Or at least, that's the streaming way. If this was a digital download with on need to phone home it will in fact be stuck on your PS3/4 unless they force you to update to do anything with your PS3/4. From there they can probably delete it during a patch. but the PS3 is well past EoL for that.
You’re making a point about how you feel about it without presenting an argument.
The discussion of harms or lack of harm from piracy has been raging for a long time. It’s not going to be solved by appealing to the idea of right and wrong. It’s not universal in this instance which is why the argument continues.
You would have a point if everyone agrees it is wrong but some people do it anyway. However, that is not the case.
Pirates are thus “free riders” to the social contract.
You seem convinced that your system of values are the same set everyone else has. That doesn’t make for a useful argument.
The post states that piracy isn’t stealing and you agree.
There must be some other thing in your mind that is equivalent.
We've agreed it's not stealing. We've agreed that not all piracy is immoral, for some definition of immoral.
I think we can agree that this specific tort does not apply.
Which specific thing in the social contract, some simple verb such as "stealing" are you equating piracy with. Then we'll have something concrete to discuss I think.
Also that's not what trespass means. You don't "deprive" someone of their land when you walk on it without permission, and you don't "deprive" someone of their song when you pirate it.
Re trespass, that’s not what the specific tort you referred to means. A chattel is a moveable form of property. You’re talking about the colloquial version of trespass. Happy to talk about that conception of it.
Is the idea of trespass the specific thing you feel is being violated in the social contract? If not, what is?
So when you look at a comment that clearly a) is intended to diminish your position and b) seems to completely ignore what you've actually written, it's not "perceived hostility" it's simply bad faith engagement.
You still have not answered the very simple question though, and i might be a bit slow off the mark but i don’t see it answered elsewhere in this thread.
A lack of trust is not a reasonable reason to refuse to state a single verb or noun. Trust isn’t really a part of this - we are strangers on the internet.
I don’t believe that you are engaging with the discussion honestly because this is an extremely simple question to answer.
I believe this is because you have realised that you cannot defend the position you have taken.
It’s been an interesting discussion.
I just don't trust you.
It goes entirely against how humans think, strangling creativity and innovation. An artist is harmed far more when they're forced to spend years in court, debating whether their chord progression is too similar to a song written by someone who's been dead for 50 years.
Have you ever actually published anything for others to purchase?
So, evidence please. :)
Hopefully you'll be able to understand the world a bit more and contribute meaningfully to it when you're older.
Best of luck. :)
I suspect you are either not proud of your published work, or providing a link or examples would diminish rather than strengthen your position in this debate. It's easy to argue about morals and social contracts if you've published a literary work; less so if, for example, it winds up being a fan DnD extension module on DriveThruRPG.
Someone is querying your credentials to learn about you, where you're coming from, what perspective you have, what skin you have, so to speak, in the game. Dodging behind some notion of having to "earn" your credentials when you have taken a very strong and contrarian position is disingenuous.
What you must earn is my respect, and the person I replied to has lost that.
I've observed there's a lot of them about.
Unlike say... someone making claims but unable to provide evidence.
> To throw out intellectual property is to throw out art itself.
Art is older than intellectual property.
"To throw out intellectual property" wouldn't stop anybody to continue making art, it would at most challenge the way we build an economy around it.
Finally you've raised what could be an interesting point. :)
Is there usefulness in the quantity of film / television / music being created today?
Would we be better off as a society if there was... less?
Maybe turning off the fountain of crap would be an improvement? :)
Either way, it's not up to you to decide utility arbitrarily. Besides, if the art is bad, why are you pirating it in the first place? The problem is that people want the art too much, and are willing to break the social contract in order to obtain it.
That's a bold claim. My opinion is different though.
> Besides, if the art is bad, why are you pirating it in the first place?
Why are you accusing me of doing so? Are you basing it upon my not having the same viewpoint as you?
Umm you do realize that some of the greatest works of art were created LONG before "IP" was a thing right? The patronage system did pretty well....
But you don't seem to value art...?
Since you seem to be a stickler for rules and agreements I'd urge you to re-read the guidelines for posting comments on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) as looking through this thread you are definitely flirting with the edges of them.
I'm not sure why piracy is the internet hill you've decided to die on regarding arguments but I'm going to choose to disengage, give zero cares to your views on my morality, and use my own best judgement on when it's moral to pirate or not.
Besides, nobody asked you to reply to me in the first place. You engaging/disengaging was always at your own impulse. Nobody was requesting you say anything at all, so returning to that state concerns only you.
Maybe start reading a few books about it, or take a class? You're trying to argue that ethics literally does not exist, which is quite a tall order.
I think you are making the mistake of applying social contracts that can work well on a person to person level to person vs corporation situations. With the latter, one party has way more leverage than the other. On top of that corporations have proven again and again that they will mislead, lie to you and abuse you to the extent permissible by law, or even more if they think it's lucrative to so. On a person to person level that would be a very toxic relationship. They certainly didn't uphold classical inter-personal social contracts, so why should you?
Genuine question, did you fully read the article before commenting here?
The problem here is probably that most folks can’t separate what “is” and what “ought” to be. For example you’re discussing how corporations behave despite it being wholly irrelevant to the question of whether or not piracy is immoral. The argument is one of “oughts” and you’re trying to talk in terms of “is”, despite the gaping crevasse separating the two of them (Hume's Guillotine).
This isn’t where ethics is ambiguous or debated; it’s very obviously immoral to pirate, for a whole host of reasons, some of which I’ve already mentioned. From there you surely can concoct scenarios where a baby would die if it doesn’t hear a Metallica album or whatever, but the general point will stand.
In some kind of perfect world there would be no need for violence. Yet we live in a complex and ambiguous world, where the widely accepted moral view that killing is a bad thing is sometimes the "right" thing to do. Or would you argue the Ukrainian people should just roll over because the social contract says killing is bad? My point is, I don't see how the notion that piracy is bad in a world we don't live in helps this discussion. To me it feels more like an argument one could use to demand people stop doing this immoral thing now.
>If so, that'd be vigilante justice and still immoral.
Also I don't want to get to off topic, but I want to challenge your premise that vigilante justice is always immoral. (Is it immoral for a parent to punish a child for jaywalking instead of calling the police?)
And I didn't say it was always immoral, I said it was generally immoral. One should assume "generally" rather than "always"... in general.
At what point does a party become free from the obligations of their social contract with the corporate media company then?
>And I didn't say it was always immoral, I said it was generally immoral. One should assume "generally" rather than "always"... in general.
My apologies, based off your previous comments I assumed you were taking a firm ethical stance here. With that said then, I just want to point out that the claim "vigilante justice is immoral" is far from being ethical consensus among philosophers. (Communitarians vs Forfeiturist)
Ultimately this is outside the scope of our conversation so I'd rather not get hung up on it... the tone of your claim just struck me as oddly bold.
And I am taking a firm ethical stance; it's just not an absolute ethical stance.
by the law as media companies would wish us to understand it, this is piracy. but when and by whom was a contract broken during this chain of events? i shared the content with my friend, but my purchase of the DVD wasn't conditional upon any agreement not to, so it couldn't have been me who broke a contract. was the contract broken by the person at the garage sale who sold the DVD without verifying that the recipient wouldn't pass it on to another recipient who would then duplicate it? if so, doesn't that same logic imply the DVD manufacturer broke a contract? if this is how you imagine the contract to function, it would seem the existence of piracy _anywhere_ in this chain means that the entire industry is criminal.
this isn't a hypothetical, btw. there actually is a Bebop DVD out there with a chain of custody that complex (actually more complex by now).
There are other gray areas related to property and copyright. This is not one of them.
Allow me to blow your mind https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractarianism-contempo...
You mean like doing something once and then expecting to be paid for it in perpetuity?
Expecting to be paid for the efforts of others, decades after their death?
Redefining the legal system in order to prevent others from carrying out the, distribution?
I'm much more concerned about those free riders than a teen with no way to pay for digital goods, someone who couldn't afford it, or someone who'd like to keep the things they pay for.
Besides, the concern isn't pirating The Sound of Music. The concern is pirating Game of Thrones or Euphoria. That's what's being discussed here. You can obviously find exceptions to the general rule of "piracy is immoral" but it is the general rule.
Doesn't sound like he's held in high regard, except possibly to take a position to debate against.
And then there's this ...
1. a contract is just an abstraction over a commitment to give it more salability. if every contract violation is a sin then so is me committing to meet you for dinner tonight but canceling because i'm feeling under the weather.
2. show me this contract. where/when did i sign it, and was i under duress when i did so?
There's the law, that applies upon everyone in a society. There are treaties that try to make laws from countries work together.
No morality in that, just practical, time-tested and updated (and updatable) rules & codes. No need to leave a society to refuse and change its laws, hopefully.
This is neither my idea, nor is it peculiar in any way. It’s a term used to describe the agreement we all commit to in order to interact in a shared environment.
Supply/demand is also a story/theory trying to model, imperfectly, a reality. Or several ones.
They are both largely contextual, open to critique, and have been. Just take the time to enlarge your horizon, it makes it much more enjoyable and satisfying.
I know what this is used for. It's still ill-named (you don't sign it, it would be a "de facto" instead), and still debatable a theory (which states that in an ideal, invented state of nature, without such a contract enforced by an authority, violence would be the natural relation between individuals).
There's more (especially since the times of Hobbes) to describe how societies have functioned/could/should function.
Social contract theory is not much more solid than the homo economicus one: it has its points, and its flaws.
None of this is my idea; your problem is with the strength of the argument, not with my "opinion".
It IS a recent theory in the face of human history (and even more prehistory).
Those people were NOT smarter than you are, or can be. You’re terribly limiting yourself and your capacity for understanding and growth thinking they were (it’s not about humility, but submission, there’s a nuance).
It's insanely hubristic to think I (or you) are going to casually outthink many many thousands of scholars over the course of hundreds of years in a series of HN comments. To even think you may know better, without even fully understanding what it is social contract theory is, puts you firmly on the wrong side of Dunning-Krueger.
So, you're going with the old "appeal to authority" approach then?
You might want to pick a different direction, as that doesn't really work around here. :)
if i formally opt out of this "contract" (i.e. renounce my citizenship), then there are no woods i can recede to without being considered an illegal alien.
Many copyright provisions survive only because too few people are affected by them in practice. For example, publishing a photo of Eiffel tower at night is illegal in France, because the illumination is a work of art still under copyright protection. This does not mean universal acceptance of these provisions.
Copyright is broken, and in many cases actively impedes accessibility. For example, I have many DVDs that have no subtitle options. If I were hearing impaired, and if piracy were "immoral", I would be shit out of luck if I wanted to watch a film I'd, you know, paid for.
In this day and age I can go to OpenSubtitles and find a subtitle track, enabling me or someone who was in genuine need to actually enjoy what they purchased.
(Except in Australia, Open Subtitles is blocked! Its considered by the lobbyists to the Government to be piracy and of course, piracy as you point out, is "immoral regardless" and a "violation of the social contract").
There are many other examples of copyright impeding the creation of accessibility options for media where there is no economic motive or legislative requirement to produce such things, such as in the case of Audio Described content for blind and low-vision users for older films. If you're blind and want to watch, say, the Special Edition of ALIENS (1986) then there's no official option to do so, and the only way to be able to enjoy that is via (illegal) volunteer efforts on an "immoral" pirate-archivist website.
It was about the problem of rigid copyright when accessibility options are missing, and the measures that a disabled person might need to resort to to have the same access that everyone else does, especially when the copyright owners decline to make those options available.
It was about being inclusive, and inclusivity is absolutely part of our modern social-contract.
I'd love it if you re-read my earlier post, and respond to the points as made. It's an interesting and engaging debate. Thank you.
Besides, as I’ve already said, we can come up with exceptions all day, the general case of piracy, the one being discussed, is immoral. If you tie a baby to a railroad and only agree to let the baby go if it hears a Metallica song, yeah piracy would be justified. That doesn’t mean much in this conversation however.
Indeed, in many places there is legislation that formally grants exemption from copyright for this exact reason, but it's mostly a bit on the weak side and doesn't address the systemic problems, which is the big one.
Nothing immoral going on here.
If what you're describing isn't part of the social contract (e.g. as you say exceptions to copyright law), then what you're describing is vigilante justice, where you decide what harms to dole out to others arbitrarily, and that's another part of the social contract we all agree is not worth it.
Yes, and no? you are discriminating, but you may not be doing it in intentionally. Some options make it easy, where for some other arts you need dedicated specialists who know of how those disabilities navigate and then make new software or work to enable such things. An indie dev isn't going to have the references or time or even talent to make sure the blind, deaf, and physically handicapped can play their game.
>Nothing immoral going on here.
we've gone so far off the script that I think people forgot we're still talking about deluxe entertainment. Not every socetal wrong under captialism.
That's not true. If a publisher refuses to publish a book in braille because they see no profit in that, but nevertheless sues everyone who does the conversion to braille and publication on their own, then this directly deprives blind people of their cultural rights.
Yes, a company can sue over a reference to their works outside of fair use cases. a translation is not a case of fair use. Companies usually won't go after such things unless they already have immediate plans to translate, but they can. Similar to how they can go after fanart but usually leave it be as easy, free, organic advertising.
It's not a contrived example, but an actual problem with converting books to braille. The only entitlement I see here is the expectation by authors to have absolute control over their work, even if there is no profit to be made (remember: copyright was established to protect income streams).
> And what the hell is "cultural rights"?
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 27. The same article that established groundwork for copyright also establishes the right to access protected works for the well-being, education and enjoyment of others. Current standards are heavily out of balance in favor of all-encompassing copyright, which was never intended as such, and has become increasingly detrimental to the right to participate in culture.
The right to participate in culture is infringed upon, for example, when essayists are unable to publish video essays about movies and illustrate their ideas with a few seconds from each movie, because they get caught in overzealous copyright protection. I don't see a good reason why the full force of the state should back movie studios against scholars, historians and critics; it is not in our best interests.
Well they are the author or funder of said art. They should feel entitled to how it's distributed. If they are working on a braille translation and someone else pops up, you can understand why they should have the power to make sure the latter can't make money off their IP, no?
But my point is that this is contrived because most people downloading a torrent are not doing transformative work. A few may make mods or fan translations or entire overhaul of the game, but well over 99.9% just want to consume as is. And well, those 0.1% can just buy the work?
>Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 27.
That article has 2 parts. The 2nd:
>Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Pretty much defends copyright, so the goal here isn't to turn all of media into a commons. They acknowledge that art and science is something society benefits from, but also that the authors of such culture have some protection against being leeches upon.
>The right to participate in culture is infringed upon, for example, when essayists are unable to publish video essays about movies and illustrate their ideas with a few seconds from each movie, because they get caught in overzealous copyright protection.
I mean, they do? The overzealous one is YouTube in this case who has no legal incentive to push their luck, not the law which is why DMCA's aren't even more aggressive.
I get your point here, but that specific example is more a problem with the YouTube monopoly than the word of the law. I think we all agree that DMCA abusers should be punished, even if the question Of DMCA as a law us valid.
Wallstreet feeds on daily violations of the social contract, from 2008 to asset stripping to consolidation to the point where therr is no competition, etc.
>If content providers are making this technically impossible - thus depriving us of the possibility of using it for teaching, research, news reporting, or criticism - how are they not violating the social contract?
they aren't? They don't need to provide you with a DRM free copy for that. screen record your tv with your phone camera, you got the footage. Fair Use doesn't entitle you to pristine quality footage. But to go line by line:
- education and meusums has ways to request copies legally. It's a pain and money is probably involved but the process exists.
- news reporters don't need to necessary show you footage of a copyright movie to review and critique it. They will simply descibe it in text, as they have for decades before the internet made it possible to show clips. This happens even with video reports as they will simply put up other footage as they describe, or use whatever footage is fair game (usually from trailers).
This is a very powerful yet very dangerous train of thought. Modifications to the concept of property were at the heart of the way communism has been implemented in the USSR, and it led to awful results.
You might have a different goal in mind, but so did many of those involved in the October revolution.
There is a contest between scarce rights and non-scarce rights. At the moment, developed-world nations default to a position where non-scarce rights overrule scarce rights.
Example 1. Consider your ownership of a computer. A computer is scarce property. In a regime that respects only scarce rights, you could do what you like with it. In the regime that runs developed countries at the moment, there are all kinds of things we cannot do with it due to "intellectual property" rights. If you paid a company for some software in the past, you cannot do maintenance work on that software because the person who wrote it own the copyright to it. Even though you own a hard disk, you are not allowed to make copies of bits on that disk that are held to be copyright-protected. There are non-scarce things you are not allowed to distribute, non-scarce things you are not allowed to bundle, legalese garbage you have to pay lip-service to, etc.
Example 2. Imagine you manufacture mobile phones. One day you get a nastygram from a competitor who says that you are infringing on their patents. You send your team to look into it. They learn that years ago this competitor was able to secure patents on some basic techniques. In some places, patents have been granted on some things that are fundamental - it is not clear whether it would even be possible to operate in the domain without using these approaches. Your engineering team unknowingly reimplemented those same ideas from first principles while they were building the phone. You are left with a choice - 1. pay up; 2. try to appeal the patent (good luck training a non-technical judge or jury in this highly complex domain to a standard so they can reject the patent); 3. find a way to achieve outcomes without infringing on the patents. Again - non-scarce rights are severely impacting your reasonable use of scarce property. (In a scenario similar to this, Intel failed in the mobile phone space a few years back despite strong support from Apple. Quallcom has very strong patent coverage in that space.)
By law you own the metal and silicon that is in front of you. Yet there are all of these laws that prevent you from making free use of it, with each of them being grounded in somebody else's non-scarce "property" rights. How did this come about? About a century ago, governments started changing the concept of property from what everybody had understood it to be for thousands of years (scarce goods) to the arbitrary "bundle of rights" definition, and begun attaching the benefits of property to things that were not scarce. Then trade agreements were used to establish these as international standards.
Above you said that I was proposing a dystopia. Not so. The dystopia is what we have now.
A constitutional limitation of property rights to scarce property should strongly strengthen scarce property rights over what we have at the moment.
Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad" doesn't help to improve the current situation, neither does abolishing it. The way I see it, there's definitely reason in protecting ideas and the result of creative work, even if that result is a sequence of bytes. Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.
That's not to say the current situation is ideal – far from it. But I strongly believe your suggestion would lead to chaos, and it's dangerous to go there.
I made this case in the grandparent post. To reiterate: the presence of scarce and non-scarce property rights creates a contest between two things that we pretend to be the same thing (property) but which follow different dynamics (scarce vs non-scarce). Government must rule that one dominates the other. In the developed world, the way this plays out is that government rules non-scarce rights to overrule scarce rights. Removing the non-scarce rights would therefore lead to a strengthening of scarce rights.
> Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad"
But that is not what I did. I made a first-principles argument, and then supplied examples as a form of illustration.
You have quoted "bad" here as though I said it, though I did not.
> Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.
(heavy edit)
There was incentive to create in the pre-scarce world. Large bodies of great work were produced in theatre, chamber music, literature, sculpture, painting in a scarce-rights world with much lower GDP, lower living standards and no copyright. Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Chekov - these people all operated in scarce-rights regimes. People routinely copied their works. That we have these works is evidence of their incentive.
The licenses that sit behind Linux and similar systems go to great lengths to cancel protections given by copyright. Yet great work is done on these systems. The incentive must be there.
Non-scarce rights create incentive against creation. They discourage remixing of existing work, and they create legal barriers against entry into fields that are affected by patents.
Revoking the right to own things and transforming almost all private property to public goods is an extreme measure and almost certainly leads to some kind of fascist regime to enforce and maintain it.
The law I proposed has to be working against governments and semi-government institution such as banks, not about random Joes.
The firmware question is interesting, because there is no such thing as FLOSS hardware except of some low-end microcontrollers, thank you for noticing.
The most decent way of achieving this state seems like to prohibit only import of new devices and don't even bother about user's ones or anything second-hand. I have an observation that if you have 2 identical laptops but one with Nvidia/Amd and one with Intel HD then the former laptop will die naturally, such as any laptop with Ati today, while the latter laptop keeps serving until the physical death. You can install Ati driver for Windows 7 but can not for Windows 8 and never; also proprietary Ati driver fails to work with modern Linux stack while free Ati driver uses to much energy to consider the device as a laptop. This is an example of natural death of proprietary hardware/software, just stop import new proprietary devices.
Any authorities checking user devices for anything is a way of tyranny/authoritarism/totalitarism, nowadays the governmenns are working into totally another way, elusive to see for us the adults. In XXI governments use to propagate this or that ideas in schools. Teach them to have their fun and games in GNU/Linux distros and prohibit teachers to propagate Microsoft, Zoom, Viber, Google without restricting usage of these service for leisure. When the proprietary devices will start begging to buy a new hardware but it will not be available inside of the country then we will found ourselves in a new world.
> Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use?
There is no such thing in XXI as an independed government without a large dev team.
We need a figure head with a strong moral and ethical compass who lives in private as if they are in public. Whom is capable of addressing all situations with grace, elegance, respect, compassion, and humility in that order only in reverse. One whom is frugal, well read, and courteous. One whom in being frugal is able to think of all and is able to stand fast in the face of corruption as they deep down truly experience the interconnectedness of life and by proxy society… and through experiences, travels and interactions has attained a working understanding of the all pervasive ripple effect.
Oh yeah, and this person has to be willing to martyr themselves as the public life sucks!
It’s a tall ask but someone embodying those traits would scoff at the notion of wanting, let alone keeping power!
If you’d like to see what federated horizontal power structures with consensus decision making looks like and how it feels to participate in I challenge you to join a local planning commission in your city if you haven’t already and if you live in america of course…
1. Update the laws so that the shenanigans of the companies are finally named as they are:
- Retroactively removing a feature is stealing from the owner.
- Deleting bought digital content is also stealing from the owner.
- Spying on a user is an unlawful search.
2. Make these transgressions be investigated by the prosecutor's office, so that a citizen only needs to report it to them and not figure out how to get a class lawsuit going. This will allow security researchers to do their job.
3. Classify devices with unpatched and unpatcheable security bugs as "unfit for use" and eligible for a full unconditional refund, and extend warranties on them to, say, 15 years.
4. Obviously, make any kind of security research legal and protected from intimidation by the companies.
Other approach, only huge companies start making devices because medium size companies cannot take the risk of the refunds.
Users are worse off, companies are worse off everything with the outlined rules is worse. Making law is hard.
The fundamental problem lies here: you haven't actually bought anything useful. You didn't buy content, you bought a license, and that license is merely "you might be able to view content in a very specific way for an unspecified amount of time that is completely at our discretion".
You still have what you bought when they revoke the license, it's just in a different and less useful state.
That whole system needs to be crushed into dust to make a real difference. Make it so that buying a license to content isn't a thing - that you are now actually buying content - and all of the things that come with ownership will follow.
But I don't see any viable path to that happening. A sightly more possible outcome would be to have a minimum standards/requirements for digital content purposes - a set of required rights/restrictions/components for any digital purchase the all licenses must incorporate or cannot compromise on.
Could you imagine the gigantic amount of flow of money that goes into Microsoft enterprise and Office support instead flowing into open source? And the amount of bug that amount of eyeballs would catch.
Both the Linux desktop and things like LibreOffice would see meteoric improvements within the year.
Right now there is already some chances budding (in Spain’s regional governments, Munich, France’s military), it just needs to be pulled together into a comprehensive plan and get a good push.
But what's far more important (and practical) than mandating libre software is mandating libre file formats, and this is what we've seen happen somewhat successfully around the world: governments requiring official documents to be primarily available in PDF/A and/or OpenDocument (c.f. OpenOfficeOrg/LibreOffice) instead of (say) MSFT's Office OOXML formats.
in europe on the other hand the issue is entirely political. a city switches to linux. when the leading party changes it switches back because microsoft promises some benefits like jobs or worse kickbacks, or the new leader is simply ignorant and actually believes that windows is better.
In short, the first thing you need is people who care about their countrymen. People often propose ideas that start from an assumption that politicians want to make the World better, but the ones in power in the UK at least are more motivated by other things: greed for example.
Here's the problem - the seller can be a thief. The common forms of seller theft is selling something of less value than marketed, or with conditions that were not brought up earlier (like no repair).
Being illegal isn't be the only measure of theft, not in some societies. You can pirate something without theft -- as long as the seller consents to it. It won't be legal if there's no written agreement of consent. Some companies have this model where you can illegally use their software forever, but have to pay for a license. They want some of the richer people to pay, but the law doesn't recognize this selective consent, so it's enforced selectively.
But in OP's case, there's no valid transaction possible in some situations. They're not pirating nice guy WinRAR. The seller doesn't want to consent and the buyer won't consent. Because there's no possible option, the pirate assumes it belongs to nobody and takes it.
Thieves will often justify a theft, either by saying nobody owns it or that it belonged to them. There's a whole hill of philosophy here about what private property means. Taking back your homeland is not theft, because it's yours. That's why we have laws so a third party can judge these things.
But you know, maybe just come to terms that stealing isn't always unethical. Instead of saying piracy isn't stealing, it's more like piracy isn't unethical. It's pedantic, but solves a lot of the nitpicks people have on the topic.
The very same google that offers Gmail but is also known to block accounts for perceived violation of contract and which will now close Gmail accounts that aren't used for a number of months.
I go to re-listen to it last week and lo-and-behold, it’s not in my library. Even worse, I can’t even PURCHASE it again. It looks like they’ve just black-holed through production in Australia. If I lived in the US I could at least “buy” it again.
I just want to enjoy art and the worst part is it’s not even the artist doing these things. It’s money grubbing distributors. Middle men are actually the worst kind of people in existence.
> Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!
Different perspective: Imagine you've been so lucky that you were able to work on a program and GET PAID for it irrespective if it will turn out to be a flop or even deemed so bad that it's more worthwhile to write off than release. Imagine being so lucky that during the COVID-19 pandemic where most people were left without job and/or income you still had the privilege to show up on set at 5AM and do a 16-hour work shift and provide food on the table for your kids so they can eat a healthy breakfast. Talk about privilege and luck that you've ended up in a position in life that enables you this job security in life which 99.99% of humans can only dream of.
Otherwise why do finance have to pay engineers more (at least here in London) or why are the interesting jobs nearly always paying below market?
If the show or film was cancelled after the worker signed a contract to work, the expectation of the worker when they signed up was that said work will see the light of day. Part of the compensation would be having the work on your CV etc and the prestige of your name on the credits.
The studio has reneged on an expectation the worker had when they accepted the contract and did not compensate them fairly for this new risk.
> Otherwise why do finance have to pay engineers more (at least here in London)
> or why are the interesting jobs nearly always paying below market?
For the second point I think you might need to re-read what GP defines as an interesting job, they specifically give broad examples but you've narrowed that down just to startups for some reason.
The employee doesn't get to decide what happens to the product. Simple as. Employees are workers on a field.
Is that entirely fair? Depends only on whether everyone has equal opportunity to work on something else without serious repercussions. And we should work towards that.
In this case, as in many others, Hollywood is a racket and there are limited alternatives, so it's somewhat unfair. But there are multiple studios and you can always choose to toil on someone else's field.
I also know a lot of people (scientists, and many humanitarians, for example) who really aren't motivated by getting payed beyond a basic subsistence. They could make more money, and have more stable careers elsewhere. They do what they do for a lot of other reasons: status, ideals, curiosity, etc. Maybe they are just victims in a cold capitalist world that exploits them, but they get a lot done.
Do these people exist in entertainment? Would we loose something if they become disillusioned? Should they be calculating their input based on what they need to keep food on the table and pay coming in, or should they feel some (maybe irrational) connection to the larger project?
Most young people cannot imagine living in a world disconnected. It’s great until it isn’t, and at that point it’s hopeless without any recourse. It might as well be a death apocalypse.
I do know what it’s like to live in a world disconnected. Because of that I keep my media on a portable storage device and back it up on redundant devices so that it does not get lost. I pay no subscriptions to access my media. It’s always instantly available when I travel anywhere. There are no advertisements, outages, bills, pauses, or other disruptions. Because of stuff like Bluetooth, Samba, and Plex it’s available to all my household media devices automatically.
My son loves his streaming service, but that just looks like paying a premium for laziness with a high potential for failure.
piracy is causing hypothetical financial damage by braking some laws
with the irony that sometimes there is no financial damage, or that the damage is such a small fraction of the claimed damage to a point where persuading it should make no sense
through sometimes it also can be big enough to destroy companies
That said, financially supporting worthwhile projects is a moral duty. So please do your part.
This remains true irrespective of what kind and term if rights you get when you purchase an IP license.
Imagine "buying" a house, but the real owner can kick you out, put someone living with you in some of your rooms, install their security cameras, forbid you to put some furniture or have a saying on who can invite you there.
Also, piracy is as stealing as taking a photo of your car is stealing it. You still have your car, someone that wouldn't buy it anyway won't pay for that neither. And probably the person pirating it will have more rights over the thing they didn't pay than a lawful buyer would have over the item he fully paid and "bought".
If the audience of HN were writers, singers, and artists, people who know what it's like when the fruits of your work are stolen and you barely make any money (I have friends like that), the sentiment would've been quite different. But software developers can't relate to this and that's why they are so pro-piracy. They get a paycheck every month or bi-weekly and never face a situation when their intellectual work is stolen against their will and offered to their employer for free and the employer now cuts the paycheck in half because why pay if you can get it for free.
I'm not saying the current situation with content consumption is ideal. Big corps have no shame in many ways. But sometimes both sides can be wrong. And this is exactly what I'm seeing here.
> when their intellectual work is stolen against their will and offered to their employer for free and the employer now cuts the paycheck in half because why pay if you can get it for free
Your friends should get a lawyer. This is a different case than people "pirating" content because the content is locked exclusively behind yet another service subscription.
If you're pirating content, you're stealing it. I'd 100% prefer that people just own up to it than try to contrive these elaborate arguments about how the social contract has been completely rearranged and why ackshually they are not only justified but practically obligated to do it. Beyond ridiculous. Get over yourselves.
Wokeness, marketing, etc...decisions are made to change content, and the "owner" gets their product changed without consent or remedy.
Snapping features from paid-for devices, or taking away content people paid for, is shitty and should be legally banned.
DRM is a tool, like an electric drill, and you can use it to build a house or kill someone. I'm happy to pay less to rent a film online subject to constraints such as time or single device, and for DRM to enforce that. I reject the idea that my printer stops working because I used third-party ink. DRM is an implementation detail.
Finally, there's nothing noble about piracy, even if you pirate things from asshole corporations. I'll agree that it is less bad in the context, but still. Victimless crime or not, someone owns IP to whatever you are after, and using it without their permission is not some kind of civil disobedience.
I figured out a Workaround for this. I install the crapware Driver-o-Software they want me to. Then I run "Double Driver 4.10 Portable" (not affiliated), I take a backup of the driver(s). Then I uninstall (or roll-back). Then the driver is still missing but I user my Double Driver folder backup (I keep in external disk), and booya! the device works without the crapware. It adds a couple more hoops in the experience, but it has worked like a charm.
(I remember Steve Gibson mentioned DoubleDriver some years back on the SecurityNow podcast - I tried it, and I never looked back)
The t&cs of these companies probably specify that we don't own the content we buy. The problem isn't with the logic it's with the law; consumer rights should make it illegal to do what they do.
But guess what? Ain't ever gonna change cause like so many other problems it requires that we work together and our species only does that when it's self serving.
2. Sharing is caring and information wants to be free.
3. La propriété, c'est le vol!
"It is not missing anywhere, so it isn't stealing" does not apply. What applies is more like "This paper says it is stealing, so it is." The paper says it because a human wrote it there, as a result of whatever complexity going on in their natural neural network.
Please notice I didn't say "right", "wrong", "good", or "bad" anywhere.
You make it sound like "once it's written down, that's how it is. forever". Which is also not how law works (not even how religious "laws" work).
Also worth noting rather ironically: at least for video entertainment, you can usually pirate discontinued content easily.
I'm sorry to minimize your reason for such a salty rant, OP, but I just don't get it. If there's more context as to why this is personal, that may help me empathise.
Strange way to attract adoption... I can't see that linked source, which is annoying, and that stink is slathered all over Bluesky in my head, ensuring that now I not only passively haven't been motivated to make an account yet, I am now actively repelled and probably never will. (This isn't a defense of xitter, I never had a twitter account either.)
That aside – I hope this response is perhaps a little bit hyperbolic? You came across a 403 and now that site has a "stink slathered" over it?
If this is sincere you'd probably evaporate from rage trying to read US news orgs from a European country.
I don't understand why you find that language hyperbolic. Yes, I find requiring an account to see a post to figuratively stink, as in, it makes me want to avoid. A choice to decline something is not rage, and I find it strange to try to paint it as such.
That corps can brick the device you paid for or block access to your media is an different matter.
The comparison should be "the library has plenty of copies of a book but does not allow anyone to borrow it, regardless of if they have a subscription. Someone takes it out, returns it". Is that stealing? It might be, IDK, but is certainly more complex than your example.
But "piracy", is it's meant here, is the first part: lending/taking without paying.
It's not meant as a blanket condemnation of piracy, and certainly not as support for subscription access, but as a counter-example against the headline: even if you don't own, piracy still can be stealing.
At least in Europe, a company can't just remove features from a device.
If a product doesn't do what you can reasonably expect, this is considered fraud and you can go back to the store and demand compensation.
Anecdotally I would observe that few people pirate games, movies, books, etc released by publishers with a record for respecting their consumer based - compared to piracy of media released by publishers that do things like revoking access to media you’ve paid for.
Anecdotally I've seen a lot of comments over the years from book authors whose books are sold completely DRM-free, as physical books and/or DRM-free PDFs, say that they are widely pirated.
There are a lot of people who will always find an excuse to pirate. Even if the ebook is inexpensive, DRM-free, in a completely open format everything can read, and the license allows everything that you can do with a physical book bought from a bookstore including lending it to others as long as only one person at a time has access, people will find some excuse for why they must pirate it, like "I wanted to buy 3 books that week, from 3 publishers, and it is too much hassle to have to enter my credit card number on 3 different web sites".
To be fair, he wasn't the one who figured it out, *many* production companies were/are doing this. You only hear about some because the actors spoke up, but most won't risk violating their NDA
Mods, merge in earlier discussion (Cory's stupid permalink scheme),
Piracy is the only way some games and TV shows are still available.
It's important to note that I'm not saying you need to own a car to live up to the American ideal, but you'd expect the freedom conscious American to demand rights, making them the true owners of their possessions. You'd expect the American to demand guaranteed access to transportation.
This guy has a lot of good points, but this is way over the line.
This was an interesting discussion 20 years ago, but none of this matters in five years. Creative content delivery became too cheap to meter with the Internet. We're entering the age of creative content generation becoming too cheap to meter.
TBH I would be ok with that. But - inexplicably - the pro-piracy people never are.
How about the videos of your personal sexy times on your phone?
Ah but wait! Money has value! No, money does not have value. Money is a special kind of resource-constrained IP with a unique protection mechanism and tightly controlled access rights. If it were possible to hack that system - and some people have done this - it's still just numbers with no more "value" than any other numbers.
Either you accept that ownership and access control are valid ways to manage access to resources, or you go full post-scarcity neo-communist and destroy the concept of ownership altogether.
Anything else is hypocrisy.
The fact that most IP is owned by terrible people and doesn't benefit the artists is a different argument. That's an argument against wealth capture, political inequality, and rentier capitalism - a much bigger issue with relevance across multiple domains.
The real tell is that this is only ever about creative and never expands into wider questions of ownership and resource control.
My suspicion is that non-creative people resent the apparent agency and freedom that creatives have, and this is always more about that resentment than some supposed question around IP.
Basically some guy who makes music is an easier target than CEO bro, and it's always easier to punch down than up.
Money requires scarcity, otherwise its utility goes down. En masse, money copying would bring about hyper inflation very quickly. Society loses.
On the other hand, what work of art requires scarcity to be enjoyed? Personal sexy videos don't count here, as that's a privacy matter not a scarcity issue.
I can see that argument working for the fashion industry for example: buying clothes from an exclusive designer has the value of making you look unique. If suddenly that outfit gets copied and everyone is wearing knockoffs, you no longer look unique.
However if someone pays to rent a movie, and someone else pirates it, none of the consumers lost. The copyright owner only loses if a sale would've otherwise happened.
So I think that outcomes matter according to specific scenarios, and showing damage should be essential in court cases. Too many innocents have their lives ruined by inflated piracy claims that truly caused little damage.
Even the darkest tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists don't suggest that Microsoft is going to hold my WMV-encoded home videos hostage. But you seem to be taking it even further, somehow tying it to the Media Center itself. Please explain.
Posted by: Chris Anderson"
to demonstrate how blind-sided or too naive or optimistic, a supposed technology-aware person can be.
> I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:
> > WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
Leaving it as ‘WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE. YOU WILL RENT, NOT OWN, ANYTHING YOU PURCHASE FOR IT.’ would be honest.
Ditto ‘enshittification,’ ditto particularly ‘most guillotineable executive,’ ditto ‘deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup.’ These are not the words of a mature adult making a mature point: they are the words of a performance artist. One’s opponents are human beings too.
Understandable? Also yes.
Don't forget defeating DRM for ethical purposes is a grey area. Maybe even illegal.
Example: those trains in Poland [referred in the article]. I think what the company did by contracting the hardware hackers to investigate (by RE) what was going on was illegal, and what they did was illegal too.
What if they hadn't? The company would have lost the support contract.
The law is out of sync with morals and what's better for society.
So, while not recommended, the tone is acceptable or, at least, understandable.
But people are convinced that these CEO types or high ranking MBA employees don’t look down on customers or employees as people but as numbers in excel.
So it is super hard to treat them as humans too.
"The device has great battery life, tactile controls, and a responsive UI. But the main way of getting music on the device is a proprietary 'media store' that lets you rent access to albums for some unknown time. Loading your music collection as standard mp3 or flac files is currently possible, but due to security vulnerabilities in the client software this option may disappear at any time the manufacturer wants to force you into the more profitable option. The MSRP is $200 but the expected TCO of this device will be upwards of $1200 or more assuming you want to listen to a modest 50 albums."
> Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).
https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kf...
but bro! that's immoral and you will suffer in hell!
nah bro, we're already in hell.
bro! them popos will catch your ass and put you in jail!
nah bro, if they don't know, it's not illegal.
Revoking or paywalling API access falls under this definition of enshittification.
The enlightenment* brought about human rights.
We are well within the digital age without any meaningful Digital Rights.
Adversarial interop should be one such digital right.
If you want to actually own an album, you do it like Martin Shkreli purchasing the album from Wu-Tang Clan. Pay 4 million dollars and it's all yours.
Useless discussions, honestly. It's like claiming that Walter White did not actually die on Breaking bad.
Is your argument solely based on "it is, therefore it should be", or is there more to it?
What I say is, if you don't like how Oppenheimer was funded, produced and then how they tried to collect money from you when you wanted to see it then you should fund and produce your own movie and distribute it the way you see fit. Upload it to YouTube, share a magnet link - whatever. Nothing stops you from not participating in the DRM stuff.
Content distribution has gotten worse overtime to the benefit of nobody but the richest people.
The real abuse from digital media sales is the seller maintaing the right to revoke access to the work arbitrarily.
Are you a corporate lawyer? Because this sentence really doesn't mean anything but can be made to mean a lot depending on the context you decide to frame it in.
Regardless of that, it highlights the fact that you haven actually read the article itself. Which I highly suggest as it does a good job of pointing out a big issue with how that framework currently works towards consumers.
The article is a ramble on the issues of implementation of the enforcement. Only if people would play along we wouldn't have ushers in the cinema, only if people would play along we wouldn't have cashiers but a box where people put the money in and take out the change.
Implementation of DRM etc. is quite low quality and is prone to issues. So? Those unhappy should simply avoid content made with that business model and framework of tools enforcing it.
The ad-supported model gained a lot of traction and people make a lot of DRM-free content that is distributed for free in exchange of editorial influence or distribution influence. Some even see great success in it, there are YouTube content producers who can afford to make content with considerable production value.
If you like what you get stick with it, if you don't - don't. Produce the stuff the way you think should be produced and distribute it the way you think should be distributed, no one is forcing you to use DRM or whatever. That's just a tool that you might choose to use in hope that people will agree to pay you this way.
Furthermore I still believe you haven't actually read the article. As you are heavily focused on what appears to be media content. Where the article touches on digital material in general like software.
In general the article does a good job of highlighting an issue the sort of framework that is widely prevelant.
Personally, I'm more concerned on fair use and the impact on the society when a product(media or software) is withheld geographically or produced with agenda beyond collecting direct payments. The fair use is more interesting one, when a digital product is widely successful it does have cultural impact on the society and IMHO it should become public domain at some point because the society becomes like a minefield for the other creatives.
I don't really care much about the tragedy of not being able to watch a movie years later after you paid as much as hamburger for it. It is not a real issue and you should have read the fineprint.
Geographic restrictions are very much driven by the same motivators that result in DRM and revokable content
You seek to make a distinction here that simply isn't there.
You missed the point. There is not supposed to be a "framework" when it comes to personal use. When you buy a CD, you can copy it to all of your personal devices, archive it, and listen to it unrestricted at any time, at any geographical location until the end of time. You can transcode it, remix it, or edit it for your personal enjoyment. You own your personal copy and you can do with it as you wish.
These are things that you're lawfully allowed to do with your licensed copy, if it wasn't for digital distribution and DRM which are now adding restrictions that can permanently revoke your rights to access the media at any time.
Unless you're in the UK, where as far as I've gathered there's no right for private format shifting, so ripping your own CDs is technically illegal. Or unless you're talking about books and live in Germany, because there books have been excepted from the right to full private copies beyond limited excerpts (unless it's an out-of-print work) and the law was never updated to deal with digital books, so technically I'm not allowed to keep multiple copies of the same digital book on the various different devices I own (plus their backups).
An analogy would be if I rent a car and someone takes it they haven't stolen from me but they have stolen from the rental company.
(Where 'steal' is strictly shorthand for copyright infringement, but that's a pretty meaningless semantic difference outside of a courtroom.)
If I told you I would give you X if you did Y for me, but after you did Y I refused to give you X, did I steal from you?
What if I told a prospective client of yours a lie about your abilities and they didn't hire you; did I steal from you?
It's not at all meaningless. If I take a photo of your house, I copy it, then I do not deny you full enjoyment of that house. If on the other hand I steal your house, I think you would feel a little more than a semantic difference.
Now, I might copy your house and build another from the same materials, which again is unlikely to feel to you like theft.
There are lots of other possible scenarios of course. Suppose you're the architect of the first house, you got paid, but not you're pissed off because you think you should get paid again despite having done no more work... but then it turns out people see both houses and they want a house in that style, so they come to and give you another few months of work. Do you complain about it being "theft" now?
It is meaningless, because pointing out the difference doesn't move the conversation forwards in any useful way. Everyone who's discussed piracy in the last 40 years knows what 'stealing' means in a copyright context, and everyone discussing the morality of copyright theft, such as this thread, rather than the legality of copyright theft, means stealing in the sense of 'taking something without paying for it' and not 'depriving the owner of something'.
While the armchair lawyers can't move on from the semantic moral (not legal, that's important) difference we won't get anywhere. If you're a supreme court judge it matters. If you're an internet poster it doesn't.
Plenty of people skip adverts who wouldn't go into a shop and take a BluRay, because they recognise a Categorical difference between copyright infringement and theft.
Media companies want to use brainwashing (adverts, news stories, statements from authority figures) to cause people to consider theft and copying as equivalent so that they can exploit creator's labour without themselves adding value.
I'm curious what you mean by this:
>armchair lawyers can't move on from the semantic moral (not legal, that's important) difference
It seems like you're suggesting there's no legal difference between the tort of copyright infringement and the crime of theft. Which, given your cogency elsewhere seems unlikely. So, what?
While the acts of stealing and copyright infringement are different for the victim, they're not different for the person doing committing the theft. That person gets something for nothing. I'm saying that's actually the important bit in the moral argument. The answer to the question of "Is it wrong to take something without paying for it?" shouldn't really be "That depends!"
Stealing is primarily about denying someone else access to/use of something. Copyright infringement does not do that, in general.
In your opinion it's it always wrong to 'take without paying'?
Land? Air? Food? ... Culture? Where do you draw your lines.
The better car analogy is if you steal a car from me, I no longer have a car, but if you take a detailed 3D scan or photo of my car, I still have it. Of course car analogies are terrible. A library book is better: if I borrow a book and don't give it back, nobody can borrow it again and the library needs to buy a new one (theft), but if I borrow it, make a photocopy and then return it, other people can also borrow it.
The only way you can make it sound like stealing is using the "lost sale" logic, but if the sale isn't guaranteed, it's still "less" than theft, and many studies have shown that the sale to a pirate isn't even close to guaranteed.
The peak pirating years for Australia (when per capita the country dominated the file share numbers) were when digital copies of games, music, films were being marked up at 25% to 50% over the (after currency conversion) sale prices in the US and EU.
After some years of unabated piracy the Australian prices dropped to match the rest of the world and piracy rates receded to just ticking over, sustained by the technical types that enjoyed the process as much if not more than the content.
Copyright infringement is a pushback counter pressure against eye gouging over zealous pricing.
Copyright infringement or counterfeiting, which is related in some jurisdictions when an unauthorised copy is made, isn't stealing in law because it does not pass that test. Hence your example completely misses the point.
DRM serves many purposes. It's just as much tamper detection as it is intentional control.
While I want protections for promises implicitly made by products, they are implicit promises.
In the end, it's a give and take.
We as users get a lot for our money. I'm rarely disappointed by most consumer products - and they tend to be surprisingly feature rich. I look around my house and do not see DRM tragedies but products I like and have enjoyed owning so far.
This article is a clickbait rant and I'm honestly sick of it.
Just like I would not bother to buy and use a bike lock if people would not steal bikes in the first place. It's a bad analogy though, like all analogies are, since if I sell my bike I can't make it stop working for the buyer at a later time. But that's the big difference between digital and physical.
I have been working on and off on anti-piracy measures for my Lunar app (https://lunar.fyi/) and as much as I want this to not affect normal users, the app can still stop working after a decade or two if the Paddle licensing server doesn't respond as I expect it for example, and I'm no longer around to fix it. This could be regarded as DRM by some.
But I would have never wasted time with this if people would not crack my app in the first place AND demand customer support and flood my dashboard with errors unrelated to the normal functioning of the app.
If piracy isn't stealing, then protecting against it isn't limiting ownership.
You are hugely, hugely wrong in the basic premise that actual reality of piracy is something that even comes close to reasoning for people who put these anti consumer practices in.
Use your brain - DRM allows them to increase profits even without piracy (by taking away consumer rights like second sale doctrine and ability to share content with your friends and family). You're seriously implying it's a bit of piracy that's making them say "yes, let's make sure everyone buys their own copy of the movie"? Do you think copyright protection laws were extended to 70 years+death of the authors because there were too many pirates copying Mickey movies?
Don't know about other content industry, but at least in video games, "a bit of" and "piracy" are oxymoron. Any semi-popular game has a significant number of pirated copy players.
Example: World of Goo claims 90% of players play pirated copies.[1] This is a game distributed without DRM and the price isn't high ($15 and region-based). 90% piracy rate is how customers respond to no DRM.
Did they account for dynamic IPs? If not that number is way off.
(Similarly how being able to share a BluRay with your family doesn't lose the content industry N sales of discs.)
This issue is a lot more nuanced than reading some skewed stats and declaring that it's a problem.
The core issue is that this is a hugely emotional issue - the content industry (and artists of course) are constantly playing the "oh poor us, everyone is stealing, those criminals!" note to make pirates look bad... while in the same sentence establishing outright abusive DRM practices and trying to extract maximum money of every single shmuck that actually bought their content legally.
DRM has a massive negative effect on legitimate consumers - instead of quoting "90% piracy that", instead think about just how much of that piracy ACTUALLY hurts anyone and how much the attempt to fight it ACTUALLY hurts people who legitimately pay for their content and hardware.
<large number>% of copies are pirated, but only <tiny number>% of players pirate, it is simply that (some of) those that do pirate will tend to pirate a whole lot more games. Meaning that that 90% piracy rate means e.g. 5% lost sales.
And if you follow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 then 90% piracy rate could also mean 5% extra sales.
I'm happy to provide such discounts when people don't have the means to pay the whole price. I didn't build the app to get rich, I built it to help people get control of their monitor brightness, and I'm working towards that goal.
But I do have a license verification for the Pro features (https://lunar.fyi/#pro), and that is what people are cracking in the app. I only added more protection around this verification.
That's not why your analogy is wrong, especially because some connected electric bikes allow that just like smartphones do. Here is a rewriting that explains why you analogy is actually (very) wrong: "It's a really bad analogy though, since if someone steals my bike, I don't have it anymore, while “stealing” in the digital world consists in making a copy. But that's the big difference between digital and physical."
But that's the entire thing the article is about: That suddenly in the digital space, it seems to be not just normal but expected that vendors maintain control over a product even if it's sold.
> This could be regarded as DRM by some.
Indeed it is, and it shows the problems with that approach: As you say, even with the best of intentions, you can't guarantee that the DRM will only shut out illegitimate users: It might also deactivate legitimately bought apps if the licensing server has an issue or if at some point you don't have the resources to run it any longer. That makes a DRM-enabled digital product strictly worse than an analog one.
And that's if you're one of the good guys and don't get into any third party contract disputes, don't do any shady deals with user data and don't go crazy with subscriptions.
> But I would have never wasted time with this if people would not crack my app in the first place AND demand customer support and flood my dashboard with errors unrelated to the normal functioning of the app.
That sounds a bit like "I wouldn't have to put up this fence if people didn't keep jumping over it". What about permitting free usage but restricting support to paying customers?
> What about permitting free usage but restricting support to paying customers?
Restricting support is what I tried first, but it takes too much time and effort. Email is slow since I'm very often in a different timezone than the buyer. So increasing the back and forth messages for asking for the license, and then me having to go to a non-mobile friendly site to verify that license made the support emails pile up so much that I got burnt out in less than two weeks.
Asking for the license also upsets people that are already angry because they think my app bricked their monitor or something along those lines.
use an online support tool that can only be accessed by people who have a license. possibly use a tool to verify the license before they can even contact you.
everyone else can post issues on github.
also, do you track names and email addresses of those who bought a license? then you can match up requests and reduce the amount of license verification that you need to do.