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Comment by elmerfud | Hacker News Reader

If buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing.

This is fun to say, but the problem with it is that unauthorized copying never was stealing.

Depends on the definition of "stealing" and whether you consider intellectual property to be private property. Private property is a social construct and it seems you've subjectively decided to exclude intellectual property from your definition of private property. That's fine but realize that this decision is a subjective one. It is no more or less absurd that I can "own" a collection of atoms as it is that I can "own" an arrangement of bits. They are both absurd notions. But we subscribe to these ideas because they are useful.

IP is certainly private property under the laws of pretty much every developed nation. But infringement of IP rights is not “stealing” under any laws I’m aware of.

If I (unauthorized) take the AutoCAD design files of something, say a next-gen semiconductor, is it theft? The law would say yes. This guy went to prison for it.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-engineer-sentenced...

Of course if you just make a best effort to immitate the design of something, say a new Ferrari, you might get a lawsuit but won't go to prison. Just like immitating a piece of music, you won't go to jail, it'll be hashed out in the civil courts.

Ok, valid point. Trade secret misappropriation is called theft sometimes.

I was thinking more of patents, copyrights, and trademarks.

I think, in a legal term it has to be physical property. That is what the commenter is referring to.

And training LLMs on material one does not own is not stealing either, apparently :-).

Even if it was buying, piracy would be misappropriation at best.

Those are empty words and intentionally obtuse words. It obviously depends on what you are buying.

I agree ideologically but intellectually this isn’t true. A movie ticket is a license to watch the movie. If you sneak in, would anyone say that’s legal? Piracy is the same thing. Buying a video game these days is a contract for a license to use the game. I hate it, but that’s the legal aspect

For what it’s worth, theaters see it slightly differently. A movie ticket is rental of a seat in the theater.

Your focusing on the unimportant aspect though, the discussion is about the licensing for watching the movie.

No. You're missing the point that that is not what you are paying for when you purchase a movie ticket. You are renting the seat in the theatre.

The theater is absolutely passing on movie licensing costs onto its customers

> intellectually

intellectually piracy is still not stealing

it's causing hypothetical financial damages

I say hypothetical because they are actually only there if you would have bought the game/sub/etc. if you couldn't have pirated the game. But in many case that's not the case (and in many others it is). Most commonly the actual damages are much smaller then whatever companies get away with claiming they are. And there had been studies showing that for some games piracy actually increased their sells long term. Through definitely not all games.

Anyway causing financial damages != stealing, mainly on a per-case basis financial damages from actual stealing tend to hugely outweighs the ones from piracy.

You seem to really be splitting hairs here.

not at all

it's a huge difference when you consider how it will affect how people see and what people think is okay to prevent privacy (people including law makers and judges)

That’s not a good argument because what if you stole something from a store ALL the way in the back covered in dust that literally no one even knew about. Would you say that’s not theft because it’s not a loss of value?

Your analogy falls down because the act of taking a physical good deprives the current owner of that good without recompense. That is the definition of stealing.

Software and digital content piracy does not deprive any other owner of anything else, this is isn't stealing in the legal sense. It may be financial harm or copyright abuse but those are both separate crimes from theft.

Piracy isn't legal, but it isn't theft either.

If you could do piracy to my car, but my car would still be in my garage, I would be perfectly happy with it.

The issue is that if piracy were legal, the financial damage would become very real. Therefore it has to be made illegal. The fact that it’s not technically stealing is a side issue.

It's very much not a side issue, it's powerful players completely warping the discussion by abusing their power in order to emotionally load their argument.

If consumers framed subscription services as literally rape that wouldn't be a side issue either.

Yeah, we’ve had this discussion for at least 30 years now. I don’t buy it, because everyone ought to know that piracy can’t be made legal without killing much of the products. All that’d be left would be Kickstarter- and Patreon-style projects.

I'm sorry but no, "We" as in "Us in society" haven't had this discussion, in fact literal billions have been spent towards preventing this discussion from happening.

I'm not saying that every piece of data should be free to sell and distribute always, but the current state of intellectual property and DRM is nothing sort of a disgrace.

I agree that piracy being legal would be an issue (in general, in specific cases it probably should be legal).

But a major question is what is acceptable (practically, legally) to prevent piracy.

And by framing piracy as stealing it is much easier to convince law maker and the general public that very much not reasonable solutions are acceptable.

So that it's not technically stealing is really important for proper law making.

> intellectually piracy is still not stealing

Piracy is a clear and self-evident moral good irrespective of how close or not it is to stealing. Justifying piracy based on wordplay opens you up to attack by people and organizations that like to destroy what is good through manipulative wordplay.

While this is true, it is also true that the counter-party, the ones who sell games, use an equivalent wordplay, "buy", "own" to cause moral havoc.

There is this thing called civil disobedience as a tool to keep fairness in check. This might a justification of piracy.

>it's causing hypothetical financial damages

A corporation predicted huge increase in profits the next year, but didn't achieve it, so they blamed piracy for it and pressured governments to stricken punishment for piracy. A corporation felt entitled to money they didn't get and felt as a result vicitimised.

Nobody has ever been sued for copyright infringement for failing to buy a ticket.

A movie ticket is a one-time permission to watch the movie in that particular place and time - it has nothing to do with licensing.

I would think the analogy is more akin to Netflix vs owning a copy of a movie. In many cases, consumers have a choice. They can spend a bit more and always have access to a copy of a movie that they own or they could hope that it’s available on one of their streaming services (the availability being beyond the control of the consumer and subject to arbitrary decisions). This is setting aside the fact that subscription-based access almost always requires an Internet connection and DRM protections which can be viewed as an invasion of privacy.

That would be trespassing, but is it actually illegal to experience license content or just to copy/share it? If I'm in a bar and they are playing illegal streams of movies are we all commiting crimes or just the bar owner?

I bought a Ubisoft game, and got to play zero times (it won't run). I can't get a refund.

Is it legal to sneak into the movie after buying the ticket and being refused admittance without cause? Probably not.

Would a jury convict? Probably not.

Piracy is only immoral if you consider the state should prevent people from reusing everyone’s copyable work, and protect the companies for it. It’s a ridiculously difficult task which is ridiculously costly to maintain, at the expense of taxpayers.

If you consider that the state shouldn’t intervene, or shouldn’t intervene in this way, then it’s not immoral. For example, the state could say “DRM and if anyone can break the DRM, they’re free to use the game” or it could say “Any software becomes open-source after 20 years” (which, at least, would have the benefit of being useful). Same goes for songs or other artistic work, it will be much less monetizable but maybe it will restore the “art” part in “art”.

There’s a popular view that piracy is not theft. But in UK law at least (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/crossheading/de...), although copyright infringement is a separate offence, it kind of is theft too, arguably. It would be interesting to know to what extent that’s been tested, here and elsewhere.

Well, all the laws they could buy, that surely will stop a movement named after lawless ship thieves and brigands.

There is no evidence that it harms sales, as the EU found out after spending over €300,000. Actually, it leads more towards the idea that overpricing hurts legal consumption far more. And lost sales are not theft anyway, neither is copying a file.

https://torrentfreak.com/eu-piracy-report-suppression-raises...

by definition it isn't theft because you haven't deprived the owner of the original

> It would be interesting to know to what extent that’s been tested, here and elsewhere.

it would never even get that far in the UK court

If I stole Coca Cola's recipe, or the design files for the new Nvidia chip, it wouldn't be theft then? Because they still have the original, they've not been deprived of it.

I think it would be theft and I think a jury would agree.

> If I stole Coca Cola's recipe, or the design files for the new Nvidia chip, it wouldn't be theft then? Because they still have the original, they've not been deprived of it.

correct, it's not theft because it doesn't meet the definition of theft under the Theft Act

this is not difficult to understand, it's spelt in crystal clear unambiguous language in the GPs post

> I think it would be theft and I think a jury would agree.

you can think whatever you want, but it would never reach the point of a jury because the police wouldn't charge for theft and the CPS wouldn't prosecute for it either

because it isn't theft

now if you compromised a computer system to get those chip designs they might try under the Computer Misuse Act, but that's a different offence and not theft

> If I stole Coca Cola's recipe, or the design files for the new Nvidia chip, it wouldn't be theft then?

If i steal something its theft tautologically. If i break into the coca cola vault and take a the physical copy of the recipe that is theft. If i hack into the coca cola IT infrastructure and copy a file that contains the recipe without deleting it, then it is not necessarily theft depending on jurisdiction.

No, I will have to strongly disagree. Years worth of effort for hundreds of people go into a AAA Game, just like a blockbuster movie. The agreement then is, you pay somehow for the right to consume their effort. You pay directly to the game, or you pay a subscription service that then distributes its pot to the game according to their agreement, but you have to pay. That’s the social agreement. If you don’t, then you’re breaking the social agreement and you’re stealing, there’s really no justification for it.

Let’s say you somehow find that you pirating does not matter in the grand scheme of things, or might indirectly increase sales. It still does not matter. You are a part of an agreement that you should honor, not break, they didn’t hire you to market the game or to improve their sales.

Personally when I was a teen, I used to pirate games because my parents did not buy me any. Then I became a software developer. Now I can only sympathize for piracy if it’s for educational resources that uplifts you, kind of like Sci-hub. For games/ movies you need to think, do you deserve to consume years worth of effort that they put into it? Do you deserve to be entertained by their effort? In my eyes you only do if they willingly give it to you, which only ever happens if you buy or subscribe to a game.

Then call it what it is: A lease or rent.

While I also disagree with the 'memefied' version of the quote, the publishers where first to break the social contract, when they removed stuff from libraries which where 'bought'.

The wording in the stores is 'buy' not 'rent'.

yes they have some clauses in the 20 pages long AGBs, which makes it legally ok, but imho it's still a break of the (social) contract.

So, if I 'buy' product A on platform Z and it gets removed without any money returned and they expect me to 'buy' it again on platform Y, I wouldn't have any issues pirating product A

Or if I bought product B v 3.0 with an unlimited licence and they suddently stop the licence server tell me I can't use B 3.0 anymore but I can get B 5.0 as a subscripton, I'd be mad as hell.

I personally have issues where the publishers suddenly alters the deal afterwards. (and tell you that you should be happy they don't alter it further...)

Those hundreds of people do not get commission.

"Personally when I was a teen, I used to pirate games because my parents did not buy me any. Then I became a software developer."

When you're in an unfair situation, you are willing to break the rules to your benefit. But when you have wealth, suddenly only the wealthy "deserve" to be entertained, and all the poors need to know their place and follow the rules which disadvantage them.

The justification is that there is no social agreement. It's quite clear that the direction is moving away from even the possibility of ownership, and because of obscure reasons you don't care about, the original often becomes unavailable (e.g. music in a game or show being removed, or some aspect being censored, or the controlling entity loses interest in old material, or people lose track of who even holds rights). The law has been corrupted to last so long that if you wanted to share parts of your childhood with your descendants, you'd have to go through gatekeepers until your great great great grandchildren (i.e. never).

No one agreed to that any more than they agreed not to use marijuana. They were born into a world where others use violence to coerce them. As a software developer, I'd be quite happy if the law required all source to be put in escrow to receive copyright and then released into the public domain after 10-15 years, along with bans on technological measures to prevent people from modifying software. Likewise with putting masters in escrow for sound/video. Maybe even give them a full generation of protection (~25 years) since their work doesn't become obsolete and unusable like software. But the important thing is to receive a monopoly from society, you should need to give something as your part of the trade (e.g. source materials for the next generation to be able to use and add their own flavor to), and the goal should be to create cultural wealth for future generations, not to keep it from them. We can trade our rights to enable that, but not theirs; our children's rights are not ours to trade. Given that things are so one-sided, I can't imagine begrudging people at all for ignoring the "agreement".

Here's my two cents, not directed towards you, but to the discussion in general.

If someone wants to lease a product to you, and you would rather they sell it, that doesn't give you the right to pirate it. When the only way to buy a thing is to "buy" a misleading lease, piracy becomes more "permissible", as in people will blame you less for pirating it, but that doesn't make it morally good.

It's obviously a bad thing for the publisher to make it seem like you're buying something, then pull the rug out from under you. It's extremely misleading, maybe it should be illegal. It's definitely a bad thing, even if it's all technically there in the fine print that nobody reads. Pirating the thing in response to this is a situation where two wrongs don't make a right. It's debatable, sure, but it's morally gray at best.

No matter how you slice it, you're still depriving the creators/publishers/etc of the money they ask for in return for the thing you want. Maybe you don't like the publisher, maybe you think the platform is evil, but you are still taking what doesn't belong to you.

A big reason it's bad is the plain ol' categorical imperative. If everyone did it, there would be no more music, movies, games, etc, because the people making them wouldn't get paid. That's true regardless of how the thing is sold.

If you don't like how they're selling it, boycott it. That's fine. It's not like we're talking about essential goods like shelter or food. Most of the time, the discussion is around entertainment.

TL;DR Pirating is morally gray at best, but it is not 100% morally good, and I wish people would be honest about that.

The idea that there would be no more creative works without copyright is pretty obviously false for music (so many people enjoy making music that the only way it could disappear is if we evolve to no longer have ears, and even then it will probably exist in the form of deep bass that you can feel), and most likely false even for things like movies and video games. It may be the case that high budget works become extremely rare, but things like short films would continue to exist, and the existence of things like Spring or various total conversion mods show that even video games would continue. It is definitely false for things like business software, where people will pay for professional services to make their business more efficient.

On the other hand, there are plenty of interesting creative works (e.g. mashups) that are illegal today, and obviously they're being made without monetization. With new tools we even have people making things like Plankton from Spongebob singing Tool songs[0]. There would still be plenty of creativity in the world without copyright.

It's not obvious that we should prioritize the ability to easily fund high budget works over the ability of people to freely share their remixes and mashups, for example.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14yO95OVsLE

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