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Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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)

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.

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