They get the same amount of residuals if someone doesn't watch something or if they pirate it. Is it immoral to not watch something that gives someone residuals? Do you owe them residuals just because they made something?
That doesn’t make the actions equivalent.
And in OP’s case, it certainly doesn’t given him any moral authority to speak for the plight of the artists.
I’d be curious if he’s spoken to any of these artists, on the best way to support them. Somehow I doubt most of them will be appreciative of the moral stand the OP is taking here.
Someone dying of natural causes and someone being murdered both end up with the person dying, that does not mean they're the same thing.
If renting DVDs or watching a movie at a friend's house doesn't magically rob artists of residuals, then neither does piracy. In each case I am not purchasing a movie yet I am able to watch it.
This is just a roundabout way of excusing stealing. If the creator of something says “if you want to view my work, you must pay me a dollar”, then yes it is stealing (immoral) if you view it without paying. The context around it as to whether you would’ve watched it anyway is irrelevant.
Apply the same logic to literally any other item and your argument falls apart (I wouldn’t have bought that chocolate bar anyway so they’re not really losing money from me)
With a chocolate bar there is a physical good that could have been sold to someone else, but instead a new one needs to be produced to sell to someone else. This isn’t the case with digital files.
In terms of "when" it's stolen re downloading vs watching, I would say when you download it personally as you now have access to the content without paying.
Not quite. It's not stealing unless they are deprived of the original item (this is not to be confused with the money they think it is worth if they sell it or "sell" it). What is happening is copying, not stealing.
A: "Not giving someone money for an item/produced good"
B: "Not giving someone money"
B can apply to a near infinite number of cases. A is one case that is "within" B. So... the root meaning is the same. If you call A stealing, you have to call B stealing, but that's ridiculous because, for example, each day, I literally don't give money to the entire world. According to your logic I would owe the whole world population the value of every item/produced good.
* It’s definitely not stealing in the legal sense of the term, which requires a party to be deprived of physical property that they own.
* It’s also not in the colloquial sense of the term, because if you call this stealing you’d also have apply the stealing label to blocking ads/trackers on the web, taking advantage of free trials for services without any intent of becoming a subscriber, or countless other activities that could be considered “depriving someone of revenue.”
In the US, we do in fact have a legal term for the crime at play here — but the term is copyright infringement, not “stealing” or “IP theft” or whatever other stupid label the content cartels want to apply to it.
Yes that is quite literally also depriving them of revenue, and quite possibly their only source of revenue if they're a free website/app.
>taking advantage of free trials for services without any intent of becoming a subscriber
Yeah no, it's in the name...FREE TRIAL. It's literally given out for free.
>content cartels
Yes how dare companies/people want to get paid for their creative works, must be a cartel.
I think I made an error here by assuming that every reader of Hacker News would be at least somewhat pro-adblocking.
So since you appear not to be, let me ask you:
* Do you use any ad blocker at all? If yes, can you define precisely when ad blocking is stealing and when it is not?
* If I visit a random website with ads, and I don't have an adblocker, the ads on that site may be used to track me across other sites, build a profile of me to sell to data brokers, serve me malware, bog down my system resources with audio, video, crypto-miners, and other garbage, or a myriad of other undesirable things. Would you consider any of these things to be the website (or the ad network) stealing from me? At what point, if any, does the website's right to extract revenue from me end and my right to privacy/security begin?
No
With your second question:
Tracking - Tracking isn't stealing, that's a privacy question.
Building a Profile - I mean not stealing but also vague so not sure what's the point of trying to argue this one? Like if you keep going with this line of thinking you end up with "you looked at me funny which made me feel weird so you're stealing by stealing my joy". (Absurd example but trying to show how abstract arguments don't end up working) Then we would probably loop back to fallacy of composition.
Malware - Serving malware is a criminal act and you can block it, but you're also not usually going to CNN.com and expecting them to download a crypto miner on your hardware. You are, however, expecting advertisements, hence why you're using an adblocker.
Bogging down your resources/other garbage - I mean idk, case by case basis.
You keep trying to paint with broad strokes but that's not how these things usually work. In my original example, it works because it's a simple transaction the artist wanted. Pay me 1$ for my art and you can view it. They created it privately with the intent of selling, and by downloading it for free, you're breaking that intent and depriving them of potential revenue.
I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just about any site in existence. So that is actually the primary reason why I use adblockers, and blocking the visual noise is just a nice side effect.
How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker? AFAIK there's no way for me to know ahead of time when and on what site malware will be served.
I'm sorry if you think I'm painting in strokes that are too broad -- I'm trying to understand your viewpoint here. I would also like to be clear that I do think copyright infringement is a thing, and in your example of "pay me $1 and you can view my art," viewing the work and not paying is ethically dubious and probably could be considered copyright infringement in most jurisdictions. I just vehemently object to it being called "stealing" as you've done here.
I would love to see a source of a large company like CNN knowingly serving malware in the guise of ads. I've never heard of that but I'm all ears; I feel like it would be big news if CNN knowingly put a crypto miner on your device.
> How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker?
I don't know but also now you're committing a fallacy known as "Irrelevant conclusion". Yes, there's a genuine question on how you can block malware without depriving website owners of their ad revenue, however it's irrelevant to the original argument of whether blocking ads is stealing (which we've somehow come to from a piracy argument but whatever). The argument becomes "Is blocking ads stealing when some of them give me malware", but that's separate from "Is blocking ads stealing".
Alternatively you might be trying to argue "but I block ads because some of them give me malware" which can be an appeal to pity[2], but I don't think you're trying to go that far.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrelevant_conclusion [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_pity
How about this: I didn't use the word "knowingly" anywhere in my statement, and in fact I have no earthly idea whether the countless examples [1][2][3][4] of malware being served via ad networks on major websites was done knowingly. My guess is it wasn't?
So you've got the beginnings of a straw man fallacy here, questioning an argument that I never actually made.
If you'd like to learn more about why malware shows up on cross-site ad networks, there's a good quick read available at [5].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550808
[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...
[3] https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/01/18/google-ads-increa...
[4] https://blog.fox-it.com/2014/01/03/malicious-advertisements-...
[5] https://theconversation.com/why-bad-ads-appear-on-good-websi...
Ad hominem
We have to ban accounts that do this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, that would be good.
If you run a store, and a customer shows interest in a product and physically touches it is he/she stealing if she chooses not to buy it? Let's say it's perfume, and the customer samples some of the perfume, then decides not to buy it. The customer has experienced it; if the customer doesn't buy the perfume, is that stealing?
(It’s not stealing any thing at all)
Okay, now pay up. If you don’t, you’re stealing from me.
> Please take a logic class before you commit a really basic fallacy.
Agreed.
Work on the chocolate bar analogy some more, especially the part about how it's still there after digital video pirates steal it.
It's interesting that people devalue a good just because it's digital on a tech focused website named HackerNews lol.
The rest of your argument notwithstanding, that's because stealing chocolate bars is zero sum, whereas copying films is not.