So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...
Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching.
Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods.
There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.
Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...
Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity.
You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B.
This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.
People commonly use "steal" to refer to someone making a copy of data they are not authorized to have. Even you have used it that way: "I know my credit card company allows me to set a password to prevent unauthorized access from someone who might have stolen this kind of data" [1].
Regardless of the linguistic semantics, the campaign to conflate piracy and stealing was a manipulative mind game that tried to dissuade people from a common activity by overstating its harms. Pirating a movie is victimless, except for aggregated market effects where too much piracy can impact the financial viability of film production. It's very different than stealing, which has a discrete victim.
If you download a movie or a game without authorization, that's a societal no-op, unless it's a thing you would have paid money for. At scale, pirates do include people who would have paid, which is problematic for the film business. That's bad and worth solving, but it's not the same as stealing.
OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.
At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.
It's basically a subscription.
We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.
Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.
First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you).
You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection.
The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...
I'd actually rather this than the million dollar settlements for torrenting Germans and Americans have. We have "Notice and Notice", which basically means the ISP sends us a letter with very little legal heft to it.
I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure there is more to this definition.
Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case.
Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.
The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays.
But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.
I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished.
> It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it.
It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations!
In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.