Should tech companies everywhere take a militant stand re: piracy?
The ethics of piracy have been discussed, with some coming down on the side that it's indefensible, and others coming down on the side that artists make their money via ticket sales/merch/donations, that sharing of culture should be a right, that the price of music is too expensive, etc.
I happen to mostly be in that latter group, but as we all know, the various industries in whose interest it is to keep old business models going wield incredible influence and will slaughter us with lawsuits. In the age of the internet, with information being instantly transmittable from pole to pole, is it time we collectively stood up and laugh at these ridiculous demands they have? How much clout can you really have? They can't arrest everyone. AFAIK, this is what Pirate Bay does. They just don't tolerate the intimidation.
The piracy debate seems pretty settled to me.
Fighting it with the law is unenforceable and costs a fortune. There's no solution within the law.
There's only one way to beat it - convenience and fair pricing. I thought Steam proved that pretty conclusively when they entered the Russian market (famous for game piracy) and managed to beat that piracy into submission almost overnight.
I think of piracy as a lever to put pressure on businesses to take their customers into account, and provide a service that beats the piracy model. How many films would you pirate if your theater ticket was also a rebate on the DVD, for example? It seems to me the major issue is that a lot of businesses dealing in content are dead set on maintaining a monopolistic lock on their products, and squeezing every last cent out of their customers.
This is pretty spot on to how I feel.
I used to pirate games regularly, but Steam changed that. Convenience was worth the price for me.
I’m waiting for the same thing for movies now. Give me the option to download movies in 4K, non-DRM formats that I can add to my Plex server, and I’ll gladly pay for them. Until then, I keep flying the black flag.
Same here, I'm using Steam regularly. It's tough to beat the one-click install convenience. I used to auto-download gigabytes of mp3s from usenet every day, just to be exposed to new music. Now I've got something like 99.8% of all the music in the world at my fingertips thanks to Spotify. I haven't pirated a game or a song since those services appeared, and I'm quite happy to pay for them.
The only thing I still pirate actively is television. I refuse to watch ads, so cable is out. That means if I hear about a show I like, I siphon it off of torrents. It's never been easier. Frankly, movies are shit lately in general so I'm more likely to wait for a blu-ray rip than I am to see it in the theater (and theaters seem to be dying, except the groovy art house / draft house variety). If there was a draft house cinema like The Alamo near me, I'd probably see a lot more movies in the theater, at least once a month.
If the show's good, once it's done the box set will end up on my shelf next to the 2200 other movies and show boxes already sitting there. I don't even bother to open them because the rips I downloaded years ago are as good as anything I could make from them myself, but I do it to support the projects I think deserve it. I only buy like 10% of the shows I watch, though. I'm not paying for popcorn like NCIS or Blacklist or Preacher even if I don't mind their brand of mindless entertainment once in a while. I will pay for Breaking Bad, Trek, Thrones, The Wire, etc.
I've been refusing to buy vinyl, because I know the second I start down that rabbit hole I'm never coming back. Instead I make sure to see the bands I like any time they are ever near me. I'll buy their albums on Bandcamp too after sampling on Spotify, if it's something I know I'm going to listen to on a semi-regular basis.
If I had high speed internet I'd be paying for Netflix for sure. Once they own all media and become the television / cinema equivalent of what Steam and Spotify are, I'll probably stop pirating television... until they start showing ads. The instant advertising shows up, I'm out, and I'm not the least bit guilty pirating if that happens. I despise all forms of advertising and look at that entire industry as one of humanity's chief ills.
Being pragmatic, I think this. The current models, especially anything with ads, is archaic.
Personally I also try to support things I believe in, so I prefer to donate directly to the artists when I can, and check out independent music/movies.
If there were no laws regarding piracy, with nothing holding it back couldn't it be made just as convenient as the "legitimate" alternatives?
You mean this convenient? I'd say it already is.
I think you're absolutely right. People usually have no issue paying a reasonable price for convenience and peace of mind.
I rarely ever pirate media any more, with spotify and the plethora og entertainment streaming services out there at reasonable prices, I just don't see the need to. Admittedly I download things that I can't find anywhere else (online and/or reasonably priced) which often can't be found due to where I'm located.
What concerns me about spotify and netflix is the DRM and the tracking. They collect information from customer devices which is unnecessary to the delivery of the content. It goes beyond reasonable data aggregation for diagnostics and service improvement.
I think one thing that helped steam kill game piracy is that pirating games is risky, much more so than music and movies. I've pirated movies and music before, but never games. For one, as you said, steam is priced fairly and convenient, but Spotify arguably is as well.
The key difference, in my opinion, is that a .mp3 will never damage my computer or sell my data, while an .exe can.
This is honestly probably the best defensive for piracy I've encountered. Thanks for posting.
That's a commendable perspective. <3
Even apart from moral concerns, there's a very practical issue here. If you don't pay artists for their art, how will they be able to make more of it? Note: by "artist", I'm including anyone who produces art, from literature and painting to music and film. Pirating applies to copying books and pictures just as much as it does to songs and movies.
So, if a writer or a painter or a musician or an actor can't earn money from the art they produce and which you consume, how are they supposed to support themselves? We don't live in the utopian post-scarcity world of Star Trek, where people get food and clothes out of magical machines and noone uses money. Here and now, people need money to survive. So these unpaid artists have to get day jobs answering phones in a call centre or night jobs waiting tables in a restaurant. That then reduces the amount of time and energy they have available to produce the art that you like. By not paying for their art, you're hurting yourself by reducing the future amount of art available for you to enjoy.
These people are working to provide you with entertainment but you refuse to pay them for that entertainment, so they'll be forced to produce less of it.
EDIT: I just realised I didn't actually answer your central question. In case it's not obvious from the preceding rant: "Yes, tech companies should take a militant stand regarding privacy."
There's a massive industry of middlemen in the entertainment industry. Publishers, publicists, ad-men. It used to make a lot of sense, since the music part of making an album was a pretty small part of it. Pressing albums, logistics and distribution, advertising your album in each region in print and on the radio, making sure the right stock levels were at each store, etc etc etc. Now a lot of that's redundant. Anyone can press as many mp3s as they want for free, and distribute them anywhere in the world instantly. Whole floors of buildings are suddenly not needed, yet the customers still pay the same amount for the media. Itunes takes a 30% cut, but that's far less than the 95-99% cut the record labels used to take.
We're not in a post-scarcity star trek utopia yet, but we do have a song replicator. An artist selling their CD directly can now sell an order of magnitude fewer copies to make the same amount of money. They can also find other revenue streams like patreon, where some artists are making many tens of thousands of dollars per month from their fans directly by skipping a few layers of middlemen.
But shouldn't these people still be paid if this is the model the artist chose to use?
Edit: spelling
For a physical copy? Sure. For a digital copy, what exactly did these people contribute?
Why is a physical copy different from the digital, subtracting the copying to, shipping and handling of the physical medium? For a book, should the editor only be paid if a physical copy is sold? Isn't their contribution the same whether it's physical or digital?
Well those people still contributed so they should be compensated. I was thinking more about the companies responsible for manufacture and distribution of the physical mediums.
I get it. My particular area of interest is books, rather than music, and I'm amazed that the price of e-books is not significantly cheaper than printed books. However, I still don't think it's appropriate for me to find a pirated copy of an e-book and deprive the writer of their income, even if the middlemen all take a cut along the way.
I'm also aware that some self-published literature is awful, due to the lack of some of those middlemen who polish up the raw material into a sparkling gem.
That might work for the people who say they pirate art because the price is too high, but what about the "information should be free" types who believe that all art should be free on principle?
How do you feel about cases in which the author/content-creator is deceased and no longer can be paid for the work they produced?
The works of Herbert and Tolkien are now managed by legal entities, for example.
Sir/Dr/Ms/Mr/Mrs(del as aprops) Asimov answered this lower down, they believe in term limits of the authors lifetime & not inheritable.
Just plain simple "Mr" is fine. :)
Mr Asimov ~186 Esq. ? (You can tell he's just a busybody as he's not ~184 ;)
I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
Is it strange that I'd much rather pay for a physical book than an ebook, especially at those prices? That's one digital format that never really hooked me. I like the pages, the smell, maybe because I spent months of every year in a library from the age of five up until I graduated from college. I used to cash my allowance out at Waldenbooks every week. If the prices are that close, I'll take a paperback, thanks. Keep the kindle.
I prefer physical books, too. However, I already have too many physical books! I don't have enough space for all the bookshelves, and I hate lugging them around when I have to move house.
I need to buy fewer physical books, and replace some of my existing physical books with e-books. There will always be a place in my life for print books, but I need to reduce their numbers. :(
I can relate. I had seven large-size boxes of books the last time I moved. That was brutal.
The only ones I bothered to unpack were the two full of tabletop roleplaying books. The rest are sitting in the storeroom propping up a ton of other shit I could probably stand to throw away.
Having moved on average once per year in my 20s I have the opposite feeling, I much prefer an electronic book because I used to pack a couple hundred pounds of books around with me and it was never fun. In fact I donated all my books to the library and converted them to digital copies (I pirated them because I don't believe is unethical). The gouging about the price is often a bummer and I might skip a book for a long time until the price comes down to what's reasonable for a digital copy.
The only physical media I keep around anymore is vinyl but that's because I inherited a huge collection after I had made my move to a home I intended to stick around for the long haul. I purchase new vinyl only if they include a digital download though.
While I agree that the prevalence of digital media has made much of the past music industry irrelevant, we are well into the digital era by now, and even as streaming makes up the bulk of music consumption artists continue to sign to labels. Most widely publicized "independent artists" are already-succesful musicians who make deals directly with service providers like Apple; popular music (read: money-making music) is still generally produced with the benefits of a label. The market is shifting and has been shifting for years, but it still seems that labels provide a real benefit in handling distribution and advertising, and they need to be paid just as much as the artist. Furthermore, you as a consumer have no way of knowing exactly who is benefiting from residuals; a producer, for example, might be receiving half a percent and lose out on money every time someone pirates music and justifies it by saying "they'll go to a show."
If an artist wants to receive the lion's share of profit, there are a multitude of options available ranging from bandcamp to distrokid, and if they're choosing to sign to a label it's because they see a benefit to it. I'm not claiming that labels are some sort of misunderstood underdog or anything, and I'm in favor of self-publishing, but I strongly dislike the common sentiment that it's acceptable to pay nobody but the person who's name is on the cover of the album and claim moral superiority at the same time.
I hear this all the time, but have you considered why people who pirate, actually pirate?
Studies have repeatedly shown that pirates actually purchase stuff they pirate. In fact, many studies have shown that pirates purchase products they pirate at a higher rate than those who do not pirate.
I see it like this - there are two camps of people who pirate.
Camp A, which consists of the vast majority, are people who purchase products all the time but are not satisfied with the means through which they can purchase products. This may be because the product is completely unavailable in their country. This may be because the product is available, but they want to sample it first before purchasing because they are concerned about the quality, are unsure whether they want it, or some other reason and do not have access to a trial version or enough information about the product.
Camp B are the pirates who do not have the economic means to purchase the product, or simply do not want to pay for the product. I'm not sure how many fall into the former, rather than the latter, but many of us (especially while in high school or college) have fallen into the former category (cannot purchase today) and over time as they have become successful have slowly drifted into Camp A or out of piracy entirely.
What people often forget, when talking about piracy, is that in many ways piracy can actually be good for artists, because it increases their exposure. The simple fact is the subset of the population willing to pay for their art is relatively small, and increasing exposure is the best way to ensure good sales. When you think of piracy in the real world as opposed to the hypothetical realm, the problem doesn't actually exist because the people who will never pay for a product are going to continue to do so, regardless of how strong anti-piracy is.
I've honestly always thought this was really interesting, which is probably why I don't particularly support legal action against pirates. (Also because I really don't like how big labels basically abuse the law to bully people.) But still I wonder, is it really an okay justification - "sure I'm not respecting your wishes, but it's all good, since you're still going to benefit from it." Guess in the end, it's moot since I believe the issue is with our archaic distribution systems more than anything and that has to change.
Something can be morally reprehensible without any real action by society to suppress it. We don't jail people who cat call women, we just shame them. It's okay to be disapproving of pirates, even shame pirates, but legal action against them is counterproductive and actually hurts the producer. In the end the best thing to do is to allow it to happen, because it makes the producer more money than by actively suppressing it.
Let's not lump the "can nots" and the "will nots" into the same category - these are two very different groups of people. The people who can't afford to buy the product may buy the product if they acquire the economic means to do so. The people who do not want to pay for the product won't pay for the product no matter what.
Oh. It's good for exposure! Of course! So many artists want to work for exposure! Sorry, but as a former (non-professional) actor, I've heard too many stories about actors being told they should work for free because it's good for exposure, when what the producer really means is that they don't want to pay the actor for their work. Actors are generally quite cynical about being told they should work for exposure. Exposure doesn't pay the bills.
If an artist wants to promote their work for free, that should be their choice, not yours. You don't get to decide on behalf of the artist that you can take their product for free because it's good for their exposure. That's the artist's choice to make, not yours.
Look at the links above. I'm not saying they are working for "exposure" I'm saying that piracy increases exposure to a market that otherwise would not buy, and there is proof that they do buy after exposure through piracy.
I don't agree with it, on a moral level, but on a realistic level, it makes them more money.
Yes, you are saying they're working for "exposure". You even used that world yourself: "piracy increases exposure to a market that otherwise would not buy".
Regardless of whether that exposure leads to more sales, the original art is still being given away to expose the artist.
And, this is a valid business model. People do give away the products of their labour to some customers in order to increase their sales to other customers.
However, as I said, that should be the artist's choice to make, not yours. You don't get to decide on behalf of the artist that they should give their work away for free to increase their exposure. That's just not your decision to make.
You're right, and neither is it your choice. It's the choice of the pirate. And that choice results in more sales. If the artist wants to try and crack down on piracy and lose money, that's their own choice.
Ah. I see. We're talking at cross-purposes. You're talking about what is and I'm talking about what should be. It should not be anyone else's decision to give away an artist's work but the artist themselves. Only the artist should decide to give away their work for free. If they want to advertise their work in this way, that is their right. If they do not want to advertise their work in this way, that is also their right. It's their choice, not yours, not mine, and not some random pirate's.
Thank you for this comment. It irritates me that not only did he say that, but there are people agreeing with that point exclusively.
I agree partially with both of you, but as someone that works as a creative, "exposure" is just bullshit. Like you said: exposure doesn't pay bills. Sure, you'd probably not pay for it anyway, but if you're going to justify it with by claiming "exposure", you can go fuck yourself.
"Exposure" is a common argument in favour of piracy and, as I said, I've also seen it used to pressure actors and painters to work for free in real life. It's a bullshit argument no matter how it's presented.
There are artists who will give away samples of their work for free - just like the ice-cream shop that provides samples of different flavours, or a phone manufacturer that provides free samples to reviewers. It's a long-standing business model. However, the choice to give away their product for free should always lie with the artist, not with the consumer. It is up to the artist to choose what to give away, how much to give away, and to whom.
If I'm unable to pay an artist in my country, that does not entitle me to take their work for free. Anyway, I can always import a book or a CD if necessary.
If I have already paid the artist for their work, then obtaining a second copy for free is not wrong.
The central principle is always the same: the artist should be paid for the art they produce.
That's a very reasonable approach, but just for a bit of devil's advocacy, should one also consider the impact that piracy has on an artist's supporting structure? I guess my thinking is that by "reimbursing" an artist for my piracy I'd be assuming tacit financial responsibility for my use of the work. Which is fine in the case of self-published work, but if for example I pirated an ebook from a major publisher and then paid the author directly, I'm providing recompense and assuming responsibility for my copying while ignoring the low (wo)men on the totem pole that contributed to the book -- editors, graphic designers, etc.
I know in this scenario the work isn't available legally, but I guess I'd still feel weird sort of selectively reimbursing creators of a work, especially on a "top down" basis.
Like I said, if an album* wasn't available legally in my country, I would import it from somewhere else. If the only way to own the music was to download it off a torrent site, then paying the artist directly by some other means would be required.
* Why do people only talk about music when they talk about pirating? Movies and books are pirated as well!
I know this isn't about books, but what do you think about those Russian music sites? The ones where they hold the money collected for the artist/writer directly and take a cut of the funds themselves? But then the labels block any artists from accepting the money.
Software development is my day job, and getting into it was a mistake.
Sorry to hear that, I hope someday you get into employment you enjoy.
Thanks, but I'm under no illusions. I'm a working-class schmuck living in the USA, which has gone all in on totalitarian capitalism. Any paid I do is likely to boil down to making rich assholes richer.
I am an author. If you aren't willing to pay to read my stories, then why the hell should I publish them?
If you want free culture, you'd better be prepared to support the following:
Otherwise, if I have to pay to get into into a position that allows me to help contribute to the culture, then you can damned well pay for a copy of what I choose to contribute.
The current library of humanities music and literature far surpasses the lifetime of anyone who might attempt the goal of reading and listening to it all.
Why should the government grant creators a monopoly on a product which we already have more of than any of us could possibly consume?
Further youtube, soundcloud and thousands of fan fiction forums all demonstrate that many people are willing to create these products & derivative products for absolutely no monetary gain and often at high personal cost.
Why do you feel you should get special treatment? Hell think about the thousands of man hours that went into the technology stack on which we are having this very conversation. All those hours donated for free by ideologists looking to make the world a better place for their peers not personal profit. You may have donated to tildes but python? postgres? pyramid? ubuntu? debian? linux core? Do you really want to bring your personal enrichment into this here?
I don't believe it's the government, creators support this too, probably because they have mortgages and like to eat. If there is already so much to consume, why take from someone who isn't freely offering it?
Some may choose to offer their work for free, and that's fine. Some don't, and I think that should be respected. Some doctors may offer free medical advice/treatment, doesn't mean we should expect that from all doctors.
Is it special treatment to expect to be paid for your work? I work a nine-to-five, and I definitely expected to be compensated for my time and expertise.
Even the doctors who offer free medical advice/treatment don't necessarily do it all the time. They likely charge for other work they do, just like some lawyers do pro bono work alongside their paid work.
Ok so this is where the technical differences between theft & infringement really become important, muddy language like "paid for your work" doesn't help. What do you mean by 'work'? If I lift a boulder up a slope all day should I be paid? If someone writes a garbage article and I can feel myself get dumber as I read it who's doing work?
The entire economic system exists in the service of humanity. It should act as incentive so that more of the things we want and less of the things we don't want happen. Do we collectively really want yet more shitty pop music or have we already made enough? This is an industry which largely exists because teenagers are impressionable idiots who can be persuaded to like just about anything (I certainly was, the first album I bought was the M.I.B sound track!). Wouldn't we all be better off if we just had a rolling 5 year re-run of old pop music and all the marketing executives, radio DJs and pop stars just packed up, went home and picked up litter occasionally?
The government enforce the IP laws which mean that some actions (copying specific text or bits) can be considered to damage the IP's owner. Obviously the creators and middle men who benefit from these laws are happy with this. But that seems neither here nor there to me. If the government was giving me a vast grant to sit on my ass all day I'd be pretty irate at the idea of it going away but why would anyone else?
The special treatment is being paid for the copying of data which you are given to in some way 'own'. I write software generally I get paid through a contractual agreement in which I agree to deliver some software and the client agrees to pay me for delivering it. They do end up owning the copyright to the work but if copyright didn't exist they sure as shit would still pay me to get it done.
Patreon and tildes its self strongly suggest that creators creating stuff people genuinely want will get paid even when they give their products away. Meanwhile lots of the dead weight loss in advertising, marketing & IP contract lawyering would go away.
The "paid for your work" would be the exchange of money for goods and/or services, where the goods can be a physical book, a digital download of a game or whatever the creators chose as their platform. I work in software myself, and am salaried, so I'm being paid for my services. When my company sells our product, they are being paid for goods. That income allows them to pay me for my services. That's the agreement we have.
Then why pirate it at all?
Going to guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
I think I may be misreading this, can you clarify? It's not piracy if you're given the data right? We're talking about someone copying it without consent. Creators aren't being asked to be paid for the copying of data, they want to be paid for the content they have created.
Isn't this ultimately about consent? I created lots of shitty games and apps that I was happy to give away for free and I did. That doesn't mean everything I create should be up for grabs.
I don't pirate at all. I listen to streaming music, pay for netflix and buy games on steam. What gave you the impression I do? I'm just offended that so many people are wasting their lives making crap or persuading other people to buy crap because our shitty laws pay them handsomely to do so.
In the UK format switching is breach of copyright and thus piracy. Hence my inability to buy Demos' book recommendation the other day as it's no longer available on kindle.
If I tell a story around a campfire and a member of the audience who is there decides to re-tell that story without my consent does that constitute material harm for which I should be able to sue them?
You seem to be pattern different legal and moral concepts onto the way our current system works in an attempt to defend it. It's very easy to just assume that the moral & legal constructs under which we live are correct and inevitable but this is lazy thinking. The divine right of Kings was something even serfs genuinely believed in.
I'm honestly getting a little lost on what you're defending. I'm not assuming that you pirate, but you are defending pirating, aren't you? Though in this comment:
It sounds like you're discussing anti-consumerism?
Gotcha. I don't believe format shifting is infringement, regardless of the law.
For me, the difference is if I'm telling a story around a campfire, I'm choosing to offer it for free (unless I charged admission or something around my campfire). Consent is implied. In this case, I would also consider someone re-telling a story, more similar to someone covering a song as compared to copying it.
Not at all. There is definitely a moral and a legal difference to me. For one, I believe legally, this is generally not worth pursuing at all at the consumer level. And the lost sale calculations are outright wrong. Morally, I think people should just admit they're lazy and/or cheap.
I'm attacking the concept of copyright because I think it's bad for a whole number of reasons.
I think piracy is a reasonable choice for people to make if they don't think the creator deserves or needs their money. If you're struggling financially it seems crazy to me that people think some multimillionaire pop star, movie studio exec or apple share holders deserve your money for you to enjoy your society’s culture. So the ethics of piracy depend to me very much on who is doing the pirating and who they're pirating 'from'.
In addition the perverse incentives that copyright & patent law create seem to me to actively harm the types of media that are produced (would we really have umpteen FIFA computer games if not for copyright?) And I wonder if we couldn't do better with a different system.
Then sorry for suggesting you're engaging in lazy thinking. The concept of 'consent' seems a bit weird to me applied to copyright. In my view once you've created something and sold it to someone else there should be strict limits on your ability to control other peoples use of that information. The entire system should be aimed at the service of the common good and creators paid simply so that more creators are motivated in the future.
Ah I see.
Yeah, I'm actually not a strong supporter of copyright. I believe it has a purpose, but it's been so corrupted in the last decade or two. (Guess that's for another discussion).
Me too. Though I'm more in the camp of "you're still supporting something if you consume it, whether you pay for it or not". Another argument for piracy has always been that generally there is an actually benefit in sales correlating to the amount it's been pirated.
That's fair. I probably could have chosen a better word. I think the issue I see is the "and sold it" part. I recognizes that once a piece of writing is sold, it no longer belongs to the writer. They can't control how people will consume it or interpret it. But I think there's this really grey area right now where a writer (or any creator) can create something and it just never gets sold, but is still consumed. It's the neglect of the creator's wishes that I think should be addressed.
That depends. Are you lifting the boulder just because you like lifting boulders, or are you doing it to make your local neighbourhood a better place? Who benefits from your effort: only you, or other people as well?
You refer to data and bits as if the only thing being copied is a set of 0s and 1s. That's a very reductionist way of looking at it. What's being copied is a specific arrangement of 0s and 1s - information is being copied. And that information was created by someone. It didn't just arise randomly. Someone sat down for hours, days, weeks, months, to create an arrangement of 0s and 1s that would be of interest to other people, and would provide some benefit to those people. The people who receive the arrangement of 0s and 1s get something, so why shouldn't they give back to the creator of that arrangement in exchange? What entitles them to get that arrangement for free? What entitles them to receive the output of someone else's effort without exchanging something in return?
What does it matter? If they are in no way directing my actions why should I be able to demand they pay me.
Why should this entitlement be so limited then?
Surely the descendent of Prometheus should still be rewarded for every turn of a combustion engine. Lucky us that the first inventors of fire and calculus were so community minded! By your logic naturally they should've been able to hold the entirety of technological progress ransom to their private profit in perpetuity.
My position is that copyright & patents are useful concepts only insofar that they enrich humanity as a whole. This means that the benefit of creators should be considered only in so far as it motivates people to the benefit of the commons. My argument isn't that content creators should have no way to be rewarded it's that copyright specifically on music but probably on text is no longer fit for purpose in the modern world.
I think the interesting debase is on what we should replace copyright with.
If you think the only relevant factor is who created the first copy of the information then why not go all the way, infinite terms, felony prosecutions for infringement?
If they come and use the park that you have removed the boulder from because it is now usable thanks to your efforts, then they should reward you for providing them with some enjoyable open space. Unless you are choosing to donate your time, of your own free volition. But, if you tell people you're moving the boulder for their benefit, and you tell them that you expect some compensation for improving the park for them, and they use the park in full knowledge that it is now usable because of your efforts... you are entitled to get some compensation from those people who are benefiting from your efforts. If there are people in the neighbourhood who do not want to pay you for moving the boulder, they can choose not to use the park that you have made usable.
Don't try a reductio ad absurdum on me. It's a favourite tactic of mine but, even while I'm using it, I realise it's a silly approach - and I often tell my interlocutor as much.
Because I'm a reasonable person, and not the blind extremist you're trying to push me to be. There is no need for infinite copyright. Copyright should expire at, or soon after, a creator's death. I don't even believe there should be jail terms for copyright infringement. If the only punishment for infringing copyright was for the culprit to pay the creator what they're entitled to... I'd be satisfied.
This is as I'm sure you know wildly anti-copyright compared with our current system.
Do you feel the same way about patents, where this would be a strengthening of the protection? Just curious how you arrive at that specific duration.
edit> Do you also support piracy of music/books where the original author is dead? This would of course currently be piracy.
I would have thought that was obvious. A creator should benefit from their work but, when they're dead, they can no longer benefit. (And I don't believe the benefit should be inheritable by their heirs.)
But if you applied that to patents then "Science advances one funeral at a time." would be applied to engineering too.
As I wrote elsewhere about Sherlock Holmes, the patented technology is still available; it's just that you have to pay for it instead of using it for free.
The patented technology might be available.
Try and buy a Kiva warehouse robot, I'll wait.
You can't because AMZ has bought the company and isn't willing to share the logistical advantage at any price. You also cannot develop your own Kiva like systems because that'd be patent infringement.
Similarly Sherlock Holmes was available for so long because it's wildly fucking profitable. Not all good literature is so lucky look at the chart half way down this article. Did authors in 1920-1940 just suddenly get crap? Perhaps the psychological scars of WW1 and WW2 just destroyed our cultural output?
But what if they enjoyed using the boulder to sit on? Are they now blocked from using this public park without compensation to the boulder mover? Who has the right to extract private gain from others? If I build the best sand castle ever in the sandbox of my local park, what allows me to charge an entry fee from neighborhood toddlers? You are advocating the tragedy of the commons. Copyright was originally designed to encourage learning and enjoyment of the Arts. It allowed anyone to be a partial patron of an artist. But it has now metastasized to be a way for corporations to extract rent from the public. The recent article about how little music artist get versus the labels they work for proves that the model is broken. Even if a specific artist makes a small amount of money, that doesn't excuse the wholesale uselessness of the entire system. How many lost Einsteins, mop pushing Mozarts, or Walmart Shakespeares have been lost the ravages of corporate greed? You can't defend a system without understanding where it came from or who forced it to become what it is now. Personally, I feel like copyright is less than useless.
Yes on all counts. Likewise with Mastodon and OpenBSD. I also donate to the EFF and the ACLU.
The problem here is that you and I grew up under different social contracts. The one I'm used to is that artists get a distribution monopoly on their work, and they get paid.
The one you seem to be used to is that artists who want to do art for a living can go fuck themselves, since there are millions of people willing to make art for free.
I don't care for your model, and am reluctant to work under it.
Ah yes, that is exactly what I said after all.
Replying to your edit:
I would absolutely support this yes sounds ideal.
I'd absolutely love to see all three of those social systems come to fruition. I'll pay whatever taxes it takes.
I do want to see copyright terms reduced to around 10 years, though. I prefer a renewal system for copyright on intellectual property (and I'm not just talking movies, I'm talking software - everything). As long as the property is in active development, renewal for another ten year period should cost the company a percentage of the revenue for that property, that starts small and grows with each term (something like 10%, then 25%, then 50% going forward). That's the price of the government guarding your monopoly. That price goes up until it forces the property into the public domain, no exceptions.
Anything that falls out of that renewal system or is no longer under active development goes straight into the public domain, as it should be. The entire point of copyright was to incentivize growing the body of knowledge in the public domain - not to lock up our culture behind golden bars for Life+75+Disney's Lobbying budget in years. That's pure insanity. These companies prefer to get fat off their backlog instead of actually creating anything new. I'd love to see that change.
We have new models emerging thanks to crowdfunding. I think that's the future going forward for the 'starving artist' variety. After the dust settles, I'm not going to cry if musicians can't make Bowie/Madonna money anymore because the world has changed. As long as an artist can make a decent living off of their art, that's enough.
This sounds reasonable to me. Despite what I said about wanting to get paid for my work, I do think life+75 years is an unreasonable copyright term even for individuals. I only have a few issues with your proposal.
I'd be willing to treat corporations and individuals differently in that context. I expect there's got to be some wiggle room based on content type as well - can't have the first harry potter in the public domain while the author is writing the last, though... for slowpokes like GRRM perhaps we need this to get them off their asses. :P
I first ran into this idea from (of all places) a republican/libertarian think tank proposing copyright reform. There was some Harvard study that pinned the actual date down as ten years, rather than 8 or 15, by looking at revenues from all copyrighted works over the last century. Almost all properties make the vast majority of their money during that first ten years, which is why they recommended ramping up the fee so quickly. I wish I could find the damn link for that study, I had it on an old computer and deleted it, have never been able to track it down since. That was at least ten years back, it's not new.
I think if we had a more reasonable copyright system like that, people in general would be more respectful than they are now of copyrights. That might even have an effect on piracy. It'd certainly kick remix culture into hyperdrive.
Rowling would have been fine. She could afford to keep HP1 in print while working on HP7. Likewise with GRRM and ASOIAF. I'm sure Pat Rothfuss would appreciate the help, though. :)
Because you had something to say and you wanted people to hear it? I write too, I don't do because I want money.
Some people make furniture for the sake of creating something, too. But other people make furniture to sell it.
Just because some people can or want to give away the fruits of their labour some of the time, that doesn't mean everyone should be required to do it all of the time.
Making furniture isn't comparable to writing for several reasons, the largest of which being that the produced good is actually scarce.
If you're an "artist" who wouldn't make art if you didn't get paid for it then you're not much of an artist in my book. I mean in the sense that your drive is to make money through art, not to make enough money to enable you to continue producing art. It's the profit-driven attitude of the original comment I'm taking issue with.
Luckily though, your ideas and standards aren't standard for the rest of the artistic community.
Is The Little Mermaid less artistic because it was created through capitalistic means?
So, you're in favour of the "writer starving in a garret" stereotype? You think that artists should starve and suffer for the sake of making art?
The practicalities of this world are that people need to acquire money to pay for the essentials of survival, such as shelter and food. If an artist isn't getting money from selling their art, they have to get that money elsewhere. So, they get a day job answering phones in a call centre or a night job waiting tables in a restaurant. That then reduces the amount of time and energy they have available to produce their art. By not paying for their art, we're hurting ourselves by reducing the future amount of art available for us to enjoy.
At the moment I'm stuck on Amazon. I'd love to go fully independent, but that currently requires time I can't spare.
I've got one novel out that could use a new edition and new cover before being sold on Gumroad, Kobo, and other non-Amazon vendors. I've got another whose publishing rights have yet to revert to me. At the same time I'm trying to write more, take care of my wife (who's fighting cancer), and working a full-time software development day job.
I don't expect sympathy, but it isn't easy.
Could you link your books, I probably won't buy or read them unless they're Sci-Fi but I'm sure other users might. If you don't want to dox yourself do just say!
Thanks for asking, considering that I wasn't consistently friendly toward you or charitable in reading your comments.
My work is closer to science fantasy than honest science fiction. There's also a fair amount of romance.
Despite my preference for being paid, I've made my first novel available on my website under CC BY-SA 4.0 - though I should update that page to add purchase info. :)
Since the majority of the comments in here seem to be leaning on an anti piracy let me give you this anecdote;
Would you consider that stealing from the artist?
If you said yes, well than you need to go out and arrest anyone that was a music lover in the 90's or 00's, it will be a long list.
If you said no, how is that any different than doing the exact same thing digitally?
I have been an active TPB user since it went live in 2003/04 (coming to the platform from Limewire) and I will tell you right now there have been plenty of times I have purchased music or other content after discovering it on TPB.
On the other side of that coin, I have torrented plenty of albums after hearing snippets of them on my paid Spotify or Pandora accounts.
I also have a collection of around 300 CDs that I purchased back when I was in school in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many of my friends have received ripped copies of those CDs over the years, complete with sharpie art.
Torrenting has helped spread information and content worldwide, It has been a great tool for progress and the fact that so many of you have negative opinions of it saddens me.
If the artist's work has provided pleasure to 5 people (you, me, my brother, his wife, her friend), but only 1 of those people paid for it, then the artist has been deprived of 4 sales of their work. Those other 4 people should give the artist something in exchange for the pleasure they received.
For whom? What about the people who wrote those books and produced those songs? Did they benefit from all this progress they've enabled?
Why? Making mixtapes, rips and sharing second hand music has been a thing as long as the modern music industry has existed.
People that discover music via music sharing most likely will buy some of that music, attend a concert or in some other way contribute to the artist.
Yes, they have benefited. Torrenting, at its core is just peer to peer sharing, no different from my little story of friends sharing CDs but in digital form. Piracy allows for the spread of content on a level that might not be possible otherwise.
Artists are not hurt from torrenting (they are however hurt from streaming, but that's a different conversation) they benefit from it. They gain fans and spread their content wider than they normally would. Shoot, there is even a history of a artists uploading their own work to torrent sites. People are more exposed to the media being torrented and are therefore more likely to spend money on it in the future.
I know it gets said a lot, but a lot of pirates (like me) do infact buy content on a regular basis after discovering it via piracy.
A different component of that is how it has allowed content to be shared in nations where that content is not allowed. The shows, music, movies, ect are banned or not accessible in those nations and if it wasn't for the option to torrent it than it would never have been shared there.
While obviously the opinions vary, there have been plenty of musicians over the years that have stated piracy doesn't bother them, they make music for people to enjoy and if it's being pirated they see it as a sign they are doing something right.
I could list hundreds of more examples of how peer to peer piracy is harmless, and you will never actually have a response that validly gives a reason of how it isn't. I know this, because I have been on this side of the argument for almost 20 years and I have never heard anyone say anything better than "but it's illegal" or claimed it hurts artists, when there is plenty of evidence it doesn't. This argument is no different than some grumpy old guy in the 1970s trying to get teens with radio rips and mixtapes arrested.
"But we've always done the wrong thing." is not a valid argument.
I've already addressed the issue of working for exposure here.
And that's fine, as long as it's their choice to do so. If an artist chooses to give their art away for free, that's their choice. You don't get to make that choice for them.
Reread my last paragraph. You have said nothing that gives a valid argument.
I have said nothing that you will accept as a valid argument because you believe artists should work for "exposure". This isn't about my arguments. I'm arguing for artistic control. I've pointed out flaws in your arguments. My arguments are valid, even if you disagree with them. This is about you not accepting my arguments because you believe piracy is acceptable.
Spewing rhetoric is not going to change anyone's mind. Your staunch anti piracy views are not going to change people's view.
Ain't noone here changing my mind with their pro-piracy views, either. I didn't expect either side to be changing their views. That doesn't mean the debate isn't worth having.
Right, but if both parties are set in their beliefs then eventually we get to a point were we're both running around in circles.
Yes. That's how most debates on the internet end up.
Or one of the people involved realises the futility of the debate and walks away. Or one of the people involved gets bored and abandons it. Or one of the people involved gets angry and starts attacking the character or motives of the other person, so it turns into a personal fight which a moderator then has to shut down.
Welcome to the internet, where everything's made up and the points don't matter! :)
Yup, that's almost a perfect synopsis of 95% or arguments ever had online. I'm curious about one thing though. Given your views, how do you think copyright law should be enforced? Because the current model seems pretty laughable given how ineffective its been.
Buggered if I know! Even I don't have all the answers. :)
To be fair it seems like a nearly impossible task, but its interesting to see that as a product's quality and convenience go up, piracy tends to go down. Maybe in this instance the market can correct what legislation cannot.
To be honest I think it is stealing in many cases.
However I still do it. Many of the products that I download are not something worth paying the actual amount for me. I see any movie that I'm avidly excited about in theater (nearly every weekend at least 1 movie). For the other movies I would be willing to watch freely but many of them are not worth subscribing to hulu and netflix and getting cable to log into HBO. Then another show comes out on Disney XD. Then I need an entire other thing to catch any anime shows. If there was a central single thing that I could watch everything I want within 20 minutes without having to stream it from the internet (because it was downloaded previously) then I would be fine paying that at somewhere from 50-100$. But personally for me the industry has a long way to catch up with technology and the outdated business model is just too much for me to fight with.
So many people mooch off parents' cable accounts or friend circles all split a netflix login and I certainly don't blame them, but I hardly consider that morally superior.
I'm not claiming it's right, but it's just a fact of convenience. Spotify and Apple Music are getting close to reasonable, but much of the artists in weirder genres are still not available there. I do go to shows, purchase merchandise, and generally all of the other excuses, but I don't feel like this takes me off the moral hook. It's just simply that the inconvenience of paying for 10 different services and still having holes missing parts of what you want to get have caused me not to care.
When I download an older game from a legitimate source and it fails to work properly, but I can go download a pirated version without the security checks that fail since the servers have been taken down, Next time you consider purchasing something similar it makes me take pause. This has happened with tons of games that failed at launch from inadequate planning or simply a company like Ubisoft pushing out games that were purposely held back or rushed to meet a release deadline which resulted in a broken product being sold. After being burned I have blacklisted certain developers from getting my money again. While that doesn't give me the right to other products they sell for free, it's definitely not something I'm losing sleep over.
I occasionally photoshop things. This does not warrant the purchase of a several hundred dollar software purchase. Now I believe you can't even buy a permanent license for it but instead have to subscribe for $30+ a month. This is unreasonable. And yes while I can use GIMP, personally for me I can't see how unless it was a serious hobby or your actual profession that it would be worth paying for PS.
All in all yes, piracy is still wrong. I believe the majority of people that use it however are not capable or willing to pay for the product. So either the company would not get money from them either way, or they would use some other legal loop hole such as account sharing to get around it either way. Doesn't make it right, but it's just the facts.
I really wished more people just admit this! It's not for a moral reason, it's not standing up to mega corps or some convoluted logic in supporting the artist.
Yeah I mean a lot of people try to twist stuff to make themselves on the moral high ground. I'm just saying that there's not a legal practical way that matches the convenience of the illegal way for many markets. And that's from a US perspective, I couldn't even imagine the region locking for netflix and other countries also being considered.
Your perspective is too holier-than-thou and unrealistic. I pay for Spotify and (until recently) Google Play Music, yet I'm still an elite user on an audio-focused private tracker. I've bought a lot of albums straight off Bandcamp or artist websites to add to my library and sometimes share them on that private tracker (when the release isn't already there). If I had stuck solely to streaming platforms rather than paying full price for certain content, those artists would see a tiny fraction of the dollars I spent for a digital or hard copy. Anyone who snatches my uploads was probably going to pirate them anyway or generate penny fractions of revenue to listen on a streaming site.
So I have two options for deploying my budget. I can either give all artists (regardless of popularity) approximately the same amount of penny fractions per play that they get from streaming platforms, which do not generate sustainable income except for mega stars who are already well off, or I can pick and choose who I support with full price purchases of digital/hard copy music then torrent the rest. Kanye isn't going to notice if I torrent his most recent album instead of giving him pennies to stream, but that artist no one has ever heard could be able to fund a tour, a vinyl release, etc. with the $5-20 they get from a direct purchase. I've paid for music on Bandcamp before and gotten a message from the artist saying they were thinking about quitting music altogether but decided not to because of my purchase. Never had that happen with Spotify.
Streaming sites are not a realistic solution to supporting artists even if they give me some meaningless moral high ground since I technically paid for all the music I listened to. I prefer more autonomy in how resources are allocated because it can actually make a difference to lesser known artists. An analogy would be like comparing a flat tax with a progressive tax - a flat tax disadvantages those who are struggling just like Spotify does. I'm not loaded with unlimited funds to buy every single release, but I also don't believe in every artist getting approximately the same price per play.
If anyone is lazy and entitled in this scenario, it's the folks who don't bother with more than a $10/mo Spotify subscription so they can feel like they're making a difference when really their contributions don't mean squat to artists. I actually take the time to decide which artists benefit most from my limited budget.
This is made even more complicated because a lot of companies in this space allow piracy implicitly. There's been an understanding for a while that Photoshop piracy is a net benefit to adobe as it gets people learning and using their tools. Although part of that deal is that it shouldn't be used in a commercial setting. Now adobe may have changed that since moving to the subscription model. But I'd like to see more companies go the Autodesk route and allow people to download educational versions of their software for free.
Totally agree.
Photoshop does still have the trial version for 30 days. If they wanted to get rid of piracy I would imagine they would have canned that because most of the old exploits revolved around downloading the trial and then editing the exe file to not check if it was outdated or tricking into thinking it was validated by giving it a code like 1111-1111-1111-1111 and placing that in the code area.
I'm mostly with you. I don't totally see it as stealing--stealing is taking something away from someone else, not simply taking something...with no real consequences or loss to anyone--but it's definitely stealing-esque. And I do it, too. I don't pirate everything I can, but I suppose there's no real rhyme or reason to it. I pirate music that I want to check out, but also buy music on occasion--my justification here is that I would simply do without it if I didn't pirate it, but that it doesn't hurt anyone to pirate it, so...why not? I pirate software that I enjoy but cannot afford. I pirate movies that I own DVDs to but simply don't feel like ripping to my computer. I pirate movies that I want to watch but that aren't on Netflix. I pirate games on occasion if they don't have a demo and I want to try them, but I almost always just buy them--they're pretty convenient to buy.
It's all partially because piracy is more convenient, but also because I'm broke. I really don't feel bad about it because it doesn't hurt anyone. Maybe I should--I dunno. I've never stolen a physical product and never would. But I don't see digital products as having the same value. They're easy to copy, no one loses anything by copying them... So why not, especially when the producer of a digital product is doing well without my money?
I think it's a little too easy to dissociate the electronic part about it with the stealing part. I personally don't steal from anyone because I don't want to hurt people and I don't think pirating hurts people in the fact that it doesn't deprive them of that object.
However you are depriving a business from money. To me I only pretty much download something that I wouldn't pay money to have, or that it is too inconvenient to obtain legally. Or games that I specifically don't want to support the company because of shady tactics/practices before as a form of boycott without suffering.
I don't think it's okay per say, but it's very clearly different (not necessarily more moral) on any level you look at it deeper than "is it stealing? yes/no"
However it's definitely still not legal, and thus is stealing.
The ease of piracy definitely makes it easy to not even think of it as stealing. I grew up with Napster and Kazaa, and even before that made lists of games for my uncle to download for me on a BBS (he had a 56k modem, while mine was only 28.8k; plus, I didn't really know what BBSes were), so I simply grew up not thinking much of piracy. I've thought a lot about the morality of it, and while I've had periods when I've cut it off completely, that generally has corresponded with the rise and fall of my bank account. Right now, while I can pay my bills, I don't have much discretionary income.
If I couldn't pirate anything, would I spend that little discretionary income differently? Maybe, but not by much. My next "fun" purchase will be Okami HD when it comes out for the Switch on Thursday, a game that I could probably pirate easily on the PC if I wanted to. I'm not going to because I want it on the Switch, it's easy to purchase, I can afford it, and simply because I value it. I'm excited about it.
To compare, the most recent thing I've pirated is the file management program, Directory Opus, and that was a tough decision. I was just about to purchase it but then did the conversion from $89 AUD to $66 USD and realized I couldn't afford it. I definitely feel like I should pay for it eventually, because it's a great program and that price is somewhat reasonable. If I hadn't found a way to pirate it, I might've bought it. This was probably wrong of me. Feel free to judge, I guess; I guess I'm submitting myself for judgment.
For further comparison, some movies I've pirated in the past year I feel no remorse for. They were cheap entertainment; movies that I don't value and that I definitely wouldn't have purchased. Movies that have been on cable TV for free; watching them via pirating seems no different. Beverly Hills Cop, Die Hard, Police Academy, etc. I might've paid 50 cents or a dollar to rent each of these, but that's not how they're priced. For $3, I'd expect a DRM-free digital file to own.
In conclusion... Well, I guess I don't have a conclusion. My overall opinion on the subject is mostly to shrug. I barely think of it as a crime, and even though it is one, it seems to me like a victimless one.
Thats a problem with the market and its on them to figure out how to provide their products at a low price. Convenience is key and until people's quality demands are met piracy is something these companies will have to deal with. I doubt they care that much anyways, their revenue streams are certainly not being hurt.
I'm not going to say it's completely indefensible, but I definitely lean in that direction.
One of the many arguments I see is that it's not theft (because it's not a physical loss). But for me, when I buy a book, I'm not buying a stack of paper. And I think most will agree that that stack of paper is not the main value of the book. The content that an author (and editor, and publisher, and so on) worked on is. So copying is taking something of value and denying people a fair trade of their work. I can't see how this can be justified because "it's too expensive" or "it's a major business" or "the artists only sees a small fraction anyways".
Note: I should mention, I also disagree with major labels trying to purse every copy as a loss sale and honestly just trumping and intimating people by abusing the legal system...but hey, that's a whole other issue.
I'm generally more of an "ethical" pirate (I use that term loosely). There are e.g. songs, games, and movies that you can no longer purchase anywhere, especially in the case of games, and they're unlikely to ever be re-released. In these cases, your money will never go toward supporting the original author(s) of the work because the only existing physical copies will be received second-hand, and finding a physical copy in the first place is incredibly difficult at best, so you'll likely never own that content or have the opportunity to. In such cases, I have no qualms with pirating the content, and if a physical version ever does come out for a re-release, then I'll be more than happy to snag a copy (I've done so on a few different occasions). Until then, there's zero point in me being worried about "stealing" something that effectively no longer exists in any other form than a pirated digital one.
Regardless of my opinions on piracy, I don't think it is that big of an issue these days. Companies need to learn that the main thing they need to focus on to defeat piracy is not more draconian copyright law and DRM, but simply building more convenient services. Many people who used to pirate have turned to services like Netflix, because Netflix offers a more convenient product than piracy. It's hard to compete with free, but examples like Netflix show that it can be done. Money is only one part of the issue, and while you can't beat it on the money side, you can make every other facet of your business better. This is anecdotal, but I know people who used to pirate everything, but don't anymore because it is more convenient to pay for services like Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, Steam, etc.
I'm pretty much hardline pro-piracy and am 100% against any pushback against it.
Moreso than even public libraries, piracy has opened up arts and culture to the poor. Other than Wikipedia, I find piracy to be the greatest good for humanity that computers have given us, and I can't praise the practice enough. I recognize that under capitalism it isn't really possible to have free distribution of art and software be all there is, so I do throw a decent amount of money at artists when I have it (particularly for video games). Still, I don't think that makes it any less wonderful and that just is one of a million reasons why I find it's more useful to ask the question "how do we build an economic system that doesn't shut out the masses from the best things about being human?" instead.
Anyway, I'm not sure what you mean by the "stand up and laugh" part, isn't that what we're doing by participating in and enabling piracy?
Honestly I love watching my torrents seed and download. Its a harmonious p2p network of people spreading content around the world for free. Everyone shares what they have on their hard drives to everyone else. No questions asked.
I just mean that it's unreasonable to expect all of the big tech companies to police their content. Even if they "have to", wouldn't it be wonderful if Google could tell them to stuff it? They're big enough to be able to weather any storm.
Make your content affordable and easy to buy and people will buy it.
Not necessarily. The cultural works would still exist. The only difference is that you have to pay to use them, instead of getting them for free.
But the Sherlock Holmes stories were still available for the whole of the past 130 years. They weren't locked up in a box where noone could read them. They were widely published - and adapted. Movies (more than 200 of them!) and radio dramas and stage plays and television series and comics were made based on the books. It's not like we suffered from a dearth of Holmes material before the copyright expired.
I wasn't aware that there's a dearth of Batman media to consume. There are comics and cartoons and movies a-plenty for you to read and view.
If you want to use Batman for your own personal art... why are you entitled to leverage someone else's hard work to promote your work? If you, for example, wrote a novel about Batman, the only reason people would buy it is because it's about Batman. You're using the popularity of someone else's work to promote your work; you're piggy-backing on their efforts. Why shouldn't you give something to the owners of that product you're using, in return for using their work to benefit yourself?
If you want to release your personal art into the public domain, that is your choice, and you should be free to do so. You do not get to impose your choice on other people, though: they should be able to control their art if they want.
I have not said or implied that anywhere in this discussion. What I have said is that "There is no need for infinite copyright. Copyright should expire at, or soon after, a creator's death."
So I've been a pirate a couple times in my life. I also can totally 100% see it as stealing, although I also don't think a blanket policy toward piracy can fix anything. I personally would only steal something in a scenario where I knew the creator was well off enough that they would be able to create more media. There are however many many things I wouldn't steal as the artists haven't been obviously successful enough to allow for it.
As someone who used to pirate heavily and don't anymore, I will give my view of acceptable vs. unacceptable piracy:
Acceptable:
Unacceptable:
Now, I have more recently gotten out of piracy, the only thing I looked for recently we're textbooks related to programming due to the amount of money needed for purchase of the ebook. I own the actual books but they aren't useful to me when they are at home.
Music and movies and TV shows, I use streaming. If I like something well enough, I purchase it for my own library in the best format that it is available (vinyl, UHD, etc.)
I quit pirating games due to steam, gog, Uplay, origin, and wanting to play on consoles. However, these services due to competing with piracy have effectively ruined the valution of games from a consumer standpoint and now we see more and more Games as a Service with microtransactions as a result.
I think the argument that you need piracy to demo stuff is absolutely in the wrong when we have so many means of evaluating a purchase. I also believe that inherently allowing piracy devalues media and content by lowering the cost in which people are willing to pay for entertainment. It is essentially a detriment to the free market which everyone relies on to make money because content creators can't accurately price content that is proportional to the effort it took to create and the demand that the product may be in.
None of that matters when someone can side step you and get what you made for free.
Thank you, I mostly post on mobile and noticed the incorrect formatting but thought it would be too much trouble at the moment to fix!
Pirating is technically stealing. It doesn't even matter if you're guilty or not because certain ISPs will just terminate your service. The ISP here is real bad about just putting things in the notes associated with your account. Doesn't matter if it is true or not. They don't investigate or work with you. They will just say, "Well my notes indicate otherwise, is there anything else I can help you with?"
My ISP doesn't investigate piracy complaints. They get a complaint (stemming from public trackers and seeding) and just shut down your service. They don't even call you. They put up a splash screen when you open a browser and say, We got a complaint call us. And that's it. Doesn't matter if it were a mistake or not, it goes on your record and so many they just shut off your service. To me that is unethical. I know so much about this because I knew a guy who had a room mate who was pirating and worked nights. So he would see the splash screen, call, and get it handled before the roommate got home. Roommates name was on the account so it got shut off and he called to find out why and realized what happened. He had to be terminated for 6 months and that is on his account permanently.
When I was in the military, I got deployed and didn't have access to internet. I got back and lost a ton of stuff from ITunes. So I pirated it... Is that stealing? I paid for it right?
I'm very pro-piracy and I see it as a way to push back against people like the MPAA. After seeing how they treated the Pirate Bay founders during their trial I can never support that type of business model. I'm all for artists making money, but only if the product they provide is worth it and offered in a manner convenient to me. The whole culture is great too. Just a bunch of people freely sharing what they have without any need to make a monetary gain.
If your goal is to support artists with your wallet, then this is pretty much the least effective way of doing so. Streaming sites are more for accessibility and name recognition, not generating a sustainable revenue stream.
The advent of streaming sites has hurt the music industry much more than piracy ever has.
Spotify lost a lawsuit over that, they'll be paying out 50% more to artists across the board by the end of next year. Twice nothing is still nothing I know, and even better, it'll likely bankrupt Spotify because they've never made a profit until very recently.
Clearly, we've got work to do in this area, the business models aren't there yet.
Contrast that with Bandcamp, who is the only music streaming company to not only make a profit but also make their customers pretty damn happy, both the artists and the fans. They only make a couple million in revenue a year (last I checked), but they are also a small company of a few dozen employees, so it's enough. That business model is working just fine for everyone involved.
I had forgotten about that Spotify ruling. I really do admire what Bandcamp has done though - you get the opportunity to stream the vast majority of releases for free (except when artists choose to limit it) and can also support them substantially and directly with both digital and hard copy purchases.
Bandcamp also take only 15%, the rest goes to the label/artists. I always buy there first when it's possible.
If streaming sites are for accessibility and name recognition, that goes along way for what is now the primary source of income for artists - concerts. I'm not sure what the breakdown used to be back in the day (i.e. CD/Vinyl era) though.
Spotify also advertises upcoming concerts for the bands, which isn't bad.
You’re right. But interestingly enough, the private tracker I’m on has an upcoming concerts section on every artist page too. Both streaming sites and private trackers have an element of accessibility and added name recognition albeit on different scales.
And that’s really where I spend most of my money on artists. I’ve seen thousands of shows and bought so much merch aside from the music itself. I have three freaking t-shirts for my favorite band that I only discovered a couple years ago (River Whyless). Plus my wife has a shirt from them, and we own all their releases on vinyl. I’m not just bullshitting people here to justify piracy - I really do back it up with my wallet in these other ways (on top of having a Spotify subscription).
This is how I feel every time this is brought up. It's always "why should we pay mega corps" and such, but I doubt they are directly donating to the artists anyway.
That is not my intention at all, and I recognize that people will do both to varying degrees. I don't pirate (and I don't consider format shifting pirating), but I do easily bypass subscriptions when reading news articles.
I do agree with your first statement. I would take it one step further and argue that consuming an evil company's goods is still support the company. There's been studies that suggest/prove that pirated music is also purchased more often.
Me too. I honestly love when artists have their own way for me to support them. When given the choice, I do order directly from writers as oppose to buying their book from Amazon (though unfortunately, nobody seems to want to ship to where I am) when given the choice.
Maybe a less loaded term would be "right", as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
There's certainly some tension between 1. and 2., but let's not pretend like 1. doesn't exists.
That's fair. And I agree with it more than I disagree. But I also don't believe you necessarily have to pirate something in order to participate in the cultural life of the community. Radio, libraries, schools, live music cafes, lots of places offer lots of resources. Outside of pirating, the Internet still offers tonnes of resources. Of course this depends strongly on your community.
I just believe there's a line somewhere in the grey of "90 year old works still being held in the Disney vault" to "author spending two years writing a novel that sells 100 copies". And for scientific materials in general, I'm a strong believe that should all be freely available, but also that we'll need a model that enables that.
Copying someone else's digital content for your own personal use does not deprive them of the original.
Therefore, even if piracy is immoral, it is less immoral than outright theft.