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Piracy is Good: The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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You guys are deranged... Every movie you download had huge amounts of work behind it, those people need money too.
Sure, a studio makes hundreds of millions making a shitty marvel movie, but it does still legitimately cost them tens of millions to make - they just make revolting middle of the road crap so it sells to idiots everywhere.
That's why there's no good movies any more - it's too risky to tell a good story, now that we're all pirating them
The instant there's no money in it, you'll see there will be no movies made (and that's precisely why the last 20 years of movies have generally been rubbish).
The studios are fine, and by all means steal Deadpool 53 or whatever off them, but don't pretend you're being noble in the process.
At least own up that it's theft.
Similarly - It takes real skill and experience to make and record music (and if anything that's gotten a while lot cheaper than it used to be!), but the artists that aren't in the radio would be gutted to hear your downloading it.
That's also why merch is so important to a bands bottom line - it's got away less middle men in the line taking a cut
Theft is when you deprive someone of one of their possessions. How is sharing content the same as doing that? The only "theft" going on here is content producers trying to steal the meaning of the word theft.
If people need compensation for their content production (and they really should) then that can be provided for by patronage, by donations, by society in general. Putting the round peg of that responsibility into the square hole of each person "consuming" the content makes zero sense in the grand scheme of things.
Absolutely agree. I did audio engineering work briefly a few years back, and cannot in good conscience say that piracy is theft when these producers are robbing the masses blind with predatory pricing and unnecessarily restrictive "fair-use" regulations.
Those who create good products will benefit from it, all things considered piracy isn't going to be a vessel for the destruction of that anytime soon.
That's quite separate, though.
You're saying that stuff needs to be good to survive the (inevitable) losses to piracy - I don't disagree, but that complete beside the point.
Creators can open-source their stuff and they choose not to - almost like they need to pay rent, too
I think the theft isn't in the bits themselves, but in the license to 'play' the bits (be it the mp3 or movie).
Creating content isn't trivial, and the creators deserve to be compensated for that. That is where the theft is - withholding compensation.
You cannot deny you're getting a free pass at someone else's expense, surely?
On the other side of the coin, however, it is also found that when artists don't seek to control the content too closely, the piracy often results in increased sales (this is a vague memory, I'm stretching out on a limb, here!). I think this is largely why YouTube generally has everyone's music on it (cos they're monetizing the plays via ads - deplorable, but better than theft).
Personally I think it's quite common for people to pirate an album to check it out and if they find it 'worth it', that's often covered into a sale. I don't think that translates at all with movies however...
Theft is taking somebody’s property. It doesn’t require that you “deprive” the owner or that the “property” is a possession.
Businesses who want to make money need a way to make a product that can't be trivially reproduced on any basic computer. Or at least a way to distribute their product more conveniently. Everyone always pointed to how piracy declined when streaming was affordable. That was because it was more convenient to stream than make copies and host content yourself. Now that's reversing again.
Maybe it will be good if the only movies and music that are made are the ones from people with true inspiration. I wonder if Homer only wrote the Odyssey because he knew the state had strong copyright protections?
I suspect it's only reversing because the companies got greedy. Netflix used to have a massive catalogue, but now one needs to subscribe to multiple platforms, all charging like they're an aggregator rather than a niche.
The ones with inspiration in the video world seems to be TV studios these days - at least as far as sorry telling goes.
I think 'the Homers of the world' are like teachers, they're always gonna teach (remember that may Damon rant?. I'll admit I haven't read the be Odyssey, I hardly have any idea what it's about...
@flambonkscious @RedCanasta And the people who made that work earn approximately 0.1% of what you pay for the work. The other 99.9% goes to shareholders. Wouldn't it make more sense to give the workers 100%, or even 10% of the normal price?
So I agree with piracy, however one thing to keep in mind is that our economy and productivity are only in existence because of the land and equipment (as well as the labor) that it takes to produce them.
If 100% of income went to the workers, there's nothing to pay for equipment and land that is also necessary for production. Ugly as capitalism is, the end result is a productive economy. A lot of the wealth is captured in land and equipment.
Now, you can argue that the workers should own the land and means of production. That I could agree with. But you simply can't produce anything without paying for land and equipment plus labor.
@Feweroptions This is the story that capitalists tell you to justify why it's okay for them to steal your money.
Land costs nothing, and equipment is just someone else's labour.
Do note that if a manager or even a CEO does management work, that's still work and should be rewarded as such.
Also note that CEOs and shareholders are massively overpaid in today's society. If one person were to not pay them, they'd still be massively overpaid.
Land has value, and thus comes with a price. Equipment doesn't spring forward from creativity and hard work alone - it also requires materials, and besides that, you have to pay for people's innovation and hard work when buying equipment.
I would somewhat agree that pirating a just released movie is an immoral thing, and generally I don't do it. However, the main issue here is the copyright law. Just look at it: content producers almost always are forced to transfer the rights to producers, then they don't get a penny from it. Producers then hold those right for eternity, even though, realistically, you get the most of the profit from a specific content (book, movie, game) in the first year from the release date. I would change copyright law, so that original authors would always have access to revenue and management of the content, and so that the right to distribute would be held for no longer than 3 years (maybe even less). Then it fits perfectly into the paradigm of piracy for the data propagation and conservation