Is it stealing if you don’t pay for the cinema? You don’t own anything new after.
Is it stealing if you don’t pay for your haircut? You don’t own anything new after.
Is it stealing if you don’t pay for your car service? You don’t own anything new after.
In those three cases, you’re receiving a service (showing you the movie, cutting your hair and servicing your car), so yeah, you’re stealing their work, which is arguably much worse than stealing objects.
In contrast, copying a copy of a movie or a game or whatever without removing the original or even a copy of it is not stealing.
And before you chime in with “but future income!”, those profits are hypothetical, so even in the most uncharitable rational definition, you have stolen something that someone MIGHT have gotten.
Copying is not theft and you can’t steal something that doesn’t and might never exist.
So the entertainment you receive watching the movie isn’t also a service?
No. The work that went into making the movie has already been paid for. The vast majority if not all of the profits from selling and renting the movie goes to the billionaire movie studios.
At the cinema, there’s a projectionist showing you the movie and maintenance crew making sure you can do so in a pleasant environment, people working the concession stand etc.
Those are services. Owning the “rights” to something that someone else made isn’t.
Nope. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never tried to pay for goods or services with a pirated copy of Shrek 2, much less one I was trying to pass off as the “real deal”.
The gray area where I live is that streaming is not piracy. I didn’t pay for it, but I also didn’t retain a copy.
Putlocker and Wootly were my go-to spots in college because I wouldn’t get a piracy warning from my internet provider.
If there are better places these days, please let me know. I miss seeing new movies the same day they hit the digital marketplace
Yeah once internet speeds got good enough, I stopped pirating movies and shows and started just watching them on streaming sites. The quality is usually slightly worse, but not enough for me to care that much. Stops your ISP from threatening you about piracy and makes it so you don’t have to fill up your hard drive space.
Putlocker was my go to years back as well. But in recent years I’ve been using movies7 dot to. I don’t know if Putlocker has changed at all, but I remember long ago it was a bit difficult to search for the content you wanted. More modern dedicated streaming sites like the one I mentioned are much easier to search.
There was another site that I had run into a recommendation for recently that might be better than the one I mentioned…but unfortunately I can’t remember what that one is.
I’ve been using lookmovie2.to for a while and that seems to be pretty good.
If you’re looking for everything piracy related then hit up the Free Media Heck Yeah wiki:
https://fmhy.pages.dev/beginners-guide/
Or for movies particularly:
This needs to clarify digital piracy (even though the term already implies that) so people stop comparing renting physical things and spaces to it.
Exactly. If I bought a movie on Amazon, and Amazon stops existing, do I receive a physical copy/the ability to download my media? I paid for it.
I think we have to rephrase the meme here. If I BOUGHT a game on steam I do not own it even though I basically bought my own copy. I dont think rental or paying for a service is the same. They should just not disguise paying for a service as buying a product.
Make a copy of a car, meaning nothing has been taken away from anyone else? Me too, absolutely!
You have a new experience after the cinema, you have a new style after a haircut, and the car service argument is so stupid I refuse to even entertain it.
The difference is that in your later two examples, a business lost something, their time / labor. If you took someones seat at the theater, there will be a disruption at the least, maybe the customer does not get their seat or you have to be kicked out or cleaned up after, but if you don’t disrupt anything or make a mess, you caused no harm whatsoever.
No one looses anything when someone copies a file without permission. The FBI and other propaganda sources would have you believe that media companies would make more money if you didn’t copy the file, there is no evidence of that, only evidence to the contrary, even so, if it were true, taking an action that causes someone to earn less money than if the action were not taken is not theft. If I open up a store, next to your store, and sell the kind of products you sell, you will make less money than if i don’t, but no person with any self respect would ever claim that I stole anything from you, except you, the angry store owner. The reality is that these laws and their associated propaganda exist because the wealthy ruling class is terrified of making slightly less money for their investors.
Think back to the moment you learned that copying was considered theft, you knew it was ridiculous at the time, but you’ve seen so many FBI warnings, and so much of your favorite youtubers whining about facebook videos that belong to them with more views than theirs, steeling their precious views, even though almost no one on earth watches videos on facebook and on youtube, and no one who knows and wants to support a creator would ever watch their content in a way that would instead support someone else who provided no new value. The reality is that the youtuber was never going to get any views from the audience of the facebook video if the facebook video didn’t exist, but because it did, many people followed the comment saying that the video was stolen right back to the original creator. Likewise the people who are pirating software or media are probably not going to buy it in any timeline, but now that they copied the content, they might promote it to people who will actually buy it, people who otherwise would not know about it.
Think back to the moment you learned that copying was considered theft
Well copying is very broad… Plagiarism’s treatment as being both technically and morally wrong imo always makes sense. Plagiarism goes beyond copyright infringement though, since infringement only requires “use” of the material whereas plagiarism is passing it off as your own.
I agree. Though palgerism as an institutuonal rule is a lot stronder than it is in real life. If i write a paper for you and tell you that you can use your name on it instead of mine, maybe because you payed me to. I belive the law is totaly fine with that, but your readers may not like it, and your school may go as far as kicking you out.
