I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
Would you rather everyone can just walk into your house and take whatever they want? I for one am quite happy with the rules and morals we keep.
Those flags put up are often there to keep different cultures with different rules apart. It’s not as easy as erasing borders to have a free world. People are too selfish for that.
Sure, governments still steal all the time. Things are definitely not perfect, but that’s not related to someone stealing your lighter.
Selfishness is part of the human condition. Tribes needed to fight over resources and mark their territory in order to keep the tribe alive. It’s in your instinct.
There have always been borders and territories, and there have always been fights and wars over it.
I don’t really see how your “if you don’t use it” policy applies here, and I also think the problem of this topic is easier than that.
Digital piracy is not theft, by definition. Theft requires taking something with the intent to deprive the owner, copying things does not deprive the owner.
Digital piracy is copyright infringement, which (in the vast majority of cases) is not even a crime. It is a civil offense.
Counterpoint:
I wrote a book. Sold maybe 10 copies. If someone “pirated” my book, they are depriving me of the $2 or whatever Kindle Direct pays.
Admittedly not a significant amount, but it does fulfill the definition, imho.
It explicitly doesn’t.
If you have a hard copy book and someone steals it, you’re not only losing out on the potential sale price of the book, but the tangible value you have already paid to produce that copy.
Say the book is $12, you get $2, the publisher gets $5 - the book store buys it for $7, and sells for $12 making $5 profit. If you steal from the book store, they’ve lost a potential profit of $5, but more importantly they’ve actually lost the $7 they already paid for it. This is what theft is about, the value of a possession taken away, not the potential value.
With a digital book, each individual copy costs nothing. It costs something to make the original, but making a copy is free. Thus the only thing you’ve lost is the potential profit, which arguably you wouldn’t get anyway as the person didn’t want to buy from you to begin with - just because they downloaded it for free does not mean they would have paid full price if a free download wasn’t an option.
With theft, you have a tangible loss. With digital piracy, the only loss is opportunity to profit.
Yeah I’m a huge pirate but I also have subscriptions to publications, buy a bunch of games, buy music and even have almost every release from a few labels, go to concerts as much as I can. It’s not about the money for me at all
“Piracy” has never been stealing except for the boats and parrots kind.
