I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
“Piracy isn’t stealing” doesn’t require a qualifier. It’s objectively a separate, lesser crime. That correlation is just the result of effective, aggressive marketing that conflates the two. It was so effective that everyone misremembers the “you wouldn’t steal a car” ad.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think you just solved the housing crisis because this lives rent free in my head
Copying information is a nonrivalrous activity. To steal inherently requires the owner to be deprived of a thing, and copying does not deprive an owner of a thing. Copying therefore cannot really in “stealing.”
The industry argument for that is “you’re stealing our potential revenue”. I personally subscribe to one streaming service. That’s it. If what I want to watch isn’t on that, I hoist the anchor and set sail.
The predictable way that video streaming services became content islands and actually a worse user experience than cable really shows how the industry would rather provide worse experience and cash grab than attract more customers naturally. By contrast, I can subscribe to one music service, and listen to literally every artist I can possibly want to. As soon as video streaming does that (at a reasonable price), piracy for video will plummet like it did for music.
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.
- Gabe Newell
you’re stealing our potential revenue
Which is ridiculous. It’s like suing someone for tapping you on the shoulder while you’re deep in thought, claiming that you almost came up with a great invention but their interference meant you lost your train of thought. Therefore, by tapping you on the shoulder, they owe you millions of dollars of lost potential revenue from that invention.
In addition, you have to consider whether they’re morally justified in receiving that revenue. Say someone manages to bribe the government so that they get paid $1 every time someone says “shazam”. If you say “shazam” and don’t pay them, they lose $1 in potential revenue. But, is this potential revenue that they are morally justified in collecting? Copyright law is just as ridiculous as “shazam” law. In both cases the government came up with a rule that allows someone to collect revenue simply because the government says so.
IMO the entertainment industry has ridiculously warped copyright. It used to be that copyright was a 14 year term, renewable for another 14 years if the author was alive. Under that rule, Forrest Gump would just have had its copyright expire. That seems pretty reasonable. It cost them $55 million to produce, and it brought in $678 million, it’s probably mostly done making money for them. Time for their rights to expire, right? Nope, they get to keep their monopoly until 2114. It’s fucking ludicrous.
Copyright is supposed to be a balance between what’s good for people creating something, and the general public. The creator is given a short-term monopoly as an incentive to create, that’s how they benefit. The public benefits because after a short time that creation becomes public. The alternative is no copyright, where creators need to be paid up-front by someone like a patron, and what they create becomes public immediately. The patronage system is responsible for all kinds of magnificent art like most classical music, the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, etc. The argument for copyright is that the patronage system wasn’t good enough, and the public could benefit even more by allowing a short monopoly for the creator. But, with the lobbying of the entertainment cartel, the public benefit is far worse. You now still effectively have the patronage system controlling what art gets made (the entertainment cartel), they then also keep that art from the public for more than a century.
So, yeah. Fuck copyright.
I’m all for piracy but I still try to spend money where it morally makes sense to me.
I’ll buy, rent or subscribe to content from actual creators or artists or developers if I know I am supporting their livelihoods or careers.
I’ll pirate content if I decide for myself that the content has already paid for the livelihoods of the creators or workers who produced the material and now it’s only the title holders and corporate interests that are profiting from the ownership and entitlement of controlling the content for commercial reasons only. For me this is mostly just big budget movies, old films and commercially produced music.
To me, anything that’s already paid to help the original artist or creators should be made public. Locking it away and making people pay for the privilege of the content just to make more profit for someone else is piracy itself. This is especially true for films and music that are so old that the original artists and creators and owners are multi millionaires or just no longer exist.
I may be wrong but that is my own personal view of collecting digital content.
The long and short of the argument is “fuck the people who farm everyone else’s efforts for millions. They don’t own ideas or information.”
Someone ripped off your YouTube video you worked hard on? I’m mad. Motherfucker cropped out your watermark and everything!
Someone copy your big budget movie? I don’t give a fuck. You’re Fox who makes it their business to lie to everyone and buy up control.
Nowadays you can almost reach every creator out there, and we use thousands of content and tools.
How would a financially average person can afford to pay these creators in such a scale?
A dollar at a time … I’m willing to give or donate a dollar, two dollars or even five at a time … if we all did that with a popular creator, they’d easily be able to reach a lot of money in a short time.
I donate to wikipedia, Open Source Software projects I use, firefox, thunderbird, ubuntu (although I am getting skeptical about this one) and other linux projects … on top of that I send funds to creators, app developers and lemmy instances and other fediverse projects and those people who maintain the software, servers and communities in the fediverse
In all, I probably spend about three or four hundred dollars a year or more to these projects … but I know that for the majority of them, the money is going to people that need it … not to people who just want to add to their wealth after never contributing anything of value other than their ownership of someone else’s work.
And if we all did this as users across the board … these small content creators would have more than enough to sustain themselves and continue creating and maintaining these projects
Piracy is not stealing, but both piracy and stealing from corpos are good to do
Look at the shit sony is apparently intending to do. Total bullshit.
