this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Just curious, why do you not consider piracy stealing? It seems to me that if you take something of value from someone without compensation then that might as well be stealing
You make a copy of something of value, you don't steal it. It's still there afterwards
Agreed 100%. Original argument about taking something of value, if somone takes the source code, rebrands the original and re-releases the content for money, that would be stealing.
What are these people called? Not pirates for sure, Oh right they're called some big "media creator company"
But pirates aren't taking anything
I’ll never lose sleep over it and don’t care for the whales but I do directly donate $15 a month, sometimes individually but often times to 2 or 3 individuals. The only service I pay for otherwise is realdebrid. I started donating as I got to a comfortable place in life and am happy to contribute that subscription plus my $15 a month donation to the project, creator, artist w/e. I pick based on the content our household is consuming or projects I want to support.
At the end of the day I don’t think anyone needs to justify anything. Even if pirating is considered to be immoral, which I’m not arguing, it would still be the least immoral practice in the process compared to all the shit that takes place with large commercially developed content.
If things ever got stupid I’d just play crossword and do puzzles, I’m not so attached to electronic media that I’d pay over $50 a month for the entertainment.
It's actually quite simple. If I steal your car, I have your car and you don't. If I clone your car, you still have your car. Theft leaves you poorer, copying doesn't.
Now, there is a valid cargument about me having some benefit from some vehicle designers' IP without having paid for it, but it is not necessarily true that if I couldn't clone it I would definitely have bought it. So the clone cannot be considered a proven lost sale.
The law actually supports this. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for piracy under the laws of theft (except back in the day when piracy actually was theft, shiver me timbers and all that sort of stuff). It's always copyright violation, and in sensible countries the prosecution have to prove there has been substantial material loss to the IP owner, which in the case of single copies for personal use is virtually impossible (especially where we all have to pay a blank media tax which compensates copyright owners for copies that might be made, even where those media are not used for copying someone else's IP, which is scandalous, but here we are), but where someone has cloned stuff and gone on to either sell copies of ther clones that's a lot easier.