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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33066 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I’d like to solicit themotte’s thoughts on the ethics of piracy. Specificlly movies, software, and music.

Sharing copyrighted data has been a part of the internet landscape for as long as there has been networked computers. I know it traces back to the bbs days and likely even earlier than that.

Back in the early aughts I was involved in a forum where we would scan for unsecured FTP servers and then fill them with the latest movie music and software releases straight from the groups who actually created and distributed the files. The beauty of this is that you were transferring between commercial networks so the speeds were ludicrous.

This was not long after Napster popularized file sharing and typical online user was very much of the opinion that copying data and sharing it was not equivalent to stealing. Maybe it was the circles I traveled in and my age at the time, but nearly everyone was ethically fine with downloading media. The only reason one wouldn’t do it was that there you needed some minimal level of technical know how to find more than just music on p2p networks. The only folks opposed to it were media corporations, some artists, and a small amount of corporate shills.

Once iTunes, steam, Netflix’s, Spotify, and other commercial options became available, most people stopped file sharing and simply bought media. It was a common to hear the refrain that piracy was a result of lack of access to media online. If there was ease of access and a fair price, most people would be happy to purchase software. This sentiment is still common but I sense it’s become less prominent over the last few years. The streaming environment has become quite fracutured and has impaired both the ease of access and price point for legally consuming media online.

The point of this post is to suggest that people’s opinion on the ethics of media piracy is diametrically opposed to where it was for most of the internets history. The median online opinion that I see is that piracy = theft. Many of these people are young and have been thought from an early age that piracy is not ethical. I suspect that many have also changed their opinion as they age and perhaps are not working at software/medi companies where piracy not affects them directly.

From a personal perspective, I stopped pirating media when iTunes and steam hit the market because it was in fact easier to obtain things legally and I was happy to pay.

That changed about 4 years ago when I realized that I could not in good conscience pay money to Hollywood and leftist game developers. I am happy to pirate their software and steal their movies because the alternative is so distasteful to me. I will occasionally really enjoy something and find the creators to be acceptable enough to support. In those cases I will purchase something after the fact to support people that I agree with. I encourage everyone to do the same. Enforcement of file sharing these days is non-existent. You can pretty much use the the pirate bay without worry and ignore the occasional email from you isp asking you to stop. Though there are many other alternatives out there that don’t take long to find.

If someone stops writing music/painting things/writing novels/invent anything because of the piracy - i think that's great. There's no intellectual property, there are thoughts, ideas, music and so on, but if its not an object it can't be property, it's silly.

The world is full of useless crap anyway, everything will be fine with less of that, in fact everyone will be much better. People will do art not because of money but because they love it, seems like a win-win. Good musicians will still live luxuries lifestyles because they'll earn tons of money on life concerts. There will be less crap to consume sitting on the sofa the whole day, great! A lot of people will lose their jobs - fine, it wasn't doing anything anyway.

It was my opinion at the start of internet and it didn't change since. The moral arguments against piracy are usually going in the way of "it's not fair" and then showcasing the case when some poor guy creates something genius and he is still poor and unknown, while some huge corporation makes billions out of his work. And i agree - it doesn't feel fair, that corporation which makes billions abusing intellectual property rights shouldn't exist at all.

Looking at the whole humans history there's plenty of various famous people in any type of human activity, despite the fact that there wasn't any intellectual property rights at that time. Somehow Mozart was rich and famous despite the fact that literally anybody can play his works without paying anything to him. No doubt there were plenty of people who died poor and miserable despite creating something great, but it's still the case now. Maybe Mozart could have been much richer with the intellectual property laws, sure, but why is it "more fair"? A random historical person who invented let's say cheddar cheese and couldn't patent it at that time - he surely has all the possibilities to benefit from his invention even without property rights. He probably wasn't a billionaire because of that automatically, so what, why is it fair for him to be one?

Pirates want something, but not enough to pay the asking price. What gives them the right to skip it?

What gives you the right to control who has a copy of an arbitrary collection of bits?

Assuming I am the one who originally figured out how to arrange them in a specific format, I have an interest in the fruit of my labor.

If I were spending all my time doing literal charity, I would rapidly starve.

And do you think that this is a good description of more copyright situations?

Not…particularly. OP asked why people thought it was unethical to pirate. I answered:

Pirates would like to have something that belongs to someone else. That is obviously unethical, violating the rights of the creator or license-holder. It is also easy to rationalize, since any harms are very diffuse. But it is still a harm.

In today’s world, piracy does little harm, and may even be a net gain. This does not justify piracy in general.

I don't need any right to skip it, i can just skip it. What kind of right is that?

To skip the asking price?

Then i guess my right is called a free will.

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