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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?
This all falls apart rapidly on works that require actual spending to make. Good luck funding the millions of dollars it takes to produce a AAA video game without the possibility of ROI. Not everything can be a one man operation that can afford to live lean.
It's totally alright even if there won't be any AAA video games anymore, people were playing pacmans and supermarios with no less pleasure than AAA games. Humans are made the way that the amount of pleasure is always scaled up or down to some more or less constant level. Hoop rolling is an amazing game if it's the only game you know. And if you have 100 AAA games a year it just deflates the amount of pleasure you'll have from each one, to the point when you're just bored of all of them. It's programmed in human nervous system. The same for everything else. People before computer games weren't any less happy just because they couldn't play them.
Besides, there's always a crowdfunding which as practice shows can support anything - from couple of developers for the whole life(Dwarf Fortress) to half a billion of dollars for promising a dream(Star Citizen).
I find it hard to view a world with less and lower quality art/media but all of it is free as better than a world with higher quality art/media but only most of it is free and what isn't is easily affordable to someone with a very achievable income.
The world with "lower quality art/media" is basically the whole planet Earth before the second half of 20th century, roughly. The claim that we're now living in a high quality art time comparing to any previous times isn't obvious to me. There's definitely more art, but not better. The effect of "more art" on people is the subject of severe diminishing returns i would say.
The fact that the intellectual property system incentivizes people financially to create "art" purely to sell, and not when you're passionate about that so you CAN'T NOT write/paint/sing/etc leads to various things like producer projects(99% of modern movies/AAA games, which don't have anything to do with creating art, just with pleasuring proles after careful testing/probing whether it'll be successfull or not). It's not exactly art.
You are perfectly capable of living in the old way, simply only use and consume the free stuff. You want to have your cake and eat it too, an understandable desire but not an ethical one. Artists have gotten together and said they are willing to create larger works of art on the condition that you pay them for it. You are reneging on their condition and worse, you're sneering at them for having the gall to even try.
That's nice. Have I agreed to that? I don't think I have. If I have not, then regardless of whether or not they make those works, I am not bound by that condition.
Someone who purchased the content and then copied it has violated the agreement, you are an accessory to the violation of the compact. And you know damn well when you do it that you're participating in violating this compact. People who knowingly fence stolen goods are behaving unethically.
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