With the recent surge of actual piracy off of East Africa, can we finally stop referring to intellectual property theft as piracy? The crimes are unrelated.
Theft involving hacking and sale of such goods? Sounds like piracy to me.
oh, and uh …
ARRRRRR!!!
And it’s not even theft either: it’s intellectual property infringement. But that sounds a lot less sexy.
I was going to use that originally, but I figured one step at a time was better.
Main Entry:
pi·ra·cy Listen to the pronunciation of piracy
Pronunciation:
\ˈpī-rə-sē\
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural pi·ra·cies
Etymology:
Medieval Latin piratia, from Late Greek peirateia, from Greek peiratēs pirate
Date:
1537
1: an act of robbery on the high seas ; also : an act resembling such robbery2: robbery on the high seas3 a: the unauthorized use of another’s production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright b: the illicit accessing of broadcast signals
The moneyed interests who have the biggest stake in protecting their intellectual property rights will just come up with another term that’s supposed to make offenders feel bad. How about “software marauding,” or “music plundering?”
I agree that all too often, “Pirate” is used inappropriately. Which is a shame, because it is really so easy to do correctly:
You just replace all instances of “my” with “me” and all instances of linking verbs (“is,” “are”) with “be”; intersperse the occasional “arr”; and liberally sprinkle in nautical similes.
INCORRECT: My new CD was pirated, so it wouldn’t work.
CORRECT: Arr! Me new CD be pirated, so it works only as well as a square-rigged jib in a blowin’ gale!
Well, whenever I open bittorrent, the cacophony of naval warfare; cutlasses ringing out against metal and men alike, and the thunderous roar of the cannonfire often fills my ears.
Yar.
I object to your using the confusing figure of speech “one step at a time”. I bet you are not actually stepping along as you type.
With the recent surge in murder rates, can we please stop referring to crows that way?
Words can have more than one meaning, depending on context. This is something children learn in kindergarten.
It seems to me that the only people who care about this particular word’s multiple meanings are those who don’t see any problem with stealing content, and are upset about the negative connotation. Otherwise, why pick this single example out of the thousands of words with multiple meanings?
Hell, you might as well complain about the entirety of human language.
Because as the OP said, actual pirates are in the news. And because this case is such a good example of a melodramatic name being given to something in an attempt to make it sound worse than it is ( real pirates tend to assault & kill rather more people than software pirates ). It’s kind of like calling pickpocketing murder; “Someone murdered my wallet !”. And because, as several posters have demonstrated, the contrast between real piracy and software piracy is extreme enough to be amusing.
The people with the biggest stake in protecting IP rights are the individual artists who can barely make enough money to live on as it is.
As to the OP: you fail to grasp the concept that words can have more than one meaning. Hell, even Led Zeppelin realized that. You know sometimes words have two meanings.
Isn’t it actually something to do with Pirate Radio, which was so-called because it was done on a boat out at sea, in international waters?
That’s what I always figured, anyway.
Not really; almost all of the money goes to the middlemen. In some cases, ALL of it does. Such as the money extracted by the music industry’s legal crusade against “pirates”; the artists see none of that.
I guess those artists signed some stupid contracts, then.
So, stealing is okay when the victim is wealthy? I’d love to argue this in the Pit…
Otherwise known as “blaming the victim”.
It’s rather more complicated than that. First, the main argument in this thread has been that software/music piracy isn’t AS BAD as actual piracy; not that it’s right. And many cases the “victims” are exploiting people as well. And in yet other cases, they turn out defective or even outright destructive products, and the pirated versions are superior and safer. And so on.
“Mommy, mommy! He called me a bad name!”
Well, you are right that the issue is about the negative connotation. I may have downloaded movies and games, but I surely do not believe that puts me at the level of a pirate. Piracy is something far more serious than copyright infringement. It’s like calling parking offenders terrorists.