I agree that ripping your own media is morally defensible, but that doesn’t create moral high ground for pirating media you don’t own.
That’s true in a strict interpretation, but there are many shades of moral relativism here. Is it morally defensible to threaten multi-thousand-dollar lawsuits against grandparents and young children, who in some cases just downloaded a nursery rhyme or in other cases were entirely innocent and the victims of a misidentified IP address? Is it morally defensible to treat vulnerable individuals as if they were criminals engaged in large-scale commercial piracy?
The Electronic Frontier foundation has a good summary of the RIAA’s long history of harassment and overreach, none of which has done anything to help the artists. MPAA actions have followed a similar trajectory. As one article put it, “Way to go, RIAA, you just turned a former customer who found music through file sharing into a lifelong hater of the industry who will no longer buy your products.”
You can post a million articles about how shitty the RIAA is, but I don’t think anybody here is saying they aren’t - I certainly won’t. Wal-Mart is a shitty employer, but snagging a candy bar is still shoplifting. Pirating media is still stealing. Do it if you want, but it’s silly to act like it’s anything more than a crime of convenience.
My intent here is not to defend or condone piracy at any level but to describe the reality that exists today in the world of digital media. What I’m suggesting is that the industry’s heavy-handed practices and greed-based policies, like draconian mass lawsuits, prohibiting personal copies or other onerous restrictions on media that you bought and paid for, and the highly segmented nature of the current streaming market, have in some cases made piracy an attractive alternative. You can argue that any kind of piracy is morally wrong, but it doesn’t change the reality that the industry’s own practices have made it the least onerous option for many people.
BTW, I thought this was pretty funny:
oddly enough there used to be a side thing of people downloading just the previews of certain movies and franchises… its why how days they put them on youtube
One of the “disadvantages” of not activating Windows 10 is the inability to get upgrades. That is a “feature” I have been wanting for a long time. So the next Windows computer I get, I will deliberately not activate Windows, and I will not be annoyed by updates that unpredictably change my system and stall my workflow. Thanks for the info!
bleh the above was supposed to read:
oddly enough there used to be a side thing of people downloading just the previews of certain movies and franchises… its why nowadays they put them on youtube that way they don’t go in and record the ones people want and then ask for refunds
I think there’s a generational break in how people view CD ripping. An officemate of mine, a few years back (18 years younger than I am) talked about buying a CD, ripping it, then giving away / selling the CD. She saw no issues with that.
Whereas, to me, that is definitely a form of pirating.
We’ve ripped all our CDs, but the disks themselves are in a bin in the basement.
FWIW, I believe CDs are perfectly legal to rip, for your own use. The officemate’s scenario falls outside of whatever fair use principles go along with the act of ripping.
The catch is that for every person who might rip a CD for listening on his iPod, there’s a whole shitload that will rip that CD and give copies of those to everyone they know.
I mean, how would they KNOW if you ripped that CD and copied the files onto your phone/iPad? Or for that matter, do what I used to do, and rip CDs to MP3, and then burn them to CDs mix tape style, for my car stereo that would play MP3s? They can’t, and that was never the point.
At the time, they were trying to stop stuff like Napster from basically letting people rip CDs and post them online without paying for them. The step too far was criminalizing any copyright circumventing, whether or not it was for distribution or just to change the format. It caused a lot of unintended consequences that weren’t/aren’t awesome.