Also, on reread, I love how rachel actually agreed with you that it was wrong to pirate. And yet, rather than pay attention to what she said, you attack her like she’s saying that makes it okay.
Way to prove her right about people just trying to vilify others rather than actually deal with the problem. (Though at least the original poster she is responding to hasn’t made that dumb remark.)
I also want to add something to my previous post: my sister, uber-Christian, sees nothing wrong with using Frostwire to get songs. She thinks taking a grape from the church fridge is wrong, but this is perfectly okay. That’s how pervasive this message is. Don’t post in ignorance about a culture you are completely not a part of.
There’s so much wrong with this statement that I don’t even know where to begin. To start off, you’re assuming that the entire English-speaking world engages in copyright theft; that’s absurd on the face of it, I hope you realize. The people who willingly engage in the theft of intellectual property is quite small. Don’t take the noisome rantings of people on the internet as an indication of how an entire population feels.
But I’ll suppose that you’re talking about that minority and not the entire world. This time you’re assuming that the primary reason they do it is because they don’t think of it as theft, which is wrong, of course. They do it for any number of reasons – because it’s the easiest way to get their hands on the product, because it’s the cheapest, because it’s the fastest, or whatever – and the idea that they’re either unaware of what they’re or have convinced themselves that it isn’t theft is ignorant. People break the law all the time. Are they only doing it because they’ve convinced themselves that what they’re doing is legal?
I don’t care.
No, it goes to show that my understanding of the history of copyright law is more extensive than yours.
I’m not even going to respond to the notion that checking a book from the library is theft, a claim so preposterous that I literally started laughing when I read it.
Who said I was trying to convince anybody not to do it? I’m not. I DON’T CARE.
This has been a linguistic exercise for me. Whether people are doing it or not is of no concern to me, at least as far as this discussion is concerned. Nowhere did I claim otherwise.
EDIT:
You made this post while I was composing mine, and I just wanted to say that I’m laughing again.
Actual for profit piracy is the norm where I am, there are guys with racks of burned DVDs all over urban centers. Old and new movies and TV shows by the season, they seem to be serving people who either don’t know how or can’t afford a PC and internet connection. A real DVD from the US would cost around $40 - 50 USD once it gets here, video games real ones cost $100 USD or more and minimum wage is less than $2 USD an hour. Go lecture people about how they are evil.
Oh, it’s a huge market, all right. But most people don’t do it. The last study I read concerning the subject (which, unfortunately, I have lost) said that somewhere between 15-25% of Americans engage in piracy. That’s millions of people, to be certain. It’s still nowhere near a majority, however.
Is this a philosophical conundrum? How do you steal something that doesn’t exist*?
I’ll also point out that their intellectual property is property GRANTED to them by the Copyright Clause, to promote the arts and sciences. It is not granted to them because artists have an inherent moral right to own their works. There is no moral right to control the distribution of a work that has been made public, there is only a legal right.
When that legal right is violated, it’s not legally theft, it’s a copyright violation, and is punished by the specific punishments for CV, not by punishments assigned to theft.
People who call it theft do so because they don’t feel CVs get enough respect, and they are trying to link it to a crime that does get respect.
*just to clarify - future revenues don’t exist, they are completely theoretical. For instance, future revenues against Justin Bieber’s new album can be projected to be X, but may in fact be Y when it’s found out he likes having sex with kitchen appliances, on tape.
I’d assume it clusters on the younger end of the scale, where it can seem like literally everyone does it. Not to mention all the out of print music and movies where say they haven’t even been released on DVD(latest one I ran into was Quintet a Paul Newman movie!)
Since when is watching a show on Hulu free? Don’t they make money from all those commercials they make us watch?
And I would think that checking “No” to the question “Was this ad relevant to you?” would mean that I would get fewer-to-no ads for booze and feminine hygiene products. Pretending you target advertising is not the same as actually targeting advertising.
Congratulations. There’s the attitude that gives us SOPA and RIAA lawsuits and agreements among internet providers to monitor your traffic and report IP violations to movie studios. After all, expecting them to do the right thing by not stealing all by themselves isn’t going to make them stop.
All of these movies and TV shows are created with only one primary goal, and that is to make a profit. Downloading a pirated copy is theft as it deprives the production company of revenue.
Having said that I’m guilty of this sort of theft myself.
This. I have found that I have no regrets over not paying for content that has zero value to me. Bonus, I have more time for more productive activities.
I, too, currently watch only a few shows on Hulu. Though I enjoy them, I can’t say I’ll miss them all that much if they become unavailable for free. Frankly, I’ve got better things to spend my money on.
That said, I’m <this close> to cancelling my Netflix On Demand, which has been notably less worth even the reduced fee I’m paying for it since they split the DVD by mail service. Once I can get through all the documentaries on my queue, I’m gone.
I suppose I’m probably not a typical media consumer.
Boy the amount of angst-filled whining in this thread by spoiled little brats who need to watch what they want, when they want, and for free, or else they’ll go ahead and pirate a copy of it could choke a legion of horses. Bunch of over entitled, over indulged whiners.
Except that it’s simply not. As has been said a million times, piracy does not fit the legal nor layman’s definitions of “theft”. If I physically stop you from going to work one day, am I going to be charged with theft under $1000?
If you physically stop me from going to work, it doesn’t result in an object for your use like, say, a burned DVD of a copyrighted film. Many/Most people DO consider it theft because the end result is you obtaining something which you had no legal right to obtain. That very much fits the layman’s definition regardless of whatever semantic arguments people use to try and disguise it.
That said, you’d be charged with assault for stopping me. So let’s charge pirates with assault!
