People come up with all sorts of justifications to pirate media and they’re (nearly*) all bullshit.
Back in the dawn of home computing, you’d go to a computer show at your local event center and it was FULL of pirated media. People just straight up selling crates of floppy disks with copied games on them. As modems got mainstream, you had BBS numbers for nothing but trading pirated software. This wasn’t because of microtransactions or intrusive DRM or exorbitant DLC because none of that existed yet. It was because people will take free shit over paid shit if they can get away with it. Full stop. That’s the reason people were pirating software in 1982 and it hasn’t become any more noble in spirit in 2024.
*I’ll provide some grace for people in geographic regions where they cannot access the media due to political reasons or the companies making it unavailable to them
Except the act of pirating a piece deprives no one of anything. Suppose I just poof pirated copy of every Hollywood movie of the last 50 years. Right now as I was typing this. They are sitting here on my hard drive, I can run ls and see them all there. What was deprived by that act? If something was taken from the Hollywood studios by that act, they would be able tell by looking at their books if this was something I did or just a rhetorical device I was using in this thread. They can’t as nothing was taken or deprived by that act.
Again you can argue it was a immoral act as I have no right to copy those files, but it’s not theft.
And if everyone did that, no one buys the movie or software and everyone pirates it, no one gets paid, and eventually the studio cannot create anymore content. Now obviously enough people actually pay for the content so they get by fine, but nothing makes you special enough to be the exception here. I don’t get why you are trying so hard not to call it theft.
On the other hand, being able to get somewhere in a reasonable length of time is a whole lot more necessary than seeing a movie.
Are the toll roads supported entirely by the tolls, or partly by tax money?
Are the toll roads the only plausible way to get to/from some places without spending, not just a moderate amount of extra time and fuel, but a large amount of extra time and fuel?
I have no problem with people not paying for toll roads since I don’t think they should exist in the first place. Taxes should be enough to pay for all roads in this country since they are necessary for travel. And tolls are especially tough on people with less ability to pay, making it very regressive in nature.
And I have no problem with pirating games or media either. I don’t do it nearly as much as I did when I was younger, since I have more disposable income now. But I certainly did, and there were very real reasons to pirate some media like for example when video game developers and publishers put more and more restrictive DRM or other restrictions on their games. I have started to pirate again more recently, as streaming services are becoming more and more fractured and expensive.
Back when long distance telephone calls were very expensive, there were ways to cheat the system. The telephone company didn’t lose anything when I made long free calls to my girlfriend, (and I wouldn’t have called if I had to pay) but I consider what I did to be theft. Absolutely.
We have very few toll roads in the UK. Most exist for historical reasons and the tolls are very small. The M6 (Toll) North of Birmingham is a major exception. It’s a toll road because the existing M6 was unable to cope with traffic volumes and the government couldn’t justify spending taxpayers’ money on it. Bearing in mind that most of them will never use it. The old M6 remains as a slower but still viable route.
More common in the UK are toll bridges, and the reasoning is the same.
As an aside, I live South of Birmingham and can choose several routes to get there. The main road was once a toll road (as were all main roads in Birmingham) and was “deturnpiked” in the late 1880s. One alternative route is a narrow lane which for part of its length is sunk several feet below the surrounding fields. The reason is that carters used it to avoid the tolls (in the summer at least) and simply wore the unmaintained road down.
But in that case you’re depriving the business of the ability to service another customer. The hair stylist spends time cutting, has to clean their equipment, sweep the floor, on top of not being able to cut someone else’s hair. The person who jumps the subway turnstile is taking up a seat that could go to someone else, they’re adding weight to the car, and possibly causing more messes to clean up. Tapping into the electric grid is using power that needs to be generated and adding maintenance to the grid. Cable TV is a little more gray, but you’re causing some additional power draw on their equipment and possibly introducing interference and other maintenance issues. None of these things happen when pirating software or music, especially not if it’s downloaded from a 3rd party.
Like the examples above, you’re tying up a line that could be used for other calls and drawing power. That’s more the case for older manual switchboard exchanges than for more modern computerized exchanges connected via fiber optics. Nonetheless, there is a finite number of available lines and signal processing available.
I think all interstate highways should be tolled. They’re so expensive that gas taxes are funneled to them from all gas that’s burned on any street, and they still need general funds to close the 50% gap that’s left. If a street doesn’t have an interstate, US, or state highway shield attached to it, then it most likely receives no gas taxes. So virtually the entire surface street grid relies on general funds already. Yet because the cost of those highways is so hidden, they get overused and cause people to make bad decisions about where to live and work.
The entitlement is thinking you deserve a congestion-free well-maintained highway without having to pay for it. If a toll reduces usage and thus congestion on a highway, then that makes it a viable means of getting to the destination in a faster more reliable way than just hoping the “free” highway isn’t bottlenecked.
Yes in most cases; it’s taking away someone’s time and other resources.
An individual copy of software doesn’t do that (though it’s still a crime).
The only one of the examples that was similar to software piracy was using cable TV without paying. I wouldn’t call that theft either, but I accept that there may not be a term for it in some jurisdictions, so they resort to “theft”.
Here in the UK for example, watching BBC without paying the license fee is simply called “TV
licence evasion”. So if we’re going with something being theft or not based on what a jurisdiction calls it, then the answer for TV is it depends who you ask.
I44 from OKC to the Missouri border is toll. The alternative adds and hour and a half.
I 94 from Milwaukee to Chicago becomes a toll as soon as it enters Illinois. The road, the weather, don’t change. In this case, the alternate route is not that much longer. I90 from Beloit to Chicago is toll. To avoid the toll road is a half hour more. It seems most of the “freeways” in the Chicago metro are toll roads.
Illinois charges tolls because they can, not because they have to.
To me, the thing that galls me is that these roads were built as toll roads “until they were paid off”, with the promise of reverting to freeways. 70 years later, we’re still waiting.
I’m not sure what to think about toll bridges. There really isn’t an alternative to taking the Golden Gate or Bay bridge to get anywhere in SF. Same with the bridge and tunnels in NYC. And for the amount of traffic, the fees do seem ridiculous.
You mean is downloading a copy of a song different than having a hairdresser spend 30 minutes cutting your hair without getting paid? Yes, it’s different. One of them is theft, the other is copyright infringement.
But we are getting sidetracked from the original debate.
When organizations put up walls, hurdles, or gates to restrict access to their stuff, people are going to test those restrictions. If those restrictions are easy to get around, and the “right” way to access the stuff is onerous, people will get around it. And they’re not going to feel that bad about doing the wrong thing.
This libertarian attitude just hurts people at the bottom more than anyone else and turns a necessity into a privilege, and I absolutely oppose it. All roads should be fully funded through taxation so everyone benefits, but I also think many other aspects of our society should be as well.
But it is still depriving someone of something, you stole that book from the book shop, they have one less book in their stock.
If I choose to download a copy of that book, no one is deprived of anything. Not the bookstore, not the author, not the publisher. They could spend years going over every last line of their accounts and would never be able to tell if I downloaded that book or not (of if i downloaded every book they ever published for that matter)