In the usual case of video games, you DO possess it. It’s on your storage drive and you can access it, upload it, try to decompile it, burn it to DVD, etc. This is also the usual case for pirated entertainment media. Just because you didn’t yoink it off of a store shelf doesn’t mean you don’t possess it now.
Streaming pirated media might not be exactly the same but it’s not different enough to change the story either (IMO).
I would actually say it is ethical to oppose unethical business practices. And piracy is a great way to do that.
“It,” in this case, is a pattern of information, not something material. It may or may not make sense to talk about possessing a pattern of information, but since the point of “possessing” it is to use it, I think it makes more sense to talk about it in terms of use rather than possession, in the case of arguments like this thread’s,.
This sounds like a vote that something being high cost or inconvenient does, indeed, translate into entitlement.
I think part of the problem is that society hasn’t really adapted to works being available in such easily copied form.
When books, for instance, were all physical printed books: there was no question but that someone who purchased a book could then lend it to anybody they liked; and to as many people they chose to lend it to. That wasn’t even a topic of discussion; it just never entered anybody’s mind that this wasn’t legitimate.
And there were certainly things that were read by a whole lot more people than those who purchased a copy.
But the thing is: only one person can read a paper book at a time. (well, aside from somebody reading it aloud to a group.) So if something was popular, there were bound to be enough sales to recompense the author (authors not popular, or not popular during their lives, have always had problems with this), and to make it worth the publishing company’s while to keep printing books.
Theoretically infinite numbers of people can read a digital copy at the same time. So where’s the incentive to make enough of them to keep the author from having to work two other jobs someplace (and therefore to have no time to write), to pay the editor, to pay the distributors?
This has also run into an increasing tendency of makers of all sorts of digital things to say ‘no, you haven’t bought this. You’re only renting it, and you need to keep paying the rent or we’re going to take it back.’ This model has obvious advantages for the sellers, except that it ticks a lot of people off who feel like we ought to be able to buy the thing and be done with it. That’s a relatively new issue also.
So what? If someone gets caught with a laptop full of child porn or nuclear secrets, we don’t say “Well, actually, he only had a pattern of information he could USE to recreate an image of…” or “Well, he didn’t STEAL nuclear secrets because the government still had their copy…”. No, he possessed child porn and stole nuclear secrets.
The only time this sort of nitpicking comes up is when people are trying to justify why it’s okay for them to pirate stuff.
Or when someone hacks into a business and downloads the customers’ personal and financial data. People get really upset by that copying of bits and bytes.
I wasn’t trying to rationalize or justify it, just show that it’s not the same as theft. It’s a different crime, but it’s still a crime. Saying it’s “not theft” does not mean we also think it’s “not wrong,” but a lot of people here seem to assume we do think that.
Or when people are defending the rights of corporate IP holders as if they’re the lifeblood of human creativity instead of amoral money counters who would throw kittens in a woodchipper if the ROI was high enough. It’s not the little struggling garage band who has to worry about illegal digital copies, it’s the douchebag who just spent $300M on the KISS back catalog. THAT MFer has to squeeze his IP for every penny it’s worth.
And yet some publishers of e-books don’t use DRM and are somehow still in business. Best-selling authors publish books without DRM and are somehow still best-selling authors.
For that matter I refuse to believe that movies still exist, because I was assured that the existence of the VCR would murder the movie industry in the 1980s (I’m not exaggerating - the head of the MPAA testified that “that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”)
I don’t pirate books, movies or games, but the claims of huge damages are ridiculous (I do refuse to buy books with DRM).
Furthermore, is everything that interferes with a sale of a book theft? If so, Norman Spinrad owes Terry Prachett’s estate a lot of money - Spinrad wrote a hugely negative review of Pratchett that kept me (and probably billions or trillions of other people) from buying Pratchett books for several years. That’s got to be theft - it cost Pratchett money.
These debates always remind me of Douglas Adam’s’ anecdote about the time he wanted to hear how the Beatles’ new song “Penny Lane” sounded…so he found another boy who’d heard it and beat him up until he agreed to hum the tune.
So what? Some stores post security guards and some don’t but the stores with security guards have them on the payroll for the obvious reasons.
More to the point, saying “Well, Best Buy makes me check my bag on the way out and I don’t like that so I deserve to steal stuff!” is still stupid, just like justifying stealing software because of DRM
Yes, that is a stupid thing to say. DRM just makes the product useless to buy or steal.
Eh, I own literally thousands of DRM protected games and frankly never had a significant issue (and any issues was with a scant minority). Which isn’t to say that it never, ever happens out of the tens of thousands of games out there but it’s not nearly at a level to “justify” stealing shit as a matter of course.
It is more like if you purchase a product from Best Buy, but you get home and find that they still basically own and control the product you bought. By stealing it, you bypass this and own it outright.
Or you could always just NOT steal it and not play it because it’s a video game and you’re in no way entitled to play video games just because you’re mad and you want to.
Or I suppose you could buy it and THEN pirate a copy and say “Ho, ho… now I OWN this copy Ubisoft! Can’t stop ME!” but that’s not what people actually do because they never wanted to pay the money in the first place.
This is like saying really secure timelock safes encourage bank robberies.
I explained three times now. Nothing steals the money. The creator doesnt get the money they are entitled to. You are just rationalizing stealing.
Yep, it is just not called stealing in the laws.
No- their practices- and DRM is not unethical- do not allow you to commit crimes.
The creators are. They just use the corporations to make it easier for them.
If you are unable to look for a second opinion, that is your fault.
Same here.
Don’t like DRM- don’t buy it. See you have rights also.
Cool. So I committed theft by not reading his book.
You seem really soft on copyright infringement- unless you think it’s equivaleht to mass murder, you’re clearly trying to justify yourself
Nope. You would commit a crime by not buying his book, and instead pirating it. But if you want to read books for free- there is the library.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Copyright infringement is hardly a serious crime- but saying that it is okay to steal creators works by pirating is unethical and illegal.
I was trying to get closer to what, in my opinion, the OP wanted this thread to be about.
If I’m interpreting @bump’s intentions correctly, this isn’t really supposed to be a thread about piracy per se, and some of the discussion of piracy (what it is, how it’s defined, whether/why it’s wrong, etc.) seems to me to be dragging it in an off-topic direction.
Rather, as I interpret it (guided by the thread title), the intended focus of the thread is in one sense broader and in another sense narrower than piracy. It’s about people feeling entitled to get/use things for free when they’re too expensive or otherwise unfeasible for some people to afford.