I don’t need to believe you, you just admitted that you didn’t go out and buy the songs that you liked enough to keep around and burn to a CD.
Oh, prove it! Obviously you liked those enough to burn them to a CD and listen to them again. You got some pleasure out of them. Why don’t you feel obligated to compensate the band for their efforts? If the band showed up at your front door, you really think you’d say “I think you’re music is such crap that I won’t even pay you a dollar for the right to listen to it…but I do have a CD of yours in my car that I listen to occasionally.”
How convenient for them that they use this objection makes it morally right to pay no one involved in the creation anything. Oh, wait…
This is certainly a problem. But the solution is not to give the artists nothing.
Which of these alternative distribution systems are people clamoring to have declared illegal? Are you saying the music companies want to ban people from selling MP3s on their own websites? Or make iTunes (which sells DRM-free music) illegal?
The only “alternative distribution systems” that anyone wants to be illegal are the channels through which people steal from the content creators.
Nine Inch Nails released his latest album online with no DRM - no one is arguing that that should be illegal.
Agreed - but how does this make it okay to steal from them?
And that’s not possible? Are you calling me a liar?
What the fuck? You asked me a question to which the answer is something I could not possibly prove and then you’re going to ask me to?
The same reason I wouldn’t feel obligated to pay the band if a friend loaned me a store bought CD, I got it from the library, etc.- It’s nice to hear, but I’m not willing to pay for it and even if paying for it were the only option, I wouldn’t.
I never made that argument, nor would you be qualified to tell me what I would or wouldn’t do in a given situation. I also see no need to use double the space on my hard drive for the same song. The fact of the matter is that the record industry has deliberately made it more painful to procure music legally than to pirate it, even without considering the monetary expenditure, and considering what the record industry has done to the state of musical innovation in our society, I don’t see why I should have to bend over backwards to give my money to them. That’s not how capitalism works. You don’t provide a shitty service and then stamp your feet and whine when nobody buys it; you provide a service worth paying for and you get your money.
I don’t think I’m entitled to cheap music any more than I’m entitled to speed on federal property (the interstate), but I do both.
Who says I’m compromising and twisting my sense of morality by pirating music? I’d feel far worse about paying for it, considering how badly the artists are getting screwed. $15 is not at all a reasonable price for a CD, especially when the artists don’t see very much of the money.
It’s all part and parcel. You can’t make the rules and field a team. That’s called moving the goalposts, and it’s making it really hard to take your arguments seriously.
I haven’t done any of these, and I can count on zero hands the number of times the DRM has been an issue. By pirating music, games and movies, I have received the superior product over and over and over again. By the way, you can buy a music CD with copy protection that installs a rootkit on your computer, which can be highly destructive.
Personally, the first time I bought a CD with copy protection was also the last time I ever bought a CD. All I wanted to do was burn a copy for myself, since I tend to abuse the CDs I listen to, and I wanted to be able to throw it away and start over with a clean copy that sounded good. The record industry can and will win my business back by stopping this copy-protection shit. Until then, I will not buy a single piece of music for any reason unless I am 100% sure that it never touched an industry source. The industry can choose to steal from the artists by not letting them get my money, if they really want to.
I believe that DRM is one of the things that makes piracy morally justifiable, so I’m going to bring it up. Tough titties if you don’t want to hear it.
They’re free to interpret my lack of business any way they want, but I refuse to endorse industry practices by subsidizing them.
And there would probably be no iTunes either, but that’s neither here nor there, since we’re talking about real life, where there always has been and always will be piracy.
It doesn’t matter what it proves; it’s a fact. Adobe is doing extremely well despite, or, more likely, because of, the fact that its high-end software is easy to pirate. The music industry also could have benefited greatly from Internet piracy. The fact that they’ve chosen to antagonize their fans instead, says more about the industry than it does about the pirates.
What, exactly, would bring about this alternate universe where “everyone” would think it’s okay to not pay for their software? Enough people do pay for their software, when it’s just as easy (if not more so) to steal it, that the question is moot. Adobe is doing quite well, and piracy has probably added more to its coffers than it’s subtracted.
The open-source model works very well for all kinds of software, but that’s a topic for another thread. For a persuasive and well-reasoned argument on same, I suggest reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond.
That’s quite a leap. I don’t think it’s okay for Universal Studios to pirate Final Cut Pro. Why would I?
The incentive is that more piracy of your product is strongly correlated with better sales. This is a fact, and you can’t handwave it away. If you were to make a better product than Photoshop, and it were to dominate the warez world, you would soon outsell Photoshop too.
And by saying it you’re implying that I’m lying. I haven’t bought albums, tapes, etc. in years, and I’m no more interested in doing it now. It’s just that now it’s more convenient to listen to music for free.
I don’t mind listening to the radio when I work out, but I downloaded some old punk songs on LimeWire. Would I ever buy these CDs so I could have one or two songs from each band? No. (And these songs are so obscure that I doubt they’re being sold as individual downloads.)
Can I prove to you that I wouldn’t pay for them if it was the only option? No. But I know in my heart that without the free downloads, I’d just make the best with working out to the radio and since these bands wouldn’t have got me to buy entire CDs for one song. They aren’t losing any money because I did some downloading and my conscience is clear.
Alrighty the straw men you’re setting up are getting more ridiculous as this thread progresses. Get some sleep.
It is a mistake to discuss intellectual property from a perspective of morality instead of the perspective of good policy.
Unlike theft of tangible objects, using someone’s intellectual property without his permission isn’t something that is inherently immoral. There is no fundamental human right to control information you put intentionally put forth into the culture/market. It is a right we have created in the United States because we think it is good policy, like the right to express any political opinion you like. Are the Germans immoral for prosecuting holocaust deniers? Are the Swedes immoral for having different intellectual property laws? I don’t think so, and I would guess that neither do you.
So it has to be something about the contingent existence of copyright law that makes piracy immoral. You could argue that all violations of the law are immoral. But you’ve already acknowledged that you think some violations of the letter of the copyright laws are moral. So this cannot be your (consistent) position.
So the moral principle you’re left to defend is this: once the government has created a property right by legal fiat, it is immoral to violate that right in a deeper sense than the way in which any violation of the law is immoral.
First, I don’t think making something illegal changes the moral content of the action in most cases. Suppose my state requires me to recycle batteries instead of throwing them away. If I fail to do so, am I being immoral above and beyond the bare immorality of breaking any law? I don’t think so. Even though my fellow citizens now have a legal right to be free from my toxic batteries, I’m being no more or less immoral than whatever level of immorality derives from the act of failing to dispose properly of the battery (illegal or not) plus the violation of the law. In other words, the combination of the two does not raise the level of immorality.
But more fundamentally, something about that principle (that once the government has created a right by legal fiat, it is immoral to violate that right in a deeper sense than the way in which any violation of the law is immoral) isn’t quite right. Lunch counter owners in the 1960’s had a property right to their lunch counters and the legal ability to serve whomever they pleased on any basis they liked. Lunch counter sit-ins violated this property right, in some cases costing the owners money. So were lunch counter sit-ins immoral, in a deeper sense than the way in which any violation of the law is immoral? I don’t think so. I’m not suggesting that copyright violation is comparable to the civil rights movement, so please pardon the crass analogy. I only mean to show that there must be something else missing from the principle in the previous paragraph. I think what is missing is that we are implicitly assuming that the benefits of the property right in question outweigh the harms, aren’t we?
If the property rights law is a bad idea, or unjust, then violating it isn’t immoral above and beyond the immorality of violating any law. So that puts us right back at the beginning of the debate: are intellectual property protections a good idea. I happen to think they are, but I don’t think that debate is as clear-cut as “Is theft bad?” and I think you confuse the issue by presenting it as a question of morality when it is fundamentally a question of policy.
[Or it could just be 3am and I’m not thinking very clearly. Entirely possible.]
Up yours with a red-hot poker, it’s the pit. Just move and focus on convincing us that the innate emotional value of your daughter somehow factors into whether making free copies of music/software/whatever is wrong.
The problem with your main argument, Absolute, is that they’re predicated on the right of people to make money doing what they do. You’re an engineer. I don’t know what kind, so I’m gonna talk about what I know best. Say you’re a structural engineer. You get paid to (essentially) ensure that buildings don’t fall the fuck down. You can only make money so long as there’s a limited number of people who can do this. If you work out the structure for a building, and I just copy it and don’t pay you, you can’t make a living anymore. And you call me immoral. Now, suppose, instead, I come up with a computer program that can do everything you do. It’s easy-to-use, it has a success rate on par with licensed engineers. You’re suddenly out of a job. Am I still immoral? You’re getting the exact same consequences, but this time instead of stealing your intellectual property, I’m duplicating it. How is that different from the first scenario?
Here’s the thing - when we’re talking about piracy, we’re mostly talking about art. Movies, music, TV, games. You’re arguing that the people who make these things have a RIGHT to keep making them, and make a living doing it. I contest that. I’m a utilitarian. To me, the only thing that makes something moral or immoral is how happy it makes me, and how happy it makes everyone else. When we’re talking about something like piracy I think we have to talk about the whole system, not just me.
As you pointed out, if I’m okay with stealing it, I should be okay with the case where everyone does. And get this - I AM. I look at the internet, and I see people making things - software, art, food, music - for the sheer JOY of it. Some of these people make a living doing it, yes, and that’s COOL. But they’re not the majority. Most of us make our livings doing other things, and create for pleasure. And I’m not convinced that the world would be a worse place if everyone did that. For me, the model to look at is webcomics. There are several webcomic artists out there who make all of their money from donations and merch sales. They’re giving their product away for free, and still making a living. Between them, and the people who create for fun, I don’t think we’d see the creative world shrivel up and die if the pirates won. I do think we’d see a marked decrease in broadly-known, market-saturating tv shows and games, which you could argue one way or the other, but I don’t think we’d lose our artistic drive. And until you can convince me that the world would be a worse place if companies couldn’t exist by selling art, we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree.
Copyright law is an archaic joke. It no longer serves its original purposes (promoting arts and science), and should be heavily reformed. Until it is, I feel absolutely zero guilt about breaking such silly laws. If there was a viable way for me to give money to artists without giving anything to the snivelling fuckstains more commonly known as publishers I would. Blame the publishers for the lack of such.
Oh and it’s not stealing, it’s copyright infringement. Quite different actions, they deserve a different word to describe them, even if one believes them to be equally wrong. Very silly to equate stealing a car to my downloading Photoshop to fool around with even though there’s absolutely no chance whatever of me buying it.
You’re talking about creating a business that offers a (possibly) superior product to Absolute’s. You spent your time and capital to develop a new way to create building plans, which is a far cry from photocopying one of his blueprints.
Unless you’re violating some copyright that he happens to hold, its capitalism and not piracy.
Oh, I’m not saying they’re equivalent. What I’m trying to get at is what, exactly, he feels is immoral. One of his main arguments has been that by pirating, people are preventing the creators from making a living. But clearly, that - in and of itself - is not the problem. So I’d like to narrow it down, if possible. Sorry for the clumsy explanation.
In general they oppose them; I’ve even heard some condemn the existence of public libraries and the ability of people to share books with each other. If you want to go to the extremes, I’ve heard some say that all information sold should be presented electronically, on monitors equipped with eye trackers to ensure that only the person who paid can read it.
Yes, as I recall.
Actually, I said I DON’T pirate it. I just do without. In fact, I have no idea where you’d actually go to get pirated anything.
How are you being a “cheap bastard” when it’s the sellers who want to put things on your computer that can break it ? DRM and such are the sort of things that would destroy other industries, yet somehow software/entertainment sellers get a pass. I can imagine the response if car manufacturers insisted on putting some sort of self destruct on your car that tended to go off unexpectedly, and would wreck the car if you let your wife drive it instead of you, and would destroy the car if the manufacturer went out of business. Or if supermarkets insisted on poisoning all their food, sold the antidote separately, and it didn’t even always work.
Wrong; if there was no piracy, they would claim it existed anyway, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. And piracy doesn’t justify damaging innocent people’s computers.
And in real life there will always be piracy, which means you can use it to “justify” ever more destructive DRM indefinitely.
Because if you don’t put in destructive and awkward anti-piracy protection, people will make a point of buying it and not pirating it ?
Because they are expletive scum, and that’s what people can get away with ? It’s rather like expecting people to feel guilty about stealing from the Mafia.
Child pornographers aren’t know for the technical innovation, but pirates are. They are the ones who are actually coding and creating the file exchange systems that keep the free flow of information possible. Not a big deal if you live in America, but there are plenty of places where it does make a real difference.
Just to nitpick - the people making the software don’t put the price tag. It’s the publishers and distributors.
To put this in perspective - both versions are in the same shop, almost sitting side by side next to each other. Gothic 3 is not the only one - a lot of games with Chinese covers and manuals (but with English content) follows the pricing trend.
For the record, the place is Singapore, where there are almost every young Chinese can read English, but only a small minority are comfortable with reading Chinese characters.
Considering that even an US import costs 1.5 times more than an Asian release (Mines of Moria, for example), I find this strange.
Earlier this year The Big Bang Theory started screening on the Nine Network and I was enjoying it quite a lot. Four or five episodes in, Channel Nine decided to revamp their schedule and took it off the air without any information about when it would be back. Now, normally I’d go and buy the DVD so I could watch the rest of the season, but the DVD won’t be sold here until after the season has finished it’s debut run… So, what to do? Wait an undisclosed period of time for the show to resume screening? Import a copy from another country, which breaks certain copyright laws anyway? Download it from the internet? I chose the latter option. I stand by my choice to pirate the show. There wasn’t a legal option available to me at the time other than not watching the show. I had no way to give my money to the copyright holders because the channel they’d licensed to screen it in Australia was holding it back for undisclosed reasons.
I know downloading the show was morally wrong but I don’t care because I also know that I will purchase the DVD when it finally is available for sale in Australia - as I have done with other shows in the past - and I figure that kind of squares us up… particularly as I will probably put the legally purchased copy in the cupboard and never use it because I find it galling to have to sit through the unskippable anti-piracy ad and information screens at the start of every disc I buy. You don’t get that crap on pirated copies.
Actually, yes – you can’t sell anything for more than people are willing to pay for it. Piracy is, at least to some degree, a feedback on that.
BTW, do you use some form of ad blocker? If so, you are (at least potentially) depriving the creators of certain web pages of the compensation for their work. It’s obviously not exactly analogous to piracy, but I’ve always found it curious that nobody seems to have any moral qualms about that.